A while ago, I worked with an all male team of about 20 programmers. The odd thing was, though, that there were a lot of women writing code, but not officially

A while ago, I worked with an all male team of about 20 programmers. The odd thing was, though, that there were a lot of women writing code, but not officially as production programmers. They were in high level support positions, mainly working on infrastructure and data, and helping my team work within in their system. This role is now commonly referred to as dev-ops or data analyst, elsewhere, and pays very well. But, because their job title was "L2 support", they were paid less and missed out on a bunch of perks. I had a friend in "support" who had build a lot of a data normalization system that I often worked with, and we talked about the phenomenon a couple times over lunch. Basically, she was a little offended about the lower pay and the "support" title, but would rather keep her work / life balance and relatively powerful position within the infrastructure stack, than join the production team for a raise. In hindsight, someone should have fought for the whole L2 support department to be better paid; there was certainly money for that (we were in a wildly profitable niche), and the support engineers had the high ground. But we were both young technical types, and didn't have the business / legal skills or the confidence to confront management. I'm not sure how things have played out there in the years since I left, but if they wanted to, that entire L2 support team could take off and form a devops / analytics consulting firm, and probably multiply their incomes by some small integers. Then they could hire from the product team too, if they needed web/UI ;)