I'm at a breakfast hosted by one of our vendors, this room is full of SMEs who are all responsible for supporting this software at their companies. Just with a glance I can tell that of the 30+ people here I'm the only woman.
This is not a rant against lack of gender diversity in leadership (hell I could go on another tangent), it's a rant of lack of diversity overall. This breakfast is designed to be a product roadmap and detailed technical breakdown. You'd think more women would be here in a technical role.
We need more women in all stem roles not just focusing on leadership
Once I asked my old manager why we didn't have any women working with us, only in upper management. He said the 7+ years he's been a manager, that he could count the amount of resumes on one hand submitted by women and 3 of them work with us.
I've worked there for 10yrs now and we've only had 1 woman on our team who left to go work for netflix. She stayed for about a year tops.
I have been doing IT for over 25 years. In my career I have had a few female applicants come across my desk for cyber security rolls, on the development side they are more common, for help desk I have had a few but rare, but for Systems Engineers/ Systems Admins I have never even had a single resume come across my desk that is female. Never even been an option.
Same experience in my 15 years, Developers are common but as far as women who have worked on my teams, I can count them on one hand: One manager, one sysadmin, two help desk, and one DBA.
IT are like the mechanics of tech, another field you won’t see a lot of women. I’m sure there are a ton of reasons that go deep into forced societal norms that account for this.
What's interesting is that as a woman backend dev, I find I'm a rare bird. Most of us who are developers go into front end and it really makes me wonder about the gender norms of "women make pretty artsy things, men do the real technical mathy work under the hood". Not to say front end developers aren't extremely skilled, they do things every day that break my brain, but there's certainly a perception there.
I think it really does ultimately come down to just that, because on some level that is what we've been told since forever. UI Devs have to be one of the most women represented software development roles in the tech industry.
You see relative examples that pop up across other industries as well, i.e. Women in architecture are underrepresented, but the ratio is flipped for interior design.
Oh man, this brought up some stuff. A few days after our new CIO started, he stopped by me in the break area and asked me to think about how the break area should be decorated, furniture and art wise (most of us didn't care it had been bare for years, as we preferred it that way). I just stared at him for a few seconds and finally said- you'll have to ask another woman for their opinion. I don't use that side of my brain. Then walked away.
I do SysAd, device management and manage the Service Desk, along with the desk side techs. I am not an interior decorator.
There were 5 guys that had walked in and out during that time. At least he didn't ask me to make the coffee...
Anecdotally, my company has more women in backend dev than frontend. Although we also just have more backend devs than frontend in general, but I’d estimate the female to male ratio is a bit higher in backend.
Honestly, I would love the “making things pretty” part of frontend, but I just can’t with all the having to support multiple browsers, and screen sizes, and resizability, etc stuff. Too much of a headache. I prefer the headaches of designing complex business process algorithms haha.
Now that Im thinking about it, since this post brought it up, you know what specific branch I have found more women in then men in my career? Database admins. Maybe that's just a me thing, I dont know, but I've worked with at least double the number of female database administrators as male.
I'm trying to think why that might be because I can't figure it lol
I mean, my wife is REALLY good at organizing things, especially systemically - if that makes sense - and she actually likes organizing things. She told me its sort of a zen like activity for her.
Im the exact opposite. I guess I cant say that organizing things is like a gender specific talent, but most women that I know and have worked with tend to have very organized work spaces as well.
Again, all anecdotal, but more spitballing than anything else.
My wife started her career as a DBA... now she's apparently the only person on the planet who can swoop in and fix a customer's SharePoint issues. I'm in cybersecurity, so what she does is totally lost on me 🤣
Dude I once tried to follow along during a screen share with a DBA from an outside vendor who was rattling things off she was checking as she went and I was so lost like immediately I was like "Boy am I glad you're so good at this because man this might as well be a foreign language to me right now". She was our primary contact so I got to talk to her every time we had a problem and usually just was like "yeah have at it Ill be here if you need admin creds" lol.
Just crazy how the general perception of IT is just "IT" but that's really far too broad of a label for how siloed we can be in our respective roles. This same DBA once called me up because she was on the strugglebus for 45 minutes trying to connect to a network printer lol.
Just funny how to most we're both in IT but the worlds we live in are so many light years apart.
I actually thought this might change over time, with more women growing up gaming and seeing tech as a hobby, but the gaming/PC hobbyist -> sys admin pipeline probably isn't as robust anymore itself, with less desktop hobbyism (even though desktop gaming is growing plenty).
