On Sun, 11 Dec 2011 21:25:15 -0500, Derek J. Balling <[email protected]>
wrote:
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.
According to the Women in Tech panel at LISA, female participation is at
about 10% right now and slowly increasing. Up from previous years but
still a small minority.
Another observation thrown out is that female participation in open-source
projects is at about 2%, where in the closed-source space it's closer to
20%. That's more software-engineers than sysadmin types, but it does show
some of the drivers in the overall sector. The school of hard knocks that
is IRC and some OSS mailing-lists were cited several times as a large
reason for this.
Personally, I've noticed more women in my public-sector jobs than my
private sector ones. Public-sector jobs tend to be more old-school IT and
less web-scale infrastructures, and tend to include topics that don't get
much coverage at LISA such as deep Windows topics and identity-management
issues.
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.
What I'm interested in are the demographics at some of the larger
sysadmin-touching conferences that draw a larger audience, such as VMWorld
or Microsoft TechEd. I have seen more minority sysadmins in non-Linuxy
roles, such as in siloed Windows jobs; the kind of job-holders that LISA
generally doesn't attract.
--
Law of Probable Dispersal:
Whatever it is that hits the fan will not be evenly distributed.
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