I am tech – Real stories from women in technology | Hacker News Reader

I am tech – Real stories from women in technology

mixpanel.com

56 pointssuhail68 comments

One thing I have learned from my wonderful partner is stories like this can be incredibly alienating to women who don't fit into them.

For example, the "all women get catcalled" - my partner notes that since she never gets catcalled, she must be too ugly.

So what about the women who have an entirely different kind of experience? This article is a classic: https://medium.com/@maradydd/okay-feminism-its-time-we-had-a...

Is the implication here that we shouldn't let women tell any stories unless their experience is an utterly universal one experienced by every woman?

Just seems like a way to derail a worthwhile project like this. It is clearly collecting a wide variety of stories, and IMO that's worthwhile. After all, minorities - by definition - don't have universal experiences, but surely they're still worth telling?

I thought the poster just wanted people to avoid generalizing. "All women get catcalled" isn't okay, but "I often get catcalled" is fine.

I think this would be fine, if more people were talking about it. My fiancee phrasing things in a way like "I often get catcalled" frequently gets derailed by people saying what the OP here mentioned. And at that point the discussion does get shut down, because if she does mention that most of her friends have the same experience, the implication does come up.

Depending on where you live, and what you do in your day, attractive women do get cat called. A lot. An upsetting amount, and just because it's not a universal doesn't make the derailing okay either. I'm sure that people saying this don't mean to derail, just as people mentioning the catcalling don't intend it as an insult, but it does shut down conversation.

Is the implication here that ryanobjc's partner can't tell the story of how alienating these stories are to her, because that would be derailing a worthwhile project?

In fact, is the implication here that any story that is not in harmony with such a project's goals may immediately be shot down as 'derailing', without addressing the actual concerns or criticism at all?

That is how you get groupthink and echo chambers.

That's why there are multiple stories. So someone reading can see the whole range of women's experience in technology. I'm sure there will be some good, some bad.

You're correct. Something else that's noticable here is that they're all white women.

Just a quick preview of one video indicates they aren't all white. A lot are, but not all.

You mean the demographics of the videos match the actual demographics of tech companies shocking

The page presents multiple stories from multiple perspectives to try to cover all experiences. From looking at the pictures, I'm positive at least one of the women on the front page probably doesn't get catcalled either, so your partner is covered.

Another thing I don't like about this page is that they are only focusing on Software Engineering as if it represents the entire world of "Technology" aka "Tech."

I'll have you know, there's a lot of "Technology" in the kitchen as well. For example: dishwasher and microwave.

> "all women get catcalled"

Which one of these videos did that quote come from? I haven't watched them all, but I didn't see it in the few that I watched.

> So what about the women who have an entirely different kind of experience?

Just because some women have different experiences doesn't mean that there aren't real problems that other women face.

For instance, if I have never been a victim of mugging, that doesn't mean that mugging is still not a problem. And hey, I live in a city; so should I say that we should stop talking about problems with urban violence just because I haven't personally been subjected to it?

Since the page renders terribly for me, here are all the videos the page links to:

I am Tech: Challenges - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fg_ECYhptDo

I am Tech: Love - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5EzYG-2fss

I am Tech: Advice - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3NqI-0u9sA

Hilary Stone @ Mixpanel - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_STckadkcVQ

Jenny Finkel @ Mixpanel - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-2YaP4UfHY

Liz Clinkenbeard @ Github - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_tVT0dhEMU

Really hard to hire women in tech. Whenever I interviewed them, turned out they only studied Liberal Arts in college. That is very unqualified. And for the few ones that studied Physics, Engineering, or Computer Science in College, Google and other major compnies alredy hired to them all. So again, no luck there either.

In the end, you really can't force women to study something they don't like, like Calculus and Physics, the requirements for Computer Science. Afterall, they're independent, and they will study whatever they want in college, which is usally Liberal Arts, Teaching, Psychology, or Biology. But never math, or physics.

There's plenty of women that study math and physics. I know this because they were in my classes in CS, math and physics, and beside me on graduation day.

