Re: Women Sys Admins (a jaunt into the non-technical)

[Nadine Miller <nmiller@cisco.com>]

Numbers from our engineering support group inside
of IT at Cisco:

2 female college interns in the first-line phone pool
2 female process analysts in the first-line phone pool
3 female desktop support technicians
  (I include them b/c we require jr. sysadmin knowledge
   for the jobs)

6 female sysadmins (one senior, one high intermediate, three 
  low intermediate--all but the senior are home grown; the sixth
  is intermed. sysadmin material, but a senior tools person.  note
  that all of these are UNIX folk, we do not have any female PC
  sysadmins)
1 female project coordinator who qualifies as a jr. sysadmin
  (also partially home grown)

We have 3 other female managers and several other women who are 
more oriented towards operations/logistics, so they have some tech 
background, but are more business oriented.

Our total number of direct reports in the department is ~300.  This 
does not include our external contracting firm for PC purchases--they 
have a fairly large number of women in their organization.  Nor does
it include the financial folks which work for our department, but 
report to a different chain.

My personal take on the situation (caveat: highly colored by my own
understanding of personality psychology :-).  Also, these are generalities.
Reality dictates that every individual is different.  Generalities
cannot be applied, therefore, to individuals.  :-)

Women make good high-level sys admin/network admin kind of folks 'cause
*generally*, women are better at pattern matching and big-picture kind
of thinking.  They may be less interested, as a result, in the "drill-
down" focus-on-one-thing-til-you-drop approach that is sometimes necessary
at the beginning of your career when you are trying to learn intricate
systems.  This hurdle may cause some of them to decide that sys admin'ing
is not for them.

On the "personal approach" part of the equation, it's been my experience
that a great number of the women I know in the sys admin field (and
other tech fields) tend not to fit the societally understood definition 
of "womanly" behavior.  Examples: most of them tend to have more male 
friends than female friends; most are more concerned with practical 
good looks than feminine fashion; most tend to be more forthright in their 
speech and approach to others, etc.  Some might define these as "masculine" 
characteristics, but I refuse to do so because that has too much baggage. 
:-)

It's also been my experience here at HQ, and with the male sys admins I 
know in the field, that they are very open to women sys admins--I have 
heard very little "males are better" commentary from our group other 
than in jest.  In the latter, we give as good as we get. :-)

I think it would be interesting for SAGE to do a Myers-Briggs workshop
at LISA--I certainly would be interested to see the distribution of 
personality types in our field.  This could perhaps be rolled into a 
"success factors" study for giving guidance to those seeking systems
administration as a career choice (as an extension to the certification/
education work).  (Sounds like there's a thesis for someone doing
psych/career research.)

=Nadine=

--
N. Nadine Miller
ECS Sys Admin
Cisco Systems, Inc.

On Fri, 14 Jan 2000, Diane Calleson wrote:

>
>I am also interested in the raw numbers /stats on
>Women as System Admins....  I wonder about the validity
>of the results of our surveys which is a small sample or all 
>Sys-Admins.  Unfortunately, the federal government statistics don't
>keep track of the profession of Systems Admininstation seperately from
>the IT profession as a whole.   Is anyone aware of other IT surveys that
>we might use to compare to our own?  We might get a better idea about
>wether the SAGE membership has a representative sampling of the total
>number of women in the profession.
>
>Diane CAlleson
>calleson@virginia.edu
>
>UVA Electrical Engineering
>