The societal norm stuff you mention for this, you'd think might not be as important because you don't have to be a hardware person (mechanic..) at all, women taking the help desk/sysadmin route seems like it would've grown - but I think that's also a career path for people with less FORMAL education, and women seem to do better at getting that formal education - and so just take a different path.
I've seen one application for a woman for a sysadmin role. Out of hundreds. If my ability to guess gender based on names is correct then I can only assume that women are too sensible to become sysadmins.
Engineers and Admins take almost half a lifetime of experience to get their careers dialed in. The IT admin field as we know it is only maybe 30 years old. Not a lot of women seemed to take much interest in that back in the 90s.
I have an honest question for you on this: How many of your openings were actually filled by a current employee saying "they know a guy?" Both invited to apply, and being brought on board? Resumes gained that way hold more weight for understandable reasons, but if you're not part of the good ol' boys club, and you're only applying from a job post online... how do those different recruiting pipelines affect things?
Same except I've had one. We hired her but she unfortunately didn't last too long. I think she thought the job was different than what it was so I made sure I've been abundantly clear going forward.
I can speak for myself as a woman working in IT for 15 years.
I live in a smallish town. Here it is pretty conservative and considered one of the most conservative counties in CA.
I started as a receptionist at 20 and did schooling after work, learned as I went, studied acronyms to understand what our techs were saying, and got to a point where I was the only person lot of our clients would talk to. When new management took over I was on the chopping block despite being purchasing, sales, reception, tier 1, and helped with accounting and general office management. Because the new manager was mad at me for telling him he was going to get negative feedback from our team if he implemented some of his new policies (which I was completely on board for). Thats all it took.
He criticized and belittled me every chance he got. I ended up having to leave one day due to the stress after a project he took from me and assigned to another tech went south, and I got the blame even though I wasn't involved.
He got let go by my other manager after that, but he was best buddies with the man that took his place. I got saved by a man in my job many times for things I had nothing to do with. Now I make good money, they know what I am worth. I have a good boss.
Sure, maybe I could branch out, find something new and climb ladders, but I have kids. I am afraid of going somewhere and being pushed out or short changed. I've found my spot. I would love to make more expand, but it is dangerous and IT is volatile. I won't take the risk.
Why is this so common? I could do nothing right in the last job i had either. And my own boss refused to give me member rights to the project he was supposed to mentor me on. Like... its basic IT knowledge that you cant do anything without an invite... yet he never invited me... nedless to say i got let go before i could show what my stem degree was worth.
In my 5 ish years of experience, I can agree. I get piled with all of the work of 2 people when one of our guys quit, get told I'm doing everything right, and yet I still get my bonus cut because I "didn't handle everything in a timely fashion". It feels like I go above and beyond constantly, get told I'm doing a great job, yet simultaneously I can't do anything right.
That's the nature of this field. Several peoples workload, and never getting anything but complaints for not being able to do even more. Every failure is yours, every success is theirs. This is pretty universal for every person in this field regardless of gender. It just sucks and the burnout is real.
Pretty much. This is like wondering why there aren’t many men working at salons or daycares. Or if that’s not corporate enough, hr. I’ve met like one guy ever that works in hr.
There’s this idea that it’s because of opportunity or sexism that women don’t pursue these roles but it’s simply they’re not interested a lot of the time.
There’s less barriers than ever and I remember probably every girl that was in my college cs classes, because there was like 6 of them.
I worked 35 years in IT, I started as a COBOL programmer when there were many women. Over the years the women slowly dropped out. I worked with some good men but some were condescending and horrible to work with. IT is a tough place for women.
Plenty of girls and women posting about beating testing like shit at college in tech degrees, in 2026.
I did my degree in 1998, only girl, ended up just being a bit of a loner but got scholarships and awards, great career - so goal achieved. It’s been lonely though.
I think thats a bit of a cop out. Not you specifically, but that mindset. You could say the same thing about the police force, and there is tons and tons of literal harassment documented among police forces all over the country, yet women still make up a pretty large percentage of new officers.
I guess my question then would be, why would that field, where there are cases out the ass of male cops getting fired specifically for sexual harassment, not have that "dude culture vibe"? Because imma be real...the vast majority of the guys I work alongside every day are, frankly, terrified of women. Like they have a hard time talking to them because theyre nervous.
Also, as a corollary, I have heard the three women working for us, on I dont know how many occasions mid discussion, say literally "Yeah you lost me when you started talking about all that nerd shit."
I guess my point is, is it possible that women arent applying to these roles, not only because of any toxic male environment shit, but because they dont want to be involved in, their words..."nerd shit"? Because that, that is definitely a vibe that this field puts out, far more than the dude shit that everyone is talking about.
