I had an interesting Facebook conversation last night with Storagezilla (a fellow EMC blogger, and one of the biggest geeks I know). He’s at a big EMC internal conference, and he had a conversation with folks at the conference about the lack of women present. He made a pretty familiar comment:
.. talking earlier as to how we could change that mix (men to women at the conference) but we can’t hire what isn’t there.
This is what started the conversation. Zilla is sincere in wanting to see more women, but there do not seem to be women available with the proper skillset, so how can more women be hired? So a woman asked him about his job, in particular how much it paid, and he basically told her how hard the job is.
I thought it was weird he’d complain about no women to hire, and tell a woman who asked about pay how sucky the job is. To be far, zilla is an extremely strait shooter, doesn’t mince words, and doesn’t sugar his responses about anything (and that is why I like him!). So he was just being honest about what the job requires, and he’s a geek not an recruiting rep. He’s not the only person that describes jobs in our industry in that straight-forward way, and lets be honest there is a tremendous amount of work and stress that comes with many of our roles. But shouldn’t we sell the good parts first, tell about the challenges of the role, and let the individual decide if they want to risk it? Maybe this is one of the problems the industry has?
Another lady jumped in and reminded us about the study of young girls to find out why they don’t want to go into technology. Reasons: girls think that computers and engineering are “boring” , “filled with nerds” and “you are stuck to a desk all day” and most strangely that “there is no money in it”.
This got me thinking – how the heck did I get into, and stay in technology if all the job descriptions suck? I’ll tell my story, and ladies, please tell yours!
I have always loved to break things to figure out how they work. I’ve written before about how I grew up very poor, so the only time I got to figure out how things work was when one of my dad’s best friends, who was a garbage collector, would bring me broken transistor radios. I loved tearing things apart.
I went to community college as a non-trad, and they first tried to put me in business school. I said nope, I want to do Electronics. I mostly wanted to take the EET curriculum to find out how sound and video ACTUALLY went over the air waves. I was so happy when we finally got to that. 🙂
I could have stopped there, but I had started to teach myself (and my instructors) how to do HTML and had been taking programming courses. This was in 1999, and some of my brother’s friends we finishing their CS degrees, and were telling me how much money I could make with a Bachelor’s degree. So I decided to risk it and transferred to Florida State.
So what was my motivation? My kids. I wanted a steady job, with insurance. When I found out I could have that as well as make enough money to try and make up for all the years I lived under the poverty level, not to mention doing work I was very interested in, I was sold. That mother’s instinct to care for her family should not be underestimated. I’ve put up with all sorts of nonsense to provide for my kids. I would even have considered the job description ‘zilla gave.
So what is your story? What motivated you to become a technologist, and what has kept you in the field? Maybe we can start telling stories about how all the nonsense of the jobs are worth it, and convince more women to make the move to work with us. Leave a comment here, or write a post linking back here. And spread the word!
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Much like you, I loved to take things apart when I was a kid. I was always intrigued about how those little electronic devices were capable of doing such amazing things. I was also interested in the fact that I was able (through programming) to control a machine. Little ole me could make a machine do what I wanted just by typing in some words? AWESOME! Then I got sucked into the internet around 1995, I have no idea why it appealed to me. I guess since I was involved in MOOs and MUDs it may have went back to the fact that I was able to control interactions by typing in words. I fell in love with the internet and all parts of it. At the same time I was teaching myself how to build and rebuild computers. There was a sort of glamor being a girl who knew more than the guys around me when it came to technology. The guys always thought it was cool and that just encouraged me. Then when my sister (whom I’ve always looked up to and envied) started coming to me to help her with fixing her online courses and I actually enjoyed helping her my desire to become an Instructional Designer was born. The fact that it pays decent probably helped too.
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You could actually have three conversations here – the first about the hiring situation (qualified women for jobs), the second about how you became interested in technology and finally, a conversation about the (real or perceived) lack of women speakers at conferences. My comment is about that last one – diversity among speakers at learning conferences.
I don’t know if you’re going to DevLearn09 but if you are, I volunteered to lead a breakfast byte session on that very issue.
I have several ideas of why more women don’t speak at learning conferences. I don’t believe there’s a lack of women in the L&D field. I believe some women:
* don’t self-promote enough
* don’t submit proposals to speak
* do not wish to travel
* are subject to bias on the part of selection committees
* don’t feel confident enough to speak
* lack online presence (won’t show up on a search for speakers)
I’ll share a quick story…
I was sitting in on a call about selecting speakers for a conference. When proposals from men were reviewed, the focus was on accomplishments and background. When proposals for women were reviewed there was more discussion about appearance. It wasn’t intentional (I don’t think).
This post (and the conversation you had with ‘Zilla on FB) made me stop and think. I’m relatively new to storage but truth be told I almost always end up in male-dominated arenas–even in my social life. I grew up surrounded by electronics. My grandfather was an IBM Fellow who taught me how to build a crystal radio, helped me get my HAM license, and encouraged me in all and any “inventing” that I wanted to do. When kids at school called me a “brain” he reassured me that not only was there nothing wrong with having a “good mind” as he called it, but that it in the long-run I’d have a more fulfilling life as a result of it. Perhaps because it was the 70s and 80s, no one ever told me to be more “ladylike” or any other head trips along those lines. I spent hours studying spiders and snails in our Silicon Valley backyard. Looking back on it, I was a pretty happy kid. And then adolescence hit, and somehow all that good stuff got shoved aside for, I dunno, at least 20 years. But eventually I found my way back, and in high tech (esp. storage!) I feel I’ve found a home. Wow, I didn’t realize I’d have so much to say. Thanks for making room for this, Gina. I hope there are many more such stories posted here.
Janet – I wish I was going, hopefully the big ED classes will be on the east coast next year! I think your hypotheses are probably correct, so the answer is why and how to we change it. Sunshine sounds like we have very similar interests!
Thanks for starting this Gina! You motivated me to share my story here : )
http://www.allisunelearns.com/node/57