I worked for a woman cofounder. It's incredible the things some VCs told her, including trying to get the other founder to drop her from the deal explicitly because of her gender.
Make no mistake about it, the ugly goes way deeper than just a bad comment here or there. Thankfully the trend is toward better.
I'll second this; this was said in public to people that reported to her. What happened behind closed doors was likely much worse. Tracy's example of not using Mother's Rooms shows she was protective of that part of herself and not willing to even touch it when fundraising.
It makes me wonder about the correlation between "the more of an asshole you are, the easier it is to rise in power" and "the more of an asshole you are, the more you treat everyone you can (especially those that aren't the same as you) poorly". I can't think of a single time I've seen someone treated poorly because of race or gender in my professional career (direct treatment; I recognize that systemic problems are both harder to see and potentially more dangerous). I'm also not high up on the power scale.
I feel that in a lot of cases, this is basically just bullying. Where people in power, or at least senior positions, will belittle others to their own benefit. It may not be racist or sexist in its cause, but can be in its nature. Basically, if there is a way to highlight someone for any differences, a bully is likely to use that, especially if it can aim to demean that other person. So it will be sexism, or racism, though not because the originator is racist or sexist, it's just because they are ignorant, not bothered and just like to bully or put down others with any tools at their disposal. Made worse by the way they might rise in power as result of being an asshole in this way. Until they fall
Is the trend towards better? I used to think so but the stories I heard in my time in Google was really, really depressing. The problem is that getting worse can be a self-reinforcing thing. Once a few women get badly treated and leaves the gender imbalance gets worse and the bad behavior gets normalized.
Real change is slow, one of the biggest differences is you used to simply not hear about similar things.
Back during the Bush jr administration my mother’s PHD advisor was getting threading/demeaning phone calls late at night from senior members of the administration over some research she had published. What struck me is the story was shared because the researcher thought it was funny rather than actually intimidating. For context some aspect of no child left behind was being pushed because it would line specific people’s pockets and rather than simply be discreet about they where pushing a narrative.
Presumably they approached things like this because they thought it would work without blowing up in their faces. Now days I think the risk vs reward on such things has changed slightly. In another 20 years things will be likely be mostly the same but probably with minor improvements.
There is always at least one guy in any group more then a handful of people. It is terrible what kind of bullshit women have to go through in this industry.
This was an interesting read. I found it well written and kind of sad, if optimistic and hopeful.
Personally, I would love to see a lot more female developers. I am betting there is no significant difference in inherent potential talent between the two genders, so why are almost all coders I've worked with male?
One thing that bugs me: Women I know who wrote software kept finding new roles where they'd be in management instead and then they moan that they liked writing code and miss it. Maybe that tells us that sexism in software development is prevalent and they wanted out, which is no fault of theirs, and maybe they just wanted more money - but it definitely sucks overall.
I find blind technical interviewing easy because I don't usually remember new people after a few moments. My reports say "The applicant" not out of a deliberate effort to screen the potential hire's name, race, gender - anything like that but because if they left an hour ago I already couldn't tell you anything whatsoever about them besides that they've got this very idiosyncratic approach to loop structures or they seemed not to understand what thread safety means or whatever.
The only interviewee I remember at all now was a Russian woman for whom it was her first interview in the country, and her first interview in English, and my core goal for the entire time was to keep her calm enough that I could discern whether she knew how to do the job. It isn't humanly possible to stay terrified for say months, eventually she will relax if we hire her (and she did, she was fine within a week) - but she might manage to stay terrified for long enough that I can't tell if she actually understands what a compound primary key is and how these iterators I'm talking about work and if I'm not sure then hiring her would be a big risk.
My own personal experience as a female software developer is that there is pressure from all sides to go into management, and this pressure can come from both ill and good intent.
Others have mentioned that it might be because of perceived superior communication skills (good?), or perceived lack of "good-enough" technical skills (bad?)... both of these add to the problem, but I've also experienced that diversity-aware companies tend to explicitly want females in management/leadership positions because it sends a stronger message re: caring about diversity than e.g. having a female senior software engineer (As unfortunate as it is, I think most perceive "manager/team lead" as higher up the ladder than "senior software engineer").