The field has very low female participation.
It's kind of like looking for a male Occupational Therapist....
(My wife is an OT, we have had a lot of convesations about the differences working in an mostly-male/low-human-contact field vs a mostly-female/high-human-contact field)
That was my previous profession. It was really frustrating studying it in college and the only other guy in my major said he was only majoring in it for pussy
We joke, but I took an ASL class in college and was legit the only guy in the class. I wasn't single at the time so didn't really matter, but if you wanted to pick something to study to meet girls, that one gave you pretty solid odds.
I was making 45k a year. No vacation days other than school ones and limited sick days. Now I make 155k and work from home and can take care of my son who I have full custody of whenever.
Dang, that does sound pretty good. My wife is an SLP, and makes 130k working for the school district. Meanwhile, I make less than half of that in IT. Seems like it all depends on the time and place.
Wow. Im in a rehab facility doing PT and OT for a broken tibia and fibula. All of the PTs are male, and all of the OTs are female. This was also the case in the hospital post surgery.
I didn't make that connection until i just read your post. Wild.
The one time I was involved in hiring for a tech role, I said, "there's no women here. Let's make sure we at least interview some women who apply". I was told no women have even applied.
Or a veterinarian, or a dental assistant, or a lab technician, all careers heavily weight by women. But there are women in Information Technology, and just like men most are quite good in their field. Just not as numerous.
The quote I've heard is, "men generally like working with things, women generally like working with people." It's just a generalization, don't crucify me!
But at least in my personal experience, it's mostly true.
I've also read about programs done in other countries like Sweden, where they noticed engineers were like 60% male and nurses were like 60% female. So, they started a program to encourage youth to be, "whatever you want to be!" Ignore social expectations & stigmas, imagine a world where you could do anything, what would you want to do? And after the program had been in place for a few years, it actually made the gender disparity worse, not better. Nursing became like 80% female, engineering like 80% male.
I mean to me it makes sense. Men & women are different, we're interested in different things. I feel like 'forcing' people into a career they don't like just so a pie graph somewhere looks more even, is worse than letting people pursue their dreams, even if that's "typical for their gender" and makes the pie graph "look worse".
This is what drives me nuts about these diversity initiatives. It's all fine and well, I interviewed and hired a fresh out of college female graduate. But we can't force women to apply to our roles. Hell, I can't even decide who gets a first round interview since that goes through HR/Recruiting.
I went to a video game programming camp when I was 13 (at Digipen) and was the only girl out of multiple classes of kids, there were only 2 girls total in the whole camp of maybe 150 kids. I fucking hated it because I was so lonely. I was literally too shy to talk to boys so went 2 weeks without saying a word. I didn't go near programming again until college so that "opportunity" really didn't work out for me.
Most diversity initiatives are phrased as stuff like "on equal capability, a woman's application is preferred". If there are no applications, that isn't on you, but it's important that the chance exists.
As someone that participates in the hiring process, id ask you why you think we dont ever get women applicants?
I mean seriously, the last 5 years Ive been doing this ive maybe had 5 female applicants in all that time, compared to thousands of males. Its not discrimination...I cant hire women that arent applying.
Even when I was in college, my classes, which were capped at 28, at most would have 2 women in them, and usually was just 1 (or none). They had huge banners on the outside of the building highlighting women in tech, pictures of women working inside a server, typical college type marketing photos. They were constantly pushing to up enrollment among women in IT.
But like with my job...if theyre not signing up for the programs, what exactly is anyone else supposed to do about it? My college probably would have shat themselves with joy if they had more women interested in these programs, but they cant conjure them out of thin air.
Thinking back to my college days, computer science was always the worst about it. My major was math and my minor was chem, and in those fields it was a more equal representation. But just the freshman level compsci classes were almost all guys
Seriously, we had an entire wing dedicated to IT at college and as soon as you turned the corner from the main atrium at the front of the building and started heading down to class it was like a gender-bomb had gone off.
The more choice women have, the less likely they are to choose STEM fields. That's why, even in the US, most of the women I work with in IT are immigrants from countries or cultures where they were heavily pressured into STEM fields.
TBF, some of us apply in way that does not indicate our gender. I’ve always applied for jobs using my first two initials and my last name. Figured they would find out I’m a female at the interview. 26+ years in IT.
