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In my ten years in the SWE industry I have never met anyone who thought or said that women were not capable, the fuck is this shit?? I have multiple women as part of my dev team and they are equally respected
One in five is mind blowing to me, who are these pathetic fucking bigots? I have no doubt there are many because people suck but in every job I’ve had I worked with women devs. Maybe it’s because I’m in the PNW
So, this may be part of the answer, but I've had similar experiences to you, except for one startup where just about everyone was like that. Place was basically a frat house - its office was right on the water (which was awesome) and they literally had a bunch of binoculars for oggling women paddleboarding and shit (which was not awesome)
It might be that most of us don't experience this behavior because it's condensed into companies that encourage this behavior? I'm no sociologist, but that seems to jive with what I know about echo chambers and whatnot
I think you might be right. I was at a conference one time where there was a super creepy presenter that made a whole bunch of "brogrammer" jokes. He was not asked to return and lots of people walked out of his talk.
Yeah I wouldn't be surprised if people like that find companies with similar cultures and just all stay there so they can be shitty together
That’s partly it; the PNW does seem more open minded most times; but I bet the other part is you’re a guy.
This isn’t the sort of thing women tend to talk about with men, for obvious reasons. I bet those women on your dev team have some stories, if you could get them to open up about it.
In my experience, most discrimination is subtle. For 18 months, as the only female sysadmin on a team, I was routinely left off of important email chains, "forgotten" to be invited to critical meetings, not given access to important tools to perform my job, and asked to perform secretarial duties for my male counterparts. Any suggestions I made were met with "thanks for the input, but we are going in a different direction". Weeks later, one of the males would be praised for coming up with the same idea i had proposed earlier.
We have multiple trainings telling us how not to be overtly sexist. What they don't cover, is the common micro aggressions that are easily overlooked. Were my coworkers overworked? Yes. Do things get overlooked? Yes. Can you forget one person on a team of 5 for 18 months straight? No.
Weeks later, one of the males would be praised for coming up with the same idea i had proposed earlier.
I've even seen this happen within a single meeting, its the most common sexist behavior I notice. Newer female staff would suggest something, older male would say it later in the meeting and get the approval and action from it. We had a private channel with us younger-ish people on the team and she was very open about it there, and was comfortable with us overemphasizing when she had come up with ideas. Things like "yeah I agree with [her] idea" when it was appropriate and speaking up more in those cases. If she wouldn't have brought it up casually like that and discussed it openly we wouldn't have been as aggressive either, and this has happened with a few female colleagues.
This sounds like a very toxic environment, i'm sure it happens but i've never withnessed anything like this
It sounds fairly similar to racism, tbh
In case you haven’t heard the term before, you just discovered intersectionality.
It sounds fairly similar to racism, tbh
I think a lot of the confusion in this thread comes from you saying this in a way that sounds like you don't know more and have for the first time made this connection. Down the thread, it's clear you know exactly what you're saying, and you seem annoyed that other users didn't recognize that in the first place.
I'll bite. This sort of ultra-shallow analysis fails to explain why the sexism of software developers today is apparently harder to overcome than the sexism of medical doctors and lawyers was decades ago. Somehow women managed to break into those fields, so that in the present day almost 40% of doctors and lawyers (and more than half of medical and law students) are women. I don't see a consensus on what fraction of software developers are women (presumably because there's no official license to be a software developer) but the numbers appear to range from 10% to 20%. That's what the fraction of women lawyers was in the late 80's, and I think it's going to be hard to claim that today's software developers are better at excluding women than 80's lawyers were.
I believe that the claims about sexist treatment are real - even if software developers were much less sexist than average, one woman in a group with nine men would experience more sexism than she would in a less unbalanced environment. I don't believe that sexism is what keeps most women out of software development; if it could do that, it would have kept them out of medicine and law too.
The question to me is what happened in the 1970s and 1980s that resulted in women no longer going into CS based fields?
Why is it that developers used to be 80-90% women, whereas computer engineers was the male dominated field and now IS and IT are all functionally male fields?
