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

[spaghettisquash.livejournal.com]

I'm a sysadmin (and have been for over a decade). I would never actively recruit a young woman to enter my field of work - everyone deserves better than this. I support those that want it, and I am delighted when they complain about incredibly minor hints at sexism (if that bothers her, nothing like my work history could have happened to her - awesome!).

My perception is that female programmers (perhaps excluding operating systems programmers) have had a substantially more pleasant time of it than I have. The numbers mean that make more sense; my general sense is that there are a lot more female programmers (10-20% vs 1-5%?), so the dominant culture shifts from "expects some in a reasonably large group" to "expects none, even in a pretty large group (and there are no large groups)".

It is reasonable to believe that in 15 years, my field will be completely different than it is now - both the nature (or existence) of work and team dynamics.

[noirem.livejournal.com]

It is reasonable to believe that in 15 years, my field will be completely different than it is now - both the nature (or existence) of work and team dynamics.

This. There are lots of "traditionally" male industries that women had a hard time breaking into. Things get better. Shanna wants to do everything her daddy does, so teach her as much as she wants to learn.

[angelbob.livejournal.com]

The proportion varies a lot, but in my experience, 1-5% is actually a pretty good estimate of the number of female programmers in large companies. 10% is conceivable, especially if I'm seeing disproportionately few, but 20% is far, far, far more than I routinely see.

This may be unusual. I've worked programming operating systems, graphics drivers, hardware drivers and other low-level crunchy systems programming stuff, where women may be less common. Ditto for startups. Here at On-Site the proportion is around 10% female, but the team is so small that that translates to "yes, there's a female programmer here." So I have no clue if web programming is different, or if it's just that, yes, Becky works here.

[tg2k.livejournal.com]

At my company I think it's between 10-20% for programmers and I have never noticed any sexism there. For the admins, one of the very high up people we hired long before I joined the company is a woman, and that probably keeps down any sexism as well, though I don't know of a single woman working under her.

I may be lucky though; I have never worked at a company where I have noticed any male coworkers displaying sexism. Either that, or I have conveniently blocked it out of my memory.

FWIW, in a couple areas I have some really talented female coworkers, and I suspect this helps dispel any possibility of sexist talk, even besides all the harassment training we receive. But it may well be that these women all feel more pressure to perform, and conform, than their male counterparts.

[angelbob.livejournal.com]

The places I've worked haven't had a problem with deciding women were incompetent. However, that hasn't been the complaint I've heard from the women I've heard complain of sexism. Generally they were competent and acknowledged as such (disclaimer: not always. Some places do that badly too).

The problem I've heard discussed lately is that the guys they worked with tended to make them uncomfortable (example: telling a lot of dirty jokes) and when confronted, tend to intensify that behavior rather than toning it down.

On the one hand, I don't remember seeing that in my workplaces. On the other hand, I'm much less sure that I'd notice that than that I'd notice discrimination based on ability.

But yeah, the complaints I'm hearing currently aren't directly based on ability. Maybe that's progress? I don't feel qualified to say one way or the other.

So yeah. I'm not seeing much sexism either, but it's been pointed out to me that I'm looking in the wrong place.

[ef2p.livejournal.com]

The places I've worked haven't had a problem with deciding women were incompetent.

My last experience working with a female programmer came down to the the fact that she wasn't a good programmer. It wasn't her being female, it was she couldn't code worth a damn. I did use what she wrote, but I did a lot of editing of it myself.

[angelbob.livejournal.com]

Sure. As with male programmers, that happens.

[rightkindofme.livejournal.com]

FWIW I appreciate you talking about your experience frankly. There aren't many who will.

[bellaballanda.livejournal.com]

I have permission to talk about a friend's experience. She's a sys admin on the east coast and the only girl on her team. Many a day I'm going to bed on this coast and she's still up/doing work. For some reason, even though she's not the lowest person on the totem poll, she's always the one doing work late, she's the one who stays till things are done. I don't know if it's her being female, or if it's that she's the one who cares the most. So yea.... I don't know if she'd recommend it for people in general who care the most about things and whether or not that correlates with gender, I don't know...

[rightkindofme.livejournal.com]

I am probably reading you wrong, but I feel fussy so I'm going to respond to you. Yes, things will be different in 15 years. I still want to know how things actually are for women rather than seeing things through a Pollyanna type lens. I want women to feel comfortable speaking their truth and not feel shut down. I kind of read your comment as, "Yeah that's your experience but things will be different so don't rain on someone else's parade" and that bothers me.

