Tech is the best industry for women
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Let's keep tech inclusive and accepting and weird.
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Before switching to software, I was a Research Associate at the Fred Hutch. At one point my Principal Investigator told me point-blank: "I don't expect to help you or motivate you, the other Research Associate, or the PostDocs much, because you all get paid far more than the Grad Students."
Being a manager and giving a bit of excitement and motivation is so easy. It's free! It's free to have a positive attitude and be excited for your work and let that be infectious. Yet my boss just decided not to do it. Academia biology research is so fucked.
I think you can be unpopular or stick out in a lot of ways and still be successful, but I don't think it's as simple as come-as-you-are. You'll do fine (I'm sure Eich is personally fine) but you can easily hit some challenges along the way.
Also, if you want to keep tech weird doesn't that mean you need to reject the non-weird, the "conformists". How is that accepting at all?
Tell that to software engineers past the age of 50.
Look, every industry has its pros and cons. Sure tech is good for the Burning Man crowd (if you live in the Bay Area or other major American liberal city), but it certainly suffers from a ton of ageism, among other maladies.
I think it all comes down to what sort of industry you personally feel more comfortable in. For me, that's tech, but if my conservative Christian grandmother were alive today she sure as heck wouldn't be comfortable in the Bay Area tech scene.
Whenever you find yourself patting yourself on your back for being inclusive, just do the math - is your group really inclusive or is it just symbolically signifying inclusiveness?
Come work at a BigCorp. Here at Microsoft, every age range is represented, W/L balance is great (people supporting online services who are responsible for The Phone that week aside), and every team I have been on strives for diversity and inclusion.
That said, is it a pure meritocracy? Of course not, people who play politics and are good at getting assigned to high visibility projects get promoted faster. But good work is rewarded, and people are generally quite happy.
Edit: The food isn't free, but the on campus medical clinic, summer farmers market, and other tiny perks that come from having a huge and expansive campus set amongst what looks like woodlands, more than balances it out.
And, regardless of gender, no one will bat an eye if you go at 4:00pm to pick up your kids.
BigCorps also have stability which "old" people need to support their families, especially when the kids are going to college.
I have contracted with numerous companies with old engineers. Insurance, Embedded Appliances and Defense had a reasonable distribution ages.
I'm not trying to be negative towards your experience --- I'm glad you have a happy perception of the industry --- I just want to reinforce how important it is for us to improve diversity in all its forms before we start congratulating ourselves.
Tech's not perfect, but I think they do it better than most (all?).
None of them are, but tech isn't any better.
This does seem to be changing for the better thanks to the Internet, but there's still a very long way to go.
One thing for sure is that no industry in the world is all that meritocratic. But Music and Sports (even with the mainstream whitewash) for sure has a better social and racial distribution than any other industry I can think of.
1. Many companies have a low interview bar. Anyone with a CS BS degree can get an interview at at least a few good companies. If not, you can spend time creating interesting Github projects to boost your chances.
2. Your performance in the interview usually depends on the amount of time you spend studying algorithms.
3. Most knowledge and skills in the industry can be found one click away. General software engineering jobs are self-learnable as long as you have an internet service and a web browsing device.
Additionally, networking plays a huge role in who hears about a job opportunity, who gets interviewed and who gets hired.
A few months ago, I made a sexist statement here on HN about women and that they don't think logically [0]. Well, I couldn't be more ashamed and sorry for that. I've known some incredible women in tech ever since, and came to realize that I was wrong. Tech is actually a place where women can shine.
[0] That statement got my account banned and I couldn't get it back.
Edit: corrected my sentences to better convey my meaning.
For the future, if you're actually contrite, you should probably stop referring to that belief as a "fact".
Inclusion means accepting people as people, not accepting just the people who look, talk, and share the same beliefs as you.
No. There are some beliefs that run counter to our societies ideals. Those beliefs and the people who espouse them should be shunned. Harshly.
Sorry you (theoretical Republican) don't think Gay people should be allowed to get married. Keep your backward ass beliefs to yourself.
