A Request to Women Working in Tech
Jun. 1st, 2010 08:54 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
noahgibbsA 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.
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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.
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Came upon this question while browsing...
Date: 2010-06-04 02:46 pm (UTC)I am in robotics, another _very_ male dominated field. I have also experienced a lot of sexism, some of it rather illogical (for example, assumptions that the 5' girl must be the assistant when doing demos with some rather large robots, while there is a 6'+ guy standing there...). There are a couple of things I think should be mentioned though:
Most fields now need programming experience. This includes both arts and design fields (programming background helps shorten the learning curve with a lot of design software), and science related fields (a lot of not-directly-related-to-computers science labs advertise for people with programming skills to provide them with support).
Any programming experience in any technical field will only help, in the long run. When Shanna grows up, she will have the choice to continue in a programming heavy field or move into a field that is light in programming (but still has some). The point is, though, she will have learnt, by the time she gets there, what the field will be like in terms of sexism.
There are some fields like biological computing which I have seen have a lot more equitable gender ratio - and they are severely starved for programmers.
I would say encourage her to learn programming, because it will help her (I spent a lot of time in high school being the go-to person for programming problems, because the guys tended to be a lot more condescending when providing solutions - it did wonders for my confidence in my own abilities)
I do not think the negative effects will become a problem until much later in life - around the age of 19 or so, by which time she will be old enough to decide if she does want to switch to a different focus, and she will still have enough time to successfully make the switch.