Men realized it was high paying with low barriers to entry and did shit like this (Men Overran a Job Fair for Women in Tech) repeatedly until women felt like it just wasn't worth the trouble anymore.
In order to keep barriers to entry for themselves low, they created barriers for others by being loud, forceful and unpleasant. It's very similar to how other minorities were and are kept out of various fields. It's not a new playbook. It's not that difficult to figure out.
Also, there has been a significant shift in the field since the 70's, 80's, 90's and early 00's when uber "nerdy" personality types were prevalent to the modern era of "tech bros" that is kind of the result of the same things and due to the same behavior.
Except behaviour like that didn't exist in my high school, where the IT and IS classes I took were again, almost exclusively guys.
No one in the class gave a shit what gender you were, no one was harassed, but almost no girls had interest in it enough to sign up. This despite half the class being jocks who literally signed up for the class as an alternative math/science credit because they didn't pass the grade 11 science / math class(es).
My mother was in IT in the 1980s but left the field due to a combination of myself, siblings and being laid off due to the change from building sized servers to more modern ones. When she went back she didn't have the credentials or knowledge to be more than data entry.
Hell, I recall shop class in 9th grade was an even split, but suddenly in grade 10 it dropped off a cliff and became a sausage fest.
The issue I can see is that for an unknown reason school aged girls seem to have been culturally dissuaded from IT and IS when the technical revolution in the 1980s took place.
Taking one extremely isolated event that even in the event's own history is unprecedented, and extrapolating it across the entire industry is wrong and dishonest. If it was as systemic as you state, then that fair would have always had that issue, not have it suddenly occur this year.
You may feel that way strongly and want to reinforce your biases with anecdotes. Instead of argue with you in kind, allow me to provide resources going back to 2008 produced by very qualified women that come to similar conclusions. If this isn't enough there's sourced material in these and much more found elsewhere.
The Athena Factor: Reversing the Brain Drain in Science, Engineering, and Technology - June 2008
Over time, fully 52% of highly qualified females working for SET companies quit their jobs, driven out by hostile work environments and extreme job pressures.
...
Hostile macho cultures. Women in SET are marginalized by lab coat, hard hat, and geek workplace cultures that are often exclusionary and predatory (fully 63% experienced sexual harassment).
...
The data show that, for
many SET women, attrition rates spike 10 years into a career. Across the climates of science,
engineering, and technology, women experience a perfect storm in their mid- to late 30s.
...
Athena Factor 2.0:Accelerating Female Talent in Science, Engineering & Technology - 2014
In this report, we revisit the SET landscape—expanded to include Brazil, China, and India as well as the U.S.—to determine what has changed for the better and to offer solutions for what has resisted change. The good news: the pipeline of global female talent in SET remains rich and deep, with women being the majority of SET college graduates in many key geographies. They’re ambitious, eager to be promoted, and dedicated to their professions: 80 percent of U.S., 87 percent of Brazilian, 90 percent of Chinese and 93 percent of Indian SET women say they love their work. However, a sizable proportion say they feel stalled and say they are likely to quit their jobs within a year.The fundamental reasons haven’t changed. While no longer subjected to overt bias, women continue to face powerful “antigens” in SET corporate environments. However, our new data identifies newly revealed nuances.
These include:
- Hostile macho cultures. Women in SET are marginalized by lab-coat, hard-hat, and geek workplace cultures that are often exclusionary and promulgate bias.
- Isolation. SET women no longer find themselves the sole female on a team or at a site. Yet they still feel excluded from “buddy networks” among their peers and lack female role models.
- Scarcity of effective sponsors. Although SET women have sponsors, they don’t reap the benefits to the degree that their male colleagues do. The “sponsor effect” (the differential in satisfaction with career progression for individuals with sponsors vs. those without) is 22 percent for U.S. SET women versus 32 percent for men, 19 percent for Brazilian SET women versus 42 percent for men, and 21 percent for Chinese SET women versus 58 percent for men.
- Difficulty with executive presence. SET women struggle to decipher and embody leadership attributes, and receive little useful feedback to correct this perception.
...
...
