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This is likely going to be 100% ignored since I'm late to the party on this but my wife's experiences have been that true discrimination and difficulty doesn't
by carrja99 10y ago
This is likely going to be 100% ignored since I'm late to the party on this but my wife's experiences have been that true discrimination and difficulty doesn't rise until a female engineer tries to enter management. When she was "just an engineer" things were great and nothing went wrong.
When she tried to level up into management, she faced these difficulties:
- competition from other female managers who had transitioned into the role from product management. They often times felt immensely threatened by her technical acumen and played politics to stop her.
- Lots of pretending from engineers (never the ones she's led, oddly enough) that she "doesn't know anything"
- Her current manager recently demoted her on his second day and told her "she should do engineering because he believes she'll do great at it and, if she can prove herself, she might be put in charge of a project and have a chance at leadership in the future."
The last one still has me pretty irked since it's recent.
- cloudjacker 10y agoisn't this a challenge for every software engineer? it is practically a stereotype for other engineers to criticize someone else's code it is practically a stereotype for senior software engineers to face a career plateau and you think this was uniquely sexual discrimination? so lets give you the benefit of the doubt, of the things you described, these are issues all software engineers face.
- brianlweiner 10y agoThe reality is that women face presumptions about their technical incompetence at a much higher rate than men. This is well documented and researched. [1] Obviously male developers also get undermined by their coworkers and face career plateaus. That is reality, but it is not a binary action - simply because some men face similar problems does not imply that it is an equal problem for both genders. [1] http://www.uchastings.edu/news/articles/2015/01/double-jeopardy-report.pdf http://www.uchastings.edu/news/articles/2015/01/double-jeopa...
- cloudjacker 10y agoYeah I'm going to stick to what I said earlier, the way you phrased it almost tries to put a shield around any rebuttal. He could have completely not mentioned the idea of gender being a crutch and it would have sounded like a gender neutral problem known to engineers.
- carrja99 10y agoYou do have a point. I do have a male friend who is also facing a similar situation. When I commented I was emotional since it was more recent and while she was demoted without regards to performance the dude promoted 3 white guys he brought in. ಠ_ಠ