There is the possibility that in 15 years things will magically be 100% welcoming to women, I'm not holding my breath. I will encourage my daughter to go into tech if she wants to but I want her to do so knowing she is fighting an uphill battle if it exists.

As for traditionally male industries: I worked as a theatre tech for a few years. I got a lot of sexist, nasty treatment. It really wasn't worthwhile for me. Yes, it is better than it used to be. It still isn't good enough.

[bayareajenn.livejournal.com]

It's too bad I don't get to hear this person's reasons. I wonder if I'm not seeing sexism.

I worked for a few years in Quality Assurance for an internet-based start-up. I wasn't the most technologically-inclined person on the job, with my bachelor of arts and all. Nonetheless, as a black box tester, I was very good at my job. I wasn't, however, paid very much. The boss could have said that it's because I didn't have any experience, but instead he said it was because at the time I was living with and dating one of their lead programmers, and since he was making lots of money, as part of that household, I didn't need to make very much. Is that sexist? I don't know. I didn't feel like I was in a position to argue, given my level of experience, however. A year later when I was still doing a great job but no longer dating/living with that guy, I held out for more money. I ended up getting a 10k per year raise (unheard of), but even with that I was still making 10-15k less than someone hired right out of college to do that job.

That was the only thing that might even be considered sexism that I noticed or can recall. Being good at my job probably helped keep that kind of thing to a minimum. Also, the people I worked with were intelligent and professional. Everyone worked long hours, male and female, except some of the folks with kids (male and female).

The only thing in my life right now that strikes me as maybe being sexist is when I take my car in to the shop and say something is wrong with it, and the mechanics downplay my concerns before even checking out the vehicle. Then again, it could be how they treat all of their customers.

As far as jobs in the past, well...I worked in fast food a lot and was always placed at the order/checkout stations and never on the line. I'm pretty sure that was sexist, as all the women worked the front and all the men worked the back. I think that's changed since I was in my late teens/early twenties, though. I did *a lot* of work in theater (paid and unpaid, on stage and off -- I have a degree in Acting), and never once experienced sexism. I wasn't always good at that work, either. If I was incompetent, I was called on it for what it was, and not because I was a woman. That said, I hate working in theater because so many people are so hypercritical and hypersensitive at the same time. It's a rough working environment unless you get just the right mix of people. Working in the animal care and training field, well I'd have to say the field itself is so dominated by women, I haven't seen any sexism other than the "I-wish-we-had-a-big-strong-guy-to-help-us-lift-this-heavy-crap" kind. Pretty harmless stuff.

[judith-s.livejournal.com]

The problem is that if you encounter only one female programmer, it leads to this (http://xkcd.com/385/).

I'm no longer in tech, but my industry is largely male as well (although 15% female partners at my firm now). Sexism is real, but unfortunately it's real in every industry. I actually think that tech on the whole is less sexist than a lot of other fields.

[judith-s.livejournal.com]

Yes, there is sexism. But there is sexism in almost every career path, and especially well paying career paths which tend to be dominated by men. I've experienced some sexism. And probably caused some too, when I took time off when I had kids and reduced my hours so I could have a family life. My partner whose wife had a baby took off a total of 3 hours that day, and still works 12 hour days and many weekends.

Pointed here by a friend...

[datagoddess.livejournal.com]

I've worked in tech for over 20 years, and while the overt sexism has gotten better (back when I was a programmer, in the early 90s, I was mistaken for a secretary by a client) there's still a lot of pressure to be 'one of the boys', to be able to handle the sexist jokes, the comments about being on my period if I'm having a bad day, at any sign of aggravation or aggression told to "calm down", things like that. Getting called "sweetie" or "hon". Being treated like I can't rack a server because I wore a skirt that day (let alone pull cables for the thing!).

Nothing that can be taken to HR, but a lot of being treated differently because I'm female. Since I started telecommuting 3 years I don't see nearly as much of it, since my interaction with co-workers is much more task focused than it usually is face to face, but I do still get it from various people.

I don't have to prove myself as much as I used to, but that could also be because I hold a senior position which I wouldn't have gotten if I didn't know my stuff. When I deal with the off-shore support people (in my case usually Brazil) I have to deal a lot with being talked over, with being dismissed, which annoys me because they're a lower support level than I am.

To give you background, I'm current contracted support by LargeTLA to support InternationalStoreChain, and I'm a senior SAN administrator. InternationalStoreChain has outsourced their North American operations to LargeTLA (multiple data centers, large environment). Of the tech people I deal with day in and day out, I would say maybe 2 others are female.

