Is it harder for women techies to succeed?

“few employers, even though they don’t tell you, like to have a mom with a few kids on their IT team. You are not really regarded as dependable if you have to take your kids to the hospital in the middle of your working day. IT, put it simply, is not a family-friendly field”

So one is not supposed to have a family? Or is the the Man only supposed to have the family and the Woman (with no job) cares for the sick child? maybe one’s children do not have to be one’s only focus in life, but eventually unless one dies early, one retires, the Job goes away and one’s family is all that one has left.

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Women techies face no challenges in the workplace. Remember, we are all equal.

I’ve been a senior Programmer analyst for 8 years and I would recommend IT as a career for young women. As long as you keep your skills up and are good at your job you’ll have plenty options and opportunities.

Right now I’m getting calls or emails weekly from recruiters and I’m not even looking for a job.

If your able to build up a good resume and develop a good reputation you can try consulting or contracting. You can work for a large corporation in just about any industry or work for a smaller company or shop. If you don’t like the work environment at one company you can try another. Every place is different.

I’ve found what counts most in this business is quality of work not gender.

22 yrs of working 90 hour weeks takes it toll on the family and your health. I am looking at starting my own business and it may NOT be techy! Too much new education needed yearly and the layoffs…I’ve been cut 5 times since 2001 not due to performance but projects getting rescheduled or dropped.
Looking at buying a bagel shop or something ‘mindless’ until retirement. Good pay was pre-millenium when banks/mutual fund companies hired but now it seems only short term contracts available and it is difficult to compete as an overweight middle-aged woman. NOT FUN ANYMORE

I am a senior software engineer for more than 10 years, tech lead at my current position, and a woman, a mom with one child. I have worked for middle sized companies, a small IT shop with fewer than 10 engineers, and a world’s biggest enterprise software developer, over the past decade.

Personally, I like what I am doing, get paid decently, probably more than most working women, I am not talking about those ceos, or whatever o’s, nor big name lawyers or doctors. I am talking about regular working women with a college education.

I do think IT field should be on the top of your career list once you look deep into yourself, ask yourself a couple of questions:

1. What kind of family are you going to have, and what kind of mom do you want to be down the road? If you want to have a big family and stay home at least for a few years raising your children, IT is not your field. You will have a tough time to come back, even just to find an entry level job after a few years absence. Besides your out-of-date skills, few employers, even though they don’t tell you, like to have a mom with a few kids on their IT team. You are not really regarded as dependable if you have to take your kids to the hospital in the middle of your working day. IT, put it simply, is not a family-friendly field.

2. Are you a life-time learner? Do you like challenge or are you scared of changes or new things? If you are good at learning new things, love challenges, you are an IT material. Skills in IT fields go out of date quickly, you will have to update your skills constantly, or you are out of the game, that is one of the reasons you don’t see a lot of women staying in the IT field for too long. I have been the only female member on the team most of my IT life. There are fewer women computer science graduates in the first place. Then many turn themselves into technical writer, QA, which requires lower level technical skills, or project managers. Don’t confuse yourself here. Project managers are not IT directors, SHE makes less most times than her male programmers she manages, even the kid on her team!

As we all know, women are just as smart and capable as men. But don’t blame men only when you can not keep up with the game. As mom, you have a lot of more to do than dad. It is difficult to keep up with the new stuff in the IT world as it is, even for men, let alone for mom with so much other stuff to take care of. Just to give you an example, when I go to the Microsoft .net user group I belong, I would be one of the 3 or 4 females sitting among, let’s say 100 techies. So far, there has not been even one female presenters at our monthly meetings since my 5 years membership!

IT really offers a lot of things other fields don’t have, being your own boss, being creative, flexible schedule offered by most IT shops, casual dress and financial gain, just to mention a few. To be honest, you will have to be at a pretty high level in management to make as much as a senior level IT engineer. Chances are you will be a senior engineer if you stay in the field no matter how bad your social skills are, but you might never be a senior manager even if you work for your whole life. Then if you have good people skills, plus technical skills, you can be a technical director or chief archtect or even CTO, choices are yours. If you don’t like office politics, then you can make a decent living besides job satisfaction just being an engineer.

I have never experienced any open discrimination because I am a woman at any of the companies I worked for. I get along with my male co-workers just fine without knowing any sports or going out hunting with them. I am respected by my male boss and male co-workers the way they respect anyone else. My ideas and opions are taken as seriously as anyone else. But I am a pure techie, not an IT manager.

So it is a good field to get into if you like it. Women have tougher time getting promoted in other fields too, it is not an IT only problem.

To get equal treatment, be yourself, forget your gender, compete with your talents. Don’t whine. Don’t look at everything as gender discrimination. 9 times of 10, it is not. And you will enjoy your life being in this field. Actually you won’t be lonely, IT does not exist by itself in most companies, most likely you will work with designers, writers, artists, which are female-dominant fields, and you can always find work-place friends from other teams, as for me, I do make friends with guys I work with. They can be good friends just like other women. Of course, don’t talk about shopping, new shoes, well, I do get compliments for my clothes, shoes from those guys sometimes, believe it or not. So be brave and enjoy your life as a nerd.

