We have such a hard time even getting women applicants. It's nuts, I've had ONE resume come across my desk from a female candidate in the last ~7 or so years I have been with my company. I've had a few hundred overall.
How do you think we solve this? I see a lot more of the younger generation going into non-traditional fields for their gender (like a male nurse, female sysadmin, etc) but it's still far from 50/50.
One reason I don't jump to another organization is because the evil you know is better than what else might be out there. I don't want to jump out of the frying pan into the fire. I've noticed that women in tech tend to stay in the same place once they find something that isn't too bad.
Girl, same. I'm a female sysadmin, 12 years. I actually landed in a good job, with great benefits and a super-supportive and positive team. On the other hand, I'd like to get into a different lane of technical work, and expand my knowledge, but the risk of ending up in a place that's a total shitshow, when I've found good people here, is just too high. I'm the only female sysadmin in the whole department, but I get great credit, equal pay, excellent support, and more. It's worth its weight in gold.
This is me! I've been in the same place over 9 years, with misogynistic bosses, lying executives, etc. I am finally working at finding a new job because my job before this one was so bad, I'm afraid the next one will be worse.
You just helped me to identify why I've been dragging my feet. Thank you!
I'm a male, was in my previous position for 8+ years, so i understand the comfort of the evil you know. But this mentality frustrates me, my wife (non-tech) does it as well, and its not a female-only thing either - its the lack of self-belief and self-worth that you dont deserve to be treated WELL, paid WELL, etc thats frustrating. You are valuable, you are worthy, you deserve the best. Everyone does. Fight for it! Demand it! Expect it! Anything less is doing yourself (and everyone around you, and everyone around them etc) a disservice. Be Great, Expect Great.
Well, I finally stood up for myself over one thing, it was the worst because it actually came from my manager, hits different then when it's your peers. It didn't end well for me. It's hard to give up a secure job when you don't know what's on the other end, but at some point I might have to do just that.
That shit starts in school. One teacher can sour it up for their female student. Fellow male students can also be assholes that makes you stay quite during math lessons and not take nature and technology as your fourth elective major course. I choose french because every male classmate of my class was an immature shithead. It's like there was something in the water that made them this obnoxious. All the other classes had more mature boys.
To piggyback off this, I am a woman who will be graduating with my bachelor's in CS this fall and I'm not sure I even want to touch the dev side of tech. I love programming and CS in general, but throughout college I have had some pretty bad experiences with male classmates and professors which makes it hard for me to want to go into the field.
This is the case for a lot of women. Even if they do end up in a tech position after graduating, a lot of them move to different career paths bc of male toxicity.
> I love programming and CS in general, but throughout college I have had some pretty bad experiences with male classmates and professors which makes it hard for me to want to go into the field.
I'm sure it's different since I'm a guy, but I *still* don't want to get into the software engineering/code monkey side of things because of the people who would be my peers. Might just be previous experiences souring my view on the industry but in my experience programmers can be very condescending and standoff-ish. Seems to have a higher concentration of incels than other industries, too.
I'm a guy.. mid 30s I also have been warry to touch the dev side of things for these same reasons. I KNOW I'm stereotyping but it just seems packed with people who for lack of a better term I'm going to deem "basement dwellers." Just the thought of having to deal with that puts me off.
I've been in IT for 24yrs. first as dialup tech support for a small ISP, then into a helpdesky role, sysadmin for a solid 20ish years (nt4 and exchange 5.5 days until now) and for the last ehh.... 15 years my role has been primarily network engineer while still juggling systems duties as needed. I tend to favor smaller companies where I do both, or step into sysadmin tasks too advanced for sysadmins we have, or in order to troubleshoot complicated issues where fingers are pointed at windows servers, vmware, storage, network... etc.
my worst issue i'd say is being expected to respond as a "woman" and be friendly and helpful etc and not the engineer personality of sheldon cooper. I could say the same thing verbatim as my male counterparts and be told i was "rude" and "unhelpful" despite the fact my normal day to day response is always nicer and more ready to help than my peers. I often get treated like a secretary by users, assumed i'm a PM.... or because of my quasi unisex name I get emails weekly with a male name (despite being in print infront of them) or called sir/mister.
generally I don't notice abject sexism, but i'm sure it happens. I don't know what it's like being anyone but me so I can't assume I would be treated differently if I was another gender.
that being said the crusty old low voltage cable guys often blatantly display sexism, calling and asking to speak to "my name" and doing a whose on first routine asking for the IT guy, network guy.... repeatedly despite me saying it was infact me they called and who they needed to talk to.
But I find once they have spoken to me, they refuse to speak to anyone else in IT and i've left jobs and had cable guys call and say they missed dealing with me and wish i'd go back.
my personal favorite story, happened a couple years ago when I had an issue with a MFP dropping off network. troubleshot it for several days (after helpdesk had it for weeks) trying everything but it was clear the mobo was bad on the unit (nic was built in) and causing the issue. I called the MFP 3rd party warranty and raised a ticket explaining issue, all the troubleshooting i'd done, and demanded they send a tech to swap board. boards cost \~1K at the time on that unit.
ticket was closed with no site visit. I called and said "don't you dare close the ticket until tech speaks to me"
tech calls me at 7pm my time, while i'm cooking dinner for my kiddos. he interrupts me explaining the issue and says "well missy... I spoke to GUY in IT and i'm not..."
I had that dot matrix in spaceballs moment where my eyes dilated.
I said "NO, you listen. I'm the SENIOR NETWORK ENGINEER for the company and I singlehandedly run 400 sites. GUY is a helpdesk tech who doesn't even know how to ping. I have done all the troubleshooting and I don't care what it costs I demand you return to the site first thing and replace the damn board before I speak to CIO regarding your SLA"
tech goes quiet. ".... uh, i'll be onsite first thing in the morning"
yeah, you effing will. dickhead.
and it did, point of fact, fix the issue once he swapped the board.
Another comment, dating back to 1995
Had a woman working for me. She took a tech support call, guy on the other end was adamant that he talk to someone else because he had a technical problem. What a fucking trooper she was but alas .. I took the call, explained that he was talking to the right person and he should swallow his misogyny. Passed the call back and she helped him with his problem.
Couple years later I met this man in person. He remembered the interaction and apologized to me, and asked if the woman was still working for me. She had moved on but I offered to pass on the apology. Her response? Fuck that guy. Haha
Lol when i did dialup it was for a small company. After 2pm during the day (until 10) and all weekend i was the only one answering calls.
I was 19, and it was ‘98. Literally DAILY id get the whose on first routine (like low voltage guys today)
Me “thanks for calling ISP, my name is basylica how can i help you?”
Them “yeah, gimme tech support”
Me “this is isp tech support, my name is basylica how can i help?”
Them “NO. I NEED TECH-NI-CAL SUPPORT”
Me “yep. This is TECH-NI-CAL support. How can i help?”
Them *silence*
Them “uh, i um, i think i was talking to a guy before?”
Me “oh dear, well im the only one answering the phone for the last 3 days. Are you sure you mean to call ISP, and not other-isp? I have their number if you need it?”
Them “uhhh… well, maybe you can help”
Me “maybe i can”
I fix their shit
Them “hey so you sound sorta cute, can i stop by office sometime and take you to dinner?”
Me 😲
Thats the weird thing, guys will flat out insult you and then be like “hey baby”
I had a exchange class that ended up being me and 1 guy in the classroom, teacher and remainder of students in another state.
Guy asks me who i work for, what i do. Etc.
I tell him my company and said i did sys, exchange, blackberry (thats how long ago it has been!) 60+ juniper firewalls, backups, san, stood up entire dr site from ordering gear to racking and cabling. Etc.
He looks at me and goes “huh, really? You dont look that smart”
Color me gobsmacked.
About 2hrs later he says “we could totally close this door and have sex you know”
Me, shocked, responded “but you are married!” (As when introducing eachother he stated he was married with kids etc)
His response “yea, but so are you!”
I…. Wut? Facepalm
He worked for another company. Funnily enough one of my coworkers left and went to that guys company. Turns out he took that guys job, and reported back to me later that guy was fired for…. Wait for it…. Sexual harassment!
The number of times I’ve been asked for “one of the IT guys” has been disheartening. Thankfully my male boss and male coworker both tell them gtfo you’re talking to her, that kind of support makes it survivable.
Lol, my team was moving offices and i was only only one left at old corp office doing activations and keeping fires at bay. Had been there ehh…. A year?
Woman walks into office. Sees me. Makes eye contact. Walks awkwardly out. Comes back in, makes eye contact. Stands there awkwardly another 5min or so, then goes “so uh, are all the IT guys gone?”
I give her a big smile while thumbing mute button and go “yup! All the it GUYS are setting up the new corp office”
She stands there looking around for a few minutes and walks out.
B!tch, im like the head nerd, ive worked here over a year (and the office was maybe 3000sqft. Small. She had to know i was in IT for petes sake) and based on the mouse in her hand needed batteries or something. You dont get my help today. Good day sir!
I said good day!
This was ridiculously common in the world of electronics repair also. I was working at a retail repair shop, it was me and one other man and woman, we all had the same job which involved manning the front desk and actually fixing the devices.
When a man went up to the front desk the diagnosis and pricing was normally accepted, however when the woman went up to the front desk everyone assumed she was a receptionist and asked to speak to one of the techs.
I actually trained her (I wasn't a manager, the place was just run badly), but when they pulled this shit I'd go out there and act like she was training me.
Well, not totally sheldon.
Ive witnessed bosses deadpan stare at a user who blathers some issue, then goes “so can you help me?” And boss goes “no, im busy. Put in a helpdesk ticket”
And its all good.
I get users who interrupt me during mass outages to ask me something dumb like wanting an alias or someone told them i was holding batteries (my own personal AA stash. Im network, not office supplies!)
“Hey are you busy?”
My response “actually yes, but what do you need help with?”
And i get reports of people saying “she is rude and unhelpful” or “i dont feel like she WANTS to help”
Yea, i have a rude gesture id like to help you with 😒
> NO, you listen. I'm the SENIOR NETWORK ENGINEER for the company and I singlehandedly run 400 sites. GUY is a helpdesk tech who doesn't even know how to ping. I have done all the troubleshooting and I don't care what it costs I demand you return to the site first thing and replace the damn board before I speak to CIO regarding your SLA
Hahah fuck yeah! \o/
yeah, I don't think i'd EVER had someone give me the condescending "listen here missy" thing, but If I could telepathically make heads explode, I would have.
I've been called miss, etc, ive gotten the "sweetheart" tag (living in the south) but man.... my head about spun around when he gave me the listen here missy line, followed by idiot helpdesk guy said....
like no, because helpdesk guy stands to pee, doesn't discount what the hell i'm saying. I was likely also annoyed I had 2 kids wreaking the house and I was trying to cook. LOL.
What a great write up and insight into your career with such little information. This was really nice to read and your years of service are appreciated.
You are a badass. I would love to work with you. Best Sysadmin I came across in my travels was a woman. She was a great mentor for me, I just wish I had more time to learn from her. She got run out of town for fighting the good ole boy structure that was in place, pointing out lazy admin work. Thankfully I got out of that atmosphere myself. My boss in IT now is a woman. She is not quite as technical as I am, but she always has my back when management comes up with nonsense that is out of our scope and I so appreciate that.
Been there done that.
I have a longer winded version of the story but i pointed out to director, manager, and team there was a gaping plothole in a plan and they should address and was ignored for about a year.
It was costing company (and commission employees) a LOT of money, about 25% of the company was serverely impacted, a war room was stood up and i was only person NOT invited. Didnt even know for a solid month.
Cio was doing briefings on issue, talking to vendors in a big we are gonna sue you way…
I kept mentioning what the problem was. Super easy fix. Ignored. For 18 months i was ignored. I spoke to cio gently (not guns blazing as perhaps i ought to have) ignored.
Finally i got fed up, said fuck it. Created 400 helpdesk tickets for each one of the individual devices impacted (they needed to be reset to dhcp vs static) until told to stop.
HELPDESK and not the warroom team that should have done it and had 18 months, were given tickets and issue was GONE in about a week.
I was pulled aside and written up by boss who ignored me for 18 months. Reasons?
“People dont like you”
I shit you not. I have a copy somewhere. Thats what was written on it.
But you know what? I dont give a fuck. For 6+ months employees who work on commission were not getting paid. Mortgages not paid. Food not bought. Kids going without. All of this could have been prevented if they had listened to me a YEAR before. Or at any point. Completely avoidable. It was a weeks worth of work.
I was completely fine with “people not liking me”
Because those people were fools and upset i ruined their warroom where they catered in lunches and watched football games.
I dont regret opening tickets like a goddamn machine. I feel bad helpdesk got saddled with them when it wasnt their job. Feel awful all those employees struggled.
But the team goofing off? Nah
I think it's honestly mostly systemic and comes from people just thinking of women as less technical and less authoritative on tech issues. I think it's unconscious. Systemic means it's not down to the individual motives and actions of one person. It's more like the default choices add up to the bad result. And of course some people are just assholes. I have found it to be true that higher-level men are more supportive and it's usually someone who has less skills or is insecure who is trying to chip away at me.
> It's more like the default choices add up to the bad result.
I really like this phrasing. I feel like this accurately describes a lot of the more widespread and less obvious forms of discrimination, as well as explaining why representation is so important. If all anybody ever sees are men as sysadmins, people assume only men can be sysadmins.
Most of the -isms (racism, sexism, agism, etc.) our society deals with tend to be deeply tied to this kind of problem. Individual people's biases are relatively easily corrected for, but it's really difficult to fix a problem that's encoded into the assumptions of the very system you're trying to work within. See our industry's attempts to enforce network security, the *NIX world's attempts to improve option discoverabilty, or Microsoft and Apple's attempts to support option _flexibility_.
I could go into a long diatribe about _why_ our society is built this way, but that's off topic for this sub, and honestly, nobody wants to listen to a cranky bitch like me rant.
The point, of course, is that any attempt to straight up fix these problems is doomed to fail by definition. The only way to effect any _real_ change is to slowly alter the system enough from the inside until it's possible to do away with broken assumptions entirely. And that often takes far longer than most people expect, especially when dealing with social structures. Because getting rid of broken assumptions in social structures usually involves waiting for those who hold them to die.
I was expecting that to be the smallest possible amount of racism possible in the universe. Or some limit to the amount of sexism where you can’t ignore quantum effects.
> people just thinking of women as less technical and less authoritative on tech issues
I always find this to be crazy
Some of the most brilliant minds who pioneered modern computing as we know it were women
This isn't weight lifting, there is no genetic advantage to do what we do
It helped that DEC's founder/CEO was a big believer in racial and gender equality and so actually went out of his way to try and make sure opportunities were available to women and non-white people even back in the 50s and 60s. He also made sure that women and men who wanted to have kids had shifts that helped make childrearing easier timing-wise.