So while things have gotten better, I still would hesitate to recommend to a young woman that a tech career, or at least one in infrastructure support like I have, would be a good choice.

[dangerpudding.livejournal.com]

So, being the woman/friend of whom you speak, I'm happy to make (some of) my reasons and history public.

I'm a sysadmin, have been in the field for almost 13 years now. I've worked mostly on the west coast (Arizona, Oregon, California) and western Europe (Amsterdam). Have been at a small local ISP, a large startup security company, an international non-profit, large governmental agency, consulting firm and now at a state university.

Saying that I wouldn't recommend that other women enter the field - that is that I don't know that I would encourage someone who wasn't already interested and fairly determined to go that route. It's a hard road, and often not fun. That's *not* saying that a woman who was interested and determined wouldn't have my full support. I've helped multiple women start in the field, I continue to do what I can to help women in the field, I believe that having women in the field is important. I'm currently working on a team of 7 and there's another woman on my team and I think this is *awesome*.

My reasons, though, are that I don't think things have gotten better, I hear constant horror stories, and I know my own history. I think I was one of the luckier ones, actually. I've *only* had to tolerate close (male) friends telling me flat out that I couldn't do this, being groped in the server room, being treated as the secretary, and nearly being fired for being fat while female, among other things. I've never been attacked in such a way that I couldn't defend myself physically (at work). I've not actually been fired (except that once, and there's nothing provable there). I've only had it implied in interviews that I wouldn't be hired if they thought I was interested in having kids in the near future, never actually said. I don't know of any rumors being started about my supposed sexual exploits with or around co-workers.

Some of these things happen in non-IT jobs, I know. But I know of very, very few women in tech who have been there very long who don't have some stories of this sort. I've learned to calibrate for certain things. At my current job, I didn't wear a dress for the first three months, knowing that dressing too nicely often gets you discounted technically. I don't back down in discussions when I know I'm right. I'm downright aggressive about handling my own hardware maintenance (aside from asking for help moving things that are too heavy, but the men on my team do that as well - and I'm cautious of who I ask).

I've worked at some of the best places for women in tech, all told. Even at those places, there were people I had to win over in ways my male colleagues didn't have to. I understand that a lot of this is invisible to the men around me, and even to other women, and I am very sensitive to it - but I have good reason.

All that said - there are parts of tech that are better than others. I hear that QA and support organizations have more women and treat women better, in general. Universities and research groups tend to be better. There are companies that are known to treat women better, groups at companies that are known for it. But overall, it's something you *have* to be aware of or you won't make it very far without deciding it isn't worth it.

[dangerpudding.livejournal.com]

FWIW, my read of the "in 15 years things will be different" comment - at least the initial one - isn't "in 15 years things won't be sexist" but rather noting that what I (and spaghettisquash) do for a living wasn't really even a glimmer in anyone's eye when I was 2 years old - so encouraging an interest in it may have little/nothing to do with where things up. More "in 15 years, knowing how to program may be like knowing how to breathe"... I am seeing an awful lot of english majors and the like taking programming classes right now.

[rehana.livejournal.com]

Hmm. From the reasons people have given, I'm probably the wrong person to ask because I want to be "one of the guys," wouldn't even think about wearing (or buying) a skirt, and don't want kids, ever.

I will say that I haven't run into much overt sexism, or any detectable suggestions that wanting kids mattered.

[spaghettisquash.livejournal.com]

I am totally happy to discuss my experiences in a non-public post (I picked out a few incidents in my post in March about why I was quitting my job). I do not actually believe that people in non-gender-normative jobs will not be punished by their peers for doing so at any point in my lifetime. The US military is actually putting energy into their problem - private industry tends to ignore the elephant in the room. My hope is that the military will set a good example on this front.

It clear that some of these commenters do not actually experience sexism (or do not notice the sexism that surrounds them), and that is awesome! I am happy for them. Honestly, if I knew what I was getting into I would have found a different field to work in. Some days, I do not want to be an example of a woman that can man up.

Some people think that IT is not better than it used to be (ie, it improved in the 80s and declined in the late 90s, so we are not at 60s level of hostility). It varies a lot; dangerpudding's new job sounds amazingly awesome. Most of my jobs have been on par with the rest of her career.

[spiffikins]

I've been working in technology for the past 10 years.