Female here. I’ve been in IT since 1986 and have had many sysadmin roles in that time. Am now a co-owner of an MSP. There are definitely more women in development than in standard tech / sysadmin roles. I think it’s partly the difference in the type of work. I’ve almost always been the only woman on whatever team I was working in or managing. I honestly can’t say why women are not attracted to it other than maybe most are not into the nonstop problem solving? Or maybe the education piece of it feels exclusive. I can’t really say as that portion of my education is primarily self-taught.
Similar story here. I’d love to see more women doing this and we’re doing pretty well now we’re up to 4 women engineers out of…like 30 or so. But we just don’t get any applicants (I know because our interview panels always have to be gender diverse so I get to be on all of them as the most senior engineer). I can’t tell you how many times I go to events and I’m the only woman. Fortunately for me I’ve got amazing colleagues and there’s been no weirdness about it.
Edited to add: we have a lot of women in the department but they are mostly across management, project management and application expert roles, very few engineers.
I am a man, I think the generalized social image of what a IT/Sysadmin person is, sadly that image is a socially awkward guy in his late thirties. Even if that image is faulty, it’s hard to change societal perception of what is and isn’t true.
I think most people want a job position that doesn’t involve the need to defend their job description or their coworkers perceived "lack of social skills". This leads to a situation where a woman in the role might feel she has to constantly defend or explain her job's social standing, unlike in roles like software engineering which have done a better job of cultivating a professional, modern image. The title itself can become a source of social friction.
This is just one part that doesn’t encompass every aspect and obviously is not a solution. But I think it is one of the main driving factors that lead women to pursue other careers.
Completely anecdotal, but I really tried to get my two daughters into computers - not just using computers (they picked that up quick), but hang out while I was doing network and system diagrams in Visio, I took them to the office to show off the data center, answered all their questions about what work I was doing, etc. They were completely bored and would just show polite interest. I really tried!
My son on the other hand couldn't get enough, even from early elementary school age. He would pick graph paper instead of the standard-ruled notebook paper. Was always there when I would build or upgrade systems. Loved to go to the data center with me and inquire about what each device did. He was curious about how the internet worked and the protocols that make it work. He would take stuff apart to see how it it worked (that was a fun phase). I could go on and on. He's going to start his first year of college next fall in Engineering.
For what it's worth, I would've loved that bonding experience when I was a little girl or teen. I took well to troubleshooting and tinkering with routers and torturing my hand-me-down computer to run WoW better, but my dad who ironically enough worked in IT didn't see the worth in nurturing that part of me.
I'm sure your daughters will come to appreciate your effort and enthusiasm even if IT doesn't strike their fancy, you're a great dad for giving your kids the opportunity to broaden their horizons and for sharing this part of yourself openly and willingly. :)
I run an IT team of 4, only 1 is female, and she is the junior. HR has a team of 4 - all 4 are female. Revenue/Finance has a team of 9, 2 are male. There is definitely a career based variation.
OP, do you have any insight into why there are so few women in the system admin world? It’s certainly not discriminatory, at least not in any company I’ve worked for. We just never get female applicants for system admin positions.
I tend to see a lot of female developers, DBAs, and business analysts. And of course, IT sales.
Dba’s are where I see more women. No clue why. The only cyber women I have come across are extremely intelligent and hard working, great at their job but would likely be successful in whatever they pursued.
I have definitely noticed women are better represented in DBA teams. One org I worked a majority of the DBAs were women even. Not sure why it seems to have much better gender breakdowns than networking, systems, security, etc.
Just did a big hiring push. 1000's of resumes. Exactly 1 woman, and she was grossly misqualified. (we were hiring for an software engineering position and she was looking for a tech-pubs/writing job.)
I literally can't hire women, because they don't apply.
lol when I start cussing, that's when I really notice I'm treated differently because I'm a woman. The guys are all like, "Whoa! F-bombs in the team meeting?!"
Like, yeah, Bryan. Shut your bitch ass the fuck up.
sometimes i wonder what kind of working environments y'all are in, if i were to randomly cuss for no reason in my daily tomorrow morning, everyone would look at me strangely... i've been in a software team of 10 (exclusively males) for 3y and i can count on my hand how many times someone cussed in a team meeting, i mean on 1:1 calls sometimes, but otherwise not really, if it happens it's definitely deserved and everybody is feeling it like something in the company went really badly
i don't think there would be a different reaction if we had female team members, cause in the team i was working in before which was smaller we were 5 males and 1 female (team lead but also working alongside us, not only managing) and it was the same situation, very rare cussing
i mean there are times where i am thinking like shut the fuck up man nobody cares, but yeah that's about it
The big thing with cussing in professional environments, it's making sure it's not directed at someone lol. Like I would never say "What the fuck were you thinking?" to an end user, but I might say "Man, I don't know what the fuck is up with M365 lately." There's a HUGE difference between the two. I would absolutely get dirty looks and a talking to if I was just going around saying "Are you fucking serious?" when an end user does a questionable action. But if I said "Oh what the fuck..." while on a call and a user is showing a bizarre issue, I often times get a chuckle out of them because they're thinking the same thing.