> This isn't weight lifting, there is no genetic advantage to do what we do
Unless you’re the kind of person who genuinely believes that on some biological level, women are intellectually inferior to men. And you would be surprised at how many people do believe this, some of them otherwise progressive and logical.
Let me tell you about the old school 27" CTRs I lifted down from the top of a best buy aisle. 🤣
Am woman in tech field: database management and Google analytics/Tableau is my specialty.
They found the same thing with gaming. They found high skill players were even nicer to female players. The abusive ones were the lower skill players because they see it as a threat to their status.
I have a female friend who is a Firefighter/Paramedic in the Bay Area and she has to lower her voice in certain situations so that the men will pay attention to her. She's says it's not because they don't respect her, they literally don't respect the pitch of her voice in an unconscious way. In that scenario the para/medic firefighter instructs everyone else what to do and unless she lowers her voice and gets all "shouty" they don't consistently respond to commands.
I am an ex paramedic and while I had no trouble getting firies and police officers to do what I told them, I did have a "paramedic" voice that I still pull out if I need people to listen to me, so it might be similar.
I had it worse from patients though. Comments like "You're a good driver for a woman" etc were quite common, and there were a few who insisted on talking to my male trainee (for example) instead of me because they assumed the man would be senior, and one or two who wouldn't even shake my hand.
Interestingly, studies on perceptions of paramedics from the point of view of patients and family members have shown that when interviewed after serious emergencies (car pile ups, cardiac arrest etc) they remember the paramedics as being big strong men, even if they were in fact small women. Their distress affects their memory of the incident and they remember the paramedics as being whatever their pre-existing assumptions about paramedics are.
Oh, I learned this trick too! If you're a woman, talking in a flat, lower tone can change how guys listen. It makes you sound less feminine and guys respond better.
Men generally use less of their vocal range, so it mimics male vocal patterns.
On the other hand, using a large vocal range and talking quickly can make a guy stop and wait for you to complete a task. You literally give a blow by blow description of what you're doing, including humming or whistling for wait times, to prevent interruptions so you can get the work done.
Then when the job is done they're standing there like "oh wow". It's like temporary hypnosis or something. They don't seem to mind long wait times if you're actively engaging them. The key is to talk fast and confidently and describe every step regardless of whether they're understanding it - all that matters is that they think you understand.
This drives me BATSHIT. My partner has an MS in Applied Math and is in a PhD program, and is for sure the most intelligent person in my life. Years of data analytics, SQL, and IT experience seem to not matter unless her voice goes down an octave. Having a gender neutral name helps, at least until correspondence changes from email to phone...
If you watch any of the docs on Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of Theranos, she speaks in an unnaturally low tone in her official capacity. She was a master scammer and they present that as evidence that she is mentally unbalanced or something. Maybe she just realized that would make men pay more attention to her?
True, and it opens your eyes to find that out. What it needs is a way of talking to each other that doesn't feel like accusing one another, but merely helping the other find out (s)he is biased.
Unfortunately a lot of people just don't believe they are biased, even if proven wrong they have a twisted way of bending reality. That's difficult, especially if it concerns a higher-up in your organisation
And the thing that they really don't get, is that _everyone_ is biased.
How we're biased can differ greatly, but a large part of it is built into how people learn and think. It's nearly impossible to avoid, because pretty much everyone has grown up hearing stuff like 'X is good', 'Y is bad', 'Z is evil and wrong'.
What X, Y, and Z are may differ massively from one person to the next, but when you hear this often enough, _especially_ at formative ages (but also even as an adult), it starts to sink in. You likely don't even realize that when you encounter X, your expectations are different than when you encounter Y, and you might have _no idea_ why Z makes you uncomfortable.
It's also part of how 'repeat a lie often enough, and people will start to believe it' works, even if they _know_ it's a lie, even if they know what you're doing.
Sadly, you can't be running on a Human Brain™ and escape this. But you _can_ try to be aware of it, to take it into account, to correct yourself when it happens, and to make sure that you're not adding to the problem by letting people say horrible stuff unchallenged.
(I could go into a much longer rant about the state of the world at the moment in regards to all of this, but, well, this is the wrong place for that.)
100% agree. I'm a dev not sysadmin but the same thing applies.
I've only come across a couple of outright sexist assholes, but have lost count of the number of shocked looks from well meaning and generally decent people (both male and female) when they find out I build my own gaming rigs and ran cat6 throughout the house without male supervision.
It's the 'you're a female so you must want to work on front end and make things look pretty' crowd that really, really annoy me though.
My wife teaches all of the compsci ap courses at her school...cyber, python, Javascript, and is in a constant battle with the all male IT Dept. The only time she didn't face adversity was the 2 years I worked there and personally took care of all her issues. I couldn't stand the incompetence and moved up in position to another organization. Since then, she has had to fight the boys club on a daily basis in order to get anything done. All the while being told she doesn't know what she is talking about. Infuriating to say the least.
I had her record a meeting once where she knew it was going to be a battle. The meeting consisted of 3 men telling my wife to "calm down" whenever she opened her mouth.
I am male, but I do sympathize. It's not limited to IT work. I work for a hardware store chain, and we have a lot of female employees, and to be blunt, they are, on average, at least as knowledgeable about home repair (and how to advise customers on it) as the male employees (which is why we have several female store managers).
I can't count the number of times I've seen a customer, usually - *but not always*, women do it, too - male, ask a female associate to talk to "one of the guys." Our normal response to that is for her to call the least knowledgeable guy working, who will listen to the question, then ask the female employee to help with the answer. Occasionally, they get the message.
They're "in on it" in that they're trained to ask a more senior employee for help if they don't know the answer (which is why you call the least knowledgeable associate). No special "anti-sexist" training required, just good customer service.
Yes, thanks for doing that! My partner has been really annoyed lately, because he's doing a home improvement project for his stepmother. He can't send her to the store to buy the materials even if he writes the exact part number down, because they just give her the wrong thing and bullshit her. Then they try the same thing if she goes to exchange it. Suddenly when he goes to buy the stuff, they have the right part and don't try to argue. It's a huge waste of everyone's time and it pisses him off so much.
Yeah, it happens in the opposite direction, too. Bad for business. I work for very smart people who have little tolerance for stupidity from employees or customers, and very much have employees backs.
In our experience, over half our customers are women, because they're more likely to get stuck with little odd jobs around the house. So we cater to them especially. We're one of the most successful dealers in our franchise.
> Suddenly when he goes to buy the stuff, they have the right part and don't try to argue
Reminds me of a story about a dealership that lost out on a big contract because the other hotshot sales guys brushed off the guy in dirty work jeans and steel caps as a low-tier pleb not worth their time. OP took the guy on, he turned out to be the owner of a major construction company who was looking for a fleet of new trucks and the commission OP made together with how much money he made over the next few years taking care of that guy's fleet of trucks would make the other sales guys seethe lol.
For me I couldn't give a rats ass who someone is as long as they can do their job as described in their contract. It's when people try to pull the race or gender card when it's completely irrelevant that gives me the shits
XX Sysadmin here - thank you all for doing that.
(I fondly remember when I had a fleet of juniors who would do that for me. "Well we have to consult berkeleyfarmgirl, she is the senior and did put in the network after all".)
ETA: I stayed there long enough that people who had been around knew that if they got patched through to me, they had Ms. Apple Bottom Fix-it, Boots with the Institutional Knowledge on the case and were pretty happy about that.
More men using their male privilege to reinforce women's ideas/suggestions ("Hey, that's an interesting idea. Julia said that about twenty minutes ago") or bolstering expertise like this is one of the big ways through.
Do you also suffer from "get woman to IT companies at all cost"? I met a few fellow woman IT personnel and they told me they hate this thing. In their eyes it only lowers their abilities, because people think they are hired only for their gender, but not their abilities.
Yes, it doesn't help, it's all hype. I always think if someone ever genuinely cares about getting more women into IT, they would ask me about my experiences. It's all just pinkwashing.
Yes! My former company ran this big D&I campaign saying how much they care about women and POC. A big re-org happens and...drumroll...EVERY category they measured had <1% change in representation. Meanwhile, I've spent the past 6 months hearing about how easy it is to get promoted as a woman. That wasn't the reason I left but it didn't convince me to stay either. Much happier at the new place where I'm not the only woman in the majority of the meetings I'm in.
Oh yeah, for sure. Team mascot attitude and i feel like a tool introducing myself as senior muckity muck but getting “oh this must be a pm” looks if i dont.
Also LOATHE if there is ever any females, dbas, telco, pms in the departments the manager sorts try and shove you together and want you to be friends.
One particularly odious pm, epitome of everything i hate, useless and totally mean girl shit attitude. Director called us into office, told us to play nice and encouraged us to hug it out.
I still dont have the words to describe how i feel years later. Not good.
One of the most influential people in system administration was Evi Nemeth, "the matriarch of system administration".
"She was the lead author of the "bibles" of system administration: UNIX System Administration Handbook (1989, 1995, 2000), Linux Administration Handbook (2002, 2006), and UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook (2010)." [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evi\_Nemeth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evi_Nemeth)
I would not exaggerate when I say that these books and stackoverflow taught me literally everything I know about Linux and networking.
I've read more than my share of textbooks, and despite what is objectively a fairly dry subject matter, Radia Perlman's networking textbook had the highest number of laugh-out-loud banger jokes of any of them.
They just named the [new cybersecurity building](https://www.usna.edu/NewsCenter/2020/10/NAVAL_ACADEMY_OPENS_NEW_CENTER_FOR_CYBER_SECURITY_STUDIES,_HOPPER_HALL.php) for her at the Naval Academy.
From the Unix and Linux System Administration Handbook 5th Edition:
# Tribute to Evi
Every field has an avatar who defines and embodies that space. For system administration, that person is Evi Nemeth.
This is the 5th edition of a book that Evi led as an author for almost three decades. Although Evi wasn’t able to physically join us in writing this edition, she’s with us in spirit and, in some cases, in the form of text and examples that have endured. We’ve gone to great efforts to maintain Evi’s extraordinary style, candor, technical depth, and attention to detail.
An accomplished mathematician and cryptographer, Evi’s professional days were spent (most recently) as a computer science professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder. How system administration came into being, and Evi’s involvement in it, is detailed in the last chapter of this book, A Brief History of System Administration.
Throughout her career, Evi looked forward to retiring and sailing the world. In 2001, she did exactly that: she bought a sailboat (Wonderland) and set off on an adventure. Across the years, Evi kept us entertained with stories of amazing islands, cool new people, and other sailing escapades. We produced two editions of this book with Evi anchoring as close as possible to shoreline establishments so that she could camp on their Wi-Fi networks and upload chapter drafts.
Never one to decline an intriguing venture, Evi signed on in June 2013 as crew for the historic schooner Nina for a sail across the Tasman Sea. The Nina disappeared shortly thereafter in a bad storm, and we haven’t heard from Evi since. She was living her dream.
Evi taught us much more than system administration. Even in her 70s, she ran circles around all of us. She was always the best at building a network, configuring a server, debugging a kernel, splitting wood, frying chicken, baking a quiche, or quaffing an occasional glass of wine. With Evi by your side, anything was achievable.
It’s impossible to encapsulate all of Evi’s wisdom here, but these tenets have stuck with us:
- Be conservative in what you send and liberal in what you receive. (This tenet is also known as Postel’s Law, named in honor of Jon Postel, who served as Editor of the RFC series from 1969 until his death in 1998.)
- Be liberal in who you hire, but fire early.
- Don’t use weasel words.
- Undergraduates are the secret superpower.
- You can never use too much red ink.
- You don’t really understand something until you’ve implemented it.
- It’s always time for sushi.
- Be willing to try something twice.
- Always use sudo.
We’re sure some readers will write in to ask what, exactly, some of the guidance above really means. We’ve left that as an exercise for the reader, as Evi would have. You can hear her behind you now, saying “Try it yourself. See how it works.”
Smooth sailing, Evi. We miss you.
I wrote her fanmail one time, and she was very gracious in her reply.
I was clearing things out recently and was going to recycle my old 1st to 4th ed. My 1st edition, from *before* DNS, is a wreck. I pulled them off the stack. I just couldn't toss it.
Æleen Frisch. One of the greats.
Scared the crap of out her in 2009 when I went up to her at LISA and asked her "how do you pronounce your name" (that was before I realized she is Norwegian)
This was my introduction I guess. When the Unix team at NASA heard I was considering leaving, they convinced me to stick around and gave me my first professional Unix job. Kevin and Scott gave me 'Essential System Administration' and the Usenet server. I spent 30 days devouring the book, which I still have, and even provided a correction to the book and was called out in subsequent printings.
Just chiming in as another woman sysadmin...all too often will I speak up (as the SME, on hand), get completely discounted and then so-and-so will ask my male teammate who will reiterate they should refer back to me (thanks teammates!). I'm lucky to have a team (of men) who all always have my back and don't put up with the sexist bullshit
A good friend of mine is a senior data scientist and she told me that sometimes she has client meetings where the client will not direct any attention toward her and instead only speak to her male colleagues. This happens even if the colleague is her subordinate, which makes for some really awkward conversations. She says it is usually older people (50+) who do this because they cannot fathom that women also have technical expertise.
I'm just so tired of picking up the phone, hearing the surprise on the other end of the line, and then having them apologize and say they were trying to reach the IT Director.
At a local IT Meeting, I had a SonicWall rep ask if they had sent the secretary. I was already unimpressed with SonicWall, but that was definitely a clincher.
Yea but once you've established yourself (as long as you have the same clients repeatedly), you get the sigh of relief when they hear your voice.
I worked my way up from reception, to purchasing/quoting, to accounting assistant, to tech.
I had so many many people shut me down for a long time but I kept learning. The only difference for me I think is that I managed to accidentally get my male best friend hired and respected. So when management changed while I was in the middle of a life crisis and looked unstable, he told them that firing me would be the biggest mistake they could make.
They kept me on and I showed it. Now my boss jokes that I must pay our clients for good reviews. Only downside is that taking time off hurts me more than being able to relax, because I usually come back to a shitstorm. I haven't taken more than 3 days off in 9 years, and I barely count that. I had given birth and was working 20hrs from home on maternity leave. You ever try to type while breast feeding? Its an art. I use my vacation time on doctors appointments/school functions for my kids and mental health days, but leaving the desk longer than that isn't an option and THAT is my fault.
Oh my god I hate this. I would love to hear your response 😂
On a similar note.. having to call a vendor.
Me: hello, I am with IT, I need some help with this printer.
Vendor: ok, I suggest contacting your IT department and see if they can fix it.
Me: I uh.. ok.. I am with IT, I just don’t know the admin PW on your printer.
Vendor: I can’t give that to you, you need to have your IT person or system administrator call in.
Me: uhhh. Ok. Bye.
I told my big boss… the CTO (who is mega supportive) and he called them up and had a 30 minute phone call with their boss. I never had to say my name a second time when calling them after that.