My experience seems to be different from other women, in that I've never had anyone either directly say anything to me, or suggest that, as a woman, I am incapable of doing my job. I've only had one co-worker ever make a sexist joke - and he's a dear friend of my, so when I looked askance at him, he apologized immediately and that was the end of that.

I've worked for the same company for the past ten years, a small software development company that I joined when I completed my programming course after college.

I took a 9 month programming class run by a school that made piles of cash off of people who wanted to get in on the dot.com boom. The school had something like 8 or 9 campuses across Canada, and much was made of the fact that the class that I was in, was nearly 50% female - out of the 34 people in the class, there were something like 16 women.

Of those 16, probably 4 or 5 really "got it" - the rest struggled to really understand the course materials. That being said, probably of the other 18 men, I would say 10 or 12 of them really did well.

When I was hired, the owner of the company had already hired a handful of people that had graduated from this program, and he was impressed enough that he was advertisting on the school's job board.

He mentioned in my phone interview that he was "actively recruiting women" because his daughter had said something to him about "why don't you have any women working for you?". My friend Marianne and I were both hired from the same graduating class, and another woman was also hired at the same time from another campus.

About a year after I started, the company had 19 technical people - 6 women in technical positions.

I was hired as a java developer, but the dot.com bust left us scrambling to find any consulting work - I did pl/sql development, I built web pages, I did java development and when that dried up, I became a DBA and the Release Manager/Build Engineer for our application. I'm a project manager, and a consultant who architects and writes code. I'm also the IT department, keeping our development servers up and running, as well as our server farm used for our hosted ASP customers up and running 24/7. I also run our technical support department and I am the person they escalate to when they cannot figure out the answer.

As a small company, that makes software that needs other well-known software packages to run (apache, tomcat, java, oracle/mysql/mssql) - we don't get to say to a customer "go ask Microsoft for help getting mssql working" - we get to become experts in *all* of the combinations and permutations of these software packages - and I'm the one who gets to troubleshoot customer installations.

I was thinking about this a couple of weeks ago, and thought maybe it's because I've only ever worked for one company that I haven't been exposed to sexism - but realistically I talk to more IT people than anyone I know, because I talk to a dozen customers a week, troubleshooting their world.

And in ten years of doing this, I've never had anyone in any way show any reluctance to work with me, or any disbelief that I could solve their problem because of my gender.

On the flip side - I don't find very many occasions where the IT person on the other end of the call is a woman. When I do, I give a little cheer inside and *hope* very hard that she will be competent.

[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?

[warsop.livejournal.com]

I'm a researcher for a major technology company. I've been here for five years. Before this, I had a similar position with another major technology company. I've also done development, tech support, and system administration. My two undergraduate degrees are math and computer science; I've also got a MS in human-computer interaction.

Looking around my group of around 200 people, there's about 40 women. If I were to remove the non-engineering disciplines of marketing and user assistance, the number drops to under 20. One of my previous managers, who has been a manager at our company for nearly 15 years, told me that I was the first woman who reported to him. Someone else hypothesised up to 20% rates for female programmers, but that's much higher than my experience. In my current group, we're under 5% for female programmers and only slightly better for female testers. That's similar for my previous employers.

There's sexism. It's gotten steadily better than what I experienced when I was an undergrad (such as my first calc prof telling me that women couldn't understand differential equations), but it's still there. I've been told repeatedly that I'm more technical than expected. In a meeting a couple of weeks ago, one of my co-workers told me that I didn't know what I was talking about with respect to math (which, thankfully, resulted in another co-worker saying "ohnoyouDIDN'T" to him).

There's subtle things as well. If I raise a concern about something, I'm far more likely to be labelled "alarmist" than if it's one of my male counterparts doing so. If I have a disagreement within my team, I'm likely to be described as "shrill". If one of my male colleagues tells an off-colour joke and I just raise an eyebrow at him, then I'm "being defensive". If someone pisses me off, then I'm "on the rag". If I back up one of my female colleagues in a technical discussion, then I'm "representing the sisterhood". If I say that maybe using "rape" to describe a technical decision you don't like isn't really appropriate, then I'm "just being politically correct".

After getting married last year, I noticed that people started asking me when I might be taking maternity leave. Last year was a wedding year in my group, so I compared notes with my other co-workers who had also gotten married around the same time I did. The other woman reported the same experience as I did, but none of the men were asked when they'd be headed off on paternity leave.