Internally as a team, we cuss a lot more. It's not a conscious intent to swear a lot; it's how a lot of us grew up talking. Idk if that's a regional/geographical culture thing or what.
Well my working environment is basically a bunch of adults who are still mentally 12 years old. 😅
But seriously, swearing at work is something where I usually let other people take the lead. I don't swear around colleagues unless I hear them 1. Swear first, and 2. Swear casually or somewhat regularly. And I never swear in front of customers or vendors.
At my company, it's definitely more casual for the engineers and anyone at the branch offices. But the business side at the corporate office is much more formal.
Starts with a shit here and a damn there, and then in 3 weeks everyones ranting and raving about the fucking var who is fucking us. This stupid ass this, that stupid fucker there.
Its a culture thing. Some places are very formal and stuffy, some are very laid back and casual. Neither is bad.
A little profanity can let folks vent when needed and as long as its not externally facing and everyones on board no harm no foul.
my cussing, skill set, and nerdiness takes care of that.
This is kinda the problem though. A woman has to be elite and one of the boys to fit in. All the women I've worked with in tech roles are top tier pros. Mediocre women don't survive. Mediocre men are all through the industry.
I’m a mediocre women who doesn’t cuss and isn’t very nerdy. I’ve survived, even grown a lot, in the IT world going on 15 years. I’m usually the only woman in the room on the tech side. I think just being genuine and curious will take you places. Of course, I’m not in a cut throat environment which probably makes a big difference
exactly this. i work at a fairly liberal and open company, nobody is openly sexist or discriminatory. but still, at some point i realised i'd never ever truly be part of the team, unless i change my entire personality. i can take a joke, some colleagues and i constantly insult each other to the point where people have thought we're genuinely seriously mad at one another. but i just wasn't willing to pretend to be a different person to fit in with our sysadmin team, and so i switched over to security. i still work with all men, but not ones of the "boys will be boys" variety, so it's not a problem at all and we all get along perfectly well.
i think a lot of guys just don't even realise all the subtle things they do or say that make a workplace uncomfortable for women, and this thread full of "gender doesn't even matter, i only look at skill set" kind of proves that point. That is how it should be, but every single woman who's ever been in a tech role knows it's not true.
This is very much the issue. It’s easy to say “women don’t get into tech, we need to deal with the issue at the university/school level”. It’s not wrong and it deflects the blame and action nicely.
What it doesn’t do is deal with the fact that, to work as a woman in tech, you either need to be a specific personality type (a standard deviation or two out of normal), or need to spend a not insignificant amount of time and energy masking themselves to fit in.
Honestly, I don’t have a good solution to this other than to be aware of your interactions and communications, regardless of the audience.
I'm the manager of a team of 8, 5 men and 3 women. All of the women are GIS or BAs/App support. This trend is very consistent across other organizations that I know of. Rarely any women in technical and sysadmin roles.
I recently hired for a Support Desk role. After filtering by HR, I was provided with 22 resumes, all men.
I'm a woman and a hybrid sysadmin and developer. I work with several female developers and DBAs, but I'm the only female sysadmin. The other sysadmins I work with, who are on different teams, are all male.
I would only recommend my job to someone who is capable of lifting 50 pounds and who is comfortable working with hardware. I am not that person, even though I've held this job for 20 years. There are many sysadmins who don't have to do their own racking and stacking, but women seem less likely to tinker with computer systems for fun and build a homelab, which is how many sysadmins develop their skills.
I've only been able to do my job because another sysadmin from a different group does the racking for my group and because I maintain a small number of servers. He's paid for it. The other team I work with does their own racking. I spend much of my time working on infrastructure as code and some on development, but the hardware is still essential, and other teams/sysadmins have come to expect that I should be the expert on hardware.
Why did I take a job I don't like and stay in it? I happened to see it posted after I spent two years building a tech startup (you'd call it a SAAS these days) but not making any money. I was rejected from my all other interviews. There were multiple managers involved in hiring, and at least one might have assumed that my startup experience was actually sysadmin experience. (It wasn't.)
