On Sun, 11 Dec 2011, Derek J. Balling wrote:
Submitted for consideration and discussion ?
I dearly hope that you're wearing your asbestos underwear :P
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.
Quite a few? Would that be up to 5%, perhaps?
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.
ITYM "People that were clearly black to my eyes" -- which isn't necessarily the
same thing (and I'm a tad surprised that you're only looking at US-based
sysadmins of colour there ... and that there's only one colour, at that...)
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.
While I'm sure you're intending this to be "Hey, look, we've got another
problem" rather than "Eh, women, we're up to 5%, that's plenty", perhaps
wondering about:
(a) sysadmins of a broad swath of minorities (visible and
otherwise), origins and genders (remember, Australia has 3)
... and:
(b) phrasing the question as an inclusive "in addition to" instead
of a "this is more important than an existing problem"
cheers!
==========================================================================
"A cat spends her life conflicted between a deep, passionate and profound
desire for fish and an equally deep, passionate and profound desire to
avoid getting wet. This is the defining metaphor of my life right now."
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