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Notes from the open space on gender diversity in DevOps at DevOpsDays London 2013.
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Women in DevOps.md

Women in DevOps

(Proposer Notes: Whilst it's apparant that IT Operations as a field lacks diversity in many ways discussion was intentionally limited to gender. Further it's my experience that working for an employer who is explicitly targeting greater diversity, the ops end of the IT scale still suffers from being a white, male monoculture.)

  • Initial mention of groups that already exist such as the Articulate Network, Girl Geek Dinners, Women in Technology, Black Girls Code etc.

  • Mention of the Sexual Harassment at Technical Conferences stuff.

  • Mention of Etsy's video and experience of sponsoring their hacker school (http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/02/etsy-cto-prioritizing-diversity-in-our-hiring-fielded-better-women-and-men/272969/)

  • Discussion that part of the problem is upstream in education - partly addressed by some mentoring schemes.

  • Most people said that the problem was, in their experience, not bias at the hiring stage but lack of applicants.

  • Further, some more experienced folk in the room felt that the number of women in tech was in fact dwindling.

  • General appreciation for broader lack of diversity, beyond gender.

  • Question posed - what attracts people to operations work and what makes them stay? The converse questions are also interesting.

  • Mention of a blog post by @shanley on monoculture in tech.

  • It was the general experience of the room that there were more more women in other fields within IT such as QAs and BAs.

  • It was noted that there seems to be a lack of awareness that operations is a career amongst women.

  • There is a myth that operations is made up of hairy, smelly men who work in dark rooms.

  • We seem to be proud of this myth and often promote the stereotype.

  • We need to actively hold up better ideals.

  • It seems that agile as a culture promotes communications and hopefully DevOps is simply a continuation of that.

  • Question posed - how have other industries (medicine) fixed the imbalance?

  • Question posed - what kind of career progression does operations work offer?

  • There was awareness that this is possibly a wider & deeper issue - do we really understand the wider "debate"?

  • Suggestion - Could DevOpsDays operate blind talk submissions to ensure there is reduced bias?

  • Suggestion - Could DevOpsDays reach out to existing Women in Tech (WiT) groups to actively promote subject to women.

  • DevOps values a wider skill set since it raises the focus from tech for tech's sake to business goals.

  • With DevOps, hopefully we can help ops grow up.

@johanek
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johanek commented Mar 18, 2013

Here's the missing blog post (I think) - not from Riak, but the author works there.

http://blog.prettylittlestatemachine.com/blog/2013/02/20/what-your-culture-really-says/

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