If someone holds well reasoned and logical beliefs for hating the gay-hater that person can at least suss out some amount of logic.
I am not saying that all homophic are stupid or that all haters of the homophobic are smart, but one of these uses evidence and logic and that correlates at loosely with intelligence.
If that means Tech is not inclusive--then you're right.
And I think using "backward ass beliefs" to describe Republicans seems pretty bigoted to me. It certainly doesn't win over the 40% who do support gay marriage from working with you and it excludes half of the country.
> It certainly doesn't win over the 40% who do support gay marriage from working with you and it excludes half of the country.
We're not trying to convince bigoted people to not be bigoted here. We're trying to cultivate a work place that doesn't discriminate against most people, and that _probably_ means that we can't tolerate certain bigoted beliefs. In my mind, not hiring someone who doesn't like gay people is quite similar to not hiring a jerk.
The OP called Republicans "backward ass belie[vers]" for not supporting gay marriage. I responded by saying that was a bigoted statement and doesn't make sense because 40% of Republicans do support gay marriage. The OP's larger point was basically that we should shun Republicans because of their "backward ass beliefs". I never mentioned that we should include anti gay workers, I didn't even mention gays. I just said we should be inclusive of Republicans. Are you agreeing with the OP's original assertion that we should shun Republicans?
Let me give another example. I am a male and I am not attracted to overweight / obese females. So I actively discriminate against overweight people in my dating life. It does not affect how I treat overweight people in any other aspect of my life, including my workplace. If I had a public dating profile which says I preferred petite females would that be grounds to not hire me? Or to give another equivalent scenario, if I was a female who discriminated against short males in dating would that be grounds to not hire me? Or to go further, would you think its fine for the tech community to blacklist people who voted for Trump?
There's something deeply troubling to me about going down that rabbit hole. That people can make such blanket statements about an entire political party, esp the party of Abraham Lincoln.
To me as a Bengali, it's no different from my parents stating "Well Pakistanis want us dead. They conducted a genocide of us 50 years ago and they feel no different. Don't cultivate relationships with them"
NO. You don't do that. You judge individuals by the individual. Not by the their political affiliation, not by their race, not by their sexuality, gender, etc.
You don't say "let's not hire this person because they are Republican and Republicans hate gays". You evaluate the individual and if you think the individual would not create a good environment for your gay workers you don't hire them. But you do that regardless of their party. I know plenty of Democrats who are bigoted, racist, or homophobic.
Seriously, this feels like a liberal version of McCarthyism.
The original point was that inclusion means accepting everyone and their beliefs. Regardless of how bigoted they are.
And that is ridiculous.
No one is saying don't hire republicans because they are anti-gay, anti-womens rights, anti-immigrant, anti-abortion, anti-muslim.
What we are saying is that if you have an bigoted opinion (such as homophobia), keep it to yourself, or you will be shunned (in tech).
You want limited government, guns in the classroom, no government medical care, trickle-down economics, fine, we can debate those policies all day long and never agree.
But sorry, no, you can't get to be a bigot and expect us to accept it.
It depends. If you wear a MAGA hat to work at this point, I wouldn't mind if you were fired for it. Keep that bigoted shit to yourself. If you wear that hat at this point, you're, in my mind, actively discriminating against certain parts of our population and deserve 0 respect from peers. I would want you out of my workplace. If you voted for him and keep to yourself, whatever. The important part is that all of my coworkers who traditionally have dealt with such discrimination don't have to feel it from you.
The other response to you basically the rest covered my point.
> That people can make such blanket statements about an entire political party, esp the party of Abraham Lincoln.
lol. What does the Republican party of today have in common with the republican party of Abe Lincoln? Seriously, I'd love to hear it. The Republican party of today is so far from what it was even 40 years ago, let alone 150.
> Not by the their political affiliation, not by their race, not by their sexuality, gender, etc.
If you were a member of the neo-nazi party, I would not want you in my workplace either. No political affiliation deserves respect merely because of its existence. If you align yourself with bigots, even if you aren't necessarily one yourself, be prepared to be treated as one.
