Female sterotyping?  I don't know.

I am the only woman in a 4 person DBA team here at my workplace.  The development team consists of an additional 7 men.  And yet, I don't feel awkward in my workplace because our entire department also includes Project managers and Business Analysts, 80% of whom are also women.  There's only 28 people total in our department, but since we're all together in the same cramped office, I certainly don't feel like the only "IT woman".

I know for a fact that workplaces still exist where aging Baby Boomers still cling to the old traditional workplace structure.  There's a good ol' boys network for promotions and such, the men refuse to do anything that's not in their job description and they grouse about the busineses not sticking to the 1950's principals of company loyalty.  Such a work environment is hardly conducive to a woman coming in to work IT.  I'm still amazed at the number of guys in my old jobs who think I can't do IT work because I'm too tiny to do a "big man's job" (because, apparently, lifting desktop computers or big monitors is what people still think of when you talk about IT work).  And until we move completely from this sterotypical kind of work environment, women may feel underappreciated and refuse to come work in IT.

But there are also good work environments, such as the one I'm in now, where everyone is expected to pull their own weight regardless of gender or age.  When we went interviewing for a new DBA last year, we received about 15 resumes, 5 of which we rejected out of hand because it was obvious the applicant was pulling his resume straight out of Books Online.  Out of the 15, though, there was only one woman applicant.  I would like to have hired her, but she, like many of the male applicants, had Paper Cert Syndrome.  I mean, you know something is wrong when you ask (in an interview) "How do you do a point-in-time restore to a database in Simple Recovery mode" and no one knows the answer is "You can't.  You can only restore to the last backup".

Maybe there is something to psychology of the thing, but I'm more inclined to think otherwise.  (See my next post).