(cont'd - 5k character count limit)
If you think women in tech is just a pipeline problem, you haven’t been paying attention - 2015
According to the Harvard Business Review, 41% of women working in tech eventually end up leaving the field (compared to just 17% of men), and I can understand why…
...
Here is a sampling of just a few of the studies on unconscious gender bias:
- Investors preferred entrepreneurial ventures pitched by a man than an identical pitch from a woman by a rate of 68% to 32% in a study conducted jointly by HBS, Wharton, and MIT Sloan. “Male-narrated pitches were rated as more persuasive, logical and fact-based than were the same pitches narrated by a female voice.”
- In a randomized, double-blind study by Yale researchers, science faculty at 6 major institutions evaluated applications for a lab manager position. Applications randomly assigned a male name were rated as significantly more competent and hirable and offered a higher starting salary and more career mentoring, compared to identical applications assigned female names.
- When men and women negotiated a job offer by reading identical scripts for a Harvard and CMU study, women who asked for a higher salary were rated as being more difficult to work with and less nice, but men were not perceived negatively for negotiating.
- Psychology faculty were sent CVs for an applicant (randomly assigned male or female name), and both men and women were significantly more likely to hire a male applicant than a female applicant with an identical record.
- In 248 performance reviews of high-performers in tech, negative personality criticism (such as abrasive, strident, or irrational) showed up in 85% of reviews for women and just 2% of reviews for men. It is ridiculous to assume that 85% of women have personality problems and that only 2% of men do.
...
Discussion of the same issues and strategies to work around them.
Everything I cited was found pretty easily with this search, and this was all in just the first couple pages of results (there was much, much more):
These were fantastic comments. Thank you for providing all this information, along with citing sources.
Uses study that ignores occam's razor, imagining a vast conspiracy all through Silicon Valley.
Reality is that working in Silicon Valley (and companies that follow their lead) sucks for everyone. Just women tends to care more about work life balance since they're not trained from birth that their only value is how much money they make.
Tech had a lot of women early when lots of manual labor was needed. Women were making and organizing punch cards, collecting output, and monitoring computers while programs ran. As computers got better the need for these functions was reduced.
I feel like part of the issue is cultural. Just like Nintendo putting video games in the boys section of the toy store, Hollywood has made tech out to be a field dominated by anti-social, awkward, and frankly gross, morbidly obese, barbaric dudes that shower once a year. From Jurassic Park to NCIS, tech people are not "sexy" and are typically quite unsavory.
Some of the newer shows have done better, as have the newer toy isles... and video games and tech do seem to be rebounding, at least somewhat (anecdotally of course).
That sounds like an easy way to identify bottom performers.
Except, unfortunately, in the business world, some of the most well-promoted people are those who do almost nothing and take all the credit for themselves, who tend to be the exact kind of people those articles describe.
We don't have as many safeguards against sociopathy in career-building, it seems, and the whole stupid fucking game seems rigged towards the interests of narcissists, sociopaths, and psychopaths, especially with the frequency they are represented in the C-suites in the US.
So these misogynistic chucklefucks often rise to the top.
Reminds me of the woman from Uber who wrote the book on microsystems. Had credit for her ideas stolen by some male supervisor like 90 times.
An unfortunate amount of men in the tech industry need a swift punch to the dick. I've spent years in IT jobs and have seen many deserving women passed up for promotions after being promised the job, women belittled, their input completely ignored, and have heard a fair amount of sexist remarks. Anyone who thinks women are less capable of tech work is a piece of garbage.
Being a computer nerd from childhood and growing up going to/organizing lan parties, gaming cons, being around that whole scene... you know about those weird guys who are just gross, uncomfortable around, naive towards women, sometimes feeling like their space is being invaded, thinking attractive women fake being nerds so they can get attention. The whole adjacent incel mindset as well. I've seen it take all sorts of forms, some perfectly innocent due to social isolation, potentially autism, just being intimidated by women especially if they're attractive. Sometimes it gets truly malicious and gross, and those guys need dick punches.
