In my ten years in the SWE industry I have never met anyone who thought or said that women were not capable, the fuck is this shit?? I have multiple women as part of my dev team and they are equally respected

One in five is mind blowing to me, who are these pathetic fucking bigots? I have no doubt there are many because people suck but in every job I’ve had I worked with women devs. Maybe it’s because I’m in the PNW

In my experience, most discrimination is subtle. For 18 months, as the only female sysadmin on a team, I was routinely left off of important email chains, “forgotten” to be invited to critical meetings, not given access to important tools to perform my job, and asked to perform secretarial duties for my male counterparts. Any suggestions I made were met with “thanks for the input, but we are going in a different direction”. Weeks later, one of the males would be praised for coming up with the same idea i had proposed earlier.

We have multiple trainings telling us how not to be overtly sexist. What they don’t cover, is the common micro aggressions that are easily overlooked. Were my coworkers overworked? Yes. Do things get overlooked? Yes. Can you forget one person on a team of 5 for 18 months straight? No.

I’ll bite. This sort of ultra-shallow analysis fails to explain why the sexism of software developers today is apparently harder to overcome than the sexism of medical doctors and lawyers was decades ago. Somehow women managed to break into those fields, so that in the present day almost 40% of doctors and lawyers (and more than half of medical and law students) are women. I don’t see a consensus on what fraction of software developers are women (presumably because there’s no official license to be a software developer) but the numbers appear to range from 10% to 20%. That’s what the fraction of women lawyers was in the late 80’s, and I think it’s going to be hard to claim that today’s software developers are better at excluding women than 80’s lawyers were.

I believe that the claims about sexist treatment are real - even if software developers were much less sexist than average, one woman in a group with nine men would experience more sexism than she would in a less unbalanced environment. I don’t believe that sexism is what keeps most women out of software development; if it could do that, it would have kept them out of medicine and law too.

That sounds like an easy way to identify bottom performers.

An unfortunate amount of men in the tech industry need a swift punch to the dick. I’ve spent years in IT jobs and have seen many deserving women passed up for promotions after being promised the job, women belittled, their input completely ignored, and have heard a fair amount of sexist remarks. Anyone who thinks women are less capable of tech work is a piece of garbage.

i am autistic as balls, but i grew up surrounded by women and have a lot of female friends. i am happily married to an attractive and extroverted neurotypical woman.

it is only working in tech that ive experienced complaints from women about my serial killer vibes or whatever. looking at someone in the face for too long, smiling too much, laughing at the wrong times, misinterpreted sarcasm… i can try to avoid women in the workplace, but that isn’t normal behavior either.

in no universe have i ever thought it would be a good idea to flirt with or be rude to a coworker. i have no idea how to improve but id love to figure it out some day. i work well with most people.

i have female friends who have received some frighteningly severe sexual harassment at work. weird comments, touching, sexually charged insults, things like that. most men don’t see it because it’s often done privately. if she speaks up she might win a lawsuit, but she loses her job and possibly her career. i have to wonder if the industry has simply been poisoned by this sort of thing.

Good lord, the sheer amount of “nuh-uh!!” in the comments is insane (and yet also fully expected). It’s the same shit I’ve heard again and again and again in the blue collar industry where I work, as though just because some guy hasn’t personally witnessed one specific incident that somehow discrimination against women magically doesn’t exist, instead of coming to the realization that they’re just not seeing it, probably because they aren’t looking for it.

Open your eyes, gentlemen. Discrimination holds many forms, more than you’d think. Pay more attention to what’s going on around you at work. Maybe actually talk to the one woman in your workplace, and then actually listen to what she has to say (and to what she isn’t saying).

You want to prove that somehow your workplace is the exception to the rule? Then make it that way. Correct hiring practices that bias towards men (and this starts with how job ads are written up, by the way). Change how pay is structured in your company to a fixed, listed scale that is open and readily available to all employees. Have clear, consistent pathways to promotion to correct the gender bias. Allow for flexibility on working hours, or remote work.

And if you can’t do any of these things because you aren’t on a position to, then at least start the conversation. Be an ally. Recognize discriminatory practices when you see them, and push for change. In the end, you’ll benefit, too.

Sounds like LTT. Lol

Every time a company appears to have any amount of frat culture there needs to be an investigation performed.

I swear, I’ve worked with career engineers and mathematicians who mysteriously forget how basic statistics work the moment this issue comes up.

I mean literally drawing two normal distributions overlapping on a napkin to people who could teach this stuff in universities, pointing at the top percentiles and going “alright, but if women are just naturally less willing or able to work in this stuff where are all these outliers that should still rank way above most dudes?”

Blank stares all around.

Confirmation bias is a hell of a drug.

I just want to point out this is very much cultural:

• In my home country (Portugal) women were maybe half of the pupils taking IT Degrees and maybe half the programmers I worked with were women. (This is apparently also the case in many Eastern Europe countries).
• In The Netherlands, there were fewer women in IT but still quite a number of them.
• In Britain they were almost absent. Working as a freelancer (so in more places than a permanent employee would) in over a decade I’ve worked with maybe 3 female programmers (out of, I guess, 100 or so colleagues), all foreigners. In management, sure there were women, programming not so much.

Funnilly enough the most machist environment I worked in was in Britain and it actually had the highest proportion of women (none of which a programmer, most low-level management) but they were there due to gender quotas and were to a large extent treated as eye-candy by their own management, seemed to have been selected for looks and whilst some of the women seemed competent, others were not and were clearly playing that game.

I’ve seen how male-only environments tend to end up with this wierd disfunctional dick-wagging culture (though that’s not at all guaranteed), but if there’s one thing that specific case in Britain alongside my experience working in places were some of our colleagues were naturally women showed me, is that women need to be there on merit and thus accepted as equally capable colleagues, otherwise the result can be a lot worse than a “mere” macho dick-wagging culture were wannabe “young-bulls” in their ignorance think that “women can’t code”.

PS: I was thinking about it some more and just wanted to add that the only environment I worked in The Netherlands with almost no women (this was a small Software Products company of maybe 30 people and if I remember it correctly there was a single female secretary) did NOT have a “bro” culture at all. I suspect this was to a large extent because most people there were out of their of their 20s, plus the manager-owners were pretty decent guys (plus the Dutch culture itself) so it was a mature adults environment not a bunch of young-bucks dick-wagging and posturing.

A thing often left unmentioned in all the talk of machismo on startups (in the US) is that it’s a very ageist environment relying on young guys who are willing and capable of working 12h/day and that definitelly makes such companies tend towards the immature end of the spectrum.

Is that Kim Wexler?

Went to the site to get some insight and all I got was shovel full of shit. Where are they pulling these numbers from. I’ve been in the IT industry my entire life and I am yet to hear someone say “women are naturally less well suited”. I know it’s anecdotal evidence but equally credible as theirs.

Articles like these are not helping the situation either. They write how IT is wild west where women are constantly sexually harassed and abused. Of course fewer females would want to work in such places. Where do you live if situation is so dire no female can walk in with a keyboard without her being molested? That’s what I’d like to know. Those places need to be closed immediately.

I could answer yes to half those questions as a man…

Are these courses taught in middle and high school to all students?

In the 90s, in middle school we had some basic computer classes that everyone had to take. In high school, both the computer programming and electronics courses were optional.

The optional courses had more men than women.

Are they still optional? Should we be making them mandatory for entry level classes so everyone gets exposed and even sees if they are interested?

Entry level science classes were mandatory.

Let me guess, they only surveyed Americans.