A specific example: I worked at a startup where D/I was a huge topic and where we spoke about it during Town Hall all the time. Complaints (mostly from females from within the company, not necessarily from the Engineering department) were always about not having females as team leads, as managers, as directors, on out executive board, etc. So every quarter, each and every competent female engineer would be encouraged to try taking a team lead or management role if there was one open. Of course, a bunch of us (myself included) had 0 interest but the prodding was there.
EDIT: Also, just in case someone is going to take this as proof that "women have it easy" at "woke" companies because the bar is lowered for going into management or something... I feel the need to explicitly state that the bar wasn't lowered. When I say "competent" I actually mean the dictionary definition of "having requisite or adequate ability or qualities". I worked with some badass female engineers, who were certainly skilled enough technically and socially to lead a team.
> there is pressure from all sides to go into management, and this pressure can come from both ill and good intent
As a guy, I keep fighting this pressure a lot too. I think it comes from organizations who don’t have enough technical challenges and they’re afraid top talent will leave out of boredom.
Said managerial challenges are often self-imposed though; I think a lot of people will know of companies with too many managers, who don't do a lot of work (that we're aware of) and spend a lot of effort looking important and busy (and rich).
Mind you, for my previous employer (consultancy) I felt like there was too little management and hierarchy; every department had a management team consisting of one or two managers and one or two sales, with other non-core-business tasks (admin) handled by the parent company. But said managers had to do everything; sales, account management, hiring, personnel management & reviews, conflict resolution, and oftentimes they came "from the trenches" so there was often an attempt to help out directly in projects as well. I think they should've spread out the roles a bit more.
Mind you, by default both sales + management there would ALWAYS earn more than the developers; what they could have done is hire junior managers that took some of the work without the exorbitant pay check.
For someone who cares about their work and cares about the impact their work and exercise-of-power has on others... How do you even possibly "lower the bar" of difficulty for being in tech management?
Sure, you can throw someone into it unprepared... but that sounds about as bewildering and miserable as when I was hired as a Senior Engineer a year after graduating from uni.
Just based on what I've seen and the women I've talked to - a lot of women in tech are encouraged to move into management because (for a variety of societal reasons) they've just upskilled more in EQ than many of their male peers.
There is also overwhelming pressure on minorities to not only succeed and be perfect but to gain positions of power to make it easier for those that follow. It's incredibly difficult to do that as an IC (for either gender).
>Women I know who wrote software kept finding new roles where they'd be in management instead and then they moan that they liked writing code and miss it.
I hear this a lot from men, too. We have a general problem in the industry of being bad at making senior engineering a rewarding career track.
Right. We glamorize "management" in every way, even going so far as to label devs "individual contributors". As if they only contribute 1x while managers contribute multiples.
I have this gut wrenching feeling that tech companies just can't be fixed. There's way too much that has to change and the powerful people don't have much incentive to do the work.
Compare your best manager and your best engineer, and the manager _does_ contribute multiples more than the engineer does. You take this to the extreme, and the best CEOs in history have added additional billions in value to the companies that they've helmed.
This is more of a function of the person's role than their individual contributions though.
A CEO's decisions generally have far wider-ranging impact than an individual contributor's, but it's not a directly productive impact in the literal production sense. The CEO didn't personally add those billions of value, they enabled others to add that value.
Ultimately, a CEO's decisions don't come out of a vacuum. The available options are created by ICs and percolate through management. The point of the CEO is to act as a sort of tie-breaker to ensure that decisions are actually made by choosing some of the options.
At least that's the case in large established companies. Obviously the dynamics are different in a small startup where the CEO is also the founder, but if the startup is successful it'll eventually transition to the "large established company" case, even if the founder stays on as CEO.
Of course it's the role? Your generated value is always your individual contribution multiplied by the task that you chose to apply that effort to.
If you replaced an excellent CEO with a mediocre CEO or with a bad CEO, then you might see, from some baseline, doubling of the company's a value, or erasing it to nothing, based on which direction you decide to set the company and its culture. If you're the CTO for the company, your choice of team structure and how you choose to influence technical architecture could lead to productive happy teams or slow miserable ones. If you're the engineer in charge of writing a service, you could set your team up for tons of technical debt down the road, or a smooth running service that's easily and safely extensible. If you're doing a bugfix, you could spend the time to truly understand and solve the issue, or throw another if loop to the pile that the next person will find and have to understand before they can make their own patch to the code.