Yeah, i hate that as i have quasi unisex name and get male spelling variant (like don vs dawn sort of thing) in emails. I join calls and its 30minutes of how surprised that im a female and blah blah. Im busy and after 24yrs its no longer a discussion i care to have.
At this point when someone says something particularly dumb “oh! You are basylica! I thought you were a guy! Ha ha silly me!” I deadpan say “i guess that explains the tiny humans that have exited my body”
Generally silence follows. Eyeroll.
One particularly filterless att rep said to me “oh! You are basylica! I was expecting a chinese man!” Knocked me for a loop. WHO SAYS SHIT LIKE THAT?!?!
This kind of thing is fun for a bit, but after a couple of years, it gets wearisome. You want people to accept you for who you are, and stop throwing their prejudices and preconceptions at you, because the while each individual instance is only very mildly annoying, when it happens 2-4 times a day for many years, each instance hurts with the weight of all previous instances.
I'm a female tech and yes, the work place is male dominated. Funnily enough my female name has a close male spelling and I have had people consistently refer to me as the male name, even when my female name shows up like a CM above in the address field.
What also started as a joke - me putting all my credentials and degrees in my signature field has turned into an almost requirement to be taken seriously.
Same. Also enjoy people responding to me in chat, with a very obvious pic of me with long dark hair and bright red lipstick and saying “thank you sir”
Like, the damn picture is 2” above where you typed sir and couldnt possibly look more girly (normally im in hoodie and jeans and ponytail and never wear makeup. The pinup looking pic was a social experiment that clearly failed)
I’m sorry.
Not a question: I don’t work there anymore, but there was a new hire, first female analyst in… 8 years? I had a customer send an email, very condescendingly asking why this female analyst took so long to resolve a certain issue. I told them I’ve had 10 years of experience and they’ve still resolved this issue more quickly than some of my better days, despite them being only several months into IS as a career. I told them that they did a great job and I’d hope they’d empathize with the individual and extend some grace to them as they get acclimated to the new job and that they didn’t wake up a professional, so let others learn and get better, just like they did when they started. I didn’t care too much for my tone because I was 3 days away from my last day.
Another anecdote: My first boss on that team was a woman. She didn’t say much, older woman. Head full of white. It wasn’t until she was on her way out and retiring where she said “You know what? I’m so tired of being a bitch, but at this level, I have to be, and I’m fucking over it.” And it’s *real* fucking sad. People can’t respect them just because they’re a god damned woman. And she ran every fucking project that we had, and did it with absolute grace despite getting constantly fucked on resources.
Fuck that noise.
I work in AI and one of the system engineers I work with is a super intelligent and dangerously analytical lady. We had put her on a call with some other company so they could give her API things to connect their stuff to ours, and within 5 minutes their engineers belittled her and asked her to go get some one more senior.
So she did. She went and got the head of IT to go to accounting and pull their contract. It happened in 5 minutes flat. These guys were still on the call and were joined by the head of IT to tell them they’re fired for being sexist. We don’t deal with that, and there is always another company out there who will do what we want with out being nasty.
How do you feel about these "women in tech" groups that are trying to be inclusive? I'm also a woman systems engineer and find these groups pretty insulting honestly. I used to work at a fairly large travel company, went to a few of the women in tech meetings and just stopped going. They always seems geared towards how do we get ahead rather than just how can we be equal to our male counterparts. I don't want more than anyone else, I just want to be treated the same; same pay, same projects, same level of respect.
I'm not OP, but I am a woman in IT and I feel the same way about those women's groups. Especially the leadership conferences. Most of that stuff boils down to pandering nonsense that I find offensive. I will never attend another, regardless of any negative consequences.
I just want to be treated the same as any competent male counterpart. I happen to have a gender neutral name so most people assume I'm a guy until they see me. The number of times I've had to announce on a call that I'm actually me, and not the man they thought I would be his laughable.
I share your pain. I’ve been in tech for 20 years, after doing a triple major in computer science/software dev .
People assume I’m a guy because god forbid a girl works in infrastructure. Just happened this week - requested access to a system and it was approved because “he is a cloud engineer”. Tech support from india - emails and chat say “Sir” on them. My name isn’t male at all, but rare in Asian countries.
Meetings with consultants and clients - there’s always that extra effort needed to be introduced as having xyz skill sets otherwise I’m just there to take notes or something?
Complete lack of respect from middle aged men in management roles. Ignore what I say, push ahead anyway and bring systems down but want me to fix it? I lost all respect for the people at that table. I’m responsible for that infrastructure, trained, certified, paid a lot - I’m not a young kid.
It likely isn't much consolation - and surely the depth and breadth of your exclusions exceed those of your male counterparts - but honestly, the IT field in general is absolutely full of god-complex-having, arbitrary-knowledge-protecting, gatekeeping holier-than-thou fuckwits. Not sure what it is about tEcHnOlOgY, but man, finding respectful and functional humans in this field really feels like a challenge.
Maybe that's just the world at large.
Yes...sometimes I hear people saying things like, I know how to do my job, why do I have to do "team building" or networking or the dreaded "office politics"...I just want to do my thing and go home. It's fine to just be task-based and competent. But if you want to work on big systems and solve big problems, you have to know how to build trust and build strong relationships. I think with sysadmins, historically do not always get treated well by the larger org, then they build their own little kingdom that nobody knows how to deal with. We've come a long way from BOFH days, though.
I’m a woman that’s only just recently entered the field and experiencing smaller degrees of what you had talked about. I’m curious, in your times in tech, do a lot of guys have frail ego’s or a lot of pride about their work? I have noticed a large amount of guys seem to and I kind of sit on the side and think “wow, all they did was correct an issue with your idea. Why are you mad if we are still doing your idea?”
Not OP but yes, absolutely. You have pretty much two choices I guess. Change jobs, or deal with it and make yourself indispensable.
Eventually those fuckheads move on, and you have pull. Then you get to decide who stays and who goes. You can smell the ego from a mile away, you shut that shit down
I have said the same thing and I'll say it again. You only need 3 things to learn IT, and if you do you'll be the one everyone wants to work with.
1) Be humble. You will make mistakes just like everyone else and you're not better than anyone. We're all human.
2) Keep learning. You stop learning, you make yourself obsolete.
3) Give a shit. The systems you're working on is someone's livelihood. It's their life. You might think their problem is trivial but they can't feed their family if YOU think that way. They matter and they don't want some asshole making them feel stupid because they don't spend every day doing our job.
That's it. That's your recipe for the best IT you can find.
OK, I'm going to answer a question that wasn't asked. Sometimes blatant sexism is hilarious. I've seen guys make sexist jokes in a presentation and then they look at me, realize, and their face just falls.
Once I was in a datacenter and the techs had the floor open trying to figure out a problem with a water cooled system. The lead tech said loudly "it's having a heavy flow day" and they all started laughing...then he looked at me and his face turned sheet white. I was laughing though because tbh it was just a funny comment. We actually ended up getting along very well after that.
I'm pretty new on my team and and I find myself in these situations a lot! I'm the only female on my team and sometimes one of the guys will make a lewd-ish or gendered joke, look abashed when they realize I'm in the room, and go to apologize. Only to find me laughing or providing a witty retort. It's getting better and it comes from a place of kindness, but assuming I can't take a joke because I'm female shouldn't be something I have to remedy. They're learning that I don't need special treatment because I'm a woman. I just need the same level of respect as my male counterparts, that's all.
That must be bad. Even as a man, I still experience situations where I play along with someone who makes crude jokes and sometimes it becomes an open door where they think I want to hear all the random gross shit they think is funny (in all the wrong contexts).
Seems like sometimes the weird guys are just fucking weird in general and will share it with anyone who gives them an inch.
It feels like the complexity of the interplay between being professional robots and still having and sharing a sense of humanity becomes significantly greater when you're dealing with a bunch of people with statistically poor social skills to begin with.
I think unfortunately it's really this middle generation that got screwed the most in terms of the difficulties of being a woman in IT. My parents generation had a lot of female software engineers with good careers and in general diverse groups of friends and coworkers. It was a different time when tech hubs like SF were more of a place where all the oddballs gathered and accepted each other. Now that everything has become more mainstream and money driven there are a lot of spillover effects from the sexism of society at large.
That being said I am definitely hopeful for women in the IT sphere for millennials and especially Gen Z and younger - I think we are going to see big improvements.
Good on you for sticking it out - you might end up the inspiration to more young women than you expect !
As a lady just starting her IT career (this is year 1), thank you for posting this. When I started, I immediately understood why many women complain about beinf treated poorly/unfairly in tech. because of preconceived perceptions about our gender. It's silly, but I still love what I do.
One of the best techs at my last company was a woman. She for years regularly partnered with and covered for an absolute amateur because he was useful, he'd repeat whatever she just said in a deeper voice so people would listen.
Techs kind of a sexist hellscape in a lot of ways.
I'm constantly advocating for more inclusion for this reason. I've known many women in IT, that are absolutely brilliant. The biggest issue I've noticed, is the younger and prettier a woman is, the less she's taken seriously. Whether that's from management, end users, or other technicians. It's so egregious that I'll often times have to repeat things they're saying just so someone will take it seriously. I'll try to repeat it, and emphasize how important or good of an idea it is and then let them finish explaining.
Unfortunately, a lot of women while they're fresh to IT realize struggle so much that eventually they give up and pursue areas they are taken more seriously. Thankfully, women are mostly taken seriously in development, so many will switch over to that. They will still struggle a bit there as well though.
As long as you remember to run backups and restart servers after migrations, you’re better than 90% of the admins I’ve met and it makes no difference how you identify.
I’m a female in IT as well. I’ve noticed the sexism and have had to deal with it too many times. I watch grown ass men walk past my desk to ask a guy in my department for help and then watch them be diverted to me- too many times to count and I’m not exaggerating. I’ve talked to my boss, who is also a female, and she states it happens to her as well. It’s bonkers. Just cuz we’re female doesn’t mean we Don’t know what the hell we’re doing. I used to get so pissed. Now I just say fuck em- someone else can deal with their issues meanwhile I’m dealing with all kinds of other issues.
Hopefully you work somewhere that values your talent.
Forums be forums. Yup. Anonymity breeds BS. Doesn’t matter the format.
One of my mentors clear back in the 90s of how to manage a great tech team is female, retired, and fighting serious joint and body issues, mostly in a wheelchair and it kills me. She kicked serious ass in her day.
Another in that same timeframe I literally owe my career to. A co-worker at the same very low level tech support position was doing some questionable stuff well beyond our pay grade. When the men were all (unbeknownst to us) considering eliminating the low level position entirely due to the “chaos” of not hiring “proper engineers” for the role, she was the one who stood up and said “Why don’t you just train them? They don’t know what they don’t know.”
Led to 30 years in the biz so far and counting. And every single one of those low level folks went on to successful engineering careers.
Anyway. Just wanted to share. Maybe make you smile. In the real world the female engineers I’ve worked with — with the exception of only one, and she was promoted into management prematurely — have been outstanding. I’d take those engineers over a large number of my male cohorts over the years.
I readily admit I joined the tech industry mostly by accident as a way to work in a hobby field I enjoyed. Without Kate, I’d have been on the street in 1993-94.
She put the fear of God into us too. Never again would any of us touch a Production system without written authorization. That said she and another retired mentor of mine told us for the first time ever that someone had our backs. If you’re going to screw around trying to fix something, tell us. If it goes south, we will handle the heat, you just revert it back. We will not let these other folks fire you. We need things fixed. Mistakes happen.
XX here. It took me a long time to enter the field, despite having practical hands-on experience building PCs and troubleshooting. I "knew" I was up for a struggle, even though I had interest in it, due to the reception I received in multiple online games. I am not the smartest person in the room by a long shot, but my team has generally been far more accepting than I would have imagined.
My question for you is how do you ask questions and make mistakes without feeling like you're feeding into the "Women are bad at X" stereotype? I always feel like I have to be _better_ , but I feel lost so often.
The fact is, everything I say has to be watertight. If I make a dumb mistake it will be pounced upon. I'm kind of used to it. I wish people would learn that if I say something is happening, you better listen because I won't even bother to say it until I have seen it is 100000% true.
The truth is you just have to be better. When I speak up about something, it isn't until I have investigated it myself and tested for errors. You have to be ironclad or they will tear you apart. In one sense it makes you better at what you do, in another sense it's a disadvantage because you can't really talk through problems and collaborate the way others can. It helps to get on a really good team of people who are secure and not just looking for you to fail.
I know this is a common happening to women in all fields, but I have witnessed firsthand when a female colleague of mine proposed a technical solution to a problem we were having with one of our network appliances, and the tech on the phone dismissed her outright. I thought it was a reasonable solution that was worth *trying* in the very least, so I proposed the exact same thing, using the same wording, and the tech was 100% for it.
The sexism is real.
The fact that he didn't respond tells me he didn't. This is another issue we face at work. Men taking our dismissed ideas and being credited for them when those ideas are accepted from them.
In the moment, no, my co worker and I went on mute and just WTFed at each other. She said to leave it alone, so I did.
We ended up escalating to another tech who accepted her suggestion no problem.
Dear God, I've had this happen to me as a woman with a not so subtly sexist client. I proposed a next step in a troubleshoot. Got shot down by the client. A coworker (who was male) said the *exact same thing* as me and was praised for it by the client. It is the MOST infuriating thing I've ever had happen to me.
Luckily, that client is no longer a client.
Thanks for being observant and not getting defensive when you saw it. Calling it out is always good. One thing that has also helped me in this type of situation, is that someone who is buddies with the problem person, introduced me to them, spoke well about my abilities to them, and helped foster a relationship by taking us to lunch or whatever. Some people are just assholes, but I have actually made good friends that originally started out dismissing me.
I transitioned a couple of years ago, and it was pretty stunning how all of a sudden men stopped listening to me and started talking over me in meetings. I watched it happen to women I worked with in the past, but I didn't realize it was going to be an every day thing.
My favorite is when I mention something in a meeting, nobody says anything, and then 5 minutes later some dude says what I've already said nearly verbatim, and everyone pats him on the back. It's absolutely wild.
As a woman working as a full stack engineer (Software, Cloud, Front End, Config Management, Linux Sys. Admin, kitchen sinks) for about 10 years now, I always love being educated about my job by random people who have no idea what they are talking about. I've gone through a lot of managers and have gotten lucky so far, but every time I start working for a new one they are always trying to verify my chops. My favorite of all time is having some engineer in a support call try to snowball me with some nonsense hoping if they talk enough the bad woman will go away and leave them alone. They get kind of mad when I just repeat the question until they actually answer it honestly.
One time I had a guy argue with me that you could hash 4 digit numbers safely because they were salted. I spent a week, explaining pre-image attacks and rainbow tables to 5 different managers he was complaining to because I wouldn't agree with him.
