Obviously, the entire slide deck is terrible, but, a personal thought about the "The NOT male engineers" slide... Some people might think "Well, it's a terribl

Obviously, the entire slide deck is terrible, but, a personal thought about the "The NOT male engineers" slide... Some people might think "Well, it's a terrible thing to say like that, that women should get the more social jobs, but society/culture/genetics/hormones -- perhaps a grain of truth, right? Women are just social!" You might even think it's a good thing to promote them, or make them the "communicators" or put them in architect positions. I just want to say that these are the good intentions that made my first few years of out of college job experience absolutely awful, which makes this slide especially upsetting to me. I was an engineering major with a strong CS background, but also a 6' tall, beautiful, outgoing, well-spoken woman. Obviously, I'd be perfect working with clients, or acting as a liaison between developers and designers, or as a technical sales engineer, right!? So, I was "let go" twice, the first time, just 5 months after graduating, and then again a year later. I missed meetings, told clients their ideas were bad, was a terrible diplomat, didn't prepare very nice-looking reports, complained about using MS Office, constantly forgot to log billable hours, spent too much time writing code... I hated it, I was terrible at it, and yet I kept drifting towards these types of jobs! It was what recruiters showed me, what college counselors showed me, what everyone said I should do, and what I thought I should do! It took me way too long (to my credit, I was young) to realize that I'm much much happier "just" writing code, and working on a project that I can really take the time to get into. If I'm going to do "collaboration" I'd rather do it with other engineers that share a common(ish) technical background, where we all bounce ideas off of each other and have similar goals for the product or feature. And I'm so much happier not having to worry about what I'm wearing to work every day, or if I need to prepare for a customer meeting in the morning! So, even if you think that it might be true that women are more social on average (whatever your own personal reasoning is, doesn't matter) PLEASE don't automatically try to lead women into roles like this, or assume that she'll be great at bridging gaps between clients/developers/designers/god-knows-what (because she's a LADY! Amirite!?). Some are, some aren't. Some men are, some aren't. But using these social/cross-discipline positions as kneejerk suggestions for a woman to "move up", or "do something more interesting" may be doing more harm than good to her career if she takes the advice.