Your assumption that women don't like these topics is wrong. I'd encourage you to seek an alternative explanation for why you are having trouble hiring women.

Although there were women in my math and physics classes to, there were definately way more men than women. And not only that, some of women eneded up doing something different after graduation.

Just because you have a degree in something doesn't mean you're will go into that field. A lot graduates ended up with a career different from their degree. Most of the time, the degree is used just as a 'certificate that i finished college' to get a job.

The problem is, women are not entering STEM careers. They don't want to. And certain people are trying to force STEM down their throat, without their consent.

You can't hire women if they're not in STEM, you can't hire them if they've decided to work in some other field instead.

The argument is:

a. Since there are not many women in these professions, young girls and women don't aspire to them. b. A decent amount of women enter the STEM fields but fall out of them because they feel unwelcome, discriminated against, etc. c. The discouragement starts early too. Our culture is very gendered and girls get pushed towards pink and fashion and boys towards soldiers and tech in general.

Here are some examples of things that make women feel unwelcome. It's pretty depressing. http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Timeline_of_incidents

I don't disagree with you re: the current STEM ratios and I do think it's a hot button issue because tech fields are lucrative (and of course because articles that piss people off get more clicks). You don't see women complaining about the construction, trucker, fisherperson, etc. jobs that are predominantly male nor do they ask for more men in nursing and education to have more gender balance there.

So tl;dr: fix the STEM pipeline starting at age 6 or so and treat the women that are here with some common decency.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_tVT0dhEMU

Is this a positive story? Is it supposed to be? Is this a story from GitHub? I'm confused about this.

Whether the events happened at GitHub or elsewhere doesn't matter for the story. She is describing her personal experience so that other people may be find the courage to ask for what they feel is equitable.

The page won't render properly because Ghostery blocks some Adobe feature as a tracker.

I have the Adobe one whitelisted and it doesn't work for me either. Can't be arsed to work out why.

Edit: I guess these are the videos: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCogU9fanQxHuSDcKXunHOgg/vid...

It's actually the Mixpanel tracker, which is unsurprising, since the entire website is Mixpanel.

i am still struggling to understand how this is important, and why we should care. men have struggles just the same, this is like reverse sexism.

well said.. unless people start taking a stand against this, we will have intelligence dragged down and innovation and pioneering taken hostage.. as we have already in cases like that of Sir Tim Hunt etc

The reason others are concerned about this while you are not is that many people regard this proposition as wildly incorrect:

> men have struggles just the same

Yes, men and women both have struggles. But many believe (including myself) that women face many more challenges by virtue of being women, than men do by virtue of being men. Women are more likely to be sexualized in work (and any other) environments, their reactions to events are more likely to be described as "emotional" or "irrational," they are widely considered (without evidence) to be inferior to men in fields like math and science, etc.

Don't forget: until relatively recently, women were widely regarded (in both law and society) as the property or either their father or, once married, husband. This is still the prevailing view in much of the world. And debates like this still go on: http://www.debate.org/opinions/are-women-the-property-of-the...

Under these conditions, it seems natural to expect that women face a lot of unique challenges, to put it mildly--and that expectation is indeed born out by the actual experiences of many women.

Discussing these issues is important because it is a crucial part of our shared efforts to eliminate these phenomenon.

that's all fine and dandy, but no one is bitching about the fact we have very very very few men working in the child care industry, for instance... better start subsidizing their jobs too?

men and women were both given the same choice of universities and classes in high school. the tech sector did not turn its back on women or minorities, they turned their back on it. now that its profitable they want a piece of that pie.

It's exhausting to keep having this same conversation over and over, but I suppose that's the purpose of comments like yours.

Look at the graduation rates for women and minorities from CS programs; then look at the industry participation rates, particularly over time and particularly with reference to seniority. They're not turning their back on tech, they're being driven out.

It is exhausting and frustrating. We need to store copy pasta for these conversation. Maybe I will compile a list.