I say this as someone who is independent; I think both parties suck. But if you're going to be a Republican who thinks that gays shouldn't get married, get the fuck out of my workplace. I don't want you here, and I'd guess most of my coworkers wouldn't want you here either.
So the majority republicans support bigotry. And we should accept that?
There have been various criticisms levelled at the idea of "colur blindness", and I think that when people say they are in favour of a meritocracy, they are in favour of continuing this idea that people start on a level field in which everyone's merit can be fairly assessed. Merit is assessed by each member of the team, and thus personal bias comes into play. The mere operation on the assesment of merit is insufficient to remove these biases, if they do exist.
I don't like the idea of "sit down and do your work", beacuse to me it feels dehumanising. Yes, I know this is how "the system" works in the "real world" but I think this attitude is stopping us from realising that when working in a team we are all human and human issues need to be addressed. So in this sense I can appeal to you too in saying that efficiency may indeed be compromised with the "sit down and work" attitude when some people are clearly facing problems.
Our mode of production does not optimise for the human side of interaction, nor the psychological aspect of the effects of production (joint or not) (i.e alienation) and for this reason I would say that we're already too meritocratic. People turn out to be pretty poor judges of merit, at least from the arguments I have seen. Meritocracy can lead to someone regarded as more experienced or doing more "important" work shutting down someone else who has legitimate criticisms.
* Going to burning man
* Going to SXSW
* Working with the LGBT community
* Tattoos / Dyed hair
* Pole dancing
* Wearing Stan Smiths
* Being obsessed with high end coffee
You shouldn't be patting yourself on the back that tech accepts these things. I've seen terrible examples of the community not accepting:
* Those who believe in gun rights
* Those who are strongly religious
* Those who are homeless
* Those who are lower class
* Those who are H-1Bs (Indian outsourcing bias)
* Those who are Republican
* Those who are black
* Those who are old / have grey hair
Being inclusive and meritocratic doesn't mean accepting things that are within your culture. It means accepting those that are outside. I remember a colleague talking about a Dropbox all hands meeting where every one was patting themselves on the backs because the recruiting team had hired many from the LGBT community. He looked at me and said "Why the f* is everyone so happy? We literally have 1 black person in a company of almost 1,000"
Seriously, if you think that having colleagues having dyed hair or going to Burning man is proof that you are meritocratic or inclusive you are in a huge bubble.
I think there's some subtle definition creep in the word "inclusive" these days. It's starting to mean "cosmopolitan". I recall the recent STEM girl scouts story. One of the commenters called the initiative "inclusive", which isn't quite the right. It's the same girls scouts doing something different, so it's not more inclusive, really. Beneficial? Sure. Eclectic? Yeah. Progressive? OK. Inclusive? I'm not following.
Alternatively, it's a change by scout leadership which broadens the set of interests to which the Girl Scouts appeal, increasing the diversity of the population the scouts will be able to recruit and retain.
Hence, inclusive.
Perhals, but there's no reason the recruitment and retention effect on people with the interests it addresses would not be, at least to some extent, immediate.
You're right, the "tech tribe" does have improvements to make in inclusivity, but at least it's a home for some people who would otherwise be outcasts in socially conservative businesses.
As for a few things:
- I think we're just as accepting of blacks, our high school education system has just utterly failed them so much that we don't have a good pipeline for getting black people into tech.
- There are a different set of values in India that cause some clash between them and Americans/Westerns. There's the culture of following the letter of the request/task, rather than the spirit of the request/task. (Similarly but differently, mainland Chinese suck at asking questions when they don't understand something.) But my overall biggest complaints with outsourced contractors is a culture of "get shit done fast, and do any hacks to get it done". Because contractors don't stay with projects for the long-term, it's not surprising.
- The homeless and lower class are, almost by definition, not people who are achieving a ton. Tech is a meritocracy, we respect getting shit done, and we're not a jobs program.
