3 ms·
Ehh... Yeah. The original article was kind of a pile of crap, but it's hard to give this any credibility either. 1) She's only worked for 6 months 2) She wor
by jenandre 14y ago
Ehh... Yeah. The original article was kind of a pile of crap, but it's hard to give this any credibility either.
1) She's only worked for 6 months
2) She works in UX, which is actually pretty well represented by women.
My two cents from a woman who actually works in a technical position (I'm a developer) for > 10 years now. Also working in infosec, which is one of the least represented when it comes to gender balance. Note: this is all totally anecdotal.
IMHO, "Imposter Syndrome" is one of the primary reasons we don't have more women in the industry, and it's reinforced heavily because of the culture of most workplaces. Why? When you emphasize a "brogrammer" and "rockstar" culture it's hard to believe that you can step in there and be just as "good as the guys."
When I'm talking about brogramming culture, I am not talking about silly shit like they turned the woman's bathroom to a man's one (lol, they did this at one company I worked at) or that you need to stop making fart jokes etc. I mean the idea we are all super awesome rockstars that sling amazing code and everyone else around you is shit and an idiot for not knowing something that you (and the other guys) know. When you're already feeling kind of alienated for being different, this can be really intimidating (and it's worse when people point it out -- I was asked an interview for a programming teaching position at a university BY A PROFESSOR "how will you handle it if people don't take you seriously as a female?")
I struggled with this for many years. I always assumed everyone around me knew more about computers (they didn't) and their code was 100% perfect (lol, it wasn't).
The effect for me was I was afraid to ask questions and when I wanted to figure out something, I did the research/reading on my own because I felt I had to prove that I was 110% competent - imagine how much time I could have saved and how much faster I would have progressed if in those early days I had just felt more comfortable asking people for help.
Because of this, I think corporate environments are an easier more comfortable place for a woman to work in a programming job than startups and small companies (again, this isn't universal). Which is sad, because I love working at a small company. And the startup space could benefit from women (since there are so few people usually in a startup, esp if you're building a product that will be widely used by women, it is invaluable to have that perspective).
2) What can you do about it? Well, if you're a woman, and you want to be in the tech field because you love working with computers, and you continue to pursue it, you're doing something already. You're an example to every other woman. I think only in this way, eventually the gender balance will even out. If you're a guy, and you want to hire a woman to join your technical team, emphasize the collaborative nature and how much they will learn on the job. Hire for smarts and ability to learn, not just knowing how to write a rails app in one day and knowing how to debug a deadlock with gdb etc.
- panda_person 14y agoI agree totally with what you say. She really doesn't have the experience in age or diversity of tech career fields to base her opinion. Women are underrepresented in tech, and that is a big problem. Just look at college CS classes, hackerspaces, meetup groups for various programming languages, etc. I think that in a lot of bigger companies, there are institutional pressures to keep this stuff on the downlow, but are more prevalent in startups.
- zachinglis 14y agoWhile I (and she) do agree that she's not the best person to represent women in tech (she says so herself) a lot of people who have been do agree in the comments, and she does work with a big company that does development (.net, Windows Phone work, design and everything else in between too in a giant open plan office. So she does see more than you'd initially think)
- jenandre 14y agoThat's like saying "I work as a nurse in a hospital in the 1950s". Sure, you may see some sexism second hand, but if you're a female doctor in the same position, it's a totally different experience. The primary thing I didn't like about the author's article was that her criticism of the original article (which were totally valid, by the way) kind of concluded with the impression (given by her anecdotal experience) that "sexism isn't as bad as it's made out to be, look, I haven't seen any." The truth is it is there, and it can be pretty bad in some cases, although these scare articles by the author she was criticizing isn't really giving any meaningful advice on how to do deal with it. Interesting she works in a big shop... coincides with my experiences that larger orgs tend to be more comfortable/friendly to women.
- zachinglis 14y agoOf course. But is it any less valid that she says than Faruk, a guy. He's particularly talking about sexism for women - something by his own line he can never understand or experience.