Twenty years ago when I walked into my first server room, I already knew the field I was choosing was not exactly waiting for me. Information technology in the early 2000s was about as male-dominated as it gets. I knew that going in. I went in anyway.
What I did not expect was that two decades later, I would still be having the same conversation.
"Can I speak to the IT guy?"
It never ceases to amaze me.
Not because it stings. Honestly it never did. The eye rolls I have collected over twenty years could fill a room. It amazes me because of the context in which it keeps happening. I am not standing there in silence. I am already mid-conversation. I have already dropped terms like CIDR notation, WAN IP, subnet masks. I have already asked for the login credentials to the modem. And still, somewhere in the middle of that conversation, the other person decides they need to talk to someone else. Someone with a different pronoun, apparently.
Camera vendors are a personal favorite. I have had vendors show up on-site to explain to me how their network camera system integrates with ours. Except it does not integrate with ours. It never did. Because whoever set it up ran the switch directly to the modem, completely bypassing our network. I had to stop the vendor mid-presentation and point to the switch physically on the wall and explain that this NVR has two NICs, one for WAN and one for the camera VLAN, and none of it was ever touching our infrastructure to begin with.
The look on their face is always the same.
That moment right there is twenty years of this career in one scene.
I was lucky early on. My mentors were good people. All men, every one of them, but genuinely good people who saw ability and not gender. They taught me the right way to build a career in this field and I carry that with me every day. I would not be where I am without them.
But I will be honest with you. In twenty years of working in IT, mentoring others, building teams, and now running my own company, I have not yet mentored a single woman in this field. Not one. Every person I have brought along has been a man.
That is not a complaint. I am proud of every one of them. But the pipeline is still thin. The tide is shifting, slowly, but it is shifting. More women are coming into this space. I can see it. I can feel it. And I still have plenty of years ahead of me, so I am not done waiting.
What has changed, and this part I love, is the room.
When I walk into a client site now, whether it is a room full of VPs or a break room full of everyday users, the feeling is different than it used to be. There is no skepticism anymore. No redirecting to someone else. The sentiment, almost without exception, is the same.
We are good. Ailyn's here.
That took twenty years to build. Turns out I was the secret sauce the whole time. I just had to keep showing up until the room figured it out.
Ascend Networks exists because I got tired of the gap between what technology companies promise and what they actually deliver. Not just for me, but for every client who deserved better. One team. No handoffs. No vendors explaining things that are not true.
If you are looking for someone who knows the difference between your WAN and your LAN and will not ask you to go get the IT guy, you know where to find us.