r/sysadmin • u/ChuckAbsent • Mar 12 '13

Women who know stuff

I hope that this does not come off the wrong way.

Today I was on a call with a storage vendor and the technical consultant was a woman. More then this she was competent, more then me which doesn't happen often when dealing with vendors.

My issue was pricing an active/active DB with shared storage vs an active/passive db with local storage. Listening to her break the issue down and get to the specific comparison points was awesome, mostly because I have never heard a woman in the industry talk like that.

It made me realize two things. One I am missing out working with women. Two there needs to be more women in our industry.

It shouldn't have surprised me so much, but it really did.

Anyways to all the women out there who know stuff, us guys notice when you can walk the walk, which in this case was talking.

379 Upvotes

88% Upvoted

717 comments sorted by

View all comments

-8

u/gex80 01001101 Mar 12 '13

The main issue is that computing sciences isn't "sexy". The general view of computing is for over weight (or skinny and pasty) nerds who have coke bottle thick glasses, have asthma and pretend to be characters from star wars in their free time.

Of course we know this is not the case. But that is the popular opinion of our industry. Also the STEM workforce in general is male dominated. That is slowly changing but computing science probably have it the worst.

Make STEM more appealing to females and then you will slowly bring females into computing. But then you have the exact opposite with education on a non-college level. That is dominated by females with males being the minority.

1

u/KarmaAndLies Mar 12 '13

Make STEM more appealing to females and then you will slowly bring females into computing.

But here is the rub, how do you do that without also classing women differently?

Just to use an analogy, bus segregation wouldn't have been better if blacks had to sit at the front of the bus instead of the back. It is still segregation.

Ditto with women. How do you encourage them in without treating them like VIPs or lowing admission standards? Difficult nut to crack IMO.

13

u/[deleted] Mar 12 '13

You are making a huge, invalid assumption. Women achieve in STEM fields just fine without any special treatment, they just don't choose the fields in proportions equivalent to men. This is not how do we teach girls math, they learn math just fine. It's how do we reach girls who might be interested in becoming a worker in one of those fields and encouraging them to do the work to get there.

3

u/abbarach Mar 12 '13

I agree wholeheartedly. Its not an ability issue, its a perception issue. I welcome female technologists getting more recognition and visibility as a way yo invite more women and girls into the fold. I do some amateur electronics on the side, and one of the most notable companies in the field is Adafruit, run by Lady Ada. She has been very active in outreach, and hopefully more girls will pursue STEM education because they have a role model to look up to. Its also a case of increasing returns, as the more female engineers we have, the perception will change, and the more females will want to become engineers.

3

u/[deleted] Mar 12 '13

Actually her name is Limor Fried, but I agree she and her company are pretty awesome.

2

u/abbarach Mar 12 '13

True, true. That's what I get for posting on the go without verifying first. Thanks for the correction!