16 ms·

When I look around my peers, not a lot has changed in the last 10 years for woman in tech

RIMR 2y ago
My thoughts exactly. It's one thing to close your doors feeling like you made a difference. It's another thing to close your doors feeling like you have just as much you need to do as you did when you started.
makeitdouble 2y ago
FWIW remote work has opened the door to many women who would have left the field otherwise, so they might be less visible. It's still not great in my opinion, but I think there's more senior engineers and managers and an overall better situation than a few decades ago.
- lolinder 2y ago
  This is an effect of remote work that isn't discussed nearly often enough: it nearly completely removes any non-work-related "culture fit" filter from the equation for hiring and promotions. Without the happy hours, shared lunch breaks, or even the water cooler conversations "fitting in" isn't nearly as important remote as it was in person. This benefits everyone who struggles to fit in with the traditional tech bro class: women, but also the neurodivergent, the deaf, the blind, teetotalers, and many more who would otherwise end up subconsciously perceived as less of a team player.
mattbrewsbytes 2y ago
Even though I feel similar and don't have any large data to look at, an unfortunate thought is that their efforts helped keep status quo. Or to put it another way, without that organization's efforts, things could have gotten much worse maybe?
ilickpoolalgae 2y ago
I don't feel the same. The last decade or so has seen an explosion of women show interest in joining the tech community. Ratio's on teams I've been on has greatly increased throughout my career. I've been on several teams now where women have outnumbered men. In my experience, the ratio is now flipped when you look at the team as a whole (XFN, etc). I may be biased though as I've only worked at "premier" large tech companies and they are probably in a better position to do DEI at scale. That being said, true senior roles in engineering (VP+) is still very male dominated. Part of that is the pipeline catching up and part of is that I see women leave engineering for other roles more often. For example I would say, in my experience, I've seen more women have an interest and engage in transitions to PM, designer, etc.
- burutthrow1234 2y ago
  It's been a change in the past 10 years but I would say women are still systemically under-compensated, under-levelled, and encouraged to move into less prestigious roles like product, design, etc. The perception that women are better at "soft skills" means that we get pushed out of technical tracks into coordinating work, managing people, and sometimes just straight up babysitting male devs. Those career paths lead to lower lifetime comp and less "impressive" titles.
  - Jensson 2y ago
    > and encouraged to move into less prestigious roles like product, design, etc Women tend to seek out such roles all on their own, there is no encouragement needed. Just adding "design" to a job title massively increases how many women applies, even if the job itself is unchanged. Just rebrand software engineers to software designers and suddenly you get many women, even though they do the same thing.
    - ygjb 2y ago
      That's a pretty bold claim to make without data to back it up.
      - Jensson 2y ago
        The comment I responded to didn't have any data either, not sure why I'd need data for a similar kind of comment while they don't? The university I went to did that and they said it was to get more women, and easily got over 50% women into engineering fields just by adding design to the name of the degree. It is a well known trick, names matters.
    - petsfed 2y ago
      I wonder if the perception of engineering as a "men's field" factors into that. Like "every engineering role I've ever had, I was condescended to by some other engineer who though he knew more than me because he was a man, maybe the culture is different around 'designer'". Likewise for "technologist". More broadly, it seems to me that a lot of engineers' perception of inequity within their field basically devolves to "well, there's nothing about the material that's sexist, I don't understand why more women don't want to do it". It reveals a staggering lack of imagination and empathy, especially within a group that stereotypically was subject to a lot of bullying as young people.
dangus 2y ago
Who are your peers and where do they work? What I’m getting at here is, maybe they're at stagnant companies that aren’t making a positive change. What I’ve noticed is that there are companies that care to be inclusive. It’s an active undertaking, not a passive one. I started my career working with all men in a toxic echo chamber, and now I’m on a team that is almost completely balanced. It’s also on me to not join teams that have a curious lack of women. E.g., if I interview with a DevOps team that had 10 people and zero women, there might be something wrong with hiring. Statistically there should be at least one or two.
- Jensson 2y ago
  > What I’ve noticed is that there are companies that care to be inclusive. It’s an active undertaking, not a passive one. That is a failure, you don't need to actively be inclusive if the problem is solved. See doctors for example, in my country kids ask if men can be doctors since they see them so rarely, the "women aren't doctors" thing has been solved, there is no need to do anything at that point except try to ensure it doesn't tip to the other side. > Statistically there should be at least one or two. That isn't how statistics works, statistically there would be 2-3, 0 is perfectly normal just by random chance. If you intentionally try to only join teams with more than average women then of course you see more and more women, even though the field as a whole hasn't changed. Edit: And given that SRE often have lots of on-call I'd bet there are much less women there than regular SWE roles. Men tend to be over represented in roles that sacrifices free time.