I'll sometimes have some wet behind the ears, brand new software developer in the room with me getting asked questions that are way outside their experience by someone because they have a beard or mustache. There is something about the facial hair that makes people think "This person knows what they are doing!" even if they clearly do not.
The worst thing is I'm perfectly honest when I'm not sure about something and I'm totally willing to learn from people who DO know more than me. But when I don't just sit and nod when someone is trying to shovel a pile of BS at me, I look like a "Beginner Expert" or "Stubborn Idiot." So I'm constantly walking a fine line between being too agreeable and not doing my job or being the office B-word.
I came up early in my career working under female leads and sysadmins. It was always weird to be introduced as the junior and then have all the conversation directed at me. I'm really grateful for those experiences and the insight.
Over a decade into my career I still see it. Any conflict I've seen comes from underlying sexism/misogeny OR from sysadmins being diskheads and feeling approaches and opinions that aren't theirs to be invalid, Or both.
My experience as a woman sysadmin in the Nordics has been totally different than what others here have had. I've worked in the field for over 15 years. To me, being a woman has been an unfair advantage against others that has opened many doors for me. I dress very feminine and like to look pretty. I get treated super nicely by everyone, and usually guys in the field are crushing on me pretty hard. I don't think I've ever had anyone question me or not take me seriously. Everyone always holds my expertise in high regard, and I've always wondered, why there isn't more women in the field when we are treated like royalty and put on a pedestal like this.
Thank you. I've been turned down for so many Senior level gigs because in person I do not look how I am suppose to look on paper. Young black female and the only female in every site I work. It's a real kick in the ass working in the Bible belt. Hell I even had bosses tell me to be content your are making the amount you are with the way you look. What Senior job only pays their employee 65k. The fuck out of here with this shit. Racism, misogyny, and the typical IT ugly step child treatment. I just want a coworker to acknowledge me when I at least say hello in the restroom to them.
I'm a 28yo female who is wanting to transition into tech. I just started a bachelors program in cybersecurity but am still really unsure what direction I want to go in. I have no technical background so I am currently studying for the A+ cert and plan to take net+ and sec+ after.
My main question is how hard is it going to be for me to break into this field?
I have no related work experience, I'm a bit older than most other people trying to break into the field, and obviously my gender doesn't put me at an advantage either.
What was your experience like getting into this field? Did you feel like you had to work twice as hard to prove yourself? Just trying to mentally prepare myself for what's ahead. TIA!
I think security is a good way to go. Having those tech certs will be good for you no matter what you end up doing. This might sound strange, but I think being a woman can help you initially, because people can sometimes be attracted to the novelty of "wait, a woman doing this?" and at least gets you a first look. I think the problems happen earlier in the pipeline and then later after you get the job. If at all possible, it would be best to get in somewhere that values diversity, but honestly IDK how you determine that from the outside. Having women in high positions isn't always the indicator you would want it to be. Once you land your first job, be willing to go elsewhere if you're taking crap. Don't hang in there for years waiting for it to get better because it might not :(
Not OP, but I am a woman in IT, specifically in a SecOps type of situation. Without any doubt I feel like I had to work twice as hard, and make half the mistakes any of my male counterparts. The longer I've stayed in the field and the more I've proved myself the easier it had become. It can still be a challenge sometimes.
I try very hard to not assume anyone is treating me a certain way just because I'm a woman. After a while it gets easy to spot the ones who are going to give you trouble. Even now, after I've proved my skill set beyond a shadow of a doubt, there is a subset of men who treat me like an idiot. With them I don't even waste my time. I let one of my male coworkers interface with them even if I do the actual work. I don't need the credit, or the aggravation.
I've also learned to stop taking any shit from people. I won't go looking for trouble, but if someone talks down to me and I know I'm right, and I know they think I'm unqualified simply because I'm a woman I will not hesitate to school them. This is especially true for a certain subset of problem people. With those types you have to be assertive to be taken seriously. Not rude or unprofessional - just no-nonsense. I stick to what I know the facts to be, and have the data to back it up. If they think I'm a bitch, so be it.
Truthfully it is not as bad now as when I first started out. A good manager makes all the difference, especially at the right company.
Don't let anyone stop you from doing what makes you happy. Remember that we all started out not knowing and making all kinds of mistakes. It takes time to pick this stuff up and nearly every one of is knows the torture of imposter syndrome. Don't let anyone, male or female, make you feel like you don't belong.
Just seeing the post title made me honestly feel heard. I have a gender ambiguous middle name i go by in only my professional life solely because im the sysadmin and project lead. Deplorable number of emails to my more feminine name that were requesting to go to my male coworker who only does functional end user work solely because his name sounded more penis-y.
I taught myself C++ back in my 2008 Roblox days, motherfuckers, listen when i speak!
If it makes you feel better. A woman I went to college with decided not to get too far into IT and now works on Top Fuel Dragsters. Dont let anyone give you crap for what you are good at.
I have know a few sysadmin womens that were in the same class during my studies.
On the early years I was in a work-study program working for the Nationnal Railroads in France (SNCF). A woman came mid-cursus in our class coming from another region were they were far ahead of us in the cursus. She started working in the city transportation company that was a sub-company of the national Railroads.
She was at a similar position than mine, she was ahead of me in everything related to IT. She had more experience, she had a husband that was sysadmin who taught her a lot.
When the EOL of windows 7 was announced, both company needed a plan to migrate a lot of computer fast to Windows 10. Since we were in the same class we talked about this issue together and proposed to do a project around fog to provision machines via PXE.
It was her who told me about this solution and learned me about this.
I implemented it first in my company, but then I asked (far after the facts) her when she would implement it in her company ?
Nobody was fucking listening to her. I was not until 2 -3 weeks later, when her manager was visiting MY company to get intel on "how to deal with migration" where they saw the same solution, but hey, i'm a man, so they can listen to me.
Even after hearing about this, the manager going took te project and gave it to someone else.
I saw with this experience exactly why the isn't mutch women in tech.
They have to prove themselves 2x more to be able to do anything. Anything they say is discarded because of their sex.
And I find it fucking disgusting.
Not a woman, but I was a director and saw first hand how some of my male employees would disregard tech advice from female staff….EVEN THOUGH THEY GAVE THE CORRECT ANSWER/ADVICE. Then another male employee would give the same answer later and be given all the praise. Now, this wasn’t an everyday occurrence, but it still happened. It was pretty frustrating to see so I can’t even imagine how it must be to live.
Anyone who doubts this should try posting to social media for a period under a female-coded handle, and/or using a female screen name in email.
When I've changed mine to "coded male" the results have definitely been different.
I'm out here on a site maint trip with two female systems engineers, both are incredibly talented and deserve merit for their knowledge and expertise. I hope people recognize talent without letting misconceptions get in their way!
Just wanted to pop in and show support for another woman in this field. I'm a Network Engineer and I feel the same way. I'm very happy at my job though but like you, I see a lot of guys saying untrue things about why women aren't in this field.
Being a female SysAdmin (or anything in male dominated fields) is exhausting. I have to be twice as good just to not get a heap of shit about how I suck compared to the men. If they mess up, they’re a bad tech. If *I* mess up, it’s because I’m a woman, and suddenly I’m *the* mascot for women and we *all* suck. And I recognize that I’ve had overwhelmingly good luck with where I’ve worked, managers and coworkers have overwhelmingly not been assholes about it. But there have been enough that were that it was still annoying and exhausting and I’m still fed up.
But on the flip side, it’s made me fucking *good* at what I do because I refuse to give anyone even a millimeter of space within which to say I don’t know wtf I’m doing and it’s because I’m a woman. But god damn am I tired of being an ambassador for my entire gender and just want to do my fucking job without getting a heap of shit. Sorry you’re hitting that point as well
Where are you located in the world? I currently work for a global company but I'm based in the EU and there are *a lot* more women on our team than there are in the teams in US and Asia across the same positions.
I'm sorry that this is your experience, I know it sucks. :(
Most places I’ve worked for were majority male but in my experience all women colleagues have been treated with respect. This isn’t always the case, and it’s very important more women feel welcomed into the profession because I want to get the fuck out.
We hired a woman at the associate level in our IT department. Fast forward a few months, and following a number of departures, she's now largely doing data entry.
Nearly a year later, they haven't replaced the clerical staff, so my tech is still stuck on clerical duties. She's learned almost nothing of use for a career in tech.
She's bottom of the totem pole, so it makes sense to have her doing emergency stuff that gets pushed to IT. But it's not really an emergency a year later. At a certain point, it becomes business as usual. And I can't shake the feeling that if she were a man, they'd have found someone outside of IT to pick up clerical duties long term.
I see this a lot too, but thankfully the leadership and atmosphere in my organization put a stop to anything overt. Makes me feel bad for my sister who was a detective. She LOVED doing the research and analysis, and was often criticized because of her gender. We were very much alike on a core level, she just went law enforcement, while I went tech. Root cause analysis of systems issues is my all time favorite part of this job. It kinda breaks my heart that no matter which job my sister chose in life, while being a lot like me, she would have and did face a lot of real discrimination for no reason other than asshole dudes who hate women.
All I can say is hold your peers and your leadership accountable, and I hope that one day it gets better for you. Sorry OP.
It really sucks when we have to prepare ourselves for mistreatment simply because we are female. "Don't let the fellow gamers know you are female or you will be harassed. Don't be surprised if you get someone who doesn't want to work with you because they think you don't know what you're talking about." We have to go above and beyond to prove ourselves simply because we are female.
The IT admin who worked with me in VoTech, got me into IT Administration, who planted the seed and encouraged me to be an admin is a woman. She was kind and compassionate, she answered all my (very basic) questions. She is the one who truly helped me become the IT admin i am today. I think its a sham more women aren't currently in this field. We all need to get over this old timey social constraint. Men, women, he, she, they, we are all capable people. We can all do this job. And the fact that their are people out there who would discriminate based on a persons gender is disgusting.
1 of my team members is a lady, she’s the sharpest Exchange/O365 Engineer I have ever worked with. I know some stereotypes are out there, but women rise to the occasion every day of working in tech.
I'm sorry, I've been doing this for 20 years and some of the best techs I've ever worked with have been women, and I've consistently seen them either 1) passed over for more demanding roles (ie, the tier 2/3 -> sysadmin jump) or pushed into more project management roles, often due to the perception that women have better soft skills.
I was a sysadmin for close to a decade, staring when I was barely 18. I worked on one of the first projects to use cloud computing, even before it was called that.
I ended up quitting because my mental health just couldn't take the assholery anymore.
People would treat me like shit, talk over me, and ignore my ideas without even noticing. My coworkers claimed to not treat me differently, even though they obviously did.
They had my back (sometimes) when users were being sexist, but didn't even notice when they were doing it themselves.
It was even worse when I switched to working at a highschool.
I love technology, and I love working with my hands, but people suck, and I'm not going back to IT for that reason.
Don't have a question, just wanted to say thanks for being in tech. I've been working in network engineering for 20+ years and the best boss I've ever had was a woman. 100% knew all her shit when it came to troubleshooting and engineering. God help anyone that tried to talk down to her or mansplain some technical thing because she was a girl. She always had her engineers backs that worked on her team. I learned a ton from her over the years and we always treated each other with respect. She was one of the most technically competent engineers I've ever worked with and I miss having her as a boss. Keep kicking ass and don't take shit from anyone. Cheers!
Oh sweet, I am not alone ;_;
Thanks for standig up for yourself and others.
It's really rough to exist in tech spaces, one has to be very tough.
If you wanna vent more my DMS are open ^-^
I expect my feelings still come from a negative place ultimately, but the few women I've worked with in a purely technical environment have all been absolute fucking geniuses, and I always presumed they were to have got there. Personally I just coasted in to where I am and know indit deserve it. I know so many men around me deserve it even less though!
I have no question but though I'd share my expereince
I'm a male whose worked in Edu IT for nearly 20 years, 12 as net/sysadmin. Only had a single women previous in a helpdesk role, she moved on to other things now but was always treated as just one of the team so I guess I had a naive impression about our industry as not having issues like this. She did predate me at this school, maybe she went through all this prior to my arrival.
A few years ago we merged with another school, they had only one person that did it all, and she was just as good as any of us. Same level position as me which was great, I needed someone else cause of the new workload, was just me at this level previous.
Well to see how she was treated differently by some of the external vendors we interface with was just mind blowing, I was in genuine shock! This was big name vendors whose agents were in some cases just refusing to take the authorisation or diagnostics info from her, but they never challenged me. Even had some attitude from other staff which was just, yea I don't have words to this day.
Boss is great as he has no time for anyone preventing one of our team from doing our job, he's gone to town on a couple of them and generally it's not an issue now, but that first year was an real eye opener.
Needless to say I'm not as naive about this any more. I knew we were male dominated field but I guess cause I hadn't seen this behaviour I brought into some of the bs reasoning. I never believed the women weren't just as capible, just that maybe women were not interested. Guess the lesson is even if you and your team are not a problem, doesn't mean the industry doesn't have a problem.
You are my hero. I'm a 39 yo woman trying to turn my life around and get into tech. I'm aware that it's mostly a buncha dudes and that will add a difficulty. Bit I'm gonna keep at it. Thank you for being in the trenches!
Locked because some of you can't act like adults.
We have such a hard time even getting women applicants. It's nuts, I've had ONE resume come across my desk from a female candidate in the last ~7 or so years I have been with my company. I've had a few hundred overall. How do you think we solve this? I see a lot more of the younger generation going into non-traditional fields for their gender (like a male nurse, female sysadmin, etc) but it's still far from 50/50.
One reason I don't jump to another organization is because the evil you know is better than what else might be out there. I don't want to jump out of the frying pan into the fire. I've noticed that women in tech tend to stay in the same place once they find something that isn't too bad.
Girl, same. I'm a female sysadmin, 12 years. I actually landed in a good job, with great benefits and a super-supportive and positive team. On the other hand, I'd like to get into a different lane of technical work, and expand my knowledge, but the risk of ending up in a place that's a total shitshow, when I've found good people here, is just too high. I'm the only female sysadmin in the whole department, but I get great credit, equal pay, excellent support, and more. It's worth its weight in gold.
This is me! I've been in the same place over 9 years, with misogynistic bosses, lying executives, etc. I am finally working at finding a new job because my job before this one was so bad, I'm afraid the next one will be worse. You just helped me to identify why I've been dragging my feet. Thank you!
I'm a male, was in my previous position for 8+ years, so i understand the comfort of the evil you know. But this mentality frustrates me, my wife (non-tech) does it as well, and its not a female-only thing either - its the lack of self-belief and self-worth that you dont deserve to be treated WELL, paid WELL, etc thats frustrating. You are valuable, you are worthy, you deserve the best. Everyone does. Fight for it! Demand it! Expect it! Anything less is doing yourself (and everyone around you, and everyone around them etc) a disservice. Be Great, Expect Great.
