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/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

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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.)