  - dangus 2y ago
    The best SRE team I was ever on beat the industry averages for gender equity. We had 50% women, including a Black woman, and a trans woman. Our hiring practices actively surfaced people who had difficulty being considered and retained on other teams and at other companies. This concept of being inclusive is a lot different than having biases. We didn’t reject men or anything like that, we just made ourselves more visible to underrepresented candidates and hired on very specific personality traits on top of the technical requirements. We also made it clear to candidates that our team was accepting and empowering to people in minority groups as they relate to our industry. For example, we would use specific interview questions to screen out people who were selfish, egotistical, and closed-minded. There would be a zero or low chance of hiring someone who would make our minority team members uncomfortable and lead them to quit because those people would have been screened out. Another example was being open to diverse backgrounds, like transitioning from a different team within the company or having a resume that lacked formal schooling. I remember a conversation that stuck with me where the Black woman on our team told me about how she tended to job hop because she could only stay at a company so long before she started to have difficulty tolerating how she was treated by everyone else in the company. As someone who isn’t a minority in my industry it was a very eye-opening thing to hear. I had never once quit because of the way people treated me on a personal level! I had always quit for job reasons like pay, quality of my projects, effectiveness of my managers. So, you’re right about random chance and statistics, but in my opinion a good team won’t allow random chance to dictate their candidate pool. In my opinion a good team that approaches 10 people will notice the fact that there are zero women and question whether they have made their team a good place for women to work for in the first place. Let’s not forget that diversity is a proven dollars and cents benefit to corporations. Conservative media right now is using “DEI” as a substitute for racial slurs, but their intended audience for those insults isn’t corporate board rooms. No, Disney isn’t a liberal corporation, they just have a policy of inclusivity to the point of being perceived as overdoing it because they know that including everyone means a larger employee candidate pool and a larger customer pool. When you say “You don’t need to actively be inclusive if the problem is solved,” the problem with that argument is that the problem is so obviously not solved. You can’t look at various outcome statistics for the racial demographics of the US or the gender pay gap statistics and tell me with a straight face that the problem is solved. The people who have the power to make those outcomes more equitable are institutions like schools and employers. That’s why I prefer my employer to be active rather than passive. (I have a hard time believing on-call is a reason why women don’t join SRE teams, especially considering that nursing has the opposite gender bias and also has far worse scheduling woes than any SRE on-call schedule I’ve ever witnessed or heard of)
Aeolun 2y ago
The only place I see/hear a lot of female devs is in India. In Japan the ratio might as well be zero.
- bookaway 2y ago
  The reasons for the numbers in the global south are different. It's not necessarily a preferred choice through empowerment, more so a profession taken up to propel oneself from poverty.
- maeil 2y ago
  > In Japan the ratio might as well be zero. Interesting, in Korea it's not nearly as bad. CS students are about 1/3 women, and the large majority of them does end up in tech. Of course still overrepresented in front-related roles and underrepresented in back-related roles but I don't think that's different anywhere really.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  >In Japan the ratio might as well be zero. may change in the coming decade or 2. Late 2010's had Japan's version of the US 70's where women entered the workforce in droves. But COVID may or may not have stalled that phenomenon. I imagine they will bring in more women before they loosen their immigration policies.
  - shiroiushi 2y ago
    Loosen them how? By importing poor, uneducated people and putting them to work as software engineers? Japan is already stupidly easy to immigrate to if you're an experienced software engineer, probably easier than any country in the world. The main obstacle is the language barrier, but there are a fair number of companies recruiting foreign engineers and offering workplaces that use English, because there's a huge shortage of software engineers here, which largely stems from how software has traditionally been treated very poorly compared to other more traditional engineering disciplines here.
    - maeil 2y ago
commandlinefan 2y ago
> not a lot has changed in the last 10 years Then maybe what we've been doing for the last 10 years wasn't the right thing?