First off I would like to comment that is it great to read that there are woman who have been in the IT field for a long time and have been successful.

I have worked in the field for over 5 years now. I definately have seen the ups and downs of what it is like to be a woman in IT. But I would not give it up. If your looking for a challenge then the IT field is the place you need to be in.

Don’t let the opposite sex deter you from entering into the field. Think of it as another challenge that you will be successful at.

I’m a female and have been a programmer/analyst or systems/analyst for 17 years now. I do like sports and have a tendency to get more disgusting than the men sometimes. This does help because they feel free to cut up and say what they want around me. I find it loads of fun. There will always be men and women who are going to be jerks, but for the most part I’ve found people to respect my work and treat me respectfully and fairly. Being good at your job and not whining helps tremendously. Also, not taking things too seriously and being able to fit in to the environment makes life much better.

I’ve been working in IT for 15 years now. Things are better, yes, but it’s still hard. For the most part, I’ve been lucky with the majority of my male collegues, it’s sometimes the end users, managers and vendors that are the problem. I was recently at TechEd in Orlando and would find that a lot of the vendors would just flat out ignore me and I’d really have to be aggressive to get their attention. Sad because it’s just a loss of business for them. My advice would be, yes, go into IT – its a fun and ever-changing field and always a challenge. Start off in smaller shops – I’ve found that those work the best in terms of recognition, the ability to learn a lot and having more say in things where you’ll actually be listened to. Good luck!

I’ve been working as a developer/DBA for about 15 years now. I agree – you need to keep a tough skin on you and you tend to have to prove yourself more than male coworkers.

Even though I come up with “outside the box” solutions that work all the time, when in meetings, etc, the tendency is to be ignored. It happens less at the company I’m at now so maybe that’s a good sign. Worse yet is when your idea is stolen from you and labeled as someone else’s work (usually a male coworker). I feel like if I was a male, they’d give me credit, at least.

On several occasions in the past, I brought a male coworker into several particularly tough meetings with me so that he would express my ideas to the group because – quite frankly – when I did it, it was swept away as not workable. The same idea presented by the male coworker in the next meeting was accepted. I was “lucky” to find someone who would do this with me but I doubt a lot of people just going into the field will find that. After 14 years, you’d hope this wouldn’t be necessary!

I am also a female who has worked in a technical field for 27 years. Yes, it is easier now than it used to be. But still in no way do we have parity with the men. The atmosphere of subtle bias pervades all levels. At the entry level the bias is actually less, and rewards are based on you actual performance. The higher you go up the ladder, more and more raises and promotions are based on how good your acting skills are and your golf score. Men who watch football, play poker,and shoot deer together are more likely to look out for each other and get considered for the next big promotion than the the woman who saved the company 20 million dollars. Even in technical fields a woman who really wants to get ahead would be advised to polish up her acting skills, take golf lessons, and start watching sports enough to be able to participate in the conversations at the water cooler. It takes more than technical skills to break into the boy’s club. It is probably worth for a woman to go into these fields because for better or worst, fields populated by men have higher pay. There is a emotional cost to it that is not obvious to the the outsider because it is lonely not having anyone that you can really talk to at work and the stress of constantly wearing that “mask” all the time.

Tech should be a great field for women, with the number of geeks already in it.

Problem for tech women is that there are obviously too few in it to make a visibile presence, or to command leadership roles.

When men want to deter women, they seem to do studies that leave out gender as a criteria of inquiry – which by itself ignores the importance of doing studies to begin with.

Without male avoidance and exclusion, women might be fine. Imagine if women were to do that with men? They’d raise the roof for inclusion – which is what women should be doing.

I have 2 daughters and neither of them are following me into the Computer Science field. They see me working evenings and weekends which has been sad for my home life.

I’ve found that it’s much more difficult for a woman to take time off to do something for her children than it is for a man to do the same thing (say, attend a soccer game). There’s a built-in mistrust of a woman’s contribution so you have to put in twice the effort a man does.

I work in Engineering so things might be better in IT.

I have been an IT Manager (degree, certified) for 10 years now, and I still get questioned by male employees about how I plan to fix their computer/email issues and why (even though they themselves haven’t a clue). My male and female bosses have basically told me to “suck it up.” Yes, I would recommend women to go into IT, and my advice to them is to get a thick skin and stand your ground.

I’m a female and have worked in a technical area for 30 years. Today it is so much easier for women to succeed in technical fields than it was 30 years ago. I find that women do not the career technical career path though. I think the main reason is it is so much easier to manage process than it is to contribute to challenging innovation. There are very, very few people who are good enough to be a gifted innovator and that includes women. But it also points to a problem that is crying for attention which is being so obsess with reaching the numbers on technical processes that we don’t believe in the importance of natural gifts and talent.

Sadly I have observed that the biggest issue holding talented women back is the piegon hole of processes that are often controlled by women. The transition to a technically global and transient workforce makes diverse individuals less desirable.

I don’t think female mentoring helps, it’s like inbreeding a climate of technical down-sizing. Good mentoring needs to be defined on a technical scale if your want technical results.