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

[trixtah.livejournal.com]

(..from above)

It is not a vile hotbed of stupid blokes - I've had a hell of a lot worse in my pre-IT life. So why is the perception of IT so bad? Because I'm sure the perception issue is a significant chunk of the reason there are so few of us there. Is there a perception that the guys are all sexist fuckheads who watch porn all day while scoffing their cheetos and refusing to bathe? Are we so afraid of being labelled "geeks"? Sure, surmounting the early disadvantages in learning technical and certain communication skills is tough enough. But what else is the problem?

I enjoy my work, and wish there were more women in it. My view is, if you can handle Word macros (which any secretary can), you can handle managing a data centre, given the right training. I think it is a great trade for women, because the culture is actually fairly accepting compared to plenty of blue-collar work, the work is interesting, and it pays bloody well.

[datagoddess.livejournal.com]

I have some issues with your generalization that women who have good sysadmin skills as you outline them don't suffer from sexism. I have them and I do still see it in my workplace. I am a geek, I have always been a geek.

When I was a manager and not a tech, yes, I saw less of it. But as a tech it is pervasive. And I'm really confused how you can equate handling Word macros with managing hundreds or thousands of servers, or petabytes of storage like I do.

[trixtah.livejournal.com]

I never said that good sysadmin skills mean you're immune to sexism. I was reflecting on why women don't seem to consider systems administration as an actual career choice (hell, I fell into it by accident) - the attributes I listed were more about explaining why we don't have the early training to think of it as a first-choice career, or, when opportunities present themselves, more women don't take the next step. I know of multitudes of women working on IT helpdesks, and then that drops by a factor of at least 20 when it comes to stepping into something like desktop support. That's a real glass ceiling.

As for my obviously bad analogy, obviously dealing with Word macros and managing thousands of servers are very different in terms of actual skillsets and scale. I mean, of course. But if you can troubleshoot, analyse, experiment, solve the problem, implement solutions reliably and are not freaked out by the idea of technology, then yes, those are the base skills that can help you run a datacentre. Ok, it's challenging work and requires good analysis and organisational skills, but it really isn't rocket science.

The best initiative I saw in getting women into IT was when a law firm I worked for was going to make scores of secretaries redundant. Instead of doing so, they were offered training in desktop support to assist with the transition to the new IT infrastructure (this was in the late 90s, so it was email on all the desktops for the first time and yadda yadda). They knew the environment, they knew the desktop packages (Word Perfect and Lotus Notes in those days), and with being given a bit of hardware troubleshooting skill (and many of them already had a decent skillset), they were bloody excellent. As far as I know, the majority of them are still working in some kind of IT-related field in a plethora of other organisations. Their previous experience was directly translatable to their new role, and they really did run with it when they realised it wasn't mystical techno-incantations that makes IT work.

I think the caves of techno-gollumhood are probably some of the worst legacies of male geek culture in terms of women thinking it requires arcane skills to do the work - I mean, hell, so many computer science courses still require advanced maths as a prerequisite when the only maths I've ever used in admin work is a bit of binary to figure out subnet masks. Not that women aren't capable of advanced maths either, but again, it's that early programming to make us believe we can't problem-solve or think analytically.

[rightkindofme.livejournal.com]

Wait a minute. You say, "Related to the above, the ability to project confidence that you know what you are doing. Girls and women are to often educated to soften their words, to compromise even when they are right, to not sound too definite for fear of sounding "aggressive". However, as part of projecting that confidence, you have to be able to not alienate certain masculine egos for fear of being a "bitch" or a "harpy" or "strident". It can be done, as I can attest."

And then say that you haven't encountered sexism? You have to very carefully work to appear just strong enough but not too strong so that you sound like a bitch, a harpy, or strident... and that's not sexism? I've never encountered a man who worried about any of those things.

[allochthon.livejournal.com]

"I've never encountered a man who worried about any of those things."

Yes, this.

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

True. And I never have either. See my fuller comment below where I do mention being found to be "too agressive". I never let it affect my behaviour that I know of (to be honest, I'd be hard-pushed to, I'm Scotish, and we are just a little bit more excitable than the English :-) )

[trixtah.livejournal.com]

Erm, that's exactly what I'm saying. That it's sexism that projects those expectations on you. And yes, I haven't encountered overt sexist behaviour from my colleagues; however, just like every other woman, I'm not immune to the endemic and institutionalised kind. Obviously I didn't highlight that aspect well enough.

I wouldn't work in an team environment where I had to sit there modifying my every utterance to be "acceptable" (and my colleagues can vouch for that), but I do do it when dealing in a political sense with management and outsiders (vendors, customers, etc).

It galls me as a feminist, and hello, a woman myself, that women are expected and programmed to take extra consideration to how we come across, but in those specific employment circumstances for me, I don't feel I compromise myself any more compared to how we compromise ourselves in various ways to work for others in a capitalist society. However, we ALL have our limits as to how much of that compromise we feel we have to make (don't swear at the customers, don't discuss religion or national politics, yadda yadda); I'm lucky that in my IT experience, my compromises as a woman have not been that qualitatively different to my compromises as an individual. It's a line that hasn't yet been crossed anywhere I've worked, and I hope it never is.

On the rare occasions when someone is blatantly sexist to my face (so far, only end users and customers), I have no hesitation in telling them to step the fuck off. I also have no hesitation for advocating for other women (and nationalities) whose personal style is not so confrontational as the default working culture in some organisations I've worked in.