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.
Your experiences chime with my own, as another woman with just over 10 years of experience - especially the part about being afraid to ask questions. This extends to being afraid to try new tasks, take on new projects, or even just ask for critiques of my code, all of which I know are important in this line of work. Obviously these fears are not solely experienced by women, but I think there are some feedback loops which are particularly likely to lead women into this rut.
As an example, after university I discovered that when I'd been struggling alone to do my assignments and assuming all the guys were just finding it easy, all the guys were going round to each other's rooms, hanging out together, discussing work and looking at each other's code. They didn't think to invite me, possibly out of fear that I'd misinterpret it as a date or that I'd ruin the boys' club atmosphere, and I rarely asked them about work for fear of looking like I wasn't up to their level.
While it's not quite so obvious in the workplace, there's still some of that going on over lunchbreaks, after work or in impromptu meetings. And once you've been unintentionally out of that loop for so long, it's very hard to feel confident enough to ask people for a quick primer in what they're doing, because you feel like the only one who doesn't already know. Again, not intentional and by no means exclusive to women, but as a woman in a mostly-male workplace you are automatically something of an outsider and that can be hard to shake off, especially when trying to shake it off could get you labelled as "pushy", something women are generally socialised not to be.
"As an example, after university I discovered that when I'd been struggling alone to do my assignments and assuming all the guys were just finding it easy, all the guys were going round to each other's rooms, hanging out together, discussing work and looking at each other's code. They didn't think to invite me, possibly out of fear that I'd misinterpret it as a date or that I'd ruin the boys' club atmosphere, and I rarely asked them about work for fear of looking like I wasn't up to their level." - this x1000. It doesn't help when you're attending a super competitive CS program with a bunch of people who seem (or give the appearance of) knowing everything. I'm not saying they really could have done anything about it, or it's anyone's fault I felt excluded. In fact, it was entirely my fault I did all my group assignments alone; had I overcome my introversion, I have no doubt I would have gotten friendly responses. However, I think CS is going to be attractive for a higher proportion of introverted people than not. How do we make those environments friendlier to sensitive outsiders like this? It's not an easy problem to solve.
While 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)
That'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.
Of 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.
I'm not saying her opinion is more or less valid than Faruk's, but in terms of the antecdotal "arguments" of her blog her authority may be less meaningful than, say, someone who works with 99% male neckbeards hacking linux kernel for 15 years (just as his anecdotal arguments would be less valuable than hers).
> (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?")
There are good ways and bad ways to broach the topic, but this is an important question to answer. Not as a hiring filter per se, but as a likely problem that needs a solution.
I went to college with (And teaching-assisted / tutored) classmates older than me, and I had to deal with the issue of "how will you handle it if people don't take you seriously as a young person?" (I didn't deal with it very well, until I got old enough that a couple of years of age difference wasn't significant anymore. Gender doesn't fade away like youth does, so gender-related issues needs active problem-solving)
I agree, it's a valid problem to deal with, but the wrong time/place for it. Remember, at an interview, you are putting the impression in that young person's mind: "wait, people won't take me seriously as a female?" -- that's something they carry with them beyond the interview.
I agree with almost all of this save the part about the gender balance eventually evening out.
I don't know that there ever will be parity and I don't know that that is a problem.
Proportional representation is not always desirable or natural. Different groups do things in different proportions. Such is true of men and women; in aggregate, they do things in different amounts. This is not de facto evidence of insidious discrimination; we don't seem to assume so in the case of men not being in female-dominated industries like education.
Ultimately the lack of proportional representation is mostly the result of real differences between men and women. To try to create proportional representation would either demand hiring tokens or heavy duty social engineering to reduce gender differences. I don't like either option.
I think "even out" was a bad/lazy choice of words on my part. What I mean is, it will get to a point where the ratio of women in tech will be more or less equivalent to the ratio of women that WANT to be in tech. This may or may not be exactly 50%. It could be 25%. I don't know myself. It's getting better in certain areas, but when you talk about "technical" positions e.g. programming, sysadmin, etc the ratio seems to be pretty bad and far less than what it could be.
Right now I suspect too many women that are kind of interested and may want to do this kind of work are scared off/intimidated (or worse, they never even consider it because of the thought "I'm not that kind of person") by the stereotypes/culture/etc and that's too bad.
I 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.
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.