“I had so many advantages, and I barely made it”: Pinterest engineer on sexism

Edit: I took a risk saying something like this, and have some karma to burn, but please, if you downvote, at least say why.

I don't have confidence in myself. Fault of society. Sexism.

I don't know how how to reject advances. Fault of men. Sexism. (BTW. How is giving anyone's a t-shirt with your name a sexual harassment? I could totally imagine a guy giving one to another guy and other than being rather lame gift, not be a big deal.)

Obviously being a guy makes it so much different, and your road to becoming an engineer is very straightforward. You're always overconfident, never shy, noone ever is mean to you, noone ever bullies you, society melted you to be a perfect human being capable of anything you desire.

It's amusing to see how woman raised in America (especially CA!), where everything is super sexist-conscious, and sometimes plain rigged in favor of girls (eg. how many boys vs girls gets drugged for ADHD, as they naturally can't stand still in the class?), still find a way to blame everything on sexism.

Of my programmer friends and classmates who quickly landed good jobs, only one ever took the initiative to ask his boss to consider hiring me. The others just smiled and shrugged when I begged for career advice.

Once I had squeezed into my first company, I rarely received support from my coworkers, and mostly advanced my skills through staying at work for extra hours and spending lonely weekends on side projects. I've come a long way, but I still wonder how far ahead I would be today if I'd just received a bit more support early on.

I'm not convinced that there is widespread sexism in the computer industry, because I've worked alongside and been managed by many fantastic women, and witnessed them advance as quickly as me.

However, I think it's a rare individual who can become a great programmer without having strong support, mentorship and encouragement. Women need that support just as crucially as men, and it's important to draw attention to the places where they are not receiving it.

I was thinking about this lately. I realized, that among my friends, we have been playing this weird game of terrible insults and trying to appear the smartest guy in the room since we were 10. We still do it while in pub some-times :)

Interestingly, girls never wanted to participate. I remember talking to one of my friends in High School where she told me how terrible one of my friends was, where he was always ridiculing her. I tried to explain, that this was normal among that particular group of friends, and that she should ridicule him back. She thought that attempting that wasn't worth the time and effort, because the result of her trying to flip the ridicule would probably be just more ridicule towards her. My thoughts were, yes, it took me 3 years to learn to endure the ridicule and fire back ... so, yeah, probably not worth it to get into this game, if you don't find it fun.

But as a esult, with this way we were trying to one-up each other for better part of a decade, of course "we were unfazed by any of the challenges professors might throw our way".

IMHO there's nothing that can really be done about the examples guys being assholes, or nothing that can be realistically done about all of them, but I think nine tenths of this article wouldn't exist if we start raising girls to be risk takers instead of social objects. Notice how much the author obsessed over themself in relation to everyone surrounding them. Fifteen hours on an assignment wasn't a problem until she heard of her peers doing it in less time. We're simply not going to have women succeeding in tech and entrepreneurship until we break down the construct of women existing solely as objects that are parts their society. We're all the absolute worst kinds of sexists, because of what men and women expect of young girls. Of course they're going to fail when they're raised believing that trying and failing is worse than not trying at all.

You're more privileged than 99.9 percent of the world. Just admit it and drop the false morality.

First, she went to Stanford, a school absolutely BUILT on bullshit, bluster, competitiveness and social networking. I'm about as dead center of the stereotypical male engineer as it gets--and the Stanford attitude came through and sure made me cringe when looking at graduate school. UC Berkeley matched my personality much more strongly.

Second, her parents inculcated into her to care way too much about her relative competence rather than doing something interesting. This, in my opinion, is always the dividing line that separates out the genuinely good from the mediocre. When you write a website to optimize trading card game returns, who cares whether it took you 5 hours or 15 hours to write it? It does something you think is interesting, and that is good enough.

Third, it seems like being the offspring of two PhD parents that she was missing a few social survival skills that most people learn from home. To quote House: "It's a basic truth of the human condition that everybody lies. The only variable is about what." That doesn't make people bad, but everybody has their own wants, needs, desires, agendas, etc. Everybody has to learn to deal with that at some point.

And, my thanks to that professor who made you a TA. I have occasionally, myself, had to twist the arm of a female undergraduate to become a TA, take on a programming assignment for a company, or enter a programming competition.

The strained sexism tie-ins were unnecessary because most of the challenges she faced are universal, I remember hearing the same gloating conversations and feeling the same way when I was young.

As for the back massages and tshirts with men's names on them, that is a bit weird and should probably be taken up with their supervisor if it continues. It's most likely to be caused by poorly calibrated social cues than straight up sexism. There's nothing sexist about awkwardly showing interest in someone, it's only a problem if they don't take no for an answer.

It's hard to do the latter - I think I'd succumb to welcoming women in the workplace to avoid being sexist, as opposed to the expectation of the colleague doing useful, good work - now that I think about it - ironically in trying to reduce sexism in the workplace, I would make a sexist situation worse. Maybe it would be better not to have read the article at all.

Sexism isn't necessarily intentional (socially inexperienced college guys hitting on the only girls in their peergroup when they are unwanted). However; it exists and is very measurable. The least we can do is acknowledge it, even if we don't know what to do about it.

I'm not sure about most of you men, but I happen to like having women around. If we can't encourage more to work with us, we can at least do our best to be accepting to the people we already work with.

Edit: We do have great, data-backed responses to all posts as always. Its a difficult problem to understand because most people won't experience it and are probably tired of being reminded about.

Let's face it, writing software is not for everybody. The author is such a person.