Why we need to talk about women in tech

It started with a rant on how Bluesky handles its data. (On Bluesky I might add.)

This post started the back history of why I hate how Bluesky handles its data, but that is just empty text that serves no purpose. But what did spawn from that was me throwing thoughts into the ether on women in tech moving on to how the lack of teaching the history of tech to the younger generations is crippling them.

I meet up once a month with other women and women presenting folks for a women in tech event. We get together, drink beer and cider, eat pretzels and beer cheese, while we talk about our work, our interests, and our projects. I’ve met a lot of cool people that way which is helping me build a network here in lower N. Michigan.

(A woman no one knew showed up one meeting and asked if her boyfriend could come talk to us about our ideas on his new app. The boyfriend showed up anyway and spent the entire evening taking over the conversation. We were all stunned. Here is our place to not be with men and yet he couldn’t stop mansplaining the project. The woman never came back and the coordinator of our meet-up apologized profusely for letting that happen. Look, men, women and non-binary folks need their own space; stop trying to take over!)

A young whippersnapper joined us back in the summer of 2025 and she was soliciting us to come speak to her peers at the local community college on women in STEM. I threw my hat in the ring, we had a video chat, and I told her my story of how I took a class called Introduction to the Internet back in 1994 or ’95 and it was all command line. Archie, Veronica, Pine, FTP, and IRC were our tools of choice. These words mean very little now, especially to people like the young whippersnapper.

I’m in an interesting position since I started out in tech all those years ago but swapped to the humanities in the early ’00s when the company I worked for was going through massive layoffs. I wasn’t on the chopping block but I took that as a sign to get the hell out of dodge. I applied to a few colleges, got accepted, and in the winter of 2003, I was sitting in a classroom for the first time in nearly a decade.

Since those early days of my academic career, while I continued to pursue a humanities degrees (double major of English Lit and Art History; masters in Humanities, masters in Library Science and Archives), tech never left my world. I was building, exploring, or fixing things. I was the go to person for friends and family. I took to the internet like a duck to water and found jobs that catered to both halves of my brain. I’m a hybrid.

When finding a library job after I graduated in 2010 was nearly impossible (I eventually got hired for a library systems admin in 2011), I thought about going back into tech again. The money was certainly better, and surely how non-males were treated was better, right?

I’ll let you chew on that for a bit.

(The answer is “no” and in some ways, it’s a lot worse. If you are a non-male working in tech and you claim you’ve never been insulted, suppressed, patronized, or mansplained, you are fooling yourself.)

Lisa’s history of working in tech

The whippersnapper and I set up a Google Meet meeting and I told her my story. I told her how I was so focused on the internet in my first foray in college, I became the unpaid tech support person in my school’s computer lab. That in the spring of 1996, I started volunteering for a local freenet (bastard child of BBS‘), which was a volunteer run ISP that provided connections and server space to the internet for locals. You either connected your modem via a local phone bank or telnet into the service. I handled questions on how to use IRC and how to move email in Pine. The cost was very low to have an account. Maybe $5 or $10/month? (Mine was free since I was a tech support person.) When I left college, I spammed my resume (via email thank god) to every local ISP within a 60 mile radius of my house. I eventually got a job doing tech support for a ISP 40 minutes away.

By this time, how we think of the internet with browsers and such was a thing. I remember my college lab installed Netscape .96 (precursor to Mozilla/Firefox) and I stood behind someone watching the image of something I can no longer recall render line by line. The college’s entire connection to the internet was a T1 (1.544 Mb/second compared to my current home speed of 300 Mb/s). Command line was faster than graphical interface but who wanted to stare at a blinking cursor when you could see the color image of a flower from Scandinavia even if it took 15 minutes to download? (Answer: no one.)

I eventually moved to San Francisco in the summer of 1997, started working for a local ISP there and later moving to Virginia in the fall of 1999 doing networking for a global company. I went from answering phone calls to making the internet move. It was thrilling to make and understand how data moved from one point to another.

Working as a woman in tech

In all these moves and jobs, I was typically one of few if not the only woman. I was “assertive” and a “bitch” because I knew what I was doing. I learned and studied. Working in tech was an outlet for my brain, I made great money, and it was a career where I didn’t need a college degree (but certification was almost a must have). Even after becoming team lead, I still was having difficulty with my colleagues.

And to be brutally honest, it was not only the men but also some women were assholes. The concept of women supporting women was not the thing then as it was every person for themselves. This was not to say all women were jerks but many were.

In 2011, I started working as a librarian with my tech jobs on my resume. I was hired because I understand how a library catalog worked or how to write HTML to update a page. I was liaison to the tech department and worked with the computer profs on making sure their students had the most up to date knowledge and information.

But I left that job, and I went back to thinking about tech again. Could I get back into networking? Surely my skillset may be rusty, but I could do it. But competition had changed in the 10 years since was gone and now college degrees in computer science were murmured along with certification.

And how were women perceived now compared to then? (I’ll let you take a guess.)

(Do not get me started on when technology is promoted for women and it is always pink graphics, dumbed down titles, and sounds patronizing as hell.)

(Also don’t get me started that coding and fullstack development are the main fields women are suggested to work in. There is a lot more to tech than those two things and we’re doing a huge disservice to women in limiting their choices.)

Teaching the internet

Library jobs came and went but tech, and teaching tech, remained a constant in my life. Starting in my San Francisco days, I taught my own introduction to the internet and at the global company, classes on BGP, IP routing, and DNS. Later it went to classes on tech literacy and how to use social media.

I can not get away from tech if I tried.

This is me telling all of this to the whippersnapper and she’s excited to have me speak. She thinks what I will talk about will be important, especially the roles of women in STEM. We also talk about computer hardware, Linux, and how the internet goes. When I started to talk about Unix (precursor to Linux), she had no idea what I was talking about. When I explained data packets fly via switches and routers, her eyes glazed over.

It got me thinking, and of which I’ve been mulling, that we are doing a disservice to the younger generations not explaining how the internet works. The whippersnapper cared, of course to an extent, but she knew mostly nothing and she knew enough nothing to not even know how to go looking for it. Chromebooks, tablets, and phones you can watch TV on have been a constant in her life. She does not know the sound of a modem connecting or using *70 to turn call waiting off so that if someone called while you were connected to the internet, the connection would not be disrupted. (Y’all remember Motorola Razrs? Mine was hot pink and I put sparkle jewels on it).

As a society, we’re constantly talking how we need to remember the history of the event or a place or a thing to make sense of the present and so we won’t repeat our dumb mistakes. We use history as the backdrop for books, food, and movies. History is all around us, so then, why are we not teaching these whippersnappers the history of the internet?

I know there are youths who do know these things, but not enough, I think. Are they teaching the history of the internet in computer science programs? Are we seeing movements or activities to garner interest?

I’m not saying these don’t exist but I am saying there is not enough.

And that, my friends, is where I’ll pick up next week!