All of this is why I mentor other women at my company. In each and every one of those mentoring relationships, sexism has come up at some point. The subtle forms of it are the ones that will drive you crazy because it's hard to identify whether it's actually happening or whether you're just being "sensitive" (another word often thrown at women).

[charleshaynes.livejournal.com]

I have been active in trying to recruit more women into the tech companies I've worked for for the past 20 years. I've talked to a lot of women in tech during that time, I've taught classes in sexual harassment in the workplace, and I've tried to pay specific attention to this issue.

My impression is that things got better for a while during the 70s and 80s, but that they've been steadily declining since the mid 90s, and that right now things are worse than they've been in a while. I believe I'm relatively familiar with spaghettsquash's situation, and I recommended that she hire a lawyer, her situation was so bad.

I've known other women who left the company due to sexual harassment situations that I was sure didn't actually happen any more - a senior manager making direct and blatant sexual advances to women who worked for him.

Like spaghettisquash I encourage women who are in the industry, but these days my primary approach to getting more women in to tech is to try to improve working conditions in the companies I work for rather than trying to actually convince more women to work in tech - because until sexism in the workplace improves I can't in good conscience try to recruit more women into the field. (I do try to recruit women who are already in tech to companies I believe are good places to work.)

[ETA, an example. Yesterday in a meeting a woman presented a proposed hardware layout for a new system we're building. It includes a diagram of how the equipment should be installed in the hardware "rack." (it's called a rack diagram.) One of the (male) engineers said "Nice rack." I was shocked and said "You did NOT just say that!" The other males in the room all thought it was funny and presumably that I was a humorless git. (I'm in Australia, sexism is worse here.)]

[karenbynight.livejournal.com]

Female, unix sysadmin, senior.

I probably wouldn't encourage other women to enter the field, either. It's not the brutal experiences in sexism: the guys who were cabling the unix lab I managed who had extensive meetings with me about where I wanted the ports and then wished me a happy secretary's day; the interview where the guy told me that he hadn't wanted to interview girls today but it turns out that I was actually competent; the co-worker who harassed me for years after a bad divorce and the bosses who either did nothing or lied to the guy and told him they'd seen me crying over his treatment of me so couldn't he lay off it; the boss who tried to bring me to his viewpoint by saying "this is your dad speaking". Those brutal experiences invite brutal responses, and I know how to play political hardball.

It's not even the random experiences of gender disconnect: the new co-worker who had to take 30 seconds to process out loud about how I'm really technical for a woman as if I've never heard that before before he started to geek out with me like he would have a guy; the blog entries and speakers that went along about the common geek experience, lulling me into the sense that just maybe they understood that it transcends gender before they made a gendered joke, perhaps about how we're all the same in that the wife just doesn't understand about our need to packrat hardware, to remind me that they consider me an outsider; the constant use of "your mother" as the archetypical naive user as if some of their geek friends weren't *already* mothers. Those serve to remind me that a lot of people forget that it's OUR world now, too... but as an eternal optimist I have hope that with excellent work and a working sense of humor, we can remind them.

No, the thing that really gets me is that these all point to a fact that's immutable and beyond my control to change: as long as I am in this field, I have to constantly confront my belief that I get paid less and treated as a less valuable employee than my male co-workers of the same level. And that it's almost worse that that belief is likely to be untrue during some parts of my career... because the odds are, it's true much more often than it's false. And so I get to second-guess continually: would I have gotten that raise if I were born with a penis? Would my boss have rated me higher? Would my co-workers listen to me more? Would I be able to work a little less hard or a little less long of hours for the same result?

[karenbynight.livejournal.com]

I don't mean to come off sharp, but: your boss told you that you didn't deserve a paycheck that was commensurate with the value of your work because of who you were dating and you're not sure whether or not that's sexist? Was the boss telling that to any men? Did he change your salary as soon as the guy and you broke up, or did you have to ask? And, if that was the boss' logic, why didn't he pay you the full amount and cut the programmer's salary? After all, if his money was yours because you were dating, then your money was also his; it could have gone either way, right? But it never does.

[bayareajenn.livejournal.com]

Nobody else who was working there was in a (known/public) relationship with someone else also working there, so he probably didn't say it to anyone else. But yeah, now that you put it that way, it probably was sexist. I had to ask for the raise at my yearly review. I can't imagine my boss saying the same thing to a guy whose wife had already been working there for a while. I figure that he didn't cut my boyfriend's salary because he was working there before I was, and his salary was already set and contracted. This is the kind of thing that happens when you know you are absolutely not qualified for the job, even if you can do it well. I had no leverage.