7 ms·

To a Future Woman In Tech

47 points by kevinSuttle 14y ago

zekenie 14y ago
This is awesome. Really powerful stuff. I wonder about one line: "I hope that your initial interactions involve an immediate transfer of trust in your abilities, rather than starting off by always having to prove yourself." I'm not sure I agree with this 100%. Shouldn't everyone have to prove themselves at first? Does anyone merit immediate transfer of trust in their abilities?
jeremysmyth 14y ago
While I agree with much of this, I find the fact that it's signed "bitchwhocodes" remarkably hypocritical. If gender is so irrelevant, why put it up front in such an aggressive way?
- sp332 14y ago
  Because we don't live in that future yet.
  - zekenie 14y ago
    Agreed. Also what you call yourself is different from what others call you...
  - jeremysmyth 14y ago
    That may be true, but I know of many females on here who use androgynous names to avoid the (unfortunately all too common) sort of prejudice and sexualised conversation described in the post, and of some who use their real names and risk the same sort of unwelcome comments. While my username might give away the fact that I'm speaking from a position of "male privilege" (and that is a choice I made without having to consider that it was male privilege, which is itself a symptom of my male privilege), I don't think it's helpful for someone to use their username to signal an aggressive viewpoint, at the same time as urging a more moderate approach (honey-badger comment aside).
- juridatenshi 14y ago
  It's her twitter handle and looks like it's one she's been using for a good long while. Pretty sure she's just signing her work. Your comment reads a lot like a tone argument. That type of discourse is derailing and generally unproductive. :)
  - jeremysmyth 14y ago
    I had no problem with her tone, actually, which was pretty much on the button.
  - dfxm12 14y ago
    I didn't read this comment as a tone argument. Baseless accusations are also unproductive. :)
- sdoering 14y ago
  OK, was thinking the same. But got struck by the tone, that seems to radiate from your comment. Yes, I agree 100% with what the creator wrote. I am really, really sick with women earning less then men, having to fight harder, having to endure sexiest jokes and inappropriate comments. I really despise inequality. So, that said, I now have a problem. What ever I could no say, to discuss this issue and the site, might come about as as some kind of relativization. Because, I got sidelined by the twitter-handle. Whatever I had read to this point got covered in some judgmental-icing. My first emotion was sadness, that such an great site, such great words had been used for satire, as this was my first guess to what the handle meant. Sad, I know. Wrong, I know. But this was my first reaction.
- rayiner 14y ago
  I don't think the argument is so much that "gender is irrelevant" generally but that it's irrelevant in the specific contexts herein. The holy grail so to speak is being able to identify yourself as a woman an have it not matter.
- tedks 14y ago
  Gender should be irrelevant, but it is not currently irrelevant. It is highly relevant, and to ignore this is to ignore obvious reality, roughly equivalent to jumping off a cliff because reality is subjective and you believe that you can fly. I think the choice of that particular moniker has more to do with the fact that women are rarely both liked and respected in any professional field. Competent women are viewed as cold; warm women are viewed as incompetent. For a woman to be competent, she must be a bitch. This is obviously not the best state of affairs, but it is the way reality is.
  - dominic_cocch 14y ago
    Very well put.
  - rozap 14y ago
    Really? I wasn't aware. I thought I knew plenty of competent women who weren't "bitches". I guess I was mistaken.
    - tedks 14y ago
      http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.0022-4537.2004.00381.x/full http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.0022-4537.2004....
- wilkie 14y ago
  It's her chosen name. When you can choose a name, you do so based upon a tradeoff between comfort and identity. Women on the internet can't always afford both, and so choosing such a name seems powerful. It certainly is never hypocritical.
recoiledsnake 14y ago
Regardless of gender, a game developer is not a great career unless you're high up in the company ladder. Too much stress, being forced to work crazy hours without extra pay starting months before deadlines, not great pay etc. Once the novelty wears off, it's a hard crunch. http://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/274.html http://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/274.html
- drd 14y ago
  It is always about women’s rights and animals’ rights. When somebody is going to talk about men’s rights? All the things she talks about, I have seen happening to male developers too.
  - dfxm12 14y ago
    Shouldn't you be pushing for a dialoge around the the more aptly named developers' rights then?
    - rmk2 14y ago