Looking at women's CS graduation rates means nothing if you don't look at overall graduation rates. I have yet to see any proof that women are really being driven out from CS rather than being driven into some other field.

True enough. But I don't think everything is necessarily A-OK so long as women are landing in some other field. It is also important why women are being driven away from CS (whether into some other field or not).

it's always been profitable. but now it's socially acceptable, even prestigious depending on your role. big difference.

Yes, I am all for greater male participation in the child-care industry. (I really am!) So say we all. Are you satisfied? Will you now please join us on in constructively discussing the exclusion of women from tech, law, science, politics, accounting, carpentry, the military... and how to fix it?

If the child care industry were representative of men's exclusion from most high paying, socially powerful fields, then I would expect the 'bitching' to begin. But, as it is, the child-care field is not a field that a lot of men would like to get into, it pays fairly poorly, (unfortunately) confers little power or respect, and is largely an anomaly in an economy where most jobs, especially powerful ones are dominated by men.

The "confers little power and respect" bit, by the way, seems to be true of most woman-dominated fields (child care, teaching, nursing...). Do you suppose this is a coincidence?

> But, as it is, the child-care field is not a field that a lot of men would like to get into, it pays fairly poorly, (unfortunately) confers little power or respect, and is largely an anomaly in an economy where most jobs, especially powerful ones are dominated by men.

Its actually not really an anomaly for jobs that pay fairly poorly and confer little power or respect to be dominated by women and/or persistently disadvantaged minorities. (It's really part of the same effect as jobs that pay well and confer power and respect being dominated by white men.)

oh this is a copout! there are many low wage job categories dominated by men... garbage collection, construction(low level), shipping, commercial kitchens, yard work, i could go on and on.

none of which get neither money nor respect.

why should someone engage with you when you are already convinced you are right?

Yes, people are bitching about the lack of men in childcare. Go seek out child development communities online and see them wrestling with the problem! See men who try to et into childcare complain that they are assumed to be incapable of working in early-years education because they might be a pedophile! It's a huge problem, and one we should get upset about. On teaching and child development forums these exact issues are discussed.

But this is hacker news. A site for people in the tech industry, not the childcare industry. We can and should care about representation and participation and opportunity in our industry. We can do something about it here.

interesting, i was unaware of a movement in childcare to get more men involved. i do think it similar to tech, in that(historically) if a man said he wanted to run a daycare for a career, it would have raised eyebrows. just as a woman saying she wanted to be a software engineer might have at a time. that said, in the above reference. the man would still, to this day, get a lot of strange looks for picking that as a career choice, whereas the woman would not.

In spite of the fact that countless surveys and specific women regularly report that they often still face difficulties being accepted as techies, both by male technical peers, and by nontechnical people, and that they are persuaded against going into technology by both explicit advice from family, teachers and role models, as well as cultural expectations and media images, you're saying you think that women don't get "strange looks" for picking software engineering as a career any more?

Why do you think women feel the need to create websites like this (https://mixpanel.com/i-am-tech/) in the first place if the idea of being a woman in tech is only "historically" eyebrow-raising?

The assumption that sexism is, like racism, one of those things that people used to do in the 1950s, is really not helpful.

you are assuming that men don't also face this issue or similar? not dressing hipster enough, not being a mac fanboy, being older then the rest of your team, preferring one programming language over another, etc. Men have issues as well, and I've seen men catch much worse hell at work in IT then any woman i have worked with. until you have worn another's shoes, you cant state that they have it any easier with any more certainty then picking a keno ticket.

> but no one is bitching about the fact we have very very very few men working in the child care industry, for instance

Don't lie. A simple websearch returns very many hits for people talking about the shortage of men in pre-school and primary school education.

let me ask you this simple question, whether you take it in context or not is upto you :) ... do you really think and know I might add, that there are no differences between men and women? especially in their brains??

I am sure there are differences. But I do not assume, like some, that these differences -- whatever they are -- coincidentally make women worse at the tasks that our society deems economically and politically important.

