The Benefits of Being a Female Software Engineer
jeanhsu.com
jeanhsu.com
The likelihood that you will see a blog post about the "benefits of being a male software engineer" is exactly the same as the likelihood to see a blog post about the "benefits of being a male social worker".
We do not need to artificially try to bring in more engineers of a certain gender just because the numbers don't make sense.
And we do not need more blog posts calling out our oddities as engineers. We all dress like dorks. We all have our quirks. Get over it.
You know why we don't need a "benefits of being a male software engineer" post? Because every day is a "benefits of being a male software engineer" day for male software engineers.
You should probably have a read of http://amptoons.com/blog/the-male-privilege-checklist/ . As a rule when it comes to this sort of material, if it makes you feel uncomfortable and defensive, please think about why this is before commenting.
I'd love to see a post about "benefits of being a male social worker", or any other female-dominated field! As a feminist (3rd wave), I don't think equality is possible without addressing the problems faced by men, as well as women. Men in such jobs are routinely mocked by other men and subjected to ridicule by our masculine culture society. And that sucks.
Go read about the advantages women have in hiring in the sciences: http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=12062&page=R1
Anecdotally, women are also given advantages in big corporate IT, but I'm not aware of any studies. Corporations are generally loath to give away data on stuff like this, who knows what lawsuits it might bring.
I only skimmed the rest, but I found 14) particularly amusing. The politicians who stole my lunch [1], my freedom and my money all have a penis (just like me). This is a privilege how?
[1] In Jersey City, where I live and work, Steven Fulops chased away the food trucks to protect subway.
Of course, the link you provided wasn't for the general tech sector - it was specific to universities, which have other aspects in play. Even within the general tech sector, there are plenty of reports of questionable hiring practices. I've found to be not uncommon for my gender (female) to be an issue during interviews, and we've seen posts here in the past about this subject. Further, women are often moved rapidly into management roles, and their technical abilities treated as suspect.
And yes, I'm speaking as something big corporate IT, and it's no better. Just looking across at our large (40+) server support teams, you can count the number of women on one hand. The application support teams here are slightly better, but only just. We're a typical shared services company in the UK, and our competitors are all very similar.
As for 14, you've found a truth about privilege lists - they might not always be things you like.
4) is a matter of whether you personally adopt a collectivist viewpoint or not. If women disproportionately adopt collectivist viewpoints, why is that anyone's fault besides their own?
5) is probably on point. 6) may be true in general, but (much like 1-3) it seems false in tech. Consider Leah Culver - "ooh, a girl that can program, and hot", as opposed to "meh, barely competent".
7-14) may be true, but are similarly irrelevant to a conversation about women in tech. Also, you still haven't explained how 14 is a "privilege". How does Obama's penis benefit me, relative to a woman?
There are certainly reference classes for "likely to wield political power" that change the likelihood ratio by far more than "male."
The issue is not the raw numbers, but the pychological problem - that people like you are not in power, or not as equally holding power. That you are not of the type of people who have power.
And yes, there are other privileges, like White privilege, middle/upper-class privilege, straight privilege, cis privilege, not-abused privilege, and so on. These intersect to cause more issues again.
Unless, of course, you're privileging gender privilege far above other types of privilege.
...and I just hit semantic satiation.
I am privileged in some ways, and not in others. Generally privileges are treated as being different and hard to compare, because "oppression olympics" (arguing some are more harmful than others) never actually helps the discussion, and generally leads to people forgetting to check their privileges - who am I to speak for the experiences of other minorities?
The fact that you act amused at "not-abused" as a privilege is part of the whole problem, especially when you consider how this intersects with with privilege (or lack thereof) issues.
The concept of intersections between privileges (or the lack thereof) is important - that some combinations of the effects of a privileged society are worse than others.
I currently enjoy not-superstitious privilege, not-being-kidnapped privilege, not-being-forcefed-arsenic privilege, and many others that help me maintain my status and position in ways I may never have thought of. But calling them "privileges" is silly; it leads, as I said, to semantic satiation; and that's part of the whole problem.
