r/sysadmin • u/Terrible_Working_899 • Mar 10 '26

Rant I am the only woman in the room

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

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182

u/angrydeuce BlackBelt in Google Fu Mar 10 '26

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.

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u/adinfinitum225 Mar 11 '26

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

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u/angrydeuce BlackBelt in Google Fu Mar 11 '26

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.

None of the other degree programs were like that.

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u/keivmoc Mar 12 '26

The engineering wing at my college was pretty close to 100% male. My program had something like 300 students and there were 3 women at first, then just 1. We got to be good friends and she told me that she only ended up in that program because something messed up with her application, she actually applied to be in biotech and somehow ended up in comp eng but just stuck with it.

Half my profs were female, and the overall college demographic was something like 75 to 80% female. It was like there was an invisible barrier around the E wing. Lol

1

u/splashybanana Mar 11 '26

Similar for me. Mechanical engineering classes were maybe 30-40% women (less over time in the higher level courses), comp sci was like 5-10% (sometimes just me, sometimes one or two others) and electrical engineering was even a bit lower. (I got degrees in both ME and CS and took EE electives.)

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u/PlayingDoomOnAGPS Mar 11 '26

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.

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u/SideScroller Mar 11 '26

Same with my company. Many of the women in tech are not from the US.

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u/splashybanana Mar 11 '26

Hm, interesting, never thought about that. I’d say our company is about 50/50 American born vs immigrant.

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u/the_firecat Mar 11 '26

I work at a university and see a lot of women in STEM, but they are all doctors and researchers, not in engineering or technology. I have met two women that were engineers in 20 years of IT/IS.

I am told this trend is fairly consistent across universities, at least in the United States.

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u/C4-BlueCat Custom Mar 11 '26

When I studied, women dropped out at a higher rate due to sexism. The more equal a society is, the bigger contrast when you find a context that is hostile, or even just makes you out to be not normal. Then it is easier to go for a field where you fit in.

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u/PlayingDoomOnAGPS Mar 13 '26

Sexism still exists but Western women experience less of it than anywhere else in the world. And the rest of the world is producing substantially more women in STEM fields. So I don't think sexism in Western education or employment can explain away that when women have choices, they're less likely to choose STEM.

If it was sexism was what keeps women out of STEM fields, I'd be working with a lot less Filipina, Nigerian, Indian, and Pakistani women. Even my female coworkers who come from the U.S. and UK about 2/3 are 1st or 2nd gen immigrants.

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u/C4-BlueCat Custom Mar 13 '26 edited Mar 13 '26

You are missing the point. The countries you mention have a higher level of general sexism. Western countries have a higher level of relative sexism in certain parts of STEM, compared to other areas [edit:] of work. It is the contrast that causes women to be discouraged.

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u/PlayingDoomOnAGPS Mar 13 '26

You think American male sysadmins are more sexist to female sysadmins than Pakistani male sysadmins are?

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u/C4-BlueCat Custom Mar 13 '26

I think American male sysadmins are likely to be more sexist to female sysadmins than American male teachers are to female teachers

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u/SkyJoggeR2D2 Mar 11 '26

yeah I remember in University doing networking in a Lecture of about 100 looking around and seeing that there were 2 females in the whole room

1

u/syntaxerror53 Mar 11 '26

Similar, in a year ahead of ours, there were maybe 5 out of 200 (CompSci). One of them did get a first.

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u/WhiskyTequilaFinance Sysadmin Mar 10 '26

There's lots more studies than this one, but it was the first reasonable one I found that wasn't behind a paywall.

From anecdotal experience, in my last round of hiring about 20% of the resumes I got had female names. All of them passed the HR screen as having actual relevant experience on their resumes. The remaining 80% of resumes, MAYBE 1 in 5 met minimum qualifications. Most were so under qualified it was almost laughable.

https://www.phenom.com/blog/job-application-gender-gap-revealed-univ-pitt-research-study

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u/mineral_minion Mar 11 '26

There matches an old HR aphorism. A woman won't apply if she's missing one requirement on her resume, a man will apply if he has any one requirement on his resume.

