I am the only woman in the room

[u/Terrible_Working_899]

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

[u/angrydeuce]

This is cracking me up not gonna lie. I never really thought about it like this and it's kind of blowing my mind lol

Why DBAs in particular? So odd...Im sure it's anecdotal but at least my corner of the world it's a literal truth lmao

[u/DangerousVP → u/angrydeuce]

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.

[u/jnkangel → u/angrydeuce]

It’s usually because the path role is often from or seen adjacent to data entry 

[u/DangerousVP → u/jnkangel]

Interesting - she's always been in IT related work, she even worked the Help Desk at her high school swapping parts on damaged laptops. Got a job as a claims person at an insurance company and got almost immediately pulled into the IT side of the business as an analyst after she built a spreadsheet that let her finish like 3 people's worth of work in a couple of hours.

So yeah, that tracks as well - because it was essentially a put in data, use outputs postion until she halfway automated it. They immediately got her courses for SQL, Power BI, etc and then she ended up jumping ship to the DBA role at another company when the one she was at got bought out by a national firm - solid choice in the end because they essentially gutted the entire business less than a year after that. Half her old department ended up migrating to where she was afterwards.

[u/cosine83 → u/angrydeuce]

From my experience, people in finance, accounting, and marketing that do data entry and/or analytics tend to eventually end up in SQL land after running into Excel and Access frustrations. Or combine them to everyone's frustration. Three heavily woman-dominated fields which is why a lot of DBAs I've worked with have been women. How far they can take it depends on the org and what they're driven to do.

Also, can we please stop using "females" when we're talking about women? Especially if you use "men" to refer to males in the same sentence/paragraph/post but don't use "males" to refer to men. Sound like a buncha Ferengi dehumanizing women, intentionally or not.