Many people here do not enjoy neurotypical privilege, but they don't use that language, they try to describe the actual problems they face and the ways to surmount them as efficiently as possible.
You are also implicitly assuming that the category of "like you" matters at all. But that's a choice you are making. I can choose to view Peter Thiel as "not like me" because he is gay. I can also choose to view him as being "like me" because I aspire to be awesome in the same ways that he is.
If women are less likely to make this choice, that's not privilege. That's simply the choices of individuals holding them back.
Women get hired, promoted and paid better than men in certain jobs (enlisted military service, govt jobs) that they strangely don't want! So some of it is self-inflicted.
8. On average, I am taught to fear walking alone after dark in average public spaces much less than my female counterparts are."
First, those are two pretty big caveats, especially considering how the vast majority of people in prisons are men. Second, I'm pretty sure males are far more likely to be the victims of violence than females. So while these individual claims may be true, it seems to ignore the bigger picture.
Maybe there are some legitimate points in this list, but for the most part I think this is an example of the "make so many accusations that none of your readers will have the time or energy to go through and refute all of them" school of writing.
If doctors didn't make so much $, I am convinced that women would make up the majority of doctors.
However, there are more females in medical school now than males, it's just a matter of time as the older generation retires.
Personally, I think there would be more doctors if it didn't cost $200k+ and 4 years to get a medical degree (compare the opportunity cost vs working as a software engineer for 4 years with only a bachelors).
I don't think it's inherently terrible to have fields that are dominated by one gender or another but I do think that in the case of school teachers men are being pushed away by social forces and it's detrimental to all children to be taught only by women.
I, for one, didn't become a teacher because the pay is terrible, I make more annually my first year out of school (programmer) than most highschool teachers make anually.
It had nothing to do with gender, more to do with money.
Also, my mom is a highly advanced math teacher (teaches AP courses, grades AP tests etc), so I think she provides a good rolemodel for women and men who want to be good at math.
And I bet that other teachers appreciate there being a man around, just as I have found that a workplace that includes women engineers is a much nicer place to work than one that doesn't.
We only really develop a proper understanding of gender around the age of 7, but influences before then set up the mindstates to come, and help to drill everyone (including parents and teachers) in appropriate gender roles.
Kids see male doctors and female nurses. They have female teachers at school. When shopping for toys, the girls get pink kitchen sets and dolls, and the boys are offered machines and cars.
From a young age, our society teaches us that women are not engineers, and men are not teachers. We need to solve them both.
My wife is in medical school, and there are more females in medical school now than males.
In order to change these kinds of things we need to move on from the past and look forward, and stop worrying about what color toys our children have.
Personally I think we need to overhaul what kind of education is valued. As in, encourage all kids to get STEM degrees, or alternatively become lawyers or doctors. Stop encouraging kids to go to university and major in english or philosophy or... any number of majors that lack hard math / science classes.
If we get kids to major in the right kinds of things in college, I think we can stem the current unemployment recent grads are feeling (nobody is looking to hire a liberal arts psychology major, except restaurants (waiters)).
(Of course, one of the reasons that I didn’t go on to a career in teaching is that the pay sucked. I believe that one of the reasons teachers’ pay sucks is that it’s a traditionally female occupation, and schools can recruit women who do not depend on their teaching salary for the majority of the family income.)
I never really considered that. I always assumed the pay sucked because tons of people who don't have actual career passions decide to just be a teacher instead. It's like never having to leave school and get a real job! Boy, that's going to get me some flak, but I've seen it first hand plenty of times.
For evidence, my state (Connecticut) has one of the strictest set of teacher certification requirements in the country (being a teacher here basically makes you an automatic hire in most of the rest of the country). Yet, whenever there's a teacher job opening, it gets hundreds of applicants.