:(
To address your other points:
* I don't buy the pipeline argument. I've seen huge bias is how the tech community treats blacks. For example, I've seen a few black colleagues try to transfer into software engineering and get huge amounts of push back. Ironically I did the same thing (transfer from product management to dev) and I was supported. Why was I treated differently? Probably because I'm Indian so I am supposed to be a developer. In all the interviews I do, people assume I have a CS degree and lots of experience even though my resume says the complete opposite. I benefit a lot from the assumptions around my skin color while a black person gets the opposite experience.
* I get why people don't like offshore centers but that doesn't mean they should assume there aren't some very talented H1B developers. I have seen many. India has some of the best computer science programs in the world.
* I don't understand your comment on the homeless but the point I was trying to make was that verbally insulting poor people, the homeless, or old people is not inclusive or meritocratic. I've seen many examples of that in the tech community. I'm not asking people in tech to give free jobs to the homeless I'm asking people not to verbally insult them.
Tech is all about mental aptitude. Some mental health issues interfere with the required skills and some do not. Someone with ADD, bipolar or impostor syndrome is not strongly adversely affected, while someone with dissociative schizophrenia and cannot make decisions that keep sheltered will not succeed in tech and might not even with proper treatment.
What can tech do to better reach out to people who are homeless because they have mental issues that impact their decision making so much as to destroy their ability to maintain shelter? This problem is too big for a company to handle we need cultural and government change to address that.
I don't know what is up with your black colleagure, could you expand on that? I went from being a shitty programmer to a decent because a black programmer taught me a few key lessons about how to think, so there are at least a few mixed in with us.
I think tech is about as inclusive as it can be barring isolated exceptions.
If I am wrong, then please tell me. I even asked for more information on something I was unsure of.
Tech is hugely accepting. It is too easy to be punished by putting out bad products, so people put aside that which doesn't matter for the product and get to work. Skipping people for any of these reasons could mean not hiring the right person. Any team without enough of the right talent fails in the marketplace.
It depends on whether the parameters of your group accepts more people, and another measure might look at whether or not your group accepts more kinds of people, or some weighted balance.
Also, if we were to add in some choice examples, I'd look at how the teaching profession treats LGBT people. Such people are under risk of being considered pedophiles. It's probably a career-killer, and any administration that backs that teacher would need strength to resist parents.
http://www.mit.edu/~jcb/tact.html http://ozarque.livejournal.com/176349.html
This might differ based on the herd, though. My uncle's cattle are beef cattle, so not much in terms of friendly human interaction. Dairy cattle might have less fear of humans.
Not here I don't. Every tech company I've worked in mostly had the same types of people there as everywhere else. I've never seen a single person with dyed hair, nor anyone who goes to Burning Man, is gender non conforming or has unusual hobbies like burlesque dancing.
Same with the companies I've interviewed at, applied for or toured around. I guess they'd skew younger than they would in other industries (though I haven't seen much of a difference on that front), but no one here is your hipster college student stereotype.
Still, maybe it's different over in Silicon Valley compared to London.
I'm tired of titles that don't explain what the article is about. Something like "Why the tech industry is a good industry for women" would be a more accurate reflection of the content.
We've been conditioned by clickbait farms to sensationalize our personal blog posts.
However, to be fair, headline writers have been writing "clickbait" headlines for far longer than there have been clicks. Headlines in magazines and newspapers have never been scientific journal titles.
Now, remind me why we shouldn't use smart headlines?
I really respect her for letting the facts and content of her article speak for itself. I wish more would do the same.
None?
But my hypothesis would be social services and hospitality because both those industries have a high percentage of women advancing from entry level to management roles and I think a track record of career progression is probably a decent proxy for it being a good industry for a demographic.
But I'm definitely not going to write a blog post saying "Social services it the best industry for women" until I did a lot more research into it.
All the things you hear about in tech, you hear about elsewhere. But the men in them don't seem to compete with each other over who can be the most self deprecating and sympathetic with those calling them out.