      He won't because then his "argument" wouldn't work the same way, where the fight for women's equality is equated to the fight for animals rights. Then, his anecdotal evidence of "the same thing happening to males" could not be used to counter what is in any way, shape or form a systemic problem for women in technology. Additionally, his "argument" builds on the false dichotomy of men's/women's rights, whereas men supposedly need a lobby to protect them from feminist advances. The idea is the same as talking about animal rights and somehow decrying the lack of engagement in butchers rights to counter any advances made. It's a typically deflective move that only serves to steer away from addressing the actual underlying problems (and is very much a symptom of the very same structures). If he were to see this as a question of human rights (which it is, or at the very least ought to be), men's rights wouldn't be separable from women's rights, simply because they fundamentally dissolve in a concern for overall equality.
      - drd 14y ago
Peroni 14y ago
Has anyone applied the reverse argument to nursing? I'm getting sick of the gender argument to be honest. Sure, women in tech are a minority. Sure we'd all like to see more of a gender balance. However I have yet to see someone actively retarding that balance.
- mimiflynn 14y ago
  > Has anyone applied the reverse argument to nursing? Can you explain this further?
  - Peroni 14y ago
    Sure. The general complaint is that tech is dominated by males. Conferences & meet-ups are sausage fests and the speaker line-up often all male. Female devs are considered a novelty and the term female dev is considered to be frustrating due to the term dev being appended by 'female'. Nursing is dominated by females. Male nurses are considered a novelty and men in the industry are almost always described as male nurses. Nursing is an insanely demanding career and requires tons of skill and training. Why aren't men posting in outrage about the gender disparity in nursing? Why can't it simply be accepted that programming is simply a career that tends to appeal to men more than women in the same way that nursing appeals to women more than men? There are arguments that women get paid less in tech. My direct experience with women in tech (and I have plenty) is that if anything, they tend to be better paid due to the fact that female devs are in high demand and I've yet to see proof, even anecdotal, proving otherwise. I've also yet to come across a single, official complaint of sexism in the workplace within the tech industry.
    - lindseybieda 14y ago
      Nursing is a reinforcing of traditional gender roles. It being female dominated is a bad thing to. This wasn't brought up here because this is about a girl who wants to be a programmer not a little boy that ways to be nurse. You know, I'm tried of this straw man (excuse me, straw person) being brought up every time someone talks about women in computing.
    - 14y ago
artursapek 14y ago
What ever happened to "speak softly and carry a big stick?"
leovingi 14y ago
While I find the general idea of the text acceptable, I do not agree with the sentiment that somehow if you're a woman in the workplace, you just need to be accepted for what you are and you should be provided with an "immediate transfer of trust in your abilities." My experience is anecdotal and someone else's will, of course, differ, but at our workplace, if you do a good job and you are a team player, you will be accepted. No one, man or woman, somehow has the right to be trusted until proving themselves.
- nollidge 14y ago
  That's not the sentiment she's expressing, though. You generally give people some amount of trust to begin with, right? That's all she's talking about.
  - leovingi 14y ago
    I can see your point and you are probably right :) But then again, it depends on the field as well. In any technological field, you would get hired because someone trusts in you. But once you start interacting with your team members, you still have to prove yourself to them.
guywhointernets 14y ago
Sheesh, tone down the vibrant colors. Looking at this article is painful. Luckily I can just strip the css from your site, but for an average user...?
elptacek 14y ago
So I am glad to not be the first comment on this post, because I almost was. Instead, I took a while to compose my thoughts and I'm going to take a whack at writing them down. To start, I just deactivated my facebook account to get away from exactly this type of rhetoric. Why? When I look back over my career, it is striking that I have received no career enrichment from any of my female peers or co-workers. Absolutely none. All of the help I've ever gotten has come from men. Do I take a dump on that kindness by punishing them for another person's bad behavior, or by assuming these guys only wanted to get into my pants? I can't live like that. A few years ago, I was pulling into my garage and because of whatever circumstance I have forgotten, my mind was grinding on the idea of prejudice. Specifically how the act of judging another person consumes resources in my mind that I am hesitant to commit, as I'd very much like to use as much of my mind as I can coordinate for more interesting things. This sounds arrogant, but I'm fine with that label and so let's move on. The way I think is the product of constantly having to not take on other people's drama in order to raise my standard of living. That's not the most elegant way of saying what I mean to say, but I'm a bit frustrated right now. The habit of not engaging makes me acutely aware that when I do engage, it is important to choose one's words carefully. I rarely get that right. This is a blatant attempt to engage other people in a negative way. I fail to see the benefits such finger-pointing, but I am willing to learn that there might be some. It seems that if there were no perceived benefit to the actor for the act, but from here it just looks like fighting fire with fire. As a woman in technology, I've seen some things. Mostly I just let it go. I don't think of it as having a thick skin (anyone who knows me will tell you, this is not a character attribute of mine). Rather I think of it as not letting other people's drama own any part of me. And that is what I think when anyone complains of anything, be it gender bias or racial bias or religious/political disagreement: nothing can own you unless you let it. Maybe this is what having a thick skin is supposed to mean. As I have said to my kids countless times, your anger hurts you the most. I can't find a clear source for this quote, but it goes something like, "Holding onto anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die." This is not how you teach kids to deal with bullies.