The teaching profession is definitely a buyers market, and I'd bet without unions teacher salaries could be halved and still never have vacancies. No, I'm not actually saying that would be a good thing. Education provided by the lowest bidder is an awful idea.
Most of the people who apply for the jobs are mediocre because the pay sucks, and the pay sucks because the school districts don’t consider their mediocre teachers to be worth more.
(There is also, of course, a minority who teach despite the sucky pay because they actually love doing it. My understanding is that those people would rather have more autonomy in the classroom than more money.)
The likelihood that you will see a blog post about the
"benefits of being a male software engineer" is exactly the
same as the likelihood to see a blog post about the
"benefits of being a male social worker".
"benefits of being a male social worker"
I don't get your point. Aren't these exactly opposites in terms of prevailing stereotypes? So why would the odds of seeing those articles be exactly the same?
// male here, but with several female engineer friends
Or maybe you work in a more egalitarian place than me.
You do realize that we're talking in vast generalizations here. Engineers run the gamut; there will be sexist, racist and bigoted engineers too. But my experience in nearly 20 years of being in the field has been that engineers, _in general_, are more egalitarian. If someone comes up with cool shit, no one cares whether that person is a woman, or a man, or what color his/her skin is; if it's cool, everyone goes "oooh!" and s/he gets instant respect.
I got used to it over time, but sometimes it nags at me.
If you don't like their eyes, focus on the bridge of their nose, they won't be able to tell the difference.
For neurotypicals, it creates sensations of companionship and trust, until it goes on too long and then it becomes creepy and uncomfortable for them.
It's not an overt thing. There's never any one comment or specific action by an individual you can point at and say, "See! Right there! You aren't giving me equal respect!" but the pressure is definitely there.
Also, the converse is true. Not only do you have to be better, to be seen as equal, anything you do wrong is magnified. Would Leah Culver's "creative" rounding method have been nearly a big deal if she'd been male? I have the feeling that while people would still have joked about it, it wouldn't have been as widespread or for as long.
I've also obviously made mistakes and while the mistake spotlight is shining in your face, it feels pretty magnified, especially if you're one who has previously earned significant technical respect. For three years, I led the group in our company responsible for post-morteming every production issue, and reporting to our business leadership in a weekly meeting every issue that cost us more than $2000. In all that time, and in the rest of my two decades in the field, I don't think I've ever sensed a whiff of "you made that mistake because of your extra X chromosome..." (unfamiliar with Leah Culver, but will google now)
Down in her comment http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2274993 pamelafox linked a blog post she had written about it being good to be a girl in CS, but that post references a previous one she'd written in which she talks about her experience in Model UN in school, where she found herself doing the same thing. Automatically requiring other girls to 'prove' themselves more than the boys before she had respect for them as a speaker. (That post is here: http://blog.pamelafox.org/2009/10/should-i-defend-my-cred-ye...)
I try to be conscious of it, but again, I know what it's like to be on the receiving end. If this is a bias even other women aware of the problem have and have to consciously fight in themselves, how many others (men and women) don't even get as far as recognizing it?
Definitely not. If she were male (or an unattractive female), we'd never have heard of her to begin with. She would have been just another anonymous low level coder working for Kevin Rose.
"He's the Michael Moore of software." That's what the community says when a man with visibility writes bad code:
If I were to say "I like having women at work, especially when they make brownies and are not bitches," I'd have an angry horde at my door.
But Jean Hsu thinks it is okay to say it because she is a woman?
"I like some female colleagues among my male colleagues for a number of reasons, but the fact that they tend to bring brownies definitely stands out for me, because I love brownies." There, defused the entire problem?
The issue here is that either Jean is being serious, in which case she's undermining workplace equality, or she's abusing the fact that she can facetiously say such things because she can get away with it. What is she trying to accomplish?
I don't think she's trying to accomplish anything; she's just being blatantly honest and care-free, without taking into consideration how Joe Random may (reasonably) interpret what she's saying.