There may well be differences. So what I do about that is this: I scan my wall for my certifications in neuroscience. None there.

I then scan my recollection for serious papers written about the subject, with results that have been reproduced and represent the consensus view of scientists working in the field. None again.

Therefore, I conclude that my debating whether men's brains are different than women's brains would be an exercise in ignorance, much like those politicians who "proved" there is no global warming by brandishing a snowball.

> But many believe (including myself) that women face many more challenges by virtue of being women, than men do by virtue of being men.

That's absolutely a position you can only take because of your own privilege. Lower income men face arguably the worst discrimination available in the US since they are way over represented in our prisons.

I don't think trying to determine which of the sexes has it "worse" is in anyway a winning proposition or something anyone should be doing.

Hold the phone! I didn't say that all women have it worse than all men. I totally agree that gender is just one of many factors that gives some people unfair advantages and other unfair disadvantages.

My only claim is that being a woman tends to be a disadvantage in the same way that being poor or being black tends to be a disadvantage. It obviously is the case that the advantage/disadvantage conferred by one trait (here, gender) is conditioned by other factors. So, it might be that upper-income white women are more disadvantaged relative to upper-income white men, compared to the relative disadvantage of lower-income white women with respect to lower income white men. This certainly seems like a real possibility given, as you say, the unreasonably high incarceration rate of lower-income men. (Though I'm not sure I'm ready to commit one way or the other on who has it worse. I just don't know enough about the lives of lower-income women, frankly.)

Given that we were talking about the software industry, though, it seemed reasonable to relativize the conversation to, broadly speaking, middle/upper income people.

You said this statement:

> men have struggles just the same

Was wildly incorrect. It is not.

These woman made videos to share their experiences as women in tech. Men are free to organize and make their own videos too. No one is stopping anyone.

why are people down voting this? instead of valuing someones opinion and discussing things, you just try to make the opinion go away.

Hm, company behind such project could be a bit more diverse.

Here is picture of their team: https://mixpanel.com/jobs/

Great idea... So they should start hiring women who don't have the skills over others (who happen to be male) that do. Wonderful suggestion. But I'm sure they can fake-make a few Social Media fluff positions for women to fill. It's what GitHub did.

Why so angry? If company in Bengalore can have 70% women engineers, it should not be a problem for well funded startup in US.

Men make up 75% of the IT workforce and 82% of computer science graduates. If women aren't even studying the field it makes it a tad harder to hire them don't you think?

People should aspire to hire the best people in their field not the "right" gender, color, sexual orientation etc. Anything else is bigotry under the flag of diversity.

Also if you can do a little basic math you should be able to see that the average company will be no more diverse than the labor pool. For every company that is 50/50 other companies will have even less than the average.

I may be stepping on a landmine, but your numbers make me curious. Is the goal of gender diversity 50/50 female/male, or is it 20/80 female/male based off the compsci graduates? What does it mean to have a diverse development team, and how did those numbers happen?

You sarcastically state: So they should start hiring women who don't have the skills over others (who happen to be male) that do.

This asserts that if a company has hired a preponderance of men, and then it goes out of its way to hire women, that it necessarily must hire women who are inferior to the men it was predisposed to hire.

This is based on your axiomatic belief that the company's hiring was already fair and unbiased, and if a company doesn't have any (or has few) women, this is because there weren't any qualified women to hire. Same for people of colour, &c.

So if hiring is already objectively fair, seeking diversity must necessarily involve hiring inferior people.

But the argument falls apart if hiring ISN'T objectively fair, if the assumption is wrong. And that's the point being debated. Thus, if you feel that hiring is already objectively fair, you should state that outright, not beg the question being raised.

What if that's their perfect team? Stop trying to force diversity for the sake of diversity. Some companies/teams are diverse, some aren't.

Pretty sure the parent poster's point is that it's a very common rhetorical tactic amongst some proponents of postmodern social justice to expect perfect equilibrium between nation-wide population demographics and particular company staffs, then criticize the company for not following this unrealistic expectation.

They were mocking it.

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