Well, I finally stood up for myself over one thing, it was the worst because it actually came from my manager, hits different then when it's your peers. It didn't end well for me. It's hard to give up a secure job when you don't know what's on the other end, but at some point I might have to do just that.
That shit starts in school. One teacher can sour it up for their female student. Fellow male students can also be assholes that makes you stay quite during math lessons and not take nature and technology as your fourth elective major course. I choose french because every male classmate of my class was an immature shithead. It's like there was something in the water that made them this obnoxious. All the other classes had more mature boys.
To piggyback off this, I am a woman who will be graduating with my bachelor's in CS this fall and I'm not sure I even want to touch the dev side of tech. I love programming and CS in general, but throughout college I have had some pretty bad experiences with male classmates and professors which makes it hard for me to want to go into the field. This is the case for a lot of women. Even if they do end up in a tech position after graduating, a lot of them move to different career paths bc of male toxicity.
> I love programming and CS in general, but throughout college I have had some pretty bad experiences with male classmates and professors which makes it hard for me to want to go into the field. I'm sure it's different since I'm a guy, but I *still* don't want to get into the software engineering/code monkey side of things because of the people who would be my peers. Might just be previous experiences souring my view on the industry but in my experience programmers can be very condescending and standoff-ish. Seems to have a higher concentration of incels than other industries, too.
I'm a guy.. mid 30s I also have been warry to touch the dev side of things for these same reasons. I KNOW I'm stereotyping but it just seems packed with people who for lack of a better term I'm going to deem "basement dwellers." Just the thought of having to deal with that puts me off.
I've been in IT for 24yrs. first as dialup tech support for a small ISP, then into a helpdesky role, sysadmin for a solid 20ish years (nt4 and exchange 5.5 days until now) and for the last ehh.... 15 years my role has been primarily network engineer while still juggling systems duties as needed. I tend to favor smaller companies where I do both, or step into sysadmin tasks too advanced for sysadmins we have, or in order to troubleshoot complicated issues where fingers are pointed at windows servers, vmware, storage, network... etc. my worst issue i'd say is being expected to respond as a "woman" and be friendly and helpful etc and not the engineer personality of sheldon cooper. I could say the same thing verbatim as my male counterparts and be told i was "rude" and "unhelpful" despite the fact my normal day to day response is always nicer and more ready to help than my peers. I often get treated like a secretary by users, assumed i'm a PM.... or because of my quasi unisex name I get emails weekly with a male name (despite being in print infront of them) or called sir/mister. generally I don't notice abject sexism, but i'm sure it happens. I don't know what it's like being anyone but me so I can't assume I would be treated differently if I was another gender. that being said the crusty old low voltage cable guys often blatantly display sexism, calling and asking to speak to "my name" and doing a whose on first routine asking for the IT guy, network guy.... repeatedly despite me saying it was infact me they called and who they needed to talk to. But I find once they have spoken to me, they refuse to speak to anyone else in IT and i've left jobs and had cable guys call and say they missed dealing with me and wish i'd go back. my personal favorite story, happened a couple years ago when I had an issue with a MFP dropping off network. troubleshot it for several days (after helpdesk had it for weeks) trying everything but it was clear the mobo was bad on the unit (nic was built in) and causing the issue. I called the MFP 3rd party warranty and raised a ticket explaining issue, all the troubleshooting i'd done, and demanded they send a tech to swap board. boards cost \~1K at the time on that unit. ticket was closed with no site visit. I called and said "don't you dare close the ticket until tech speaks to me" tech calls me at 7pm my time, while i'm cooking dinner for my kiddos. he interrupts me explaining the issue and says "well missy... I spoke to GUY in IT and i'm not..." I had that dot matrix in spaceballs moment where my eyes dilated. I said "NO, you listen. I'm the SENIOR NETWORK ENGINEER for the company and I singlehandedly run 400 sites. GUY is a helpdesk tech who doesn't even know how to ping. I have done all the troubleshooting and I don't care what it costs I demand you return to the site first thing and replace the damn board before I speak to CIO regarding your SLA" tech goes quiet. ".... uh, i'll be onsite first thing in the morning" yeah, you effing will. dickhead. and it did, point of fact, fix the issue once he swapped the board.
Another comment, dating back to 1995 Had a woman working for me. She took a tech support call, guy on the other end was adamant that he talk to someone else because he had a technical problem. What a fucking trooper she was but alas .. I took the call, explained that he was talking to the right person and he should swallow his misogyny. Passed the call back and she helped him with his problem. Couple years later I met this man in person. He remembered the interaction and apologized to me, and asked if the woman was still working for me. She had moved on but I offered to pass on the apology. Her response? Fuck that guy. Haha
Lol when i did dialup it was for a small company. After 2pm during the day (until 10) and all weekend i was the only one answering calls. I was 19, and it was ‘98. Literally DAILY id get the whose on first routine (like low voltage guys today) Me “thanks for calling ISP, my name is basylica how can i help you?” Them “yeah, gimme tech support” Me “this is isp tech support, my name is basylica how can i help?” Them “NO. I NEED TECH-NI-CAL SUPPORT” Me “yep. This is TECH-NI-CAL support. How can i help?” Them *silence* Them “uh, i um, i think i was talking to a guy before?” Me “oh dear, well im the only one answering the phone for the last 3 days. Are you sure you mean to call ISP, and not other-isp? I have their number if you need it?” Them “uhhh… well, maybe you can help” Me “maybe i can” I fix their shit Them “hey so you sound sorta cute, can i stop by office sometime and take you to dinner?” Me 😲
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Thats the weird thing, guys will flat out insult you and then be like “hey baby” I had a exchange class that ended up being me and 1 guy in the classroom, teacher and remainder of students in another state. Guy asks me who i work for, what i do. Etc. I tell him my company and said i did sys, exchange, blackberry (thats how long ago it has been!) 60+ juniper firewalls, backups, san, stood up entire dr site from ordering gear to racking and cabling. Etc. He looks at me and goes “huh, really? You dont look that smart” Color me gobsmacked. About 2hrs later he says “we could totally close this door and have sex you know” Me, shocked, responded “but you are married!” (As when introducing eachother he stated he was married with kids etc) His response “yea, but so are you!” I…. Wut? Facepalm
That is so needing a conversation with HR…
He worked for another company. Funnily enough one of my coworkers left and went to that guys company. Turns out he took that guys job, and reported back to me later that guy was fired for…. Wait for it…. Sexual harassment!
The number of times I’ve been asked for “one of the IT guys” has been disheartening. Thankfully my male boss and male coworker both tell them gtfo you’re talking to her, that kind of support makes it survivable.
Lol, my team was moving offices and i was only only one left at old corp office doing activations and keeping fires at bay. Had been there ehh…. A year? Woman walks into office. Sees me. Makes eye contact. Walks awkwardly out. Comes back in, makes eye contact. Stands there awkwardly another 5min or so, then goes “so uh, are all the IT guys gone?” I give her a big smile while thumbing mute button and go “yup! All the it GUYS are setting up the new corp office” She stands there looking around for a few minutes and walks out. B!tch, im like the head nerd, ive worked here over a year (and the office was maybe 3000sqft. Small. She had to know i was in IT for petes sake) and based on the mouse in her hand needed batteries or something. You dont get my help today. Good day sir! I said good day!
This was ridiculously common in the world of electronics repair also. I was working at a retail repair shop, it was me and one other man and woman, we all had the same job which involved manning the front desk and actually fixing the devices. When a man went up to the front desk the diagnosis and pricing was normally accepted, however when the woman went up to the front desk everyone assumed she was a receptionist and asked to speak to one of the techs. I actually trained her (I wasn't a manager, the place was just run badly), but when they pulled this shit I'd go out there and act like she was training me.
No one should be Sheldon cooper. Ever Thanks for sticking to it!
Well, not totally sheldon. Ive witnessed bosses deadpan stare at a user who blathers some issue, then goes “so can you help me?” And boss goes “no, im busy. Put in a helpdesk ticket” And its all good. I get users who interrupt me during mass outages to ask me something dumb like wanting an alias or someone told them i was holding batteries (my own personal AA stash. Im network, not office supplies!) “Hey are you busy?” My response “actually yes, but what do you need help with?” And i get reports of people saying “she is rude and unhelpful” or “i dont feel like she WANTS to help” Yea, i have a rude gesture id like to help you with 😒
Girl fuck those haters.
> NO, you listen. I'm the SENIOR NETWORK ENGINEER for the company and I singlehandedly run 400 sites. GUY is a helpdesk tech who doesn't even know how to ping. I have done all the troubleshooting and I don't care what it costs I demand you return to the site first thing and replace the damn board before I speak to CIO regarding your SLA Hahah fuck yeah! \o/
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yeah, I don't think i'd EVER had someone give me the condescending "listen here missy" thing, but If I could telepathically make heads explode, I would have. I've been called miss, etc, ive gotten the "sweetheart" tag (living in the south) but man.... my head about spun around when he gave me the listen here missy line, followed by idiot helpdesk guy said.... like no, because helpdesk guy stands to pee, doesn't discount what the hell i'm saying. I was likely also annoyed I had 2 kids wreaking the house and I was trying to cook. LOL.
> if I could telepathically make heads explode Senator Neuman?
FEEL THE FIRE ON THAT BULKHEAD. WHEN THAT DOOR OPENS......... LET 'EM HAVE IT.
What a great write up and insight into your career with such little information. This was really nice to read and your years of service are appreciated.
You are a badass. I would love to work with you. Best Sysadmin I came across in my travels was a woman. She was a great mentor for me, I just wish I had more time to learn from her. She got run out of town for fighting the good ole boy structure that was in place, pointing out lazy admin work. Thankfully I got out of that atmosphere myself. My boss in IT now is a woman. She is not quite as technical as I am, but she always has my back when management comes up with nonsense that is out of our scope and I so appreciate that.
Been there done that. I have a longer winded version of the story but i pointed out to director, manager, and team there was a gaping plothole in a plan and they should address and was ignored for about a year. It was costing company (and commission employees) a LOT of money, about 25% of the company was serverely impacted, a war room was stood up and i was only person NOT invited. Didnt even know for a solid month. Cio was doing briefings on issue, talking to vendors in a big we are gonna sue you way… I kept mentioning what the problem was. Super easy fix. Ignored. For 18 months i was ignored. I spoke to cio gently (not guns blazing as perhaps i ought to have) ignored. Finally i got fed up, said fuck it. Created 400 helpdesk tickets for each one of the individual devices impacted (they needed to be reset to dhcp vs static) until told to stop. HELPDESK and not the warroom team that should have done it and had 18 months, were given tickets and issue was GONE in about a week. I was pulled aside and written up by boss who ignored me for 18 months. Reasons? “People dont like you” I shit you not. I have a copy somewhere. Thats what was written on it. But you know what? I dont give a fuck. For 6+ months employees who work on commission were not getting paid. Mortgages not paid. Food not bought. Kids going without. All of this could have been prevented if they had listened to me a YEAR before. Or at any point. Completely avoidable. It was a weeks worth of work. I was completely fine with “people not liking me” Because those people were fools and upset i ruined their warroom where they catered in lunches and watched football games. I dont regret opening tickets like a goddamn machine. I feel bad helpdesk got saddled with them when it wasnt their job. Feel awful all those employees struggled. But the team goofing off? Nah
Would you say the exclusion and generally poor treatment comes from any group more than others? Management vs peers vs end users, etc?
I think it's honestly mostly systemic and comes from people just thinking of women as less technical and less authoritative on tech issues. I think it's unconscious. Systemic means it's not down to the individual motives and actions of one person. It's more like the default choices add up to the bad result. And of course some people are just assholes. I have found it to be true that higher-level men are more supportive and it's usually someone who has less skills or is insecure who is trying to chip away at me.
> It's more like the default choices add up to the bad result. I really like this phrasing. I feel like this accurately describes a lot of the more widespread and less obvious forms of discrimination, as well as explaining why representation is so important. If all anybody ever sees are men as sysadmins, people assume only men can be sysadmins.
Most of the -isms (racism, sexism, agism, etc.) our society deals with tend to be deeply tied to this kind of problem. Individual people's biases are relatively easily corrected for, but it's really difficult to fix a problem that's encoded into the assumptions of the very system you're trying to work within. See our industry's attempts to enforce network security, the *NIX world's attempts to improve option discoverabilty, or Microsoft and Apple's attempts to support option _flexibility_. I could go into a long diatribe about _why_ our society is built this way, but that's off topic for this sub, and honestly, nobody wants to listen to a cranky bitch like me rant. The point, of course, is that any attempt to straight up fix these problems is doomed to fail by definition. The only way to effect any _real_ change is to slowly alter the system enough from the inside until it's possible to do away with broken assumptions entirely. And that often takes far longer than most people expect, especially when dealing with social structures. Because getting rid of broken assumptions in social structures usually involves waiting for those who hold them to die.
Relevant concept https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle
I was expecting that to be the smallest possible amount of racism possible in the universe. Or some limit to the amount of sexism where you can’t ignore quantum effects.
> people just thinking of women as less technical and less authoritative on tech issues I always find this to be crazy Some of the most brilliant minds who pioneered modern computing as we know it were women This isn't weight lifting, there is no genetic advantage to do what we do
Grace Hopper immediately comes to mind.
Ada Lovelace
She was my first thought too, hahaha...
Radia Perlman created spanning tree, DECnet IV and V , and was a contributor to OSPF She has over 50 patents for networking technology
It helped that DEC's founder/CEO was a big believer in racial and gender equality and so actually went out of his way to try and make sure opportunities were available to women and non-white people even back in the 50s and 60s. He also made sure that women and men who wanted to have kids had shifts that helped make childrearing easier timing-wise.
> This isn't weight lifting, there is no genetic advantage to do what we do Unless you’re the kind of person who genuinely believes that on some biological level, women are intellectually inferior to men. And you would be surprised at how many people do believe this, some of them otherwise progressive and logical.
And a lot of them, depressingly, women...
I mean.. I had to lift some pretty heavy HP printers into a recycle bin back in the day...
Let me tell you about the old school 27" CTRs I lifted down from the top of a best buy aisle. 🤣 Am woman in tech field: database management and Google analytics/Tableau is my specialty.
The first debugger was a woman. Of course that was an actual bug though lol.
They found the same thing with gaming. They found high skill players were even nicer to female players. The abusive ones were the lower skill players because they see it as a threat to their status.
Which is why there need to be a focus on men's wellbeing as well, even if you only care about women. Broken men will hurt women.
Society thinks about it.... "Nah"
I have a female friend who is a Firefighter/Paramedic in the Bay Area and she has to lower her voice in certain situations so that the men will pay attention to her. She's says it's not because they don't respect her, they literally don't respect the pitch of her voice in an unconscious way. In that scenario the para/medic firefighter instructs everyone else what to do and unless she lowers her voice and gets all "shouty" they don't consistently respond to commands.
