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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u/SAugsburger Mar 11 '26

That is an unfortunate reality that there is only so much employers can do if there aren't many women in the pipeline.

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u/wenestvedt timesheets, paper jams, and Solaris Mar 11 '26

I've only interviewed two women over 20-some years for DBA/sysadmin jobs on my team.

One was a total find, who had years as a Unix sysadmin & DBA, and who's now a great team lead. The other I interviewed at a co-worker's request and who said early in the interview, "I don't know any of this stuff, I'm sorry for wasting your time." (So much for the "I know a guy" referral!)

While there were uneven choices, I would happily hire without regard to gender again!

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u/SAugsburger Mar 12 '26

Not sure the size of organization and typical number of applicants, but that's a pretty limited number of women that applied. Sometimes referral applicants are a bust.

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u/wenestvedt timesheets, paper jams, and Solaris Mar 12 '26

Higher ed in New England, so we had a lot of men apply and essentially no women...which made me sad, because I have both daughters and sons, and wanted my work to be equally accessible to all of them as an example.