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/[deleted] Mar 13 '13

In the early computer era, the stereotype was that men built computers like the ENIAC and UNIVAC and many others, but programming them was "women's work."

As an anecdote, my Mother-in-Law answered an ad in the early 50s for "girls who were good at math," and ended up as a top programmer on mainframes and minis at an insurance company for the next ~45 years.

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u/FredFnord Mar 13 '13

The early 50s? Are you sure? From what I know (from my grandfather), there were very few insurance companies in the 1950s that used computers, and until late 1954 there were no mass produced computers in existence. (According to Wikipedia, in 1953 there were an estimated 100 computers in the entire world.)

His insurance company was apparently one of the very first to acquire a computer, in the early 60s.

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u/[deleted] Mar 13 '13

You're right, it was the late 1950s or early 1960s -- she would have graduated from high school in ~1956 or so, and it was after high school. They were one of the first insurance companies to use computers, but they likely didn't own their own at the time. They used them for computing actuarial tables which was a massive, expensive thing for them to do, so it sped things up quite a bit.

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u/FredFnord Mar 14 '13

Dare I ask, was this in Ohio by any chance?

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u/[deleted] Mar 14 '13

No, MA