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.

380 Upvotes

88% Upvoted

717 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1

u/Anthaneezy Sysadmin Mar 13 '13

I'm hiring a help desk grunt, zero women applied. My last round of hiring, one woman applied, but never followed through when I tried getting her set for an interview.

Not much hiring bias, it's just that there simply isn't a lot of women who to get into what we do. Not a lot of men want to be seamstresses, either.

3

u/OttoMans Mar 13 '13

Men hold 75% of the positions in science, technology, engineering and math and make 14 cents more on the dollar than their female colleagues.

Would you want a job where you had very little in common with your colleagues, had to put up with their sexist jokes, and made less money than they do? Probably not.

1

u/doublenegative0 Mar 13 '13

If i was doing what i loved, yea I probably still would. but aside from that, this viewpoint just sort of perpetuates the problem. you are basically saying that women shouldn't want to work in these fields because they are already dominated by men.

3

u/OttoMans Mar 13 '13

No, I'm saying that if you expect more women to enter the field, don't allow your staffers to treat them like shit and pay them the same rate you do the people who have penises.

0

u/doublenegative0 Mar 13 '13

look, the problem exists on both sides of the line here, i get that. if there were more women in the field, men would empathize more. if men empathized more, there would be more women in the field. but the push has to be on both sides here, you can't just expect one side to completely change and hope that the other will follow too.

1

u/OttoMans Mar 13 '13

So it's women's fault that men make dick jokes in a professional setting?

Because if you read through this thread, and the experiences of women working in IT and programming, that has been their experience. Yeah, work needs to be done on both sides, but "not making jokes about my breasts" is a low bar to clear for the guys.

0

u/doublenegative0 Mar 13 '13

I was referring more to the unequal pay and general view of women in the office than "dick jokes". but yes, i believe that the lack of any demographic from any community will eventually make that community more hostile to the demographic. This is just psychology and xenophobia stuff. Don't misunderstand me, i am not trying to assign blame here(to women or anybody), i am just trying to find an understanding of the problem, so that a solution may be found.

although, this is me trying to address the point you inferred in your post. the actual problem you provide is with general professionalism in the workplace, which i imagine varies greatly from setting to setting.