Submitted for consideration and discussion … I was really pleased to look around LISA this past week and see a focus on getting women involved and interested in careers in the tech industry, and sysadmin work in particular. But I also saw a decent number of women at LISA. We know that LISA skews higher, attendance-wise, than the actual industry does, but still. There were quite a few.
What I did not see a lot of were African-American sysadmins. I saw, that I can recall, exactly "zero". I'm not saying there were none in attendance, but I'll say that they and I did not cross paths that I can remember. Now, this could simply be a matter of "African-American sysadmins are not attending LISA as much as their caucasian and asian counterparts are" (in which case, "Why not?" is a valid question we should be asking). Or it could speak to the industry in general (in which case, if LISA attendance is in fact representative of workplace demographics, it makes women-sysadmins look downright commonplace by comparison). Either way, it's an issue we should stop to give some serious consideration to, and it seems even to be an even larger problem than the "Women in Tech" one, which is already a pretty big concern. Cheers, D _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