RIMR 2y ago

My thoughts exactly. It's one thing to close your doors feeling like you made a difference. It's another thing to close your doors feeling like you have just as much you need to do as you did when you started.

makeitdouble 2y ago

FWIW remote work has opened the door to many women who would have left the field otherwise, so they might be less visible. It's still not great in my opinion, but I think there's more senior engineers and managers and an overall better situation than a few decades ago.

lolinder 2y ago
This is an effect of remote work that isn't discussed nearly often enough: it nearly completely removes any non-work-related "culture fit" filter from the equation for hiring and promotions. Without the happy hours, shared lunch breaks, or even the water cooler conversations "fitting in" isn't nearly as important remote as it was in person. This benefits everyone who struggles to fit in with the traditional tech bro class: women, but also the neurodivergent, the deaf, the blind, teetotalers, and many more who would otherwise end up subconsciously perceived as less of a team player.

mattbrewsbytes 2y ago

Even though I feel similar and don't have any large data to look at, an unfortunate thought is that their efforts helped keep status quo. Or to put it another way, without that organization's efforts, things could have gotten much worse maybe?

ilickpoolalgae 2y ago

I don't feel the same. The last decade or so has seen an explosion of women show interest in joining the tech community. Ratio's on teams I've been on has greatly increased throughout my career. I've been on several teams now where women have outnumbered men. In my experience, the ratio is now flipped when you look at the team as a whole (XFN, etc). I may be biased though as I've only worked at "premier" large tech companies and they are probably in a better position to do DEI at scale. That being said, true senior roles in engineering (VP+) is still very male dominated. Part of that is the pipeline catching up and part of is that I see women leave engineering for other roles more often. For example I would say, in my experience, I've seen more women have an interest and engage in transitions to PM, designer, etc.

burutthrow1234 2y ago
It's been a change in the past 10 years but I would say women are still systemically under-compensated, under-levelled, and encouraged to move into less prestigious roles like product, design, etc. The perception that women are better at "soft skills" means that we get pushed out of technical tracks into coordinating work, managing people, and sometimes just straight up babysitting male devs. Those career paths lead to lower lifetime comp and less "impressive" titles.
- Jensson 2y ago
  > and encouraged to move into less prestigious roles like product, design, etc Women tend to seek out such roles all on their own, there is no encouragement needed. Just adding "design" to a job title massively increases how many women applies, even if the job itself is unchanged. Just rebrand software engineers to software designers and suddenly you get many women, even though they do the same thing.
  - ygjb 2y ago
    That's a pretty bold claim to make without data to back it up.
    - Jensson 2y ago
      The comment I responded to didn't have any data either, not sure why I'd need data for a similar kind of comment while they don't? The university I went to did that and they said it was to get more women, and easily got over 50% women into engineering fields just by adding design to the name of the degree. It is a well known trick, names matters.
  - petsfed 2y ago
    I wonder if the perception of engineering as a "men's field" factors into that. Like "every engineering role I've ever had, I was condescended to by some other engineer who though he knew more than me because he was a man, maybe the culture is different around 'designer'". Likewise for "technologist". More broadly, it seems to me that a lot of engineers' perception of inequity within their field basically devolves to "well, there's nothing about the material that's sexist, I don't understand why more women don't want to do it". It reveals a staggering lack of imagination and empathy, especially within a group that stereotypically was subject to a lot of bullying as young people.

dangus 2y ago

Who are your peers and where do they work? What I’m getting at here is, maybe they're at stagnant companies that aren’t making a positive change. What I’ve noticed is that there are companies that care to be inclusive. It’s an active undertaking, not a passive one. I started my career working with all men in a toxic echo chamber, and now I’m on a team that is almost completely balanced. It’s also on me to not join teams that have a curious lack of women. E.g., if I interview with a DevOps team that had 10 people and zero women, there might be something wrong with hiring. Statistically there should be at least one or two.