- emily37 14y ago
  Well said. If I had read something like this when I was eight years old, I probably would have almost immediately backtracked and started looking for something else to do with my life. The author could instead tell her niece that being a game developer sounds like fun, and then help her deal with any discrimination as it comes up, if it comes up at all. But to start off a person's career with the message that she is going to be discriminated against, that she is going to be at a disadvantage, that she should watch out for all those people trying to drag her down... that's just sabotage.
ultramundane8 14y ago
I'd be a little worried about introducing the term "sausage party" to my eight year old anything who clearly has a working knowledge of electronics. It seems like it'd be a very dangerous thing to search.
michaelochurch 14y ago
Plenty of these problems are garden-variety nastiness that men face as well. I'll take this one, which doesn't strike me as gendered: I hope that your initial interactions involve an immediate transfer of trust in your abilities, rather than starting off by always having to prove yourself. That's not gender-specific. It's an outgrowth of the fact that there are a lot of arrogant, narcissistic assholes in our industry who automatically assume superiority over other people. It's annoying to deal with someone who thinks he could do your job, better than you, in half the time... but men deal with those shitheads as well. They get on everyone's nerves. It's not gendered. That said, I think the rarity of women in the software industry is symptomatic of an unhealthy environment. For a variety of reasons, women tend to be less tolerant of bullshit in order to protect an ego. I would like to see more women in technology, but I don't think the major battle, at this point, is dirty jokes or overt sexism. The guy who calls a woman a bitch because she won't get him coffee gets reprimanded and possibly fired (and he should, because that's just unacceptable). The current-day battle is the generally unhealthy environment of long hours, backstabbing, and low autonomy for the people actually doing the work... and all of those issues are genderless. You do, for example, need a "thick skin" to survive in the software industry-- regardless of gender. You'll be called an idiot by a manager whose IQ is the square root of yours, over a mistake made at the end of a 12-hour day. You'll get rejected for jobs because you couldn't explain how to sort a doubly-linked list in a 30-minute phone interview. You'll have to debug code that throws a profanity-laden exception name disparaging a colleague of yours (or possibly you). When you take a set of very smart but mostly socially retarded people (engineers) and make them answer to less smart but devious and nasty people (executives) this is the culture you get. Male or female, none of this stuff is easy to deal with, and no one should have to deal with it at all... but, right now, it's the price of admission. Gender is one weapon that people use in overall corporate nastiness, but one of the less potent ones by this point. It's not only focused toward women, for that matter. I've seen men get hit hard with gender-specific smears as well. What keeps working in technology worth all the nonsense is the possibility for change. Change is what we do, and most engineers (male and female) are good people. We dislike cultures of authority and abuse. Left to our own devices (rather than put into a pissing contest by executives) we will almost always try for positive-sum, inclusive outcomes. Besides, programming itself is pretty neat.
- 14y ago
commanda 14y ago
"I hope that skill will always be held in higher esteem than your gender - if you had no skill, you would not be part of the discussion, and your gender is simply a modifier." This is the point that really rang true for me. I guess I will never know if people praise my ability because they're surprised that a woman's code can be so good, or if my code is truly good. I would love to be confident in the fact that I'm highly regarded and asked to speak at conferences because of my skill and not because I can be the token woman.
papsosouid 14y ago
>"I hope that your initial interactions involve an immediate transfer of trust in your abilities, rather than starting off by always having to prove yourself." I suspect her experiencing this has more to do with being a web developer than being a women. Web development has always been regarded as trivial work, and not "real programming". And unfortunately a huge number of web developers have embraced that idea and decided "we ain't need no fancy book learnin". It is easy to fall into the trap of assuming anyone who says they are a web developer is probably incompetent.

