This. I think this is really damaging. A misogynist sees this characterization and thinks, "Lol. See, what did I tell you?" An employer thinks, "Hiring women requires hand holding." A young girl thinks, "My friends won't want to do this with me."
This. I think this is really damaging. A misogynist sees this characterization and thinks, "Lol. See, what did I tell you?" An employer thinks, "Hiring women requires hand holding." A young girl thinks, "My friends won't want to do this with me."
The cottage industry devoted to writing blog posts about how hard it is to be a woman in tech and all the sexism and hardship all women face along the way seems to be doing their part to continue to intimidate and discourage women from learning to code. But for the self-promoter, this continued imbalance offers basically limitless opportunities for career progression through pointing out sexism rather than through technical ability.
Easily 90% of the female engineers I encounter are from East or South Asia where these blogs aren't widely read. It's an interesting correlation, even if by itself it proves nothing.
As long as there is a market for that kind of rhetoric and enough eyeballs show up to generate the ad impressions, blog posts will be written about it. If shit on a stick was what everybody wanted to read about, we'd be up to our ears on whether blue or purple shit was the hotness this fall. The transparency of it and that people seem to find it confusing is the funniest thing of all.
Tech is scary for women. I've seen all kinds of casual sexism on the workplace that, while generally not intended as hurtful, men simply don't have to go through.
As a man, I'm pretty sure I've never had people talk about how hot I was after I left an interview or meeting. I've never been singled out to go fetch coffee, or told to "calm down, love".
FWIW, my mom, mid-50s, has been in tech since the '80s. She has complained of sexism. She also says the idea that tech is more sexist is a joke, and that her younger female co-workers complain a lot.
Anecdotes are anecdotes both ways, you saying zero of those things are scary is missing the point, women are not some sort of fragile creature that will get easily offended or scared; none of that is scary, sexism is not scary most of the time, but it's demeaning to be treated as a lesser.