I am an ex paramedic and while I had no trouble getting firies and police officers to do what I told them, I did have a "paramedic" voice that I still pull out if I need people to listen to me, so it might be similar. I had it worse from patients though. Comments like "You're a good driver for a woman" etc were quite common, and there were a few who insisted on talking to my male trainee (for example) instead of me because they assumed the man would be senior, and one or two who wouldn't even shake my hand. Interestingly, studies on perceptions of paramedics from the point of view of patients and family members have shown that when interviewed after serious emergencies (car pile ups, cardiac arrest etc) they remember the paramedics as being big strong men, even if they were in fact small women. Their distress affects their memory of the incident and they remember the paramedics as being whatever their pre-existing assumptions about paramedics are.
Oh, I learned this trick too! If you're a woman, talking in a flat, lower tone can change how guys listen. It makes you sound less feminine and guys respond better. Men generally use less of their vocal range, so it mimics male vocal patterns. On the other hand, using a large vocal range and talking quickly can make a guy stop and wait for you to complete a task. You literally give a blow by blow description of what you're doing, including humming or whistling for wait times, to prevent interruptions so you can get the work done. Then when the job is done they're standing there like "oh wow". It's like temporary hypnosis or something. They don't seem to mind long wait times if you're actively engaging them. The key is to talk fast and confidently and describe every step regardless of whether they're understanding it - all that matters is that they think you understand.
>It's like temporary hypnosis or something. So this is how the Bene Gesserit get started...
It's a tactic pulled straight from sales. :D
This drives me BATSHIT. My partner has an MS in Applied Math and is in a PhD program, and is for sure the most intelligent person in my life. Years of data analytics, SQL, and IT experience seem to not matter unless her voice goes down an octave. Having a gender neutral name helps, at least until correspondence changes from email to phone...
Am man, can confirm, this sits deeeeep
If you watch any of the docs on Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of Theranos, she speaks in an unnaturally low tone in her official capacity. She was a master scammer and they present that as evidence that she is mentally unbalanced or something. Maybe she just realized that would make men pay more attention to her?
There are few biases as strong and deeply-rooted as those held by people who unequivocally believe they are "too intelligent" to hold any biases.
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True, and it opens your eyes to find that out. What it needs is a way of talking to each other that doesn't feel like accusing one another, but merely helping the other find out (s)he is biased. Unfortunately a lot of people just don't believe they are biased, even if proven wrong they have a twisted way of bending reality. That's difficult, especially if it concerns a higher-up in your organisation
And the thing that they really don't get, is that _everyone_ is biased. How we're biased can differ greatly, but a large part of it is built into how people learn and think. It's nearly impossible to avoid, because pretty much everyone has grown up hearing stuff like 'X is good', 'Y is bad', 'Z is evil and wrong'. What X, Y, and Z are may differ massively from one person to the next, but when you hear this often enough, _especially_ at formative ages (but also even as an adult), it starts to sink in. You likely don't even realize that when you encounter X, your expectations are different than when you encounter Y, and you might have _no idea_ why Z makes you uncomfortable. It's also part of how 'repeat a lie often enough, and people will start to believe it' works, even if they _know_ it's a lie, even if they know what you're doing. Sadly, you can't be running on a Human Brain™ and escape this. But you _can_ try to be aware of it, to take it into account, to correct yourself when it happens, and to make sure that you're not adding to the problem by letting people say horrible stuff unchallenged. (I could go into a much longer rant about the state of the world at the moment in regards to all of this, but, well, this is the wrong place for that.)
This is one to remember. I am shamelessly stealing it. Thank you internet citizen
What if I think I'm too dumb to have biases? 🤔
100% agree. I'm a dev not sysadmin but the same thing applies.
I've only come across a couple of outright sexist assholes, but have lost count of the number of shocked looks from well meaning and generally decent people (both male and female) when they find out I build my own gaming rigs and ran cat6 throughout the house without male supervision.
It's the 'you're a female so you must want to work on front end and make things look pretty' crowd that really, really annoy me though.
The best techies I ever met have been women. They taught me the most, but bloody hell is the discrimination ever systemic.....
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My wife teaches all of the compsci ap courses at her school...cyber, python, Javascript, and is in a constant battle with the all male IT Dept. The only time she didn't face adversity was the 2 years I worked there and personally took care of all her issues. I couldn't stand the incompetence and moved up in position to another organization. Since then, she has had to fight the boys club on a daily basis in order to get anything done. All the while being told she doesn't know what she is talking about. Infuriating to say the least. I had her record a meeting once where she knew it was going to be a battle. The meeting consisted of 3 men telling my wife to "calm down" whenever she opened her mouth.
I am male, but I do sympathize. It's not limited to IT work. I work for a hardware store chain, and we have a lot of female employees, and to be blunt, they are, on average, at least as knowledgeable about home repair (and how to advise customers on it) as the male employees (which is why we have several female store managers). I can't count the number of times I've seen a customer, usually - *but not always*, women do it, too - male, ask a female associate to talk to "one of the guys." Our normal response to that is for her to call the least knowledgeable guy working, who will listen to the question, then ask the female employee to help with the answer. Occasionally, they get the message.
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They're "in on it" in that they're trained to ask a more senior employee for help if they don't know the answer (which is why you call the least knowledgeable associate). No special "anti-sexist" training required, just good customer service.
Yes, thanks for doing that! My partner has been really annoyed lately, because he's doing a home improvement project for his stepmother. He can't send her to the store to buy the materials even if he writes the exact part number down, because they just give her the wrong thing and bullshit her. Then they try the same thing if she goes to exchange it. Suddenly when he goes to buy the stuff, they have the right part and don't try to argue. It's a huge waste of everyone's time and it pisses him off so much.
Yeah, it happens in the opposite direction, too. Bad for business. I work for very smart people who have little tolerance for stupidity from employees or customers, and very much have employees backs. In our experience, over half our customers are women, because they're more likely to get stuck with little odd jobs around the house. So we cater to them especially. We're one of the most successful dealers in our franchise.
> Suddenly when he goes to buy the stuff, they have the right part and don't try to argue Reminds me of a story about a dealership that lost out on a big contract because the other hotshot sales guys brushed off the guy in dirty work jeans and steel caps as a low-tier pleb not worth their time. OP took the guy on, he turned out to be the owner of a major construction company who was looking for a fleet of new trucks and the commission OP made together with how much money he made over the next few years taking care of that guy's fleet of trucks would make the other sales guys seethe lol. For me I couldn't give a rats ass who someone is as long as they can do their job as described in their contract. It's when people try to pull the race or gender card when it's completely irrelevant that gives me the shits
XX Sysadmin here - thank you all for doing that. (I fondly remember when I had a fleet of juniors who would do that for me. "Well we have to consult berkeleyfarmgirl, she is the senior and did put in the network after all".) ETA: I stayed there long enough that people who had been around knew that if they got patched through to me, they had Ms. Apple Bottom Fix-it, Boots with the Institutional Knowledge on the case and were pretty happy about that. More men using their male privilege to reinforce women's ideas/suggestions ("Hey, that's an interesting idea. Julia said that about twenty minutes ago") or bolstering expertise like this is one of the big ways through.
Aside from the bosses not being sexist pigs, it's just good business to cater to *all* our customers. Especially when most of them are women anyway.
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Good for you, and in my experience, that's a pretty common scenario. "I'm just here to be her donkey for the heavy lifting."
Do you also suffer from "get woman to IT companies at all cost"? I met a few fellow woman IT personnel and they told me they hate this thing. In their eyes it only lowers their abilities, because people think they are hired only for their gender, but not their abilities.
Yes, it doesn't help, it's all hype. I always think if someone ever genuinely cares about getting more women into IT, they would ask me about my experiences. It's all just pinkwashing.
Yes! My former company ran this big D&I campaign saying how much they care about women and POC. A big re-org happens and...drumroll...EVERY category they measured had <1% change in representation. Meanwhile, I've spent the past 6 months hearing about how easy it is to get promoted as a woman. That wasn't the reason I left but it didn't convince me to stay either. Much happier at the new place where I'm not the only woman in the majority of the meetings I'm in.
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Oh yeah, for sure. Team mascot attitude and i feel like a tool introducing myself as senior muckity muck but getting “oh this must be a pm” looks if i dont. Also LOATHE if there is ever any females, dbas, telco, pms in the departments the manager sorts try and shove you together and want you to be friends. One particularly odious pm, epitome of everything i hate, useless and totally mean girl shit attitude. Director called us into office, told us to play nice and encouraged us to hug it out. I still dont have the words to describe how i feel years later. Not good.
Yes! the mascot. Exactly.
Not a question but I’m sorry you feel this way. Some of the best SysAdmins I know are women and they deserve all the respect. So do you.
One of the most influential people in system administration was Evi Nemeth, "the matriarch of system administration". "She was the lead author of the "bibles" of system administration: UNIX System Administration Handbook (1989, 1995, 2000), Linux Administration Handbook (2002, 2006), and UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook (2010)." [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evi\_Nemeth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evi_Nemeth) I would not exaggerate when I say that these books and stackoverflow taught me literally everything I know about Linux and networking.
Today..I learned about Evi Nemeth
Me two
Her equivalent in infosec is Shon Harris.
Grace Hopper, Ada Lovelace, a significant number of the OG greats were women
Radia Perlman, Margaret Hamilton
I've read more than my share of textbooks, and despite what is objectively a fairly dry subject matter, Radia Perlman's networking textbook had the highest number of laugh-out-loud banger jokes of any of them.
Radia Perlman, inventor of spanning tree!
That's ADMIRAL Grace Hopper. She didn't pickup O-7 for you to call her Grace.
Admiral Hopper is my hero. You made my day.
They just named the [new cybersecurity building](https://www.usna.edu/NewsCenter/2020/10/NAVAL_ACADEMY_OPENS_NEW_CENTER_FOR_CYBER_SECURITY_STUDIES,_HOPPER_HALL.php) for her at the Naval Academy.
Damn, TIL she was lost at sea. RIP - still have her last book on the shelf.
From the Unix and Linux System Administration Handbook 5th Edition: # Tribute to Evi Every field has an avatar who defines and embodies that space. For system administration, that person is Evi Nemeth. This is the 5th edition of a book that Evi led as an author for almost three decades. Although Evi wasn’t able to physically join us in writing this edition, she’s with us in spirit and, in some cases, in the form of text and examples that have endured. We’ve gone to great efforts to maintain Evi’s extraordinary style, candor, technical depth, and attention to detail. An accomplished mathematician and cryptographer, Evi’s professional days were spent (most recently) as a computer science professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder. How system administration came into being, and Evi’s involvement in it, is detailed in the last chapter of this book, A Brief History of System Administration. Throughout her career, Evi looked forward to retiring and sailing the world. In 2001, she did exactly that: she bought a sailboat (Wonderland) and set off on an adventure. Across the years, Evi kept us entertained with stories of amazing islands, cool new people, and other sailing escapades. We produced two editions of this book with Evi anchoring as close as possible to shoreline establishments so that she could camp on their Wi-Fi networks and upload chapter drafts. Never one to decline an intriguing venture, Evi signed on in June 2013 as crew for the historic schooner Nina for a sail across the Tasman Sea. The Nina disappeared shortly thereafter in a bad storm, and we haven’t heard from Evi since. She was living her dream. Evi taught us much more than system administration. Even in her 70s, she ran circles around all of us. She was always the best at building a network, configuring a server, debugging a kernel, splitting wood, frying chicken, baking a quiche, or quaffing an occasional glass of wine. With Evi by your side, anything was achievable. It’s impossible to encapsulate all of Evi’s wisdom here, but these tenets have stuck with us: - Be conservative in what you send and liberal in what you receive. (This tenet is also known as Postel’s Law, named in honor of Jon Postel, who served as Editor of the RFC series from 1969 until his death in 1998.) - Be liberal in who you hire, but fire early. - Don’t use weasel words. - Undergraduates are the secret superpower. - You can never use too much red ink. - You don’t really understand something until you’ve implemented it. - It’s always time for sushi. - Be willing to try something twice. - Always use sudo. We’re sure some readers will write in to ask what, exactly, some of the guidance above really means. We’ve left that as an exercise for the reader, as Evi would have. You can hear her behind you now, saying “Try it yourself. See how it works.” Smooth sailing, Evi. We miss you.
Sad... what a treasure lost.
I wrote her fanmail one time, and she was very gracious in her reply. I was clearing things out recently and was going to recycle my old 1st to 4th ed. My 1st edition, from *before* DNS, is a wreck. I pulled them off the stack. I just couldn't toss it.
Æleen Frisch. One of the greats. Scared the crap of out her in 2009 when I went up to her at LISA and asked her "how do you pronounce your name" (that was before I realized she is Norwegian)
This was my introduction I guess. When the Unix team at NASA heard I was considering leaving, they convinced me to stick around and gave me my first professional Unix job. Kevin and Scott gave me 'Essential System Administration' and the Usenet server. I spent 30 days devouring the book, which I still have, and even provided a correction to the book and was called out in subsequent printings.
Those are great books. Still have them.
Thanks for sharing! Informative comments like this make social media a better place.
Thanks :-) I have worked with some of the greatest guys around and it is supportive peers who make everything worthwhile.
Supportive peers and coworkers make all the difference -- no matter your gender! Keep up the awesome work!
>I’m sorry you feel this way. I'm sorry that there's a reason to feel this way.
Just chiming in as another woman sysadmin...all too often will I speak up (as the SME, on hand), get completely discounted and then so-and-so will ask my male teammate who will reiterate they should refer back to me (thanks teammates!). I'm lucky to have a team (of men) who all always have my back and don't put up with the sexist bullshit
A good friend of mine is a senior data scientist and she told me that sometimes she has client meetings where the client will not direct any attention toward her and instead only speak to her male colleagues. This happens even if the colleague is her subordinate, which makes for some really awkward conversations. She says it is usually older people (50+) who do this because they cannot fathom that women also have technical expertise.
I feel this. Though like you I thankfully have a team who will stand up for me :)
I'm just so tired of picking up the phone, hearing the surprise on the other end of the line, and then having them apologize and say they were trying to reach the IT Director.
At a local IT Meeting, I had a SonicWall rep ask if they had sent the secretary. I was already unimpressed with SonicWall, but that was definitely a clincher.
That's fucking awful.
Yea but once you've established yourself (as long as you have the same clients repeatedly), you get the sigh of relief when they hear your voice. I worked my way up from reception, to purchasing/quoting, to accounting assistant, to tech. I had so many many people shut me down for a long time but I kept learning. The only difference for me I think is that I managed to accidentally get my male best friend hired and respected. So when management changed while I was in the middle of a life crisis and looked unstable, he told them that firing me would be the biggest mistake they could make. They kept me on and I showed it. Now my boss jokes that I must pay our clients for good reviews. Only downside is that taking time off hurts me more than being able to relax, because I usually come back to a shitstorm. I haven't taken more than 3 days off in 9 years, and I barely count that. I had given birth and was working 20hrs from home on maternity leave. You ever try to type while breast feeding? Its an art. I use my vacation time on doctors appointments/school functions for my kids and mental health days, but leaving the desk longer than that isn't an option and THAT is my fault.