47 points by kevinSuttle 14y ago

This is awesome. Really powerful stuff. I wonder about one line: "I hope that your initial interactions involve an immediate transfer of trust in your abilities, rather than starting off by always having to prove yourself." I'm not sure I agree with this 100%. Shouldn't everyone have to prove themselves at first? Does anyone merit immediate transfer of trust in their abilities?

jeremysmyth 14y ago

While I agree with much of this, I find the fact that it's signed "bitchwhocodes" remarkably hypocritical. If gender is so irrelevant, why put it up front in such an aggressive way?

sp332 14y ago
Because we don't live in that future yet.
- zekenie 14y ago
  Agreed. Also what you call yourself is different from what others call you...
- jeremysmyth 14y ago
  That may be true, but I know of many females on here who use androgynous names to avoid the (unfortunately all too common) sort of prejudice and sexualised conversation described in the post, and of some who use their real names and risk the same sort of unwelcome comments. While my username might give away the fact that I'm speaking from a position of "male privilege" (and that is a choice I made without having to consider that it was male privilege, which is itself a symptom of my male privilege), I don't think it's helpful for someone to use their username to signal an aggressive viewpoint, at the same time as urging a more moderate approach (honey-badger comment aside).
juridatenshi 14y ago
It's her twitter handle and looks like it's one she's been using for a good long while. Pretty sure she's just signing her work. Your comment reads a lot like a tone argument. That type of discourse is derailing and generally unproductive. :)
- jeremysmyth 14y ago
  I had no problem with her tone, actually, which was pretty much on the button.
- dfxm12 14y ago
  I didn't read this comment as a tone argument. Baseless accusations are also unproductive. :)
sdoering 14y ago
OK, was thinking the same. But got struck by the tone, that seems to radiate from your comment. Yes, I agree 100% with what the creator wrote. I am really, really sick with women earning less then men, having to fight harder, having to endure sexiest jokes and inappropriate comments. I really despise inequality. So, that said, I now have a problem. What ever I could no say, to discuss this issue and the site, might come about as as some kind of relativization. Because, I got sidelined by the twitter-handle. Whatever I had read to this point got covered in some judgmental-icing. My first emotion was sadness, that such an great site, such great words had been used for satire, as this was my first guess to what the handle meant. Sad, I know. Wrong, I know. But this was my first reaction.
rayiner 14y ago
I don't think the argument is so much that "gender is irrelevant" generally but that it's irrelevant in the specific contexts herein. The holy grail so to speak is being able to identify yourself as a woman an have it not matter.
tedks 14y ago
Gender should be irrelevant, but it is not currently irrelevant. It is highly relevant, and to ignore this is to ignore obvious reality, roughly equivalent to jumping off a cliff because reality is subjective and you believe that you can fly. I think the choice of that particular moniker has more to do with the fact that women are rarely both liked and respected in any professional field. Competent women are viewed as cold; warm women are viewed as incompetent. For a woman to be competent, she must be a bitch. This is obviously not the best state of affairs, but it is the way reality is.
- dominic_cocch 14y ago
  Very well put.
- rozap 14y ago
  Really? I wasn't aware. I thought I knew plenty of competent women who weren't "bitches". I guess I was mistaken.
  - tedks 14y ago
    http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.0022-4537.2004.00381.x/full http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.0022-4537.2004....
wilkie 14y ago
It's her chosen name. When you can choose a name, you do so based upon a tradeoff between comfort and identity. Women on the internet can't always afford both, and so choosing such a name seems powerful. It certainly is never hypocritical.

recoiledsnake 14y ago

Regardless of gender, a game developer is not a great career unless you're high up in the company ladder. Too much stress, being forced to work crazy hours without extra pay starting months before deadlines, not great pay etc. Once the novelty wears off, it's a hard crunch. http://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/274.html http://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/274.html

drd 14y ago
It is always about women’s rights and animals’ rights. When somebody is going to talk about men’s rights? All the things she talks about, I have seen happening to male developers too.
- dfxm12 14y ago
  Shouldn't you be pushing for a dialoge around the the more aptly named developers' rights then?
  - rmk2 14y ago
    He won't because then his "argument" wouldn't work the same way, where the fight for women's equality is equated to the fight for animals rights. Then, his anecdotal evidence of "the same thing happening to males" could not be used to counter what is in any way, shape or form a systemic problem for women in technology. Additionally, his "argument" builds on the false dichotomy of men's/women's rights, whereas men supposedly need a lobby to protect them from feminist advances. The idea is the same as talking about animal rights and somehow decrying the lack of engagement in butchers rights to counter any advances made. It's a typically deflective move that only serves to steer away from addressing the actual underlying problems (and is very much a symptom of the very same structures). If he were to see this as a question of human rights (which it is, or at the very least ought to be), men's rights wouldn't be separable from women's rights, simply because they fundamentally dissolve in a concern for overall equality.
    - drd 14y ago