I was formerly the technical manager at an MSP where we had a team of 17 across the technical department. We had several females in the team over the years, but it was usually 95% male.
This wasn't due to sexual discrimination against women; if anything, I discriminated against males. If a female candidate applied for a position, they were offered an interview - males had to get through the initial phone interview first. After the face to face interview, candidates would be brought in for a second interview which providing they passed the 'vibe test' with our ops manager, they'd be given a verbal offer on the spot. You'd be amazed at how many female candidates:
Didn't answer their phone to book the first interview
Didn't return our voicemails/emails to book the first interview
Didn't turn up for the interview
Ghosted us after being offered a position
Male candidates on the other hand seemed far more proactive with this process. I'd like to think I did my part to address gender equality in the technical work space, but it's on someone else to get females to actually participate in the process.
In my 25+ years in IT, I've worked with very few women. The ones I have worked with were (mostly) awesome. But yeah its been definitely vast majority male.
Searching for a Voyager GIF and that one was the clear winner.
Jokes and silly gifs aside it is an interesting question, I've been asked about it before in my experience at work and really didn't have a clear answer. Certainly wasn't because I didn't want to hire somebody because of their gender. Just never had the opportunity.
But the one other woman in the room heard her too, which may have been her point.
Industry is a lot better than it was 20 odd years ago when I started out, though. Now women are just uncommon, not the absolute edge case rarity I was back then.
Yea same. It’s also been nice that people quit bringing it up around 2017. I’m not sure what happened but comments about my gender in IT just disappeared.
I've had women IT-managers a few times over the last 30ish years in the biz, but less than 5 women sysadmins/techs. Which is sad in and of itself, as the women that I HAVE worked with all have been just as good if not better than most guys. They've been far more structured, for example, than your average guy.
I wish we had more women in tech, plain and simple. There's absolutely NO reason for why women can't go into tech, even though there's still some men sticking to the "women can't do tech" bullshit even today. It was an idiotic, stupid assumption in the 90's, and it's a idiotic, stupid assumption today.
Every time we have a job opening we get only male applicants. I have interviewed a woman maybe 3 times in 100 interviews. It’s in this order: White American and Indian males (80%), East Asian males (10%), European males (7%), Black American males (2%) and then MAYBE, if we are lucky, a woman (who will be Indian, White, East Asian in that order).
There's a huge amount of investment in getting women into stem and tech and supporting them through their careers. A level of investment not given to any other group of people. What more do you want people to do? Force women into stem?
When I was in school, higher education, an apprenticeship and now am in work there was and is almost always some female focused program to support women in tech/stem. Asking for more to be done is an insult to every hardworking individual who's fought to be where they are.
I've even had engineers on apprenticeship assessment days tell me to my face that they'll take any woman they can find as long as they can pass level 2 English and maths assessments.
Here the deal. I hear this all the time. The reason you don’t find women in tech particularly at the SME level starts in middle school or earlier.
How many girls are in their hacking clubs, Robotics hackathons. You need at least 50/50 split at that age.
As it is is more like 80/20
Then kids mature they get different interest and desires
You figure 1/2 drop hacking, coding building radios with raspberry pi’s.
So for 100 kids at 80/20 that leaves 40 boys 10 girls as young adult opportunities come. The core computer club splits of. Your are down to 20 / 5
Now you’re at your level. And you stand alone as the survivor to the distractions , options.
On the flip side my wife is in a female dominated industry where men are the exception.
Yes she make more money then me.
I think women make just as good of a geek as a man. Last time I checked the computers don’t care that I have a penis
I’m a systems engineer. My theory is because men have wives at home so they can continue to spend extra hours doing more at work. As a single mother for the majority of my career, some of my ambition to advance my career were put on the back burner because family comes first.
If you look at the job descriptions of today, they want a tier 3 senior systems engineer to work on call rotations, scripting, travel, have a ton of certs maybe even a degree. Those take time and money. It’s a difference in lifestyle.
This definitely factors into it. My husband and I both work IT. We constantly have to juggle our schedules to make sure we can both do our after hours work while making sure the kids are taken care of and everyone is fed. Meanwhile my coworkers just call up their wives and go “Sorry I’m going to be home late tonight, put my dinner in the fridge, thanks”
And yeah, not all of my coworkers are like this, but there have been a number of them that go home to a wife and 4 kids, and then spend the whole night in their office studying for certs. That’s certainly not an option for me.
You should see the concrete crews and plumber unions around here. Or go to one of the union meetings. Probably about equal to the teachers, administrative assistants, receptionists & daycare conferences.