I wonder perhaps if this has something to do with the tendency of men in tech to be smart, introverted, liberal-leaning, wallflowers, humble (or fake humble), not socially well-tuned, somewhat feeble and self-sacrificial. (As a tendency, not a rule.)
Picture the employees in a Wolf of Walstreet type company, and employees at Uber. Is sexism equally frequent at both places? Probably. But which group of men do you see self-reporting and willingly fighting to adopt a self image of sexist? Probably not the Wolf of Wallstreet-ers.
"One hackernews points out that the problem in tech isn't endemic sexism, but that male engineers are just so much better than all other men."
Edit: By that, I mean the traits I pointed out above are debatable in terms of desirability. Things like self-sacrificial and feebleness definitely seem like flaws to me at least. I am somewhat surprised that you interpreted these descriptors as superior.
But I'll just add that you selected a couple traits for your examples out of a list of largely positive traits (either universally regarded as positive or lionized in tech almost as badges of relateable honor: introverted, wallflower, etc.).
The overall message as I read it was "men in tech are more introspective and empathetic."
I don't know what n-gate is.
Scott Aaronson had a really nice comment about this on his blog: http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2091#comment-326664
What's wrong with a fancy degree? I don't understand why fancy degree is used as a pejorative around here. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that most people these days that come from bootcamps make more money than people with "fancy degree"s.
You're gonna have to really qualify that statement. The vast majority of tech startups do not improve the world in any way.
The problem is the opposite. People with fancy degrees often look down on others who DON'T have fancy degrees.
Thus, other people often engage in defense, counter ribbing at the other side. But we need to be aware that the current culture context of this it is very common for Fancy Degree people to be praised and everyone else to be looked down upon.
Arrogance is not a desirable trait in any person, but doesn't a fancy degree take work? I find it interesting that on HN we seem to hold up startup employees as shining examples but fancy degree holders as corrupt power brokers, when both take quite a bit of effort.
> But we need to be aware that the current culture context of this it is very common for Fancy Degree people to be praised and everyone else to be looked down upon.
Right, but in tech, where most are paid astronomically high salaries, if the Fancy Degree is looked down upon, then aren't the non-Fancy-Degree people in a fairly privileged position? Maybe this attitude is only prevalent in the online HN forum, and Fancy Degrees are actually valued in industry.
There are lots and lots of other paths that one could follow, and they all have both advantages and disadvantages. One path is not automatically better than any of the others 100% of the time.
The problem is that the common, pro-fancy degree perspective comes from a very hierarchical perspective that just isn't true at all.
It assumes that Harvard is better Stanford which is better than a tier 2 or tier 1.5 school.
There is even a hierarchy AMONG similar fancy degrees. IE, Computer Science is better than Information Systems.
Many an Information Systems major will be able to talk about their experience of being shit on for their choices because apparently everyone thinks that the only reason to do Information Systems is because you didn't get accepted to computer science.
Because of the hierarchical cultural context in which we are in, I am not going to criticize Info systems majors for making fun of CS majors, nor will I criticize startupy, non-fancy degree holders on HN for making fun of the fancy degree holders.
Sure but then we're just replacing one form of hierarchy with another, where we replace company tiers with school tiers, and job titles with degrees.
> The problem is that the common, pro-fancy degree perspective comes from a very hierarchical perspective that just isn't true at all.
You don't think there's any truth in that an Ivy League school is more selective than a community college? I'm not saying that it makes sense to say that Harvard > Stanford, in all ways, or even that these schools have a fair selection system, but it seems to me that this has become a black-and-white affair (pro-degree vs. anti-degree, pro-hierarchy vs. anti-hierarchy) rather than a nuanced issue.
Lets say you have two people.
1 who went to an ivy league and gets a great job at an investment bank and another who went to a community college, but spent most of their free time self studying and building a startup that ends up being valued at, say, 10 million dollars.
Which of these two people is smarter, more successful, and/or a harder worker?
My answer is "I don't know". Both people have their strengths and weaknesses.
The school that you went to, no matter if it is an ivy league or a community college, is just a single aspect about you.
