>
> If at least some of the women in IT were able to report that they
> had received none of the shit that most people here are all too well
> aware of, that would be -really- cool. At the moment, most women
> who have posted to the thread have stories of discrimination based
> on gender rather than ability; and many of the men posting have seen
> this in action, too.
Hi everyone --
In response to this paragraph, I would like to share my early and very
positive experiences in the IT industry as a 23-year-old female. I hear
so many bad things about what happens to women in this industry, and I
fully understand that it would only be by the best of luck if I did not
run into it eventually.
I went to college right out of high school, with less than no idea about
what I wanted to do with my life. I was a 5-year double-bachelor student
in music and 'some academic major'. That academic major morphed from
Philosophy to Math to Biology to Chemistry and finally to Religious
Studies (almost exclusively on Buddhism w/other non-Western religions).
All of this ended up with me doing three years of college that basically
went no where. I took some time off, moved back home and went to the
community college there for 2 semesters, while working part time at a book
store. I took Calc 1 & 2, Physics and some other classes, and realized
that I really dug higher math. The reason for this was mostly my Calc 2
teacher, whom everyone but me hated -- he actually made us think and
abstract and *understand* what we were doing, and not just spit out
problem after problem. I got nothing but encouragement from him to
pursue my talents in higher math.
Then, I had a split with my mom, and ran off the Maryland with my
boyfriend (please don't ask -- my mom and I are fine now, but we've had
our rough periods, and my bf and I are still together :-). I still didn't
have my bachelor's, but planned to go back. I started temping, and went
to work for this company where I was basically a secretary. I had been
doing stuff with computers since my mom bought me an Apple IIe when I was
really young, but had never done anything serious. Anyway, when I was
temping, I was basically forced to confront the PC world (I had a
Macintosh PowerBook in college), and sort of muddled on through doing Word
and Excel stuff. Then, I started using formulae in Excel, and thought it
was pretty cool. One day, my 'boss' asked me to do a mail merge, which I
had no idea how to do, but I read the documentation and played around with
it and got it working. She then asked me to maintain this small database
of addresses I'd input to send out more letters. I ended up leaving that
company (although I went back as a full-time employee a few months later)
and at my next company, there were a bunch of reports that they were
generating by hand, using the same data each time. I set up a mail merge
for them (this was totally MS Word mail merging -- what did I know?), and
showed them how they could use fields in form letters to generate reports
and stuff. I started experimenting with if-then-else mail merge things,
so that if a field was blank, print something else -- that kind of thing.
I was really feeling the need to get back in school, so I started
researching schools in the area and found that the University of Maryland
had an extension called University College that was for commuting, working
students. I applied, and was looking at classes. Suddenly, it came to me
-- I loved making computers do stuff! I really enjoyed figuring out the
if-then stuff, and I had received encouragement at my results. So, I
signed up for CMSC 130, the first Computer Science course, along with a
Visual Basic course. On the first day of the CMSC course, my professor
was talking about the Unix compiler for Ada, and then he looked up and
said, "You all don't know what a compiler is, do you?" We all looked at
him blankly, and he started from the beginning. I worked actually with my
bf to figure out the school Unix system (he knows Unix very well), and he
showed me what a .login file can do, and walked me through most of the
basic commands. I worked pretty closely with a wonderful TA, and my
professor that term, and ended up getting a 98 percent in the class.
I went back to the first place I'd temped, having been offered a full-time
job in their corporate manufacturing department. Even though my job had
little to do with computer science my two male bosses encouraged me to
apply for tuition assistance, and they signed off on numerous classes of
mine (reimbursement was 85% for and A or B, 50% for a C). They also
encouraged me to use the company computers in the evening for my school
work. Our sys admin (NT) there was a woman, which was also encouraging.
They ended up having me develop a MS Access (with Visual Basic) complaint
tracking system.
I left that company for a position at an IP faxing business where I am
today. I was taking two classes per term in the evening, and was about
1/3 through my CS major (Math Minor) when I came to work here. My bf had
been working here for a while in tech support, so I did get a
recommendation from him. I started in Network Operations, monitoring a
network of Linux fax servers, with an Oracle database and a few Solaris
machines. I tried to learn as much as I could about what I was doing, and
ended up taking over the billing system from a guy who left. This put me
into contact with a particular boss-man who oversaw the database side of
things, and he started teaching me basic SQL, and set me to tracking down
bad data in the database, etc. As I progressed in my classes, I started
to apply my knowledge on the job, and ended up writing reports in PL/SQL.
My sort-of boss kept giving me more and more programming-type work, in C
and PL/SQL.
After several months of increasing responsibility, I realized that I
wanted to go back to school full-time (so I could finish in a year), which
meant I needed a part-time job. I worked up my nerve, and told my sort-of
boss that I wanted to work for him part-time as a programmer. He said OK!
So, I started back to schoolf full-time, and I program part-time in C and
PL/SQL.
Here at this company, our Oracle DBA is female, as well as our other main
PL/SQL programmer. Recently, my boss hired a programmer to take some of
the load that had been on me, and she is female as well. I have never
been discouraged from progressing here, nor have I ever been anything but
*en*couraged at school. In fact, in my school, most of my CS classes are
close to 50/50 female. I thought for a while about that, and I think it
has to do with the fact that it is a commuter school. Most of the people
in my classes are older, and they have been in the work force for some
time. I think that alot of these women, like me, did not realize the
first time aroung that CS interested them. They gained confidence in
their jobs, and realized where they wanted to go. My higher math classes
are much more uneven in the male/female ratio.
I think many factors went into where I am now. My mother is a doctor
(radiologist), so I never felt any personal limitations about what I could
do as a woman. My dad was an engineer. I grew up in Dearborn, Michigan,
which is the world headquarters of Ford Motor Company. We had two female
valedictorians, one of whom went to University of Michigan Engineering
school, and the other who went to Virginia Tech. I think it was because
so many engineers lived in Dearborn, and I know at least my engineer
father had no qualms about taking his little girl to work and showing her
the servers and such. I have had either benevolent or encouraging
teachers and bosses -- mostly encouraging. I have had good luck in
happening across things that I liked to do. I have also had the good
fortune to come across people who did not looked surprised when I said
what my major was, or when I talked about how much I liked math -- some
do, but not alot.
I agree with other posts which have expressed the same thing -- I am not
looking for a 50/50 split. I would like it to be totally weird and
out-dated for someone to look at you funny or even be 'very surprised'
that you, as a woman, chose to become a programmer, or sysadmin, or
whatever other technical thing you become. That's when I'll feel we've
really progressed far.
We've made progress already -- my mom went to Medical School in the late
50's/early 60's. During her residency, she was asked by a male
superior if she perhaps planned to farm out her children so she could
have a career. It was assumed that she would go into pediatrics. But she
made it, and she made it so I can sit here today and tell you all of this.
I said this would be long! I felt I had to speak up, because we talk and
talk about encouraging women into CS, but so often along with that the
only discussion is of the problems associated with it. We rarely talk
about the good things that have happened to us, the things that *would*
make women think CS might be a good place for them. So, share!
Thanks,
_Cat
/././././././././././././././././././
The plural of anecdote is not data.
\.\.\.\.\.\.\.\.\.\.\.\.\.\.\.\.\.\.\
************
[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.linuxchix.org