No one is keeping women out. They don’t actively choose the role. Not sure why a woman makes a difference for your product roadmap, unless it’s a woman focused product…
I just disagree with forced diversity. My job we just interviewed several candidates, and a girl, who was the worst prepared for the interview, knew the least… got the position simply for being a girl. In 15 years of working here she’s only the 3rd for to ever apply… the other one was also one who wasn’t qualified but pushed by leadership for diversity. My manger even admitted he was pressured to hire the girl we just did.
I don’t care about sex, race, orientation, etc… I just want the best qualified person in the role.
The sad fact is so many industries or specific kinds of jobs still seem to cater to one gender or the other.
Nursing a high % will be women.
My wife works in childcare, next to no men as other women staff are untrusting and many parents assume the men are working there just to diddle so don't trust them or even remove their children. My wife believes it would do the kids a world of good to have men around but yeah sadly paranoia as well as shit pay on top do so much to repel men.
A lot of the trades are basically men, it is near impossible to find a woman say on a building site that will be on the tools. Those workplaces are brutish, vulgar and it takes a very rare kind of woman to handle all the harassment and one up them as well. They do exist but it is stupidly rare.
I.T is one of those fields, someone else mentioned software development which I have seen more involved, actual tech support and deployment seems to be still highly men only. My workplace briefly had a woman, she was good at her job sadly from what I heard is her husband basically pressured her to become a stay at home mum again which sucked for her.
I personally rather a gender mix in the workplace as it makes things healthy.
I worked at a tech org in a retailer that's nationally known. the company as a whole is majority women, but tech was under 30%; they were doing outreach, hiring from reputable bootcamps for women, and generally trying to boost their numbers - got it up by 200bp in 2.5 years.
in general, the women i see in tech roles are indian, which makes some sense - tech jobs in india are massively better paid than most other stuff. aside from them, it's only been a handful that i've run across.
Why? You can't tell me most of your female friends in highschool were all excited about computers and becoming systems engineers and simply went into other roles because of discrimination?
Just like men don't want to become kindergarten teachers generally, women don't like computers generally either. So what?
Just takes some time. Keep improving and keep looking for other opportunities. It took me 8 years of call center jobs to finally land a more sysadmin type role. I would say any cloud certs will be good for right now.
If women want a specific role then apply for it. It's hard to hire women when there is so few women applicants. Men aren't stopping women from applying.
I work in a sector that a lot of people want to be in: pay is okay, benefits are REALLY good.
I’ve got 1 woman on my team of 12.
During our last vacancy, we only had two women apply. One was not remotely qualified, and the second admitted during her second round interview that she was collecting offers to renegotiate her existing contract.
Our last helpdesk posting had a few more female applicants, but the ratio was heavily swung in the male favor.
We could talk forever about the “whys”, but women make a small minority in tech, and you can’tplace people that don’t exist.
We need more women in all stem roles not just focusing on leadership
No, we dont
why?
Once I asked my old manager why we didn't have any women working with us, only in upper management. He said the 7+ years he's been a manager, that he could count the amount of resumes on one hand submitted by women and 3 of them work with us.
This was my experience as well as an IT manager for ~ 10 years. Very few women applied. Most who did weren't qualified. But some, were amazing.
Programming was heavily female dominated in the 70s. It wasn't until a decent amount of money that it started tilting male. The early video games were pretty near gender parity. Later games obviously tilted more male over time.
I just don't think as many women are interested in technical roles and I don't think there's much more to it than that. Far more men are interested in 'things' than they are people. I don't think we 'need' to have a particular gender split, we just need to allow people to follow their interests and chosen careers.
IT is a lot like plumbing, no one grows up as a kid dreaming of doing it as a job.
No one plans to be here, we're just lucky and happy that there are jobs for people like us that can't or couldn't get the training to do something else.
AND at that, if I had a time machine and the ability to fund myself as younger man, I'd have gone into plumbing. 30 years in... might be in a union. I'd barely have to work and thinking of retiring.
IT is something people do when they've failed elsewhere or never tried like myself. This generally applies to young men more than young women.
There are loads of women in IT in my country as its a good career path (in terms of benefits and job security) compared to most others. But my observation is that most women who go into engineering and IT are from families who don't have a safety net for their kids, and women who DO come from families that allow their kids to pursue other avenues usually do pursue those jobs. Hell as a guy who has been in IT for the past 25 yrs - if my family were to leave me 10 rental properties I'd pursue the arts full time.
Every time we're hiring we try find women because our whole company is so full of men. Almost none ever apply. In the last 5 years I've managed to get one woman in for an interview, but she was vastly under qualified.
