A Request to Women Working in Tech

[noahgibbs]

A friend recently said something about which, as Shanna's father, I feel conflicted.

She said that as a woman working in technology, she wouldn't recommend that other women enter the field. She's a system administrator. So, while she's not a computer programmer like myself, she's in a very similar field with mostly similar interpersonal dynamics. That is to say, what she says almost certainly applies to my field if it applies to hers. And as an actual woman working in technology, her experience is going to be significantly more accurate than my from-the-outside impressions.

I'm not going to repeat her reasons here. Rather, I'd be very curious whether other women working in technical fields, especially system administration and/or programming, felt the same way. Anybody care to comment? When you comment, please let me know what you do/did in technology. For some of you, I'll know offhand. For many of you, I'll have forgotten. For anybody who comments, there may be other readers who don't know/remember.

Anonymous comments are turned on here. Technically I *do* log IPs and I don't see a quick way to turn it off just for this post, but you have my word that I won't attempt to match up anybody anonymous here with any specific person. If you're really worried for some reason, there are many fine technical measures to make that tracking ineffective at finding you.

Comments

[spiffikins]

Ran out of room!


Unfortunately, I talk to a *lot* of incompetent sysadmins. And because there are so few women out there, every one of them that is incompetent - makes me cry a little inside, because if you talk to 10 men and 5 are incompetent - that sucks...but if in the same period of time you only talk to 3 women, and 2 of them are incompetent...that's just painful.

We had one woman who worked with me, who ended up taking maternity leave twice in 3 years, plus scaled back her work to only work part-time, and from home.

The company wasn't able to replace her while she was out - so her job got dumped on me, in addition to my own work. When she came back part time - her job was not suited to part time work from home - but the company wanted to be "flexible" - and so her life choices again, simply made my life harder. I was resentful of the situation, and although I see it from all sides - *my* life was made more difficult for several years - which sucked.

This was an epic - but I guess overall, my experience has been that it's not so much if you're male or female as whether or not you excel at your job and are seen as competent.

That being said - I'm sure others have completely different experiences and perhaps I'm simply not seeing it in my case?

[snippy]

her life choices again, simply made my life harder

No, your employer's decisions about how to handle her choices, choices they permitted her to make, made your life harder. Your employer could have managed the situation so that you didn't bear the brunt of the decision they made to allow her to work part time. Blaming her for taking advantage of their offer is sexist and unfair.

[spiffikins]

there's an entire set of circumstances that you aren't aware of, so you can certainly have that opinion. However, suffice it to say, that during her pregnancy and afterward, she was unable to do the job she was hired to do - and her insistence on pretending that nothing had changed, and belief that she was still doing the same amount and quality of work - when it was clearly not the case - caused harm to those around her.

[(Anonymous)]

WOW. This really bothers me. I understand that there may be extenuating circumstances, but this kind of wording applied to any new mother is problematic.