Peroni 14y ago

Has anyone applied the reverse argument to nursing? I'm getting sick of the gender argument to be honest. Sure, women in tech are a minority. Sure we'd all like to see more of a gender balance. However I have yet to see someone actively retarding that balance.

mimiflynn 14y ago
> Has anyone applied the reverse argument to nursing? Can you explain this further?
- Peroni 14y ago
  Sure. The general complaint is that tech is dominated by males. Conferences & meet-ups are sausage fests and the speaker line-up often all male. Female devs are considered a novelty and the term female dev is considered to be frustrating due to the term dev being appended by 'female'. Nursing is dominated by females. Male nurses are considered a novelty and men in the industry are almost always described as male nurses. Nursing is an insanely demanding career and requires tons of skill and training. Why aren't men posting in outrage about the gender disparity in nursing? Why can't it simply be accepted that programming is simply a career that tends to appeal to men more than women in the same way that nursing appeals to women more than men? There are arguments that women get paid less in tech. My direct experience with women in tech (and I have plenty) is that if anything, they tend to be better paid due to the fact that female devs are in high demand and I've yet to see proof, even anecdotal, proving otherwise. I've also yet to come across a single, official complaint of sexism in the workplace within the tech industry.
  - lindseybieda 14y ago
    Nursing is a reinforcing of traditional gender roles. It being female dominated is a bad thing to. This wasn't brought up here because this is about a girl who wants to be a programmer not a little boy that ways to be nurse. You know, I'm tried of this straw man (excuse me, straw person) being brought up every time someone talks about women in computing.
  - 14y ago

artursapek 14y ago

What ever happened to "speak softly and carry a big stick?"

leovingi 14y ago

While I find the general idea of the text acceptable, I do not agree with the sentiment that somehow if you're a woman in the workplace, you just need to be accepted for what you are and you should be provided with an "immediate transfer of trust in your abilities." My experience is anecdotal and someone else's will, of course, differ, but at our workplace, if you do a good job and you are a team player, you will be accepted. No one, man or woman, somehow has the right to be trusted until proving themselves.

nollidge 14y ago
That's not the sentiment she's expressing, though. You generally give people some amount of trust to begin with, right? That's all she's talking about.
- leovingi 14y ago
  I can see your point and you are probably right :) But then again, it depends on the field as well. In any technological field, you would get hired because someone trusts in you. But once you start interacting with your team members, you still have to prove yourself to them.

guywhointernets 14y ago

Sheesh, tone down the vibrant colors. Looking at this article is painful. Luckily I can just strip the css from your site, but for an average user...?

elptacek 14y ago

So I am glad to not be the first comment on this post, because I almost was. Instead, I took a while to compose my thoughts and I'm going to take a whack at writing them down. To start, I just deactivated my facebook account to get away from exactly this type of rhetoric. Why? When I look back over my career, it is striking that I have received no career enrichment from any of my female peers or co-workers. Absolutely none. All of the help I've ever gotten has come from men. Do I take a dump on that kindness by punishing them for another person's bad behavior, or by assuming these guys only wanted to get into my pants? I can't live like that. A few years ago, I was pulling into my garage and because of whatever circumstance I have forgotten, my mind was grinding on the idea of prejudice. Specifically how the act of judging another person consumes resources in my mind that I am hesitant to commit, as I'd very much like to use as much of my mind as I can coordinate for more interesting things. This sounds arrogant, but I'm fine with that label and so let's move on. The way I think is the product of constantly having to not take on other people's drama in order to raise my standard of living. That's not the most elegant way of saying what I mean to say, but I'm a bit frustrated right now. The habit of not engaging makes me acutely aware that when I do engage, it is important to choose one's words carefully. I rarely get that right. This is a blatant attempt to engage other people in a negative way. I fail to see the benefits such finger-pointing, but I am willing to learn that there might be some. It seems that if there were no perceived benefit to the actor for the act, but from here it just looks like fighting fire with fire. As a woman in technology, I've seen some things. Mostly I just let it go. I don't think of it as having a thick skin (anyone who knows me will tell you, this is not a character attribute of mine). Rather I think of it as not letting other people's drama own any part of me. And that is what I think when anyone complains of anything, be it gender bias or racial bias or religious/political disagreement: nothing can own you unless you let it. Maybe this is what having a thick skin is supposed to mean. As I have said to my kids countless times, your anger hurts you the most. I can't find a clear source for this quote, but it goes something like, "Holding onto anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die." This is not how you teach kids to deal with bullies.