Like I'd have a guy walk in to a lan party, completely disheveled looking and unkempt, smelly, and he'd get pissed that "we didn't say there'd be girls here," implying he would have cleaned up if that were the case. I forgive any sort of mental illness or autism related thing when it comes to this, but it's not an excuse when it's clear they understand it's an issue. One guy once brought his freshman "Asian girlfriend" who could barely speak English, and would talk about their sex in gross ways in front of her without her knowing. That was a tough one because they were inseparable the whole time and finding a way to tell him to stfu without making her uncomfortable was a challenge. Someone blew up at him after the event and he never made it out again.
Good lord, the sheer amount of “nuh-uh!!” in the comments is insane (and yet also fully expected). It’s the same shit I’ve heard again and again and again in the blue collar industry where I work, as though just because some guy hasn’t personally witnessed one specific incident that somehow discrimination against women magically doesn’t exist, instead of coming to the realization that they’re just not seeing it, probably because they aren’t looking for it.
Open your eyes, gentlemen. Discrimination holds many forms, more than you’d think. Pay more attention to what’s going on around you at work. Maybe actually talk to the one woman in your workplace, and then actually listen to what she has to say (and to what she isn’t saying).
You want to prove that somehow your workplace is the exception to the rule? Then make it that way. Correct hiring practices that bias towards men (and this starts with how job ads are written up, by the way). Change how pay is structured in your company to a fixed, listed scale that is open and readily available to all employees. Have clear, consistent pathways to promotion to correct the gender bias. Allow for flexibility on working hours, or remote work.
And if you can’t do any of these things because you aren’t on a position to, then at least start the conversation. Be an ally. Recognize discriminatory practices when you see them, and push for change. In the end, you’ll benefit, too.
i am autistic as balls, but i grew up surrounded by women and have a lot of female friends. i am happily married to an attractive and extroverted neurotypical woman.
it is only working in tech that ive experienced complaints from women about my serial killer vibes or whatever. looking at someone in the face for too long, smiling too much, laughing at the wrong times, misinterpreted sarcasm... i can try to avoid women in the workplace, but that isn't normal behavior either.
in no universe have i ever thought it would be a good idea to flirt with or be rude to a coworker. i have no idea how to improve but id love to figure it out some day. i work well with most people.
i have female friends who have received some frighteningly severe sexual harassment at work. weird comments, touching, sexually charged insults, things like that. most men don't see it because it's often done privately. if she speaks up she might win a lawsuit, but she loses her job and possibly her career. i have to wonder if the industry has simply been poisoned by this sort of thing.
Sounds like LTT. Lol
Every time a company appears to have any amount of frat culture there needs to be an investigation performed.
I just want to point out this is very much cultural:
Funnilly enough the most machist environment I worked in was in Britain and it actually had the highest proportion of women (none of which a programmer, most low-level management) but they were there due to gender quotas and were to a large extent treated as eye-candy by their own management, seemed to have been selected for looks and whilst some of the women seemed competent, others were not and were clearly playing that game.
I've seen how male-only environments tend to end up with this wierd disfunctional dick-wagging culture (though that's not at all guaranteed), but if there's one thing that specific case in Britain alongside my experience working in places were some of our colleagues were naturally women showed me, is that women need to be there on merit and thus accepted as equally capable colleagues, otherwise the result can be a lot worse than a "mere" macho dick-wagging culture were wannabe "young-bulls" in their ignorance think that "women can't code".
PS: I was thinking about it some more and just wanted to add that the only environment I worked in The Netherlands with almost no women (this was a small Software Products company of maybe 30 people and if I remember it correctly there was a single female secretary) did NOT have a "bro" culture at all. I suspect this was to a large extent because most people there were out of their of their 20s, plus the manager-owners were pretty decent guys (plus the Dutch culture itself) so it was a mature adults environment not a bunch of young-bucks dick-wagging and posturing.
A thing often left unmentioned in all the talk of machismo on startups (in the US) is that it's a very ageist environment relying on young guys who are willing and capable of working 12h/day and that definitelly makes such companies tend towards the immature end of the spectrum.