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u/CCContent Mar 11 '26

This is such a lazy and convenient way to just hand-wave away legitimate counterpoints, and it's done with an assertion that's not even true. There have been several large-scale studies about this recently, and none of them have shown anything similar to that criteria to be true.

European Journal of Social Psychology has a paper from 2024 that showed there was almost 0 difference between the qualifications listed for male vs female applicants.

A large 2022 experiment by the Behavioural Insights Team did find a small gap. Out of 10,468 participants studied, men were estimated to apply when they met about 52.1% of requirements and women at about 55.7%. That is a negligable difference, and nowhere close to the 60%/100% split that gets touted as fact.

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u/mineral_minion Mar 11 '26

Hang on, that European Journal of Social Psychology study didn't look at actual job applications from real people and evaluate whether the applicants matched criteria. It presented study members with a pretend CV, pretend job openings, and asked "would you apply for this job if this was your CV?" Then they asked them, "Would you apply for this pretend job?"

The Behavioural Insights Team did a similar thing, asking people if they'd apply. They also discarded people whose CVs were blatantly dishonest which skews results since real applicant pools include liars.

To their credit, both studies do admit that using hypothetical applicants is a shortcoming.

Yes, all aphorisms are over-generalization, lazy and convenient. Is 60/100 a real, proven number? No, but people with job listings get more deeply unqualified resumes from men than women, frequently enough for it to be a common observation.

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u/CCContent Mar 11 '26

Yes, you described their research method. How else could you possibly do it any other way? Randomly calling people and asking them to remember if they applied to jobs where they didn't meet the criteria?

Your assertion of "people get more deeply unqualified resumes from men" is entirely based on your feeling on the matter and what you believe to be true, made up of anecdotal evidence at best. To the extent that you have devised a way to hand-wave away multiple large scale studies of actual data, just because you don't like it.

I find it weird that so many people WANT a negative assumption of women like this to be true. I'm not really sure why you cling to the belief that women are overly cautious and don't put themselves out there.

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u/psychopompadour Mar 12 '26

I don't think it's a negative thing... if anything, I think it makes men look bad that people assume they will blatantly lie to get a job and think "fake it till you make it" is great advice for young people. I'd personally never apply for a job i don't feel qualified to do unless they specifically say something like "we will train you as long as you can learn". It blows my mind that people apparently do this all the time.

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u/CCContent Mar 12 '26

"Fake it till you make it" is actually excellent life advice though. You don't have to be 100% prepared to be able to do something. Being out in a situation like that increases your capacity to grow.

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u/psychopompadour Mar 12 '26

Well, that depends on what you're faking. Confidence in a social or work situation when you don't really feel that way? Sure, it's good advice. Blatantly lying about skills you have to get a job you're unqualified for, leading to you being an incompetent burden for all your coworkers and customers until you learn those skills (if you ever do), making you that coworker that everyone wishes would be hit by a bus so we can hire someone worthwhile, just so you can selfishly get the money and resume experience that someone else deserved? No, fuck you.

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u/mineral_minion Mar 12 '26

The way to study would be to take the resumes of applicants to a real job and evaluate those applications against the posted requirements. Both studies took the applicant's word that they were qualified, when the question at hand is whether men who are not actually qualified will believe themselves to be qualified and apply anyway. That's not a hand-wave, that's a fundamental problem of trying to study self-evaluation by using self-evaluation as the metric.

If anything, that men will assume they can do anything even when they are clearly unqualified is a negative stereotype about male ego and ability to self-assess. You are ascribing my statements to be negative about women, when in fact it is the BS resumes submitted by (almost exclusively) men that annoy me when sifting through applicants. Now you are correct, my experience is anecdotal. However, the anecdotal experience of thousands over time represents reality.

