Hacker News Reader

Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

Could you perhaps state those reasons?

[edit: sorry for asking. Didn't realize asking a poster to explain their reasoning was frowned upon here. ]

I'm a female dev who has mostly worked in male-dominated teams. I'm currently working in a female-dominated team. The differences are extreme, with the largest being that the mostly-female team has a really difficult time taking criticism and giving criticism (saying 'no' to bad ideas). They're too optimistic and not realistic enough IMO. But what do I know, I'm just the dev! :\

I'm not surprised that giving criticism is harder, since women are socialized to give feedback indirectly, through body language and other social signs, and even when speaking about a problem not to do so plainly. Simply saying what you think is treated as a "masculine" trait. I imagine the ways of communicating that are treated as appropriately "feminine" are much less effective in a technical context.

Do you consciously model ways to give criticism that your female coworkers will feel comfortable with? Does it help them open up and criticize each other? What works? (This is a subject I have an interest in in a personal context as well, since I sometimes get baffled and frustrated by indirect communication and would like to be better at coaxing women to be more direct, which is hard if the relationship isn't already close.)

Also, I'm surprised that women have a hard time taking criticism. I didn't expect that at all. Can you say more?

Both genders bring different experiences and perspectives to problem solving.

Also having a mix of genders in an office in my experience leads the natural cliques that form in any office to be more interdependent. I'm not a sociologist or claim I can explain it but that has been my experience in working in almost purely female or male environments and working in mixed environments.

Having someone in the extreme minority will always make them feel like an outsider.

If you are problem solving in a domain where gendered perspectives are irrelevant [1], would you then agree there is little value to having diversity?

As for cliques, I don't have much experience with them. Within university departments, I only observed three particular flavors of clique: domain specific (math/physics, number theory), chinese, and women. I suppose you are right - the woman clique did have women from multiple domains in it.

As for being in the minority, I don't agree with you there. In all walks of my daily life, I am an extreme (racial) minority. In the past month or two, excluding family, I've had a conversation with perhaps 2-3 people of the same race as me. It isn't an issue at all - right now, I feel like less of an outsider than during past periods where I dealt with lots of people like me.

[1] Examples would include every field I've ever worked in: trading stocks, medical imaging, quantum physics.

I would say getting perspectives from different people is never irrelevant. So no I would not argue against diversity even in those cases you listed.

It is possible you just didn't recognize the cliques. They aren't always super obvious even when they are prevalent.

I like racial minorities in the workplace are a different concern than gender minorities. Mindless discrimination based on race is very much noticed and looked down on these days. I wouldn't say its the same about gender. If all your co-workers always forgot to invite you to lunch or assumed you wouldn't want to do what they do because of your race you would be right to compare.

Now you are begging the question. How is a woman's perspective different from a man's perspective on Fourier analysis, scaling a database or technical analysis of stocks?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com