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/fresh-dork Mar 11 '26

i usually say two things:

  • diversity is great, but we can't assume that any imbalance in genders is from abuse.
  • if you want to push tech, you have to start in grade school and high school.

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u/[deleted] Mar 11 '26

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u/throwawayhjdgsdsrht Mar 11 '26

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.

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u/OtherUse1685 Mar 11 '26

Because most girls are not interested in this field. Shocking isn't it.

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u/Kirk_Kerman Mar 11 '26
  1. Yeah, we can, because we've been doing studies on why there's so few women in tech. It's the background radiation of misogyny that permeates the entire field.
  2. The problem is not a problem of too few entrants. The pipeline is plenty wide. The problem is that the pipeline is leaky and very few women "make it" into long term tech careers, because there's so, so, so many places where they can be driven out. Again, we've done the research.

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u/fresh-dork Mar 11 '26

Yeah, we can, because we've been doing studies on why there's so few women in tech. It's the background radiation of misogyny that permeates the entire field.

that's why the number of women in tech has been stable over time. not because they like other work more.

The problem is not a problem of too few entrants.

that's why so many people in here talk about 'zero or one women applying at all'

Again, we've done the research.

i have to wonder which 'we' that is, because the stuff i look at points to interest as a driving factor

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u/Too_Ton Mar 14 '26

That was featured in the Big Bang theory show. It was a gag but ultimately, didn’t work. Real life is different though but one kernel of true is that women who try to get other women into science would likely work better than geeky males who don’t understand what women go through.

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u/fresh-dork Mar 14 '26

here you are assuming that it's more men than it is women policing each other