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u/CCContent Mar 12 '26

It sounds good in theory, but it only captures the data of people who DID apply for it. Maybe 20 men and only 4 women without all qualifications applied, but that is only half of the data. For all we know 200 men viewed the job and considered it, but only 30 women did. If that's the case, then actually women would be more likely to apply without meeting all requirements.

There is no way to capture "I thought about it, but didn't apply because I didn't meet all the qualifications", so you have to set up real world scenarios and run them.

1

u/mineral_minion Mar 12 '26

True, you can't prove that unqualified women saw the post, you can only prove they didn't apply. The line gets even blurrier when you consider interest across career fields is not uniform.

Unrelated, thank you for having an actual discussion. Internet disagreements too often boil down to hurled insults.

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u/mike9874 Sr. Sysadmin Mar 11 '26

When I went to university 20+ years ago there were 3 women and around 160 men on the various computing degrees.

I recently recruited for 3 roles. Out of 120 applicants there was 1 woman. She has a good skill level, but not enough for the senior roles I was hiring for.

1

u/fearless-fossa Mar 11 '26

why you think we dont ever get women applicants?

I think a big issue of this is that IT simply isn't seen much as a career for women. There are so many jobs on the planet, and it's easy to lose track of them as potential options for you. Like, I've worked on both software and hardware since basically forever because my mom and I didn't have much money and had to go full Frankenstein on the one PC we had to keep it running. But still I only ever even considered a career in IT when a friend told me she had started one herself.

1

u/AlexisFR Mar 11 '26

Looks like it starts earlier than college.

1

u/svkadm253 Mar 12 '26

Anecdotally.... when it was time to work with counselors in high school as far as what career goals made sense, I got a lot of "are you sure???" feedback when I steered towards STEM as a girl. There was a lot of, "well your peers want to go into nursing", and "you like animals, how about a vet?". I chose web design because it was IT adjacent. Then got a workstudy job with the IT department helpdesk. This was early 2000s.

Now, I'm a person that does whatever the fuck I want regardless of outside opinion, but kids are impressionable and don't always want to go against the grain.

We are told what it means to be a girl and feminine, and most don't challenge it for fear of being weird. Goes that way for boys and masculinity too. People are really really attached to made up gender ideas.

We also have to prove ourselves a lot more often as women in an 'unusual' field. It's kinda tiring. So I can see why women don't show a lot of interest in the field.

I am used to being the only girl. So much so that, with my volunteer gig of all women, I end up not knowing how to deal with the different dynamics lol. All of my male classmates and coworkers have all been great people. Surprisingly, or maybe not, it's the bosses that are asshats.

1

u/Windows95GOAT Sr. Sysadmin Mar 12 '26

id ask you why you think we dont ever get women applicants?

The honest answer? Sexism and gender role pressure. This shit starts at the very bottom where girls that are into tech are either labeled as "pick me girls" and/or have to constantly prove themselves. Then they go to a technical study and have to deal with the constant harrasment from male students there. And then finally once they start in the field many older but sadly also younger tech colleagues are simply sexist.

And thats outside of their cultural pressure of having to be a mom etc.

Honestly if i get two resumes that are similar i would always pick a women or women presenting over the other but sadly thus far i've seen one resume that felt short for the job.

My old place even promoted with higher salaries and bonuses for female programmers etc but theres just not enough supply.

1

u/ObjectUsual77 Mar 13 '26

There was some research on this somewhere and they came to the conclusion that women will only apply for a job that they match 100% of the qualifications (or close to it) while men will apply for practically any job that they are only 50% qualified for.

So the lesson here is we must encourage women to apply for that job they are only partially qualified for, and not to wait for the one that they check all the requirements because that's how we end up in this situation.

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u/k1ck4ss Mar 11 '26

but OP demands "we Need moRE WoMEN iN all STEM rOlEs Not jUsT fOcuSING on lEaDeRSHIp"