emily37 14y ago
Well said. If I had read something like this when I was eight years old, I probably would have almost immediately backtracked and started looking for something else to do with my life. The author could instead tell her niece that being a game developer sounds like fun, and then help her deal with any discrimination as it comes up, if it comes up at all. But to start off a person's career with the message that she is going to be discriminated against, that she is going to be at a disadvantage, that she should watch out for all those people trying to drag her down... that's just sabotage.

ultramundane8 14y ago

I'd be a little worried about introducing the term "sausage party" to my eight year old anything who clearly has a working knowledge of electronics. It seems like it'd be a very dangerous thing to search.

michaelochurch 14y ago

Plenty of these problems are garden-variety nastiness that men face as well. I'll take this one, which doesn't strike me as gendered: I hope that your initial interactions involve an immediate transfer of trust in your abilities, rather than starting off by always having to prove yourself. That's not gender-specific. It's an outgrowth of the fact that there are a lot of arrogant, narcissistic assholes in our industry who automatically assume superiority over other people. It's annoying to deal with someone who thinks he could do your job, better than you, in half the time... but men deal with those shitheads as well. They get on everyone's nerves. It's not gendered. That said, I think the rarity of women in the software industry is symptomatic of an unhealthy environment. For a variety of reasons, women tend to be less tolerant of bullshit in order to protect an ego. I would like to see more women in technology, but I don't think the major battle, at this point, is dirty jokes or overt sexism. The guy who calls a woman a bitch because she won't get him coffee gets reprimanded and possibly fired (and he should, because that's just unacceptable). The current-day battle is the generally unhealthy environment of long hours, backstabbing, and low autonomy for the people actually doing the work... and all of those issues are genderless. You do, for example, need a "thick skin" to survive in the software industry-- regardless of gender. You'll be called an idiot by a manager whose IQ is the square root of yours, over a mistake made at the end of a 12-hour day. You'll get rejected for jobs because you couldn't explain how to sort a doubly-linked list in a 30-minute phone interview. You'll have to debug code that throws a profanity-laden exception name disparaging a colleague of yours (or possibly you). When you take a set of very smart but mostly socially retarded people (engineers) and make them answer to less smart but devious and nasty people (executives) this is the culture you get. Male or female, none of this stuff is easy to deal with, and no one should have to deal with it at all... but, right now, it's the price of admission. Gender is one weapon that people use in overall corporate nastiness, but one of the less potent ones by this point. It's not only focused toward women, for that matter. I've seen men get hit hard with gender-specific smears as well. What keeps working in technology worth all the nonsense is the possibility for change. Change is what we do, and most engineers (male and female) are good people. We dislike cultures of authority and abuse. Left to our own devices (rather than put into a pissing contest by executives) we will almost always try for positive-sum, inclusive outcomes. Besides, programming itself is pretty neat.

14y ago

commanda 14y ago

"I hope that skill will always be held in higher esteem than your gender - if you had no skill, you would not be part of the discussion, and your gender is simply a modifier." This is the point that really rang true for me. I guess I will never know if people praise my ability because they're surprised that a woman's code can be so good, or if my code is truly good. I would love to be confident in the fact that I'm highly regarded and asked to speak at conferences because of my skill and not because I can be the token woman.

papsosouid 14y ago

>"I hope that your initial interactions involve an immediate transfer of trust in your abilities, rather than starting off by always having to prove yourself." I suspect her experiencing this has more to do with being a web developer than being a women. Web development has always been regarded as trivial work, and not "real programming". And unfortunately a huge number of web developers have embraced that idea and decided "we ain't need no fancy book learnin". It is easy to fall into the trap of assuming anyone who says they are a web developer is probably incompetent.