Jensson 2y ago
> What I’ve noticed is that there are companies that care to be inclusive. It’s an active undertaking, not a passive one. That is a failure, you don't need to actively be inclusive if the problem is solved. See doctors for example, in my country kids ask if men can be doctors since they see them so rarely, the "women aren't doctors" thing has been solved, there is no need to do anything at that point except try to ensure it doesn't tip to the other side. > Statistically there should be at least one or two. That isn't how statistics works, statistically there would be 2-3, 0 is perfectly normal just by random chance. If you intentionally try to only join teams with more than average women then of course you see more and more women, even though the field as a whole hasn't changed. Edit: And given that SRE often have lots of on-call I'd bet there are much less women there than regular SWE roles. Men tend to be over represented in roles that sacrifices free time.
- dangus 2y ago
  The best SRE team I was ever on beat the industry averages for gender equity. We had 50% women, including a Black woman, and a trans woman. Our hiring practices actively surfaced people who had difficulty being considered and retained on other teams and at other companies. This concept of being inclusive is a lot different than having biases. We didn’t reject men or anything like that, we just made ourselves more visible to underrepresented candidates and hired on very specific personality traits on top of the technical requirements. We also made it clear to candidates that our team was accepting and empowering to people in minority groups as they relate to our industry. For example, we would use specific interview questions to screen out people who were selfish, egotistical, and closed-minded. There would be a zero or low chance of hiring someone who would make our minority team members uncomfortable and lead them to quit because those people would have been screened out. Another example was being open to diverse backgrounds, like transitioning from a different team within the company or having a resume that lacked formal schooling. I remember a conversation that stuck with me where the Black woman on our team told me about how she tended to job hop because she could only stay at a company so long before she started to have difficulty tolerating how she was treated by everyone else in the company. As someone who isn’t a minority in my industry it was a very eye-opening thing to hear. I had never once quit because of the way people treated me on a personal level! I had always quit for job reasons like pay, quality of my projects, effectiveness of my managers. So, you’re right about random chance and statistics, but in my opinion a good team won’t allow random chance to dictate their candidate pool. In my opinion a good team that approaches 10 people will notice the fact that there are zero women and question whether they have made their team a good place for women to work for in the first place. Let’s not forget that diversity is a proven dollars and cents benefit to corporations. Conservative media right now is using “DEI” as a substitute for racial slurs, but their intended audience for those insults isn’t corporate board rooms. No, Disney isn’t a liberal corporation, they just have a policy of inclusivity to the point of being perceived as overdoing it because they know that including everyone means a larger employee candidate pool and a larger customer pool. When you say “You don’t need to actively be inclusive if the problem is solved,” the problem with that argument is that the problem is so obviously not solved. You can’t look at various outcome statistics for the racial demographics of the US or the gender pay gap statistics and tell me with a straight face that the problem is solved. The people who have the power to make those outcomes more equitable are institutions like schools and employers. That’s why I prefer my employer to be active rather than passive. (I have a hard time believing on-call is a reason why women don’t join SRE teams, especially considering that nursing has the opposite gender bias and also has far worse scheduling woes than any SRE on-call schedule I’ve ever witnessed or heard of)

Aeolun 2y ago

The only place I see/hear a lot of female devs is in India. In Japan the ratio might as well be zero.

bookaway 2y ago
The reasons for the numbers in the global south are different. It's not necessarily a preferred choice through empowerment, more so a profession taken up to propel oneself from poverty.
maeil 2y ago
> In Japan the ratio might as well be zero. Interesting, in Korea it's not nearly as bad. CS students are about 1/3 women, and the large majority of them does end up in tech. Of course still overrepresented in front-related roles and underrepresented in back-related roles but I don't think that's different anywhere really.
johnnyanmac 2y ago
>In Japan the ratio might as well be zero. may change in the coming decade or 2. Late 2010's had Japan's version of the US 70's where women entered the workforce in droves. But COVID may or may not have stalled that phenomenon. I imagine they will bring in more women before they loosen their immigration policies.
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  Loosen them how? By importing poor, uneducated people and putting them to work as software engineers? Japan is already stupidly easy to immigrate to if you're an experienced software engineer, probably easier than any country in the world. The main obstacle is the language barrier, but there are a fair number of companies recruiting foreign engineers and offering workplaces that use English, because there's a huge shortage of software engineers here, which largely stems from how software has traditionally been treated very poorly compared to other more traditional engineering disciplines here.
  - maeil 2y ago

commandlinefan 2y ago

> not a lot has changed in the last 10 years Then maybe what we've been doing for the last 10 years wasn't the right thing?