There are many paths to success and aspects about you as a person, and I would not say that what college degree someone got is even close to the most important or predictive factor about a person's life or how successful they are going to be.
She's new to tech. 2 years by her own account. That's not a lot of time to experience all the industry has to offer (good or bad). No comment on whether her feelings will change over time; they very well may not.
Pole dancing photos and other stuff. Maybe in SV. But, in DC, stuff like that is very likely career limiting. I can't say for sure, that's a gut feeling based on the jobs and companies in the area.
Unfortunately, this is the very definition of a straw man.
So, I'm not at all convinced that this is because of anything inherently virtuous about people in this industry. Rather, I think it's that we're at a point in business cycles and history where tech industry labor is sufficiently in demand that potential employers aren't using extraneous criteria to discard candidates.
While I think it is great that people are being treated well because of this, I also think it's important that people don't become complacent about issues like employment discrimination just because they happen to be doing well right now.
Why are you so concerned about 'skewed perceptions' than the suffering of others? Surely the latter corrected will automatically address the former without any intervention.
This kind of 'since its good for me its good for everyone' thinking is self absorbed and often premature. One negative experience could send the author careening to the other end.
I suspect there are some important truths in this post, and my intuition is perhaps a bit of naivete as well, it's hard to say for sure. I think humankind has a decade or two of suffering to go through before we can start to have conversations at a level above adolescence on topics such as this, but by then how many other things will have changed?
1.Tech is less bad than many, many other industries. I can personally speak to overt, even illegal sexism in the field of medicine at a level that would cause riots in tech. I’ve heard similar stories in academia, to say nothing of fields like manufacturing. We live in a sexist society, and the professional world reflects that.
2. Being “less bad” than other industries does not mean we don’t have an obligation to do better. We as an industry need to be doing more to make sure that the vast majority of stories are like this one. We’re not there yet.
For example, how would the relatively sterile and sexless HR policies of Big Co. handle the pole dancing the author refers to? How long before that had to go too?
But in IT and many other industries this kind of behavior would get you flat-out escorted out of the building. What's considered OK on a film set is not tolerated in most offices.
How is that a gender specific thing?
It's not perfect but it's there.
IE, it values the brilliant asshole.
Sure, the brilliant asshole is very smart, and makes good individual contributions. But thats not really what matters.
What matters is the TOTAL contributions of the entire team. And the brilliant asshole, often brings a lot of INDIRECT negative value to that entire team, as he creates a toxic culture that negatively impacts the other people that he is supposed to be working with.
Whether or not a "meritocracy" is good or not depends entirely upon the definition of meritocracy that you are using.
I haven't witnessed this, but maybe I've just gotten lucky with the companies I've worked at. The companies I've worked at seemed to value both your individual contributions as well as your ability to make others more productive.. being a toxic asshole to your coworkers would absolutely not fly, even if you were hyperproductive. There were certainly some people who were highly valued that were highly productive that didn't seem to particularly _care_ about making other people's lives easier, but they also weren't toxic - they mostly kept to themselves.
"Tech is the best industry for women, compared to the others"
It's not like it's the 60-ies. Posting photos about you having fun should always be allowed wherever you work ( well, maybe public jobs is an exception - politics, teachers, etc. ).
I'm sick of this topic, anyway.
I'm glad she has a positive experience. It's far from common. I wish her good luck on the road of discovering empathy.
As a guy, I didn't use the foosball table or the ping pong table all that much. They said it was a "brogrammer" thing, but I don't understand how other people wanting to compete on the table top sports among themselves is a somehow bad sign. If anything, it's good that the members of team that want to can bond over fair competition in something unrelated to job performance.
That is where the problem comes from. You'll be excluded from the "inner circle" unless you participate in a specific kind of activity.
Clearly, this is not limited to foosball tables. Or even typically male activities. The core problem is having only bonding experiences of a specific kind.
The biggest thing is, it's unnecessary. As a European, the US attitude of having entertainment at work continues to puzzle me. I go to work, I put in 8 hours of work, I go home and have fun. Why we need foosball tables (or reading groups, or wine tasting clubs, or whatever) is beyond me.