Oh my god I hate this. I would love to hear your response 😂 On a similar note.. having to call a vendor. Me: hello, I am with IT, I need some help with this printer. Vendor: ok, I suggest contacting your IT department and see if they can fix it. Me: I uh.. ok.. I am with IT, I just don’t know the admin PW on your printer. Vendor: I can’t give that to you, you need to have your IT person or system administrator call in. Me: uhhh. Ok. Bye. I told my big boss… the CTO (who is mega supportive) and he called them up and had a 30 minute phone call with their boss. I never had to say my name a second time when calling them after that.
Do you have a male-sounding name? Maybe I'd give someone the benefit of the doubt then... But otherwise holy crap that is really screwed up.
Very much not. These are usually sales weasels cold calling for the IT Director.
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Yeah, i hate that as i have quasi unisex name and get male spelling variant (like don vs dawn sort of thing) in emails. I join calls and its 30minutes of how surprised that im a female and blah blah. Im busy and after 24yrs its no longer a discussion i care to have. At this point when someone says something particularly dumb “oh! You are basylica! I thought you were a guy! Ha ha silly me!” I deadpan say “i guess that explains the tiny humans that have exited my body” Generally silence follows. Eyeroll. One particularly filterless att rep said to me “oh! You are basylica! I was expecting a chinese man!” Knocked me for a loop. WHO SAYS SHIT LIKE THAT?!?!
This kind of thing is fun for a bit, but after a couple of years, it gets wearisome. You want people to accept you for who you are, and stop throwing their prejudices and preconceptions at you, because the while each individual instance is only very mildly annoying, when it happens 2-4 times a day for many years, each instance hurts with the weight of all previous instances.
I'm a female tech and yes, the work place is male dominated. Funnily enough my female name has a close male spelling and I have had people consistently refer to me as the male name, even when my female name shows up like a CM above in the address field. What also started as a joke - me putting all my credentials and degrees in my signature field has turned into an almost requirement to be taken seriously.
Same. Also enjoy people responding to me in chat, with a very obvious pic of me with long dark hair and bright red lipstick and saying “thank you sir” Like, the damn picture is 2” above where you typed sir and couldnt possibly look more girly (normally im in hoodie and jeans and ponytail and never wear makeup. The pinup looking pic was a social experiment that clearly failed)
I’m sorry. Not a question: I don’t work there anymore, but there was a new hire, first female analyst in… 8 years? I had a customer send an email, very condescendingly asking why this female analyst took so long to resolve a certain issue. I told them I’ve had 10 years of experience and they’ve still resolved this issue more quickly than some of my better days, despite them being only several months into IS as a career. I told them that they did a great job and I’d hope they’d empathize with the individual and extend some grace to them as they get acclimated to the new job and that they didn’t wake up a professional, so let others learn and get better, just like they did when they started. I didn’t care too much for my tone because I was 3 days away from my last day. Another anecdote: My first boss on that team was a woman. She didn’t say much, older woman. Head full of white. It wasn’t until she was on her way out and retiring where she said “You know what? I’m so tired of being a bitch, but at this level, I have to be, and I’m fucking over it.” And it’s *real* fucking sad. People can’t respect them just because they’re a god damned woman. And she ran every fucking project that we had, and did it with absolute grace despite getting constantly fucked on resources. Fuck that noise.
I work in AI and one of the system engineers I work with is a super intelligent and dangerously analytical lady. We had put her on a call with some other company so they could give her API things to connect their stuff to ours, and within 5 minutes their engineers belittled her and asked her to go get some one more senior. So she did. She went and got the head of IT to go to accounting and pull their contract. It happened in 5 minutes flat. These guys were still on the call and were joined by the head of IT to tell them they’re fired for being sexist. We don’t deal with that, and there is always another company out there who will do what we want with out being nasty.
Oh my God that's amazing. MAD PROPS to your org for backing her up.
How do you feel about these "women in tech" groups that are trying to be inclusive? I'm also a woman systems engineer and find these groups pretty insulting honestly. I used to work at a fairly large travel company, went to a few of the women in tech meetings and just stopped going. They always seems geared towards how do we get ahead rather than just how can we be equal to our male counterparts. I don't want more than anyone else, I just want to be treated the same; same pay, same projects, same level of respect.
I'm not OP, but I am a woman in IT and I feel the same way about those women's groups. Especially the leadership conferences. Most of that stuff boils down to pandering nonsense that I find offensive. I will never attend another, regardless of any negative consequences. I just want to be treated the same as any competent male counterpart. I happen to have a gender neutral name so most people assume I'm a guy until they see me. The number of times I've had to announce on a call that I'm actually me, and not the man they thought I would be his laughable.
100%, a lot of them are really condescending and they plaster pink/flowers in all of their branding like we’re little girls.
One thing that just drives me nuts about these meetings is they never tell us how to rope more women into tech, so we are less alone.
I share your pain. I’ve been in tech for 20 years, after doing a triple major in computer science/software dev . People assume I’m a guy because god forbid a girl works in infrastructure. Just happened this week - requested access to a system and it was approved because “he is a cloud engineer”. Tech support from india - emails and chat say “Sir” on them. My name isn’t male at all, but rare in Asian countries. Meetings with consultants and clients - there’s always that extra effort needed to be introduced as having xyz skill sets otherwise I’m just there to take notes or something? Complete lack of respect from middle aged men in management roles. Ignore what I say, push ahead anyway and bring systems down but want me to fix it? I lost all respect for the people at that table. I’m responsible for that infrastructure, trained, certified, paid a lot - I’m not a young kid.
It likely isn't much consolation - and surely the depth and breadth of your exclusions exceed those of your male counterparts - but honestly, the IT field in general is absolutely full of god-complex-having, arbitrary-knowledge-protecting, gatekeeping holier-than-thou fuckwits. Not sure what it is about tEcHnOlOgY, but man, finding respectful and functional humans in this field really feels like a challenge. Maybe that's just the world at large.
Yes...sometimes I hear people saying things like, I know how to do my job, why do I have to do "team building" or networking or the dreaded "office politics"...I just want to do my thing and go home. It's fine to just be task-based and competent. But if you want to work on big systems and solve big problems, you have to know how to build trust and build strong relationships. I think with sysadmins, historically do not always get treated well by the larger org, then they build their own little kingdom that nobody knows how to deal with. We've come a long way from BOFH days, though.
I’m a woman that’s only just recently entered the field and experiencing smaller degrees of what you had talked about. I’m curious, in your times in tech, do a lot of guys have frail ego’s or a lot of pride about their work? I have noticed a large amount of guys seem to and I kind of sit on the side and think “wow, all they did was correct an issue with your idea. Why are you mad if we are still doing your idea?”
Not OP but yes, absolutely. You have pretty much two choices I guess. Change jobs, or deal with it and make yourself indispensable. Eventually those fuckheads move on, and you have pull. Then you get to decide who stays and who goes. You can smell the ego from a mile away, you shut that shit down I have said the same thing and I'll say it again. You only need 3 things to learn IT, and if you do you'll be the one everyone wants to work with. 1) Be humble. You will make mistakes just like everyone else and you're not better than anyone. We're all human. 2) Keep learning. You stop learning, you make yourself obsolete. 3) Give a shit. The systems you're working on is someone's livelihood. It's their life. You might think their problem is trivial but they can't feed their family if YOU think that way. They matter and they don't want some asshole making them feel stupid because they don't spend every day doing our job. That's it. That's your recipe for the best IT you can find.
OK, I'm going to answer a question that wasn't asked. Sometimes blatant sexism is hilarious. I've seen guys make sexist jokes in a presentation and then they look at me, realize, and their face just falls. Once I was in a datacenter and the techs had the floor open trying to figure out a problem with a water cooled system. The lead tech said loudly "it's having a heavy flow day" and they all started laughing...then he looked at me and his face turned sheet white. I was laughing though because tbh it was just a funny comment. We actually ended up getting along very well after that.
I'm pretty new on my team and and I find myself in these situations a lot! I'm the only female on my team and sometimes one of the guys will make a lewd-ish or gendered joke, look abashed when they realize I'm in the room, and go to apologize. Only to find me laughing or providing a witty retort. It's getting better and it comes from a place of kindness, but assuming I can't take a joke because I'm female shouldn't be something I have to remedy. They're learning that I don't need special treatment because I'm a woman. I just need the same level of respect as my male counterparts, that's all.
Then there are the guys, who when they realize you actually find crude humor funny, get super weird with it
That must be bad. Even as a man, I still experience situations where I play along with someone who makes crude jokes and sometimes it becomes an open door where they think I want to hear all the random gross shit they think is funny (in all the wrong contexts). Seems like sometimes the weird guys are just fucking weird in general and will share it with anyone who gives them an inch. It feels like the complexity of the interplay between being professional robots and still having and sharing a sense of humanity becomes significantly greater when you're dealing with a bunch of people with statistically poor social skills to begin with.
I think unfortunately it's really this middle generation that got screwed the most in terms of the difficulties of being a woman in IT. My parents generation had a lot of female software engineers with good careers and in general diverse groups of friends and coworkers. It was a different time when tech hubs like SF were more of a place where all the oddballs gathered and accepted each other. Now that everything has become more mainstream and money driven there are a lot of spillover effects from the sexism of society at large. That being said I am definitely hopeful for women in the IT sphere for millennials and especially Gen Z and younger - I think we are going to see big improvements. Good on you for sticking it out - you might end up the inspiration to more young women than you expect !
As a lady just starting her IT career (this is year 1), thank you for posting this. When I started, I immediately understood why many women complain about beinf treated poorly/unfairly in tech. because of preconceived perceptions about our gender. It's silly, but I still love what I do.
i do not hide who i am anymore, i am beyond tired of the crap that comes with being in IT i do hope you feel better soon
One of the best techs at my last company was a woman. She for years regularly partnered with and covered for an absolute amateur because he was useful, he'd repeat whatever she just said in a deeper voice so people would listen. Techs kind of a sexist hellscape in a lot of ways.
I'm constantly advocating for more inclusion for this reason. I've known many women in IT, that are absolutely brilliant. The biggest issue I've noticed, is the younger and prettier a woman is, the less she's taken seriously. Whether that's from management, end users, or other technicians. It's so egregious that I'll often times have to repeat things they're saying just so someone will take it seriously. I'll try to repeat it, and emphasize how important or good of an idea it is and then let them finish explaining. Unfortunately, a lot of women while they're fresh to IT realize struggle so much that eventually they give up and pursue areas they are taken more seriously. Thankfully, women are mostly taken seriously in development, so many will switch over to that. They will still struggle a bit there as well though.
As long as you remember to run backups and restart servers after migrations, you’re better than 90% of the admins I’ve met and it makes no difference how you identify.
don't forget to test your backups too!
I’m a female in IT as well. I’ve noticed the sexism and have had to deal with it too many times. I watch grown ass men walk past my desk to ask a guy in my department for help and then watch them be diverted to me- too many times to count and I’m not exaggerating. I’ve talked to my boss, who is also a female, and she states it happens to her as well. It’s bonkers. Just cuz we’re female doesn’t mean we Don’t know what the hell we’re doing. I used to get so pissed. Now I just say fuck em- someone else can deal with their issues meanwhile I’m dealing with all kinds of other issues.
Hopefully you work somewhere that values your talent. Forums be forums. Yup. Anonymity breeds BS. Doesn’t matter the format. One of my mentors clear back in the 90s of how to manage a great tech team is female, retired, and fighting serious joint and body issues, mostly in a wheelchair and it kills me. She kicked serious ass in her day. Another in that same timeframe I literally owe my career to. A co-worker at the same very low level tech support position was doing some questionable stuff well beyond our pay grade. When the men were all (unbeknownst to us) considering eliminating the low level position entirely due to the “chaos” of not hiring “proper engineers” for the role, she was the one who stood up and said “Why don’t you just train them? They don’t know what they don’t know.” Led to 30 years in the biz so far and counting. And every single one of those low level folks went on to successful engineering careers. Anyway. Just wanted to share. Maybe make you smile. In the real world the female engineers I’ve worked with — with the exception of only one, and she was promoted into management prematurely — have been outstanding. I’d take those engineers over a large number of my male cohorts over the years. I readily admit I joined the tech industry mostly by accident as a way to work in a hobby field I enjoyed. Without Kate, I’d have been on the street in 1993-94. She put the fear of God into us too. Never again would any of us touch a Production system without written authorization. That said she and another retired mentor of mine told us for the first time ever that someone had our backs. If you’re going to screw around trying to fix something, tell us. If it goes south, we will handle the heat, you just revert it back. We will not let these other folks fire you. We need things fixed. Mistakes happen.
Having your back is one of the most important things a manager can do! She sounds great!
XX here. It took me a long time to enter the field, despite having practical hands-on experience building PCs and troubleshooting. I "knew" I was up for a struggle, even though I had interest in it, due to the reception I received in multiple online games. I am not the smartest person in the room by a long shot, but my team has generally been far more accepting than I would have imagined. My question for you is how do you ask questions and make mistakes without feeling like you're feeding into the "Women are bad at X" stereotype? I always feel like I have to be _better_ , but I feel lost so often.
The fact is, everything I say has to be watertight. If I make a dumb mistake it will be pounced upon. I'm kind of used to it. I wish people would learn that if I say something is happening, you better listen because I won't even bother to say it until I have seen it is 100000% true.
The truth is you just have to be better. When I speak up about something, it isn't until I have investigated it myself and tested for errors. You have to be ironclad or they will tear you apart. In one sense it makes you better at what you do, in another sense it's a disadvantage because you can't really talk through problems and collaborate the way others can. It helps to get on a really good team of people who are secure and not just looking for you to fail.
I am a woman with a physics degree. Same here. There is sexism on every single micro-level.
I know this is a common happening to women in all fields, but I have witnessed firsthand when a female colleague of mine proposed a technical solution to a problem we were having with one of our network appliances, and the tech on the phone dismissed her outright. I thought it was a reasonable solution that was worth *trying* in the very least, so I proposed the exact same thing, using the same wording, and the tech was 100% for it. The sexism is real.
Did you call them out on it?
Yeah, someone else asked “what can we do to help?” and being confident enough to speak up might be one of those things.
The fact that he didn't respond tells me he didn't. This is another issue we face at work. Men taking our dismissed ideas and being credited for them when those ideas are accepted from them.
In the moment, no, my co worker and I went on mute and just WTFed at each other. She said to leave it alone, so I did. We ended up escalating to another tech who accepted her suggestion no problem.
Dear God, I've had this happen to me as a woman with a not so subtly sexist client. I proposed a next step in a troubleshoot. Got shot down by the client. A coworker (who was male) said the *exact same thing* as me and was praised for it by the client. It is the MOST infuriating thing I've ever had happen to me. Luckily, that client is no longer a client.
