- How do you know that?
- Because women told us!!
- How do you know that?
- Because women told us!!
This is not about generic workplace disagreements. Yes, those happen all the time.
> How do we know this? _Because men told us_!
I know that's tongue in cheek and only half serious but I'll reply anyway.
Even if 99% of men are more accommodating, that 1% would still make employment unbearable. After 10 years you probably met a few dozen assholes and just want to quit the industry because it's not worth it.
To give a few examples of preferential treatment for which I have first-hand information:
- a hiring committee at Google is officially more likely to rule in favor of hiring a female in "borderline" cases; men go straight down the shitter in that case. Promo committees similarly treat women more favorably.
- at Microsoft a hiring manager can't hire a male candidate, especially, god forbid, a _white_ male candidate, unless they filled their diversity quota, without first obtaining an exception from their VP (which very few people bother to do). This is extremely frustrating to them, because MS gets FANG rejects as it is.
I suspect similar policies exist at other tech companies as well. This is special treatment already. This is "accommodation" to the fullest extent.
We can both be right/wrong independent of each other.
The frustrating thing is most of the analysis completely leaves this part out.
I would be interested to hear from women about ways they have been discriminated against, and how the industry can improve to make that less likely to happen.
But most analysis I see on line is just "Most programmers are men! That is sexist!" With no analysis going beyond that.