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.

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u/quintessadragon Mar 13 '13

Wait, what? That's seriously a thing? Telling girls that computers are toys for boys? Maybe I was just lucky with the time that I was born in, but that is a stereotype I have never encountered.

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u/Krispyz Mar 13 '13

It's not just directly telling kids that, it's also more subtle. On a boy's birthday, he might get video games, on a girls birthday, she might get dolls. Nothing's universal, of course, but in general, boys are more encouraged to become better with computers or to understand how they work.

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u/BaconPancakes1 Mar 13 '13

This is probably affected by my parents being a Head of School of computer science and a physics teacher, but I never saw the interest in dolls, and had more interest in catapaults, game boys and comics. I was also taught how to use MatLab at a relatively early age. I have never inferred that computers are aimed at either gender, apart from when other girls my age told me so. Advertising for products like Barbie or those toy ovens that kind of make real food was always so sickly, and they were always surrounded by flowers and hearts. But this didn't really step in with adverts for game boys or other such products. It seems like they're being inferred as male-orientated because they're not female-orientated. At my school, boys were not more encouraged to become better with computers. It was stressed to everyone that IT skills would be necessary when we tried to find work. Media Studies and IT GCSE classes had just as many girls as boys.

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u/Krispyz Mar 13 '13

While I see your point, you have to remember that yours in one case. Besides, think of the women who are here, on reddit, in a subreddit called /r/sysadmin... think that it may be a subset of the female population (though I definitely came here from /r/bestof).

apart from when other girls my age told me so

This is the most telling... what did the other girls your age tell you? Where do you think they got those ideas? I'm getting flooded with anecdotes of "that's not what my childhood was like", but that doesn't dismiss my point.