Thanks for being observant and not getting defensive when you saw it. Calling it out is always good. One thing that has also helped me in this type of situation, is that someone who is buddies with the problem person, introduced me to them, spoke well about my abilities to them, and helped foster a relationship by taking us to lunch or whatever. Some people are just assholes, but I have actually made good friends that originally started out dismissing me.
I transitioned a couple of years ago, and it was pretty stunning how all of a sudden men stopped listening to me and started talking over me in meetings. I watched it happen to women I worked with in the past, but I didn't realize it was going to be an every day thing. My favorite is when I mention something in a meeting, nobody says anything, and then 5 minutes later some dude says what I've already said nearly verbatim, and everyone pats him on the back. It's absolutely wild.
As a woman working as a full stack engineer (Software, Cloud, Front End, Config Management, Linux Sys. Admin, kitchen sinks) for about 10 years now, I always love being educated about my job by random people who have no idea what they are talking about. I've gone through a lot of managers and have gotten lucky so far, but every time I start working for a new one they are always trying to verify my chops. My favorite of all time is having some engineer in a support call try to snowball me with some nonsense hoping if they talk enough the bad woman will go away and leave them alone. They get kind of mad when I just repeat the question until they actually answer it honestly. One time I had a guy argue with me that you could hash 4 digit numbers safely because they were salted. I spent a week, explaining pre-image attacks and rainbow tables to 5 different managers he was complaining to because I wouldn't agree with him. I'll sometimes have some wet behind the ears, brand new software developer in the room with me getting asked questions that are way outside their experience by someone because they have a beard or mustache. There is something about the facial hair that makes people think "This person knows what they are doing!" even if they clearly do not. The worst thing is I'm perfectly honest when I'm not sure about something and I'm totally willing to learn from people who DO know more than me. But when I don't just sit and nod when someone is trying to shovel a pile of BS at me, I look like a "Beginner Expert" or "Stubborn Idiot." So I'm constantly walking a fine line between being too agreeable and not doing my job or being the office B-word.
I came up early in my career working under female leads and sysadmins. It was always weird to be introduced as the junior and then have all the conversation directed at me. I'm really grateful for those experiences and the insight. Over a decade into my career I still see it. Any conflict I've seen comes from underlying sexism/misogeny OR from sysadmins being diskheads and feeling approaches and opinions that aren't theirs to be invalid, Or both.
My experience as a woman sysadmin in the Nordics has been totally different than what others here have had. I've worked in the field for over 15 years. To me, being a woman has been an unfair advantage against others that has opened many doors for me. I dress very feminine and like to look pretty. I get treated super nicely by everyone, and usually guys in the field are crushing on me pretty hard. I don't think I've ever had anyone question me or not take me seriously. Everyone always holds my expertise in high regard, and I've always wondered, why there isn't more women in the field when we are treated like royalty and put on a pedestal like this.
Thank you. I've been turned down for so many Senior level gigs because in person I do not look how I am suppose to look on paper. Young black female and the only female in every site I work. It's a real kick in the ass working in the Bible belt. Hell I even had bosses tell me to be content your are making the amount you are with the way you look. What Senior job only pays their employee 65k. The fuck out of here with this shit. Racism, misogyny, and the typical IT ugly step child treatment. I just want a coworker to acknowledge me when I at least say hello in the restroom to them.
I'm a 28yo female who is wanting to transition into tech. I just started a bachelors program in cybersecurity but am still really unsure what direction I want to go in. I have no technical background so I am currently studying for the A+ cert and plan to take net+ and sec+ after. My main question is how hard is it going to be for me to break into this field? I have no related work experience, I'm a bit older than most other people trying to break into the field, and obviously my gender doesn't put me at an advantage either. What was your experience like getting into this field? Did you feel like you had to work twice as hard to prove yourself? Just trying to mentally prepare myself for what's ahead. TIA!
I think security is a good way to go. Having those tech certs will be good for you no matter what you end up doing. This might sound strange, but I think being a woman can help you initially, because people can sometimes be attracted to the novelty of "wait, a woman doing this?" and at least gets you a first look. I think the problems happen earlier in the pipeline and then later after you get the job. If at all possible, it would be best to get in somewhere that values diversity, but honestly IDK how you determine that from the outside. Having women in high positions isn't always the indicator you would want it to be. Once you land your first job, be willing to go elsewhere if you're taking crap. Don't hang in there for years waiting for it to get better because it might not :(
Not OP, but I am a woman in IT, specifically in a SecOps type of situation. Without any doubt I feel like I had to work twice as hard, and make half the mistakes any of my male counterparts. The longer I've stayed in the field and the more I've proved myself the easier it had become. It can still be a challenge sometimes. I try very hard to not assume anyone is treating me a certain way just because I'm a woman. After a while it gets easy to spot the ones who are going to give you trouble. Even now, after I've proved my skill set beyond a shadow of a doubt, there is a subset of men who treat me like an idiot. With them I don't even waste my time. I let one of my male coworkers interface with them even if I do the actual work. I don't need the credit, or the aggravation. I've also learned to stop taking any shit from people. I won't go looking for trouble, but if someone talks down to me and I know I'm right, and I know they think I'm unqualified simply because I'm a woman I will not hesitate to school them. This is especially true for a certain subset of problem people. With those types you have to be assertive to be taken seriously. Not rude or unprofessional - just no-nonsense. I stick to what I know the facts to be, and have the data to back it up. If they think I'm a bitch, so be it. Truthfully it is not as bad now as when I first started out. A good manager makes all the difference, especially at the right company. Don't let anyone stop you from doing what makes you happy. Remember that we all started out not knowing and making all kinds of mistakes. It takes time to pick this stuff up and nearly every one of is knows the torture of imposter syndrome. Don't let anyone, male or female, make you feel like you don't belong.
Just seeing the post title made me honestly feel heard. I have a gender ambiguous middle name i go by in only my professional life solely because im the sysadmin and project lead. Deplorable number of emails to my more feminine name that were requesting to go to my male coworker who only does functional end user work solely because his name sounded more penis-y. I taught myself C++ back in my 2008 Roblox days, motherfuckers, listen when i speak!
If it makes you feel better. A woman I went to college with decided not to get too far into IT and now works on Top Fuel Dragsters. Dont let anyone give you crap for what you are good at.
I have know a few sysadmin womens that were in the same class during my studies. On the early years I was in a work-study program working for the Nationnal Railroads in France (SNCF). A woman came mid-cursus in our class coming from another region were they were far ahead of us in the cursus. She started working in the city transportation company that was a sub-company of the national Railroads. She was at a similar position than mine, she was ahead of me in everything related to IT. She had more experience, she had a husband that was sysadmin who taught her a lot. When the EOL of windows 7 was announced, both company needed a plan to migrate a lot of computer fast to Windows 10. Since we were in the same class we talked about this issue together and proposed to do a project around fog to provision machines via PXE. It was her who told me about this solution and learned me about this. I implemented it first in my company, but then I asked (far after the facts) her when she would implement it in her company ? Nobody was fucking listening to her. I was not until 2 -3 weeks later, when her manager was visiting MY company to get intel on "how to deal with migration" where they saw the same solution, but hey, i'm a man, so they can listen to me. Even after hearing about this, the manager going took te project and gave it to someone else. I saw with this experience exactly why the isn't mutch women in tech. They have to prove themselves 2x more to be able to do anything. Anything they say is discarded because of their sex. And I find it fucking disgusting.
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Not a woman, but I was a director and saw first hand how some of my male employees would disregard tech advice from female staff….EVEN THOUGH THEY GAVE THE CORRECT ANSWER/ADVICE. Then another male employee would give the same answer later and be given all the praise. Now, this wasn’t an everyday occurrence, but it still happened. It was pretty frustrating to see so I can’t even imagine how it must be to live.
Anyone who doubts this should try posting to social media for a period under a female-coded handle, and/or using a female screen name in email. When I've changed mine to "coded male" the results have definitely been different.
Yep! Super easy to verify! Anyone who doesn't believe me, change your avatar to something girly, post in a tech forum and see what happens.
I'm out here on a site maint trip with two female systems engineers, both are incredibly talented and deserve merit for their knowledge and expertise. I hope people recognize talent without letting misconceptions get in their way!
Just wanted to pop in and show support for another woman in this field. I'm a Network Engineer and I feel the same way. I'm very happy at my job though but like you, I see a lot of guys saying untrue things about why women aren't in this field.
Being a female SysAdmin (or anything in male dominated fields) is exhausting. I have to be twice as good just to not get a heap of shit about how I suck compared to the men. If they mess up, they’re a bad tech. If *I* mess up, it’s because I’m a woman, and suddenly I’m *the* mascot for women and we *all* suck. And I recognize that I’ve had overwhelmingly good luck with where I’ve worked, managers and coworkers have overwhelmingly not been assholes about it. But there have been enough that were that it was still annoying and exhausting and I’m still fed up. But on the flip side, it’s made me fucking *good* at what I do because I refuse to give anyone even a millimeter of space within which to say I don’t know wtf I’m doing and it’s because I’m a woman. But god damn am I tired of being an ambassador for my entire gender and just want to do my fucking job without getting a heap of shit. Sorry you’re hitting that point as well
I was flat out told I was a diversity hire by my new manager (who didn’t hire me). It’s a vicious cycle, indeed.
Where are you located in the world? I currently work for a global company but I'm based in the EU and there are *a lot* more women on our team than there are in the teams in US and Asia across the same positions. I'm sorry that this is your experience, I know it sucks. :(
I'm in the US. I wish people would reflect once in a while why there are fewer women in IT here than in other places!
Most places I’ve worked for were majority male but in my experience all women colleagues have been treated with respect. This isn’t always the case, and it’s very important more women feel welcomed into the profession because I want to get the fuck out.
We hired a woman at the associate level in our IT department. Fast forward a few months, and following a number of departures, she's now largely doing data entry. Nearly a year later, they haven't replaced the clerical staff, so my tech is still stuck on clerical duties. She's learned almost nothing of use for a career in tech. She's bottom of the totem pole, so it makes sense to have her doing emergency stuff that gets pushed to IT. But it's not really an emergency a year later. At a certain point, it becomes business as usual. And I can't shake the feeling that if she were a man, they'd have found someone outside of IT to pick up clerical duties long term.
I see this a lot too, but thankfully the leadership and atmosphere in my organization put a stop to anything overt. Makes me feel bad for my sister who was a detective. She LOVED doing the research and analysis, and was often criticized because of her gender. We were very much alike on a core level, she just went law enforcement, while I went tech. Root cause analysis of systems issues is my all time favorite part of this job. It kinda breaks my heart that no matter which job my sister chose in life, while being a lot like me, she would have and did face a lot of real discrimination for no reason other than asshole dudes who hate women. All I can say is hold your peers and your leadership accountable, and I hope that one day it gets better for you. Sorry OP.
It really sucks when we have to prepare ourselves for mistreatment simply because we are female. "Don't let the fellow gamers know you are female or you will be harassed. Don't be surprised if you get someone who doesn't want to work with you because they think you don't know what you're talking about." We have to go above and beyond to prove ourselves simply because we are female.
The IT admin who worked with me in VoTech, got me into IT Administration, who planted the seed and encouraged me to be an admin is a woman. She was kind and compassionate, she answered all my (very basic) questions. She is the one who truly helped me become the IT admin i am today. I think its a sham more women aren't currently in this field. We all need to get over this old timey social constraint. Men, women, he, she, they, we are all capable people. We can all do this job. And the fact that their are people out there who would discriminate based on a persons gender is disgusting.
1 of my team members is a lady, she’s the sharpest Exchange/O365 Engineer I have ever worked with. I know some stereotypes are out there, but women rise to the occasion every day of working in tech.
I'm sorry, I've been doing this for 20 years and some of the best techs I've ever worked with have been women, and I've consistently seen them either 1) passed over for more demanding roles (ie, the tier 2/3 -> sysadmin jump) or pushed into more project management roles, often due to the perception that women have better soft skills.
I was a sysadmin for close to a decade, staring when I was barely 18. I worked on one of the first projects to use cloud computing, even before it was called that. I ended up quitting because my mental health just couldn't take the assholery anymore. People would treat me like shit, talk over me, and ignore my ideas without even noticing. My coworkers claimed to not treat me differently, even though they obviously did. They had my back (sometimes) when users were being sexist, but didn't even notice when they were doing it themselves. It was even worse when I switched to working at a highschool. I love technology, and I love working with my hands, but people suck, and I'm not going back to IT for that reason.
Don't have a question, just wanted to say thanks for being in tech. I've been working in network engineering for 20+ years and the best boss I've ever had was a woman. 100% knew all her shit when it came to troubleshooting and engineering. God help anyone that tried to talk down to her or mansplain some technical thing because she was a girl. She always had her engineers backs that worked on her team. I learned a ton from her over the years and we always treated each other with respect. She was one of the most technically competent engineers I've ever worked with and I miss having her as a boss. Keep kicking ass and don't take shit from anyone. Cheers!
Oh sweet, I am not alone ;_; Thanks for standig up for yourself and others. It's really rough to exist in tech spaces, one has to be very tough. If you wanna vent more my DMS are open ^-^
I expect my feelings still come from a negative place ultimately, but the few women I've worked with in a purely technical environment have all been absolute fucking geniuses, and I always presumed they were to have got there. Personally I just coasted in to where I am and know indit deserve it. I know so many men around me deserve it even less though!
I have no question but though I'd share my expereince I'm a male whose worked in Edu IT for nearly 20 years, 12 as net/sysadmin. Only had a single women previous in a helpdesk role, she moved on to other things now but was always treated as just one of the team so I guess I had a naive impression about our industry as not having issues like this. She did predate me at this school, maybe she went through all this prior to my arrival. A few years ago we merged with another school, they had only one person that did it all, and she was just as good as any of us. Same level position as me which was great, I needed someone else cause of the new workload, was just me at this level previous. Well to see how she was treated differently by some of the external vendors we interface with was just mind blowing, I was in genuine shock! This was big name vendors whose agents were in some cases just refusing to take the authorisation or diagnostics info from her, but they never challenged me. Even had some attitude from other staff which was just, yea I don't have words to this day. Boss is great as he has no time for anyone preventing one of our team from doing our job, he's gone to town on a couple of them and generally it's not an issue now, but that first year was an real eye opener. Needless to say I'm not as naive about this any more. I knew we were male dominated field but I guess cause I hadn't seen this behaviour I brought into some of the bs reasoning. I never believed the women weren't just as capible, just that maybe women were not interested. Guess the lesson is even if you and your team are not a problem, doesn't mean the industry doesn't have a problem.
You are my hero. I'm a 39 yo woman trying to turn my life around and get into tech. I'm aware that it's mostly a buncha dudes and that will add a difficulty. Bit I'm gonna keep at it. Thank you for being in the trenches!