When I worked at Wildfire at one point we had 3 women sysadmins out of 4, but we were the exceptions by far, all the vendors who came in let me know that.
I have given this a lot of thought, because I have been in this field for over 10 years and at those conferences I have never had a line for the bathroom and wait on my male friends at break time. I think to really enjoy this line of work you need to like stats, figures, and fiditity details. Aka this machine has such and such processor, rev blah that works with such and such motherboard and needs this many amps of cooling. The majority of people who enjoy it are men. If you don't enjoy those stats you have to be a really tough chick to pull off hanging with the boys who want to masturbate over hardware specs all the time.
Then you have to prove you know what you are doing when it comes to fixing things, and that can be really hard when you have no formal training but you do just "get it" and make it go. Then you have to fight the guy BS factor and realize that most of them are making it up but backing their opinions adamantly. When you back your opinions adamantly they question you and drive you insane, but it is just a perception game, women are usually only adamant when they are 90-95% sure, men tend to be even when they are only 40-50% sure they know what they are talking about
It is a stiff learning curve not only technically but socially, so to stick around I do think you need to be extremely stubborn or some form of masochist. I have been doing it for 10 years and really don't like it, my ceiling is that no one wants to let me manage, possibly because I am a female and possibly because I have not done it before. I do stick with it because I can work form home and the pay doesn't suck.
*note the comments about men,have been from my experience in many different departments, there have always been some exceptions, but there are always one who are much worse. My biggest hurdle was at Dartmouth Med School, and you would get researches from countries that make women stay home, not THAT is a serious up hill technical battle.
I have given this a lot of thought, because I have been in this field for over 10 years and at those conferences I have never had a line for the bathroom and wait on my male friends at break time. I think to really enjoy this line of work you need to like stats, figures, and fiditity details. Aka this machine has such and such processor, rev blah that works with such and such motherboard and needs this many amps of cooling. The majority of people who enjoy it are men. If you don't enjoy those stats you have to be a really tough chick to pull off hanging with the boys who want to masturbate over hardware specs all the time.
Then you have to prove you know what you are doing when it comes to fixing things, and that can be really hard when you have no formal training but you do just "get it" and make it go. Then you have to fight the guy BS factor and realize that most of them are making it up but backing their opinions adamantly. When you back your opinions adamantly they question you and drive you insane, but it is just a perception game, women are usually only adamant when they are 90-95% sure, men tend to be even when they are only 40-50% sure they know what they are talking about
It is a stiff learning curve not only technically but socially, so to stick around I do think you need to be extremely stubborn or some form of masochist. I have been doing it for 10 years and really don't like it, my ceiling is that no one wants to let me manage, possibly because I am a female and possibly because I have not done it before. I do stick with it because I can work form home and the pay doesn't suck.
*note the comments about men,have been from my experience in many different departments, there have always been some exceptions, but there are always one who are much worse. My biggest hurdle was at Dartmouth Med School, and you would get researches from countries that make women stay home, not THAT is a serious up hill technical battle.
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