So I'm a female software engineer (the only one on our team of ~50), and I couldn't really identify with most of the posts on here. Am I just really lucky, and work for one of the few good companies out there?
That's awesome! I'm so glad to hear you're in a good place. Of the many places I've worked, I'd say about half were kind of hostile for women and half were pretty okay. I've found that conferences are more consistently in the former category.
Now let's figure out what to do about that other half.
You just did. Thank you and all the other allies out there. It's important for me and my cohort to remember most people are well-intentioned and many are even enlightened, in tech and elsewhere. (Source: this is my blog.)
Where "enlightened" = agrees with all my views, simplified into dumb animated GIFs?
The "What about the menz" trope is as sexist as the behavior it's pretending to decry. Calling yourself enlightened while stereotyping the opposing gender is sheer hypocrisy.
I'm a male dev who has been subject to some very unpleasant behavior because of my work... I didn't have the privilege of summoning my white knights with a simple retweet, as you see women do over and over again in any online sexism shitstorm. I was expected to justify my choices through logical argument, and just accept the fact that people said I should be shot for publishing a Github repo. There was no outrage over that, no brotherhood to back me up.
See, if women make less money because they ask for less, it's considered a problem that needs to be solved for women. It's the fault of society that women are conditioned to be insecure about their real value!
If men self-select into technical disciplines and don't develop appropriate social skills by being immersed in competitive, meritocratic environments, it's considered a problem that women need to be protected from. The best those men can hope for is a "re-education" from the feminazis, so he knows the leash is not optional.
Isn't it funny how female empowerment seems to require the men to do all the work in making changes?
That's what "What about the menz" is really about. It's a way for women to hold on to the privilege that when both a man and a woman are crossed, it's the woman's needs which are tended to first. Women and children first, it's been around forever, and it was practiced religiously. That's why 80% of the people on board the Titanic were men, and 80% of the survivors were women. Even when faced with a certain icy death, men across all of society agreed that women 'deserved' to be saved more.
The reason it's hard being a female software engineer is because people pay attention to you when you walk into a room. That has its upsides, and its downsides, and it's often not the kind of attention that you want. But you have it anyway. You can't decry the negatives, while continuing to coast on your own privilege of not being called out on your bullshit.
I have a serious question... is this a west coast thing? A midwest or southern thing? I've worked for over 13 years in Boston, in several companies with several smart female engineers... no one ever treated them differently that I saw. So... anyone seeing this in Boston? Maybe developers here are more enlightened? Maybe all the women coders need to come to Boston. :)
"No one ever treated them differently that I saw." This is a common and understandable reaction, but it's important to remember how hard it is to be an accurate observer in these situations. For instance, I have almost never witnessed evidence of racism in my workplaces, and yet I know for a fact that in those places racism was real, common, and huge problem for racial minorities. There are 500 incidents you don't see or maybe notice for every one you do. This is why I didn't really try to answer the last question here: http://femalesoftwareeng.tumblr.com/answers
Another issue is that some places are far more enlightened than others. Gaming companies, for example, tend to be much worse for female developers. So it's very possible you've never worked somewhere that was very bad. Or maybe your coworkers just never spoke up about it for fear of ridicule/backlash.
Thanks for responding to my late addition to the thread. You're right, of course... I may have missed a lot of it. And I haven't worked at gaming companies - not a lot of those in Boston, and the "kill yourself working just to get fired 2 months after launch" thing is not really my cup of tea ;)
I'll talk to a couple female ex-coworkers and see what they have to say. I hope I didn't come off as not believing sexism exists in the software world, because I absolutely believe it.
Anyway, thanks for bringing this up. I looked through your tumblr, and luckily do not see myself in any of the gaffes that you posted about (but I'll try to keep an eye out for things I or other coworkers might do without realizing). I am saddened that there are so many on the list. I can't believe there are men who still act like that in this day and age.
I am curious why "tits or gtfo" is on the list, considering that it is designed to piss off women. It's still awful and is probably one of the most vulgar things you could say to anyone... but do actual professionals say stuff _that_ offensive in software engineering settings?
This is a collection of experiences across many settings, including professional, casual and personal. I don't think anyone would ever say this seriously in a professional setting, but shit like that still happens a lot elsewhere and has a real impact.
Joining a technical IRC channel for help and being told "tits or GTFO" is pretty demoralizing. It makes you feel like you don't belong in the community, that you don't deserve to be there and that no one wants you there.
How much of this happening do you think can be attributed to how young the Ruby user base tends to skew? How often does it occur on the Python or Perl IRC channels?
This is awesome and really sad at the same time. My last computer science class was 60-70% women and yet it seems like female representation in tech is only 30% if that.
The good news is that it seems that in larger companies the ratio is closer to 50%
Wow, really? I've worked at a few large companies and the percentage of women in engineering seemed to hover around 15%. Where is this wonderful 50% land so I can go to there?
50% is ... way off the curve. 20% is about average in the United States, but it goes down when you exclude roles that tend to be managerial to something like 14%, so your experience seems to to track with statistical norms. Just stay in the field, people need examples and role models... building up a base of role models is a really, really hard problem because it sucks for the first wave.
This problem was identified in nursing years ago (inverse). Nursing has great opportunities for growth, pay roughly equivalent to programming and shortages in every state so severe states are starting governmental programs just to get more nurses... yet less than 7% of nurses are men due to a variety of reasons, but the major one is lack of role models. Despite identifying it and trying to offset it, male nurses are still exceptional rare because they never broke critical mass on role models.
Although, thinking about it, that mark may be for the whole company and not just its eng. I think a lot of it depends on how much of an effort is taken to make females happy and to recruit them. Or if there is a female involved in the early stages of the company.
Still that 15% mark seems low. It may be worth discussing with your management about how to make the workplace better and how to recruit women better. Maybe mentorship programs or hosting 'women in tech' events
I have to admit this discussion makes me feel weird. It's a bit odd to think about people based on their attributes. It's like thinking about coworkers based on their height.
I don't think there are many large companies with 50%, but they at least have a significant amount of female engineers. I thought Google was at ~40% but I can't find the reference anymore (searching just shows Google+ stats).
I know 10gen (MongoDB) has at least some female engineers just because one of them helps run the local python meetup
Google? 40% female in eng? I don't think so. You wouldn't be able to find that number online since it's embarrassingly low, and they guard it jealously even internally.
In 4.5 years on 3 different projects (SRE team, dev team, different dev team), I was all alone. I should tally up all of the names of my coworkers and see just how it worked out. People came and went but it was always guys replacing guys.
As a male Software Engineer, when I encounter the
"rare and elusive" (he he) female Software Engineer I automatically assume they are smarter than me and not afraid to get their hands dirty with some low level goodness..