So, if you have the ability to spend a day on a single effort, one which will improve the life of one developer, or one that would improve the life of all developers, or one that would improve the life of all employees, there's obviously a preference from the company's perspective. And then you can consider things like, improving the life of people who don't even work at your company, but that's generally done on your own time, unless the company thinks that the reputation that they gain is worth giving you the time.
Anecdotal evidence tells otherwise :) Not kidding, in all the companies I worked for, the best engineers were way better contributors than average managers. Just consider that in many companies management is badly hit by diversity targets, they forcibly promote people to meet these targets and competency suffers.
Yes, I would definitely agree that good managers are much rarer than good engineers. Maybe it's because there's an order of magnitude less managers than engineers at a company, so you have less people to emulate and learn from? Maybe it's because engineers are able to use their off-time to improve their own skills, while for management you really only have books and no easy way for applied practice?
And then if we're talking about technical managers and not just CEOs, the literature there is even more limited, since most middle-management in the past has been of known repetitive tasks, rather than more variable more creative work. And it's not like there are schools that can spend four years teaching you how to be a good manager. MBA programs tend to care more about the details of running a business and let the people aspect figure itself out.
So maybe an analogy might be, if all the engineers you hired were self-taught, and if you only had one engineer assigned to each team. Then maybe your average quality of engineer would match your quality of manager.
One factor is that for engineers it is relatively simple to measure performance, while measuring manager performance is usually a very obscure and subjective process, allowing entry and promotions for weak managers.
For example, 30 minutes ago a senior director told her entire organization that the primary differentiation in the performance review for the managers will be "quality of communication". Not only this is subjective, but it is not a core performance indicator.
Yeah, interviewing is definitely harder. Again, we can draw the analogy to engineers. Is there a large pool of managers that have gone through interview training for managers and have dialed-in questions that give them good signal on how successful the managers will be? And then you run your candidate through multiple rounds of these interviewers? Are you running your candidates through different simulated encounters with different people and different setups? Or would you say it's closer to interviewing an engineer without asking them to code? So let's say you're trying to interview engineers without asking them to code, then you probably need to at least see all code they produced at their last job and ask their past coworkers about them. So then the analogous requirement for a manager would be to then interview a representative sample of their past reports?
Measuring how "good" your managers is always a hard topic. That's why I found Google's research on it so interesting, since they had both the means and the incentive to run a large-scale study using themselves as the dataset.
I'm not entirely convinced either that evaluating engineers works out that much better. What is the core performance indicator there? Lines of code? Tickets closed? Bugs created? Reputation amongst other engineers? All of those metrics are wrought with perverse incentives. I'd probably end up preferring evaluating managers on "quality of communication" compared to evaluating engineers on any of those.
I mean, this is an issue in every company on the planet, not sure why you single out tech. If anything large tech companies have the best IC paths out there.
This is true. Many other industries are absolute cesspools of corruption, nepotism, outright harassment and just all in all hellholes to work in, but the media loves to shit almost exclusively on tech.
>> but the media loves to shit almost exclusively on tech
I don't think so.
Hollywood has certainly had a lot of issues in the press...
Perhaps it's that you read more tech-focused media?
Or the founders/CEOs of big tech companies have massively high profiles and that can work against them when there is bad news to report about them or their companies.
Indeed, from people I know, working in a kitchen or as an auto parts delivery person is far, far worse for women than tech (not that tech should stop striving).
No, managers don't contribute multiples; managers are responsible for the contributions of multiple people (teams) versus individual contributions of each person in the team.
> Women I know who wrote software kept finding new roles where they'd be in management instead and then they moan that they liked writing code and miss it. Maybe that tells us that sexism in software development is prevalent and they wanted out, which is no fault of theirs, and maybe they just wanted more money - but it definitely sucks overall.
I secretly (well not in this moment but ordinarily secret) consider women in software development smarter than men, on average, due precisely to this observed tendency to spot where the social and monetary rewards are (management, other social roles "above" developers) almost immediately and start aiming for that ASAP.
[EDIT] this is in general bigcos and "startupy" places, anyway—I dunno if that trend holds in e.g. FAANG or finance or the other places where devs actually do make really, really good money rather than just good-for-not-a-manager like everywhere else.
Seems more likely that you have two groups here: one that needed to be very politically aware to get there, and one that didn't.
So yeah, the one that had to fight political fights to even end up in the industry are going to be better, on average, than the ones who got welcomed in.