But if you must do it, you should be sure to offer diversity.
This was not the case. Some women did participate, but the ones who did not participate did not miss it. They went home or somewhere else because they have the wisdom of work-life balance.
> The biggest thing is, it's unnecessary. As a European, the US attitude of having entertainment at work continues to puzzle me. I go to work, I put in 8 hours of work, I go home and have fun. Why we need foosball tables (or reading groups, or wine tasting clubs, or whatever) is beyond me.
The men I've seen (in my case in Canada, not the U.S. [but probably similar]) tend to have less work-life balance. Since they spend most of their time at work, they more likely want to have closer relationships with their colleagues. Basically everyone I spend any amount of free time with was/is either a colleague, a client, or somebody I split rent with. Here in Toronto, it seems pretty rare to really meet anyone outside of family or work. Hobby clubs/classes are okay, but most people don't really go to many of them. If you live downtown, you probably don't know the names of your neighbours. You might never have even said a word to them.
Cities like mine, and I suspect areas in Si Valley, tend to encourage loneliness. Businesses are trying to build a social group to satisfy that need, and hopefully through that improve performance, reduce the cost of HR, reduce employee turnover, and reduce total compensation. This is what my office managers and HR folks have told me. In the U.S. I think it's exacerbated a bit by the relative low density of most cities, which makes it so that you have to drive to see people.
They offer company soda for the same sorts of reasons: Sugar intake increases blood glucose, which improves brain function (especially when stimulated with the company coffee), and it tends to keep employees sitting in their desks, where they are more likely to be doing work.
Are things really that different between here and there?
All the stuff described in your linked piece: I've never seen any of it in tech.
In garages? Sure they are full of what would otherwise be nsfw. But IT? Can't remember ever seing anything. 5 years ago I heard a couple of colleagues discussing the title of an NSFW video that someone had started playing or their computer as a prank after they left it unlocked. And about the same time we had what I consider ann @$$ as manager in the department next to mine.
He would attack girls yes but he would also attack anyone else so I think it was more about being a general @$$.
And I've worked at a few places.
As for the "never experienced" - you're lucky. Or just didn't see. I've worked at openly sexist companies, I've worked with teams that had a regular lunch at a strip club, and I've seen a lot of the "oh, girls can't code" bullshit. I've seen black and latinx people completely excluded from team activities.
A lot of the people doing that weren't aware of what they were doing, but that doesn't excuse it. And if you look at things like the Petri Multiplier[1], it will help you understand why minorities are more affected by this than majorities.
None of that would fly around here.
So you are right: the things you mention are deeply unprofessional.
I have never read an article in one of these popular news sites on what should be done to increase the number of men to teach elementary schools or nursing or increase the number of women in truck driving or mining so I will not buy the "equal representation" argument.
But I will add that tech jobs are better for women because it is more likely to tolerate flexible working hours and remote work and is better for women who want to bear children and are willing to spend more time with them. I think if people actually believed that there should be more women workers in a particular position or industry, they would be highlighting more practical aspects of the nature of the job and how it might be better for them... or highlighting some positive and uplifting facts like the first programmer was a woman (Lady Ada) and one of the first programmers of general purpose digital computers (ENIAC) were also women... but that is very difficult to find. All we see is outrage politics (which I think is responsible for scaring away even the few women who want to do the job) and it baffles me that they continue to find audience for that.
I come from a middle eastern background and my first language is Arabic. Through out my career, I've never encountered any working programmer who is from my background or speaks my language. But so what? I fail to see why this would be a problem for anyone.
And once something's on the front page, it's easy to get 50 upvotes in 10 minutes.
I bet if she went to some no-name university and people saw her pole dancing then her employment would be more limited
I'm not saying you can't work at Google from a no-name university, but but there is a steeper hill.
Once you have like 7+ years of professional experience, then education matters less.
I don't think her school compensates for her hobby. It's location.