Care, People, Gender, Culture

System administration, following the definition of the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), is the task executed by “individuals responsible for the installation and maintenance of an information system, providing effective information system utilization, adequate security parameters, and sound implementation of established Information Assurance policy and procedures” . As such, system operators form an integral part of providing the infrastructure upon which our society ultimately relies. It even more so means that diversity and equity in these spaces is instrumental, as designing and operating the infrastructure provides a position of power, shaping how this infrastructure is shaped and which values are encoded in it . Despite originally being a non-cis-male  coded work environment, system administration—during the past few decades—became a classically cis-men dominated STEM field . As such, system administration, as a field, suffers from the common discriminatory actions seen across STEM .

In this research project, we empirically investigate operators’ stance towards common mechanics to improve the equity and diversity of a space, especially given the traditionally poor gender diversity in system and network engineering. We conjecture that an interplay of cultural factors observed in previous work leads to resistance to initiatives like the introduction of a Code-of-Conduct, despite operators mostly agreeing with the underlying values of such approaches. At the same time, said resistance is read as toxic refusal by people working towards a more equitable system and network engineering community, especially given the track-record of microaggressions and gender stereotyped exclusion and harassment in system operations. Ultimately, this leads to unnecessary conflict and slowed adoption of best practices, even though the underlying perspectives are actually aligned among community members. As such, our research may contribute significant societal benefit by helping to resolve communication challenges and directing efforts to align more quickly towards adopting best practices for improving equity and diversity.

Investigators: Tobias Fiebig and Mannat Kaur

The areas of networking and computer security regularly overlook a core component of secure infrastructure: The people actually building and running these systems [2]. This leads to a situation where computer scientists observe technical effcts on the Internet, but are unable to explain the root-causes of these, with a common example being the root-causes of security incidents, which are regularly rooted in simple errors and not complex attacks [1]. This project converges our expertise in system and network operations with methods from the social sciences to investigate how social and cultural effcts interact with how technology is shaped. While not purely technical, this work is instrumental for explaining technical measurement results and demonstrating excellence in science by addressing research questions end-to-end.

Our recent contributions in this field are an investigation of how COVID-19 lockdowns affected the work of system administrators using an established theoretical model developped at NASA [3]. Our work characterizes how social dynamics inflct on the work of system administrators, highlighting the impact of visibility and coordination issues amplified by the pandemic. Most critically, we find first indications for the significant role of care-work in operating systems. Our subsequent study utilizes a feminist perspective on system administration to investigate the experiences of people with marginalized genders [4]. Our findings shake foundations in this field, demonstrating that non-inclusive and toxic work environments negatively impact the career prospects of system administrators working in respectful and inclusive work environments by limiting their ability to utilize common practices for career development due to the threat of moving to a toxic environment. Additionally, we empirically describe a critical connection between a working environemnt where people can be themselves, and the security and safety of systems. Thereby, we are the first to converge the fields of system/network operations, computer security, safety science, and feminist research/gender studies work.

We are currently pursuing a joint project with TU Delft to further investigate cultural interaction effects between inclusive work environments and the system operations community, conjecturing that cultural priming effects lead to a refusal of practices even though these align with operators’ values. Furthermore, We are expanding our investigation into implicit coordination mechanisms in operators’ work, and currently prepare a study on expectations and responsibility as perceived by operators and users.

References
• [1] C. Dietrich, K. Krombholz, K. Borgolte, and T. Fiebig. Investigating system operators’ perspective on security misconfigurations. In Proceedings of the 2018 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, 2018, pp. 1272–1289.
• [2] M. Kaur, M. van Eeten, M. Janssen, K. Borgolte, and T. Fiebig. Human factors in security research: Lessons learned from 2008-2018. arXiv preprint arXiv:2103.13287, 2021.
• [3] M. Kaur, S. Parkin, M. Janssen, and T. Fiebig. “I needed to solve their overwhelmness”: How system administration work was affected by COVID-19. Proceedings of the ACM Human-Computer Interaction (Proc. CSCW), 6, CSCW2, Article 390, 2022.
• [4] M. Kaur, H. S. Ramulu, Y. Acar, and T. Fiebig. “Oh yes! over-preparing for meetings is my jam :)”: The gendered experiences of system administrators. Proceedings of the ACM Human-Computer Interaction (Proc. CSCW). Accepted 2022.