If there was a concerted effort to keep men out of software you would notice that the men still in software were very aware of the political/power dynamics around them real quick. Because the rest would be somewhere else.
> due precisely to this observed tendency to spot where the social and monetary rewards are (management, other social roles "above" developers) almost immediately and start aiming for that ASAP.
Women are not identifying the most socially/financially rewarding positions in tech and aiming for them ASAP. Women in tech are getting told "gosh you are so good at communicating and being literate have you considered being a PM or a manager or any other non-technical role?"
Possible for a bunch of reasons that women in the field tend to be more assertive and have better communications skills. Those are primary management skills.
Yeah, I dunno why it is, but that could well be. I suspect it has something to do with whatever's resulting in women attending and completing college at a higher rate than men, but that's just a hunch.
[EDIT] jesus it's so hard to write anything about this without walking on eggshells—to be clear I'm not complaining about any of this, including the college thing.
I agree on the eggshell thing. I rewrote what I said three times to try and block off any interpretation other than the one I meant. I have some friends that are female engineers and you a get drink in them and listen to all the bullshit they've had to deal with, you have to imagine how thick their skin is.
Yeah agreed, IME women, in average, have better communication and social skills than men, in average, and as you say those are what middle management is mostly made of.
As a male I've also noticed a pressure to move upwards from a 'regular' dev to e.g. tech lead or architect, but that said, I've been fortunate to have spent a lot of time working for a company where that was mainly people's own ambitions; they got rid of or raised the wage ceiling for 'regular' developers at some point.
" I am betting there is no significant difference in inherent potential talent "
I don't think it's talent, more so motivation, interest, cultural dissonance, choice - and of course all the 'bad stuff' like environments that are directly or indirectly not very conducive.
Most fields have some kind of gender asymmetry. Have a look here [1].
If one were to take some time to experience a handful of those fields, I bet the answers to why 'software' has asymmetry would be similar.
I guess I'm saying the issue may have specific roots in tech, but probably more or less rooted in more broad, cultural issues.
I was following the time honored HN tradition of posting one line about the article and then taking up a tangent.
That might be a practice to do away with.
But to be literal, I asked because I wanted to talk about it and not just read about. However that may have been a mistake on my part; this article, found through my search engine, was pretty good: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/aug/08/why-are...
Points raised in the article:
1. Inherent differences between genders, if they exist, are tiny, and vary considerably from region to region
2. Starting in the 80s computers were marketed towards males
3. Computers were often in the male sibling's bedroom and not their own, according to interviews with some female CMU students in the 90s
4. Self-bias "For instance, girls tend to score worse on a test if they are told their maths skills are being assessed than when they are told they are taking part in a study investigating how people solve problems."
5. Hostile work environments: articles about why women should not be in the workplace, sexual harassment and illegal discrimination
6. May not be a worse gender gap than other industries such as finance or media
7. Cultural: women can (physically) start a family by having children; men cannot; there is an cost to staying in a work environment with regard to starting a family, and there is a "risk-taking" in the tech industry (to be honest, I've always found it very a secure line of work, but that is what the article says)
8. Tech may be well placed to bring more females into the workplace
9. Startups where someone is encouraged to spend a lot of time at the workplace are not doable for primary caregivers (which is often mothers)
10. Algorithmic biases being implicitly developed by a mostly male workforce (e.g. voice recognition trained and tested solely by men)
Final line from the article, and why I posted my root post to begin with: “Computing is too important to be left to men.”
You're right; it's bad practice. Sometimes I just want to talk tech and it's easier for me to talk about a tangent that I undersand than to stay on-topic when I don't have any knowledge, but that's a bad habit when it comes to a post on someone's article. I'll eliminate this behavior.
> I was following the time honored HN tradition of posting one line about the article and then taking up a tangent.
I don't have too much of a problem with that, it's asking a question you should research first.
It's not that I don't want to talk about it either, I just don't want to explain the basics every time. I'm also not an expert on the issue, many people have much more to say on the matter.
If I could add something to what you've pointed out, I'd divide the reasons into two categories:
The second one worries me a lot more. We are talking about women who chose IT, who are trained, who made it. We are talking about a market where jobs and opportunities abound, where you can work from home, move anywhere you want. And yet so many women find this industry unbearable.
