Hi all,
I am de-lurking for a moment because I just had to respond to this statement
from Cat:
<snip> 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. <snip>
This is exactly what happened to me. While in high school, I took a BASIC
course and did well in it but did not pursue it. I used to watch my younger
brother dial in to local BBS's on his 2400baud modem and ask all kinds of
questions but never considered IT as a career option for unknown
reasons.....
Anyway, I studied Hotel and Restaurant Management only to realize more than
halfway through the program that it wasn't what I wanted to do. When I
graduated, I had two options: an assistant manager position at St-Hubert
restaurant or an entry-level clerk position at Transport Canada (I had been
working there during the summer for several years). I took the clerk job.
Since then, I've been a clerk/receptionist/secretary and an administrative
assistant but wasn't totally happy with any of these positions. I was
however learning alot about the applications we were running and soon became
the "local expert" in Wordperfect, Harvard Graphics etc...
Then it happened. Management decided it was time to "get connected" and
setup a LAN for the group. They wanted to hire within and my name came up.
I have never looked back. I was a network admin for 6 years and just
recently was recruited by the database group and am now a junior database
administrator "in training". They will be sending me on Oracle, Microsoft
SQL Server and Unix training in the next 5 months, just to start....
As for gender-based discrimination, I have to say that I personally haven't
encountered it here in so obvious a way than described in previous posts.
We actually have a higher than average ratio of female IT staff. I have
also been lucky enough to find "mentors" that have encouraged me to pursue
my career and to realize my worth. This was probably one of the most
important factors in my success so far. Self confidence is hard to come by
sometimes.
Ok, I'll go back to lurking now...
Pat
************
[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.linuxchix.org