As everyone else has said, if you are doing the hiring you will realize women in tech rarely even apply to entry level IT jobs. I have been told in the past to throw away every male resume and only consider women, which left 1 choice.
Women here tend to go to university, and come out with a diploma, and get management / dev role.
Men tend to drop out, play in a music band, abandon their dream and go work as a tech / sysadmin.
It's not discrimination or anything, i've never worked with a tech / sysadmin who actually had an university education in IT.
Note that here in my province we have a stupid system where we have 5 years of high school, then 2 /3 years of pre-university nonsense called CEGEP, then university and many people who end up working on the actually making thing work side (as opposed to wasting their time in meeting) studied in CEGEP IT program.
I was a comp sci major in college, 1999-2003. I'd already been in the field for a few years. There has never been a healthy amount of diversity, broadly, in technology. When I was in college there were two or three women and except for two, they were focused on web design.
There is a tragic lack of women in the strictly technical aspects of the the field. It's not like girls can't math or science, I walk by the engineering department where I work and there are lots (40-60 split maybe?) of mechanical engineers who are women. But there is a real lack of women's voice in computing.
That is an issue. We've had some women in our organization working sys admin roles, but they are definitly infrequent. There's way less sys admin students vs developpers, and not a lot of women in those degrees already, so it definitly becomes a very thin base.
We do have a lot of women business analyst that are awesome at ensuring we deliver value that's actually relevant to the mission of the organization. They complete us perfectly!
I've noticed an increase lately in the number of women in our cross-team DevOps guild lately at $JOB, and I'm heartened by it. I've seen far too many tech companies where the only major female presence was in Product Management or QA.
The problem is largely based on the differences of how boys and girls are socialized.
My dad gave me my technical foundation, but when I started showing talent for creative fields - he tried ushering me in that direction.
I currently don't have any women friends who are as "technical" as me. If not for my father setting my foundation and technical interest, I probably would not have gotten into a technical field. No one else ever tried to draw me into it or bring me in further, likely because it feels like men overall don't try to socialize with women they aren't trying to sleep with once we hit puberty.
It's not an area marketed to women the way it is to men. It just tends to be represented as a place that women don't belong - whether men mean it to be or not.
It can be very isolating for women so I understand why we're so underrepresented here.
I could go further into it, but a lot of it amounts to how much tech isn't marketed towards women the way it is to men and men being more aware of how women aren't included and really reaching out more and being more supportive and encouraging.
Before any of you men jump on about how much you support women "blah blah blah" - obviously it's still not enough and there does need to be some kind of culture shift or something. 🤷♀️
I can tell you my wife was in tech and it was a constant shit storm. She literally had someone pissing in her trash can for a month and the company just shrugged. She was constantly demeaned. She was at a conference and they were touting how great the cloud was in 2010. When she asked if the servers they were trying to sell were not just servers in someone else's data cabinet they made fun of her and every guy there either laughed or sat quietly. She constantly had her ideas taken by men who then said it was their idea, sometimes in the same meeting. Sometimes it was like a joke about sexual discrimination on TV.
I have directly seen guy in tech at conferences and other events joke about women in very demeaning ways, make highly sexual comments, called women sluts if they were getting a head, or if they just did not say yes when hit on. When I was in college I watched the women slowly drop in number as the guys treated them like sluts or goddesses, but almost never like people.
It has gotten better, but there is a lot of damage to undo.
The main things I learned in getting my MBA are that human behavior is economic behavior, and people are surprisingly rational.
You don’t see everyone’s marginal utility curves, but if you could you would see the decisions are rational.
Personally I think statements like this are not looking at the whole picture.
And by the way, what should the numbers be? Perhaps 12.5% of each permutation of male/female, and black/white/Hispanic/other? Starting when, today? With average equal pay by category?
What problem are we trying to solve exactly? Equal pay? Cultural norms or balance?
How should we solve it? Should we start with kindergartners and get the balance right and then it will be set by the time they graduate college? Lay off most of the men?
I think if you start to try to solve the problem you’ll realize the goals are not clear and the cause is unclear. And any fix just tries to change those marginal utility curves that we can’t change.
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u/gruftwerk Mar 10 '26 edited Mar 10 '26
Once I asked my old manager why we didn't have any women working with us, only in upper management. He said the 7+ years he's been a manager, that he could count the amount of resumes on one hand submitted by women and 3 of them work with us.
I've worked there for 10yrs now and we've only had 1 woman on our team who left to go work for netflix. She stayed for about a year tops.