From personal experience, I can't contribute much to point 2, as the temptation of leaving is foreign to me, nor do I know women who left. Maybe it's a cultural thing - I live in Europe and while brogrammers exist here, I have no problem finding good and respectful teams. I have worked for startups without staying late and yet got promoted to team leader. I have encountered sexism, but I also have been treated better because of my gender.
I have struggled with getting into IT, and my biggest obstacle was my lack of self-confidence. This is by no means reserved to girls, but we do hear the "girls suck at math", we see boys dominating math contests or math-oriented high schools, and it leaves a mark. Here's another good article: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-science-success/... The takeaway is that since girls are praised for results and boys for effort, "bright girls believe that their abilities are innate and unchangeable, while bright boys believe that they can develop ability through effort and practice", a vicious circle.
Still personal, but not limited to me: neurodiversity. Girls are far more often undiagnozed for ADHD and autism. We cause less trouble, we get less understanding for not behaving accordingly to society's norms. Life without diagnosis was one without help and resources to deal with my symptoms. Instead, I was told my problems were my character flaws, which left little of my self-esteem. When you don't believe you can do it, you don't try yet another solution, you don't search yet another query, but you buy into the narratives mentioned above: your gender leaves you at a disadvantage and always will, you got As because you were gifted but this is how far your talents go, clearly, you're not made for this.
> girls are praised for results and boys for effort
This is a sad thing, if true. If true, it does sound very changeable. From the article you linked:
> bright girls believe that their abilities are innate and unchangeable, while bright boys believe that they can develop ability through effort and practice.
Everyone should learn somehow that effort and practice bring about change in behavior and improvement in skill level. It's the only thing that has brought me much level of success, other than birth.
> Changing it in entire societies will take time, but there is talk about "growth mindset" vs "fixed mindset".
I am glad that things are changing, and rather disappointed/frustrated/annoyed that at this point in time it's still a problem. How can we as a society not instil in everyone a deep-seated belief in, respect for, and love of practice? Am I nuts or is that not so much to expect?
Oh brother. People aren't work-producing robots, developers included. Different types of people bring different types of experiences, opinions, and viewpoints. So you'll make better products if you have a more diverse group of people making them. On a personal level, wouldn't you like to work with a more diverse group of people as well?
>Wouldn't you like to work with a more diverse group of people as well?
I don't think anyone would really like to work with a truly diverse group of people. A truly diverse group would
-all speak different languages
-all be different genders (their origin culture, from which they immigrated last week, has some alternate view of gender)
-all have different views on what's normal and what's tabboo
-all have vastly different religious/quasi-religious views
The hip, trendy open-plan office would be an open war zone between the eunuch sun-god worshipper and the revivalist post-truth anti-christianite on the first day.
Aren't workplaces with a more or less even mix just more pleasant places to work? People seem to act more normal than when it's (almost) only men or (almost) only women.
there are many good reasons for wanting more women developers, IMO. are there any bad reasons for wanting such?
this is not a flip comment. if it causes a laugh i dont see a problem with that but it is honestly not intended to denigrate anyone, but bring people into, well, software, which is probably the greatest thing in existence.
diversity is generally considered a good thing in evolution.
i dont know if that applies to concepts like the tech industry, but maybe it does.
i am not against anyone and think the universe of software is a big one with a ton of room.
software is not created in a vacuum, nor is any other art or form. i want us all doing it, not just a bunch of people like me in every way.
-to signal virtue for PR purposes
-to expand hiring pools and thus drive down wages
-to get more sexual partners
-to create leverage points for internal politics (e.g. opportunities to accuse political opponents of sexism)
Perhaps you were actually asking about bad outcomes, not reasons:
-women are rationally perceived as less competent after they were given preference during hiring
-women who would have been happier in another field are encouraged into tech where they are less happy than they would have been in medicine, or law, or marketing, or at home
-women who aren't up to the task are admitted; the mismatch sets them up for failure where they could have succeeded and had better personal outcomes in another job
It is a documented (aka scientifically proven) fact that women generally prefer to work with people and men prefer to work with things. There are exceptions, of course.
In my 20+ years working in IT I met a single woman that was a developer and chose to stay a developer; a few moved from development to project management or operations, but most never wrote a line of code after graduating college, jumping directly in PM, ops or any role that allowed moving away from coding. I do not have any good explanation for this, my first sentence doesn't fully explain this.
