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How script drivers and server mothers take over IT


Girls in IT are different. Some write on Go, others manage huge databases, others do pentests, and others speak at conferences, telling how they are in the Amazon clouds. Some still wonder: how so? Previously, this was mostly done by the stronger sex, but now at every step you can stumble upon a maid taming Kubernetes clusters. How did it happen and is there anything worth doing?

Men from the planet Tranay, women too


Half a century ago, a woman, of course? was a comrade and friend (of a person), but from the depths of history, a stereotype about the peculiarities of the thinking of each sex still stretched. Where men are logical, sulfur and boring, therefore they choose classes with some strange gray mass of meanings, structures, types. And women are creatures with a delicate taste and elevated interests, so it is much easier for them to deal with sensations, emotions and all kinds of metaphysics. In addition, the “classical” education of girls gives them a more humanitarian communication environment: they often go to theaters, read philosophical works and poetry. And then they sit and languidly sigh at the window on the monitor screen and wait until some code knight or a brave technical support engineer does everything for them. The problem is that now these well-established ancient canons do not fit well with modern realities.Today, people wonder: what kind of female mind is this? After all, the brain is not a genital organ. But it is the presence of the brain that is necessary for working with information technology.


The heroines of the new world


Thanks to the pushing mass culture, the Gadget mouse, Acid Burn and Trinity replaced the princesses in trouble and quivering fallow deer. A pink dress with a neckline and stilettos went to the dustbin of history, they were replaced by a practical indoor outfit - a sweater, jeans and sneakers. Women confidently took the role of powerful specialists in their field, displacing all kinds of stereotypes about hysterical and helpless young ladies who punch their way dramatically by clapping eyelashes and exposing the body.

The horror story that if you are a girl in an IT post, then everyone will poke your finger and scream, remained in the corner with other shameful tales about the admins being unwashed, smelly and living on beer fuel. Now they are trying to forget such stories and push them farther to the same place where there are awkward anecdotes of enikeys and bearded notes of programmers' brides.


Fossil grafting


Is the threshold for women entering the IT world higher? And is there a so-called "glass ceiling"? I have no clear answer. You can not draw conclusions based solely on personal experience. It is impossible to go to extremes: to deliberately exaggerate paints or, conversely, completely deny the probable difficulties and environmental resistance. As a rule, the most severe cases of prejudice against women can be observed in the outback, in companies for 7 people who have no relation to the IT sphere. But such biased people are everywhere, and they think with some outdated patterns in everything. Because "10 years it worked and everything was fine." The world of people with this type of worldview is artificially limited by themselves and it’s difficult to get out of their usual ideas.
She came to the installation, broke her nail, cried and went home.

I used to have difficulties at the stage of work with installers. They simply did not want to listen to anything and wanted to do everything their own way. My psychoanalyst advised him to become a "mother" and to act with some special female magic. But magic did not happen, flirting did not work out. However, after a while, trust appeared from colleagues, which influenced their behavior. Such trust appeared over time to other newcomers, regardless of their gender.

In my personal experience, there were other cases when already at the interview stage the potential boss laughed at me without much modesty, commenting that the vacancy was “not female, say goodbye to beautiful nails”. Or the leader did not get tired of repeating that everything works because there is a student boy in the staff. Since he is a boy, it means that he is good at repairing and understanding everything in technology, and it cannot be otherwise. The best thing that can be done in communicating with such people is to get up and leave, work with these people or personally re-educate them.


But the fact is that healthy public opinion is like collective immunity. It is useful and able to nullify the epidemic of tyranny. Even the most petrified "Old Believers" in quivering virgins with borsch and other mythical creatures do not withstand the pressure of most modern and progressive people. And then they either change their minds and adapt to the new society, or resign - to live out, somewhere in the taiga forests.

Dance with snakes


Now there are initiative projects that position themselves as platforms for girls to easily enter IT. Such as Django Girls and PyLadies are examples of how the fight against sexism turns into the same sexism. According to their legend: the world is a cruel place where men are oppressed and forbidden to leave the stove. In reality, the IT teams in large companies have long been completely mixed. Adequate employers are interested in the thinking and experience of the applicant, and not in the genitals. At conferences, hardly anyone will be surprised by the speaker or listeners in the person of a group of girls. And if this will cause any emotions, then no one will give them away. Nowadays, it is unnecessary to emotionalize when women are seen - it is rather a bad manners, the same as putting emphasis on appearance / color / age.


By the way, free participation in the master class of the most “little” pythonists has a rather strict condition - you need to have no experience and just want to write code. Such positioning is already causing distrust. After all, if I want to learn something, will I sit back and wait for the right moment when the good bearded uncle comes and hands me a laptop with a compiler? Not at all. But the organizers think differently. And in reality, only a small part of the girls comes to their free trainings with burning eyes and a desire to learn exactly. Part comes, complains, how it is difficult for them everywhere to break through, how they infringe and go home, without even remembering the Python language later. As the old wisdom correctly says: if there was a desire - there would be an opportunity, but not will - absolutely everything, even a dripping tap, would interfere.

I believe that newcomers should be supported always and everywhere. After all, every cool specialist in his field began with an intern and stuffed himself cones. And here it’s absolutely not important what gender this newfag is and how old he is. Try it, tell your new colleague how everything works for you in the company and what knowledge he should get some knowledge of, treat him with dinner or coffee, if possible. And not because your newcomer is a blue-eyed blonde with a confident four. Just being at the very beginning of the career ladder, yesterday’s students need help that they don’t ask, especially young people who are afraid to ask for it, because of the upbringing costs.


Women's business


A huge part of the young tech girls are still testers, developers, and database managers. This work is not dusty, it does not require incredible physical strength, and even dress code is not needed. Sit in a clean, warm office, look at the monitor. You can work with manicured fingers and in a Victorian dress. A separate advantage of such specifics is that it can be worked exclusively remotely, especially true for women with babies at the ready, who can literally absorb the love of asynchronous programming directly with mother's milk. What makes the employer's fear absolutely unreasonable that sooner or later his ward may go on maternity leave (at any time from 12 to 50 years).
At first, we will be a little shocked, and then we will explode altogether.

But how are things going with servicemen, caravans and infrastructure specialists? Now women compress and boil the cable on a par with men. With serious faces or jokes. Do not be afraid to get dirty when changing a cartridge, do not screech at the sight of cockroaches in your system unit and bravely come to grips with the multi-tentacled monster from the switches under your table. They will light a soldering station from a hairdryer and pick up the sick server from the rack. There is certainly not up to manicure and heels. But to each his own.


Women in IT are not at all rare birds and they don’t need to be surprised at all. They can be talented engineers and therefore reprogram their bread maker themselves, take the responsibility to tidy up Alice at home and hack your office printer to print a shopping list for dinner. Everything is in place, everything is as it should. If such enthusiasm does not scare you and does not cause a desire to eliminate it, then the first step towards equality will be to invite such a lady to train a small neural network together.

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