I swear, I've worked with career engineers and mathematicians who mysteriously forget how basic statistics work the moment this issue comes up.
I mean literally drawing two normal distributions overlapping on a napkin to people who could teach this stuff in universities, pointing at the top percentiles and going "alright, but if women are just naturally less willing or able to work in this stuff where are all these outliers that should still rank way above most dudes?"
Blank stares all around.
Confirmation bias is a hell of a drug.
Is that Kim Wexler?
I've interviewed dozens of candidates to hire entire new teams and the percentage of women showing up was very very low. I ended up with an extremely diverse team of mostly men. If i interview 50 candidates and only 3 of them are women, what's the likelihood they are going to be better than all the others? I complained about this and nothing changed. And my opinion has never been that they are less competent, but it certainly looks like they are less interested in the topic, maybe becase it's male-dominated. The women I managed to hire nevertheless are absolutely good devs and if anything they have a better work ethic on average.
Went to the site to get some insight and all I got was shovel full of shit. Where are they pulling these numbers from. I've been in the IT industry my entire life and I am yet to hear someone say "women are naturally less well suited". I know it's anecdotal evidence but equally credible as theirs.
Articles like these are not helping the situation either. They write how IT is wild west where women are constantly sexually harassed and abused. Of course fewer females would want to work in such places. Where do you live if situation is so dire no female can walk in with a keyboard without her being molested? That's what I'd like to know. Those places need to be closed immediately.
Sexual assault is not the only kind of misogyny that could exist at a company. Also, no your anecdotal evidence is not equally as credible as a mass survey of women in the tech industry and women who have left it.
I have worked in tech for 10 years and until I started at my current company every single company I worked at I experienced and witnessed other women experience many kinds of hostile work environments and misogynistic discrimination. Differences in pay compared with male peers, dismissal of ability or ideas, people requesting to speak with male colleagues over me, sexual harassment in a few cases and even tolerance of casual sexual commentary on women in the work place.
This is commonplace. This is an article written by women saying that you aren't noticing the ways that we experience discrimination in the industry. And your response is "I never notice this, so it musnt be real!". Most women I know who go into tech leave eventually. It's never because of the actual work itself. It's almost always because of the attitudes of both their colleagues and often times customers and business partners. I'm very fortunate to be working IT for a women's clothing company, and my boss and her boss are women and I'd say around 60% of my team are women myself included. I've yet to experience anything like I did at other companies.
I heard it a few times, most notably from another woman working in tech. All of them older people though.
I could answer yes to half those questions as a man...
This is what makes me uncomfortable about going all-in as an "ally". I've heard very dubious and unprovable allegations in my time. If you dig a bit, it always end up being very much indistinguishable from insecurity. Everyone experience being ignored and talked over in those meetings, how is the get-go explaination sexism? How can you possibly know? Don't get me wrong, I know for a fact that some of those situations are real, but I have witnessed way too many ridiculous accusations to take this talking point seriously anymore. I am not talking about overt sexism here and bad"jokes", but at this micro-aggression concept where you can be labeled a sexist for... not agreeing with a woman?
I can tell you my experience as a man tho, I worked with incredibly nice men who were scared to say the wrong thing or to participate in some meetings because we worked with extremely vocals and repressives feminists, and you can definitely lose your job for being accused of any type of misogyny around here. The tone gets really hostile real quick too. There is no discussion to be bad on this subject, my experience is invalid because I am a man, to be ridiculed because I am ignoring very clear evidences on purpose, apparently. Next week I could write about being ignored due to my height and I would get laughted out of the room, rightly so.
Are these courses taught in middle and high school to all students?
In the 90s, in middle school we had some basic computer classes that everyone had to take. In high school, both the computer programming and electronics courses were optional.
The optional courses had more men than women.
Are they still optional? Should we be making them mandatory for entry level classes so everyone gets exposed and even sees if they are interested?
Entry level science classes were mandatory.
Let me guess, they only surveyed Americans.
The tech companies I have worked for have all been the most welcoming and egalitarian environments one could possibly ask for. Down to the level of having slack bots correcting anyone for saying 'hey guys'.