Let me ask you this, why is it so outrageous that its worth calling her out and making assumptions about her motivations just because she said something that you couldn't get away with?
A male developer saying that would _so_ not get away with it :P
To contrast, my wife works in a female-dominated kindergarden. There's so much "did you see the way X Looked at me", "Y ran crying from the meeting", "Z said Good Morning to W, but did you hear the tone of her voice?" going on it's making my head spin.
I also used to work in a logistic firm that was staffed pretty 50/50. Some days, there was enough drama to put a soap opera writer to shame. Though I suspect constant layoffs and competitive promotion jostling did its bit to fuel that.
I'm sorry if this makes me come out as sexist, but to the best of my empirical knowledge, women are more drama-prone than men.
a russian sexist proverb (maybe internatnl dont know 4 sure)
A lot of people are not going to like this type of post (as witnessed by the response here), but like any news outlet, sensationalist news sells. Jean Hsu is just following Gary V's advice and building up brand equity. There is no better way than to use your various circumstances in life to build a considerable amount of valley buzz.
Well played. I would do it too if I were in your shoes.
PS. Out of the last 10 hires I made for my previous startup, 3 of them were woman. I believe that's higher than industry standards.
PS. 30% women hires is pretty much the industry average.
As for the casual attire, I think it goes both ways. I'm totally into casual most of the times (to the point of wearing my head-to-toe footed pajamas to work), but then the days when I want to dress up or wear a mini-skirt or whatever, I feel like I'm standing out a bit too much and wish I was in the pop music industry instead. But alas, I have no singing talent and no autotune device, so back to coding I go.
The only time I've worn a tie at work is when I've had a funeral in the afternoon, and when I drove straight to work after a party in Montreal. A suit with that slept-in look sends signals, but it doesn't imply to your co-workers that you have political ambitions.
This is my experience too. Whenever I think about wearing something a bit fancy (that would be totally acceptable in another field) I feel a bit self conscious.
This sentence really surprised me. How often does this happen? Female engineers are a minority, but I wouldn't have imagined it would be that big a deal to run into a female engineer.
Frankly, everywhere I worked, be it a startup or a huge corporation, I never felt discrimination or disbelief at what I do. In the corporate world, particularly in finance and insurance, there are a lot of female developers. They're around 60% of the IT staff, from what I've personally seen in the places where I've consulted at. In the startup and more "geeky" environments, female devs are very rare. Currently I'm going on the theory that the type of person that seeks an IT job in the corporate world is different from the one that goes to startups. The degrees they have are subtly different (Business CS vs CS), their professional needs are different (stable long term employment with low risk, low % of innovation, high % of project/code maintenance in the corporate world). To me it seems obvious that there are many more women leaning towards the corporate profile than there are for the startup profile. Why this is, I'm still working on that.
Regardless of how many women there are, I have never witnessed the sort of disbelief that that phrase shows. I don't know why she says this happens, maybe it's a cultural thing where she's from.
Having worked with female colleagues (EEs), I have found much more diversity than common behavior. These sort of articles certainly do not reflect my experience (as a male).
At any rate, the lack of representation of women in software is a huge problem in the field since it cuts off effectively half of the possible work force. More importantly, software that might better reach the female audience doesn't get written, services don't get created, etc.
Now the story.
My wife is a software engineer, her last job was a technical department head at a company with about 40% female software engineers. It wasn't super high-end work, but it provided services and data worth about $30-40million/yr to some very major institutions, so it had to be rock solid.
Her immediate boss was a woman, and 3 out of 4 department heads were women. Her boss's boss was a man.
Before that she worked for a $2billion dollar large company. In her department, there were about 30% female engineers (though in another technical department there were none, go fig). (her immediate super was a woman, but later changed to a man).
Before that she worked at an e-commerce company, of the engineering staff were women, her boss was a man, but his boss was a woman.
In every case they produced great, solid work, the companies were wildly profitable, her career progressed fantastically -- and she never complained about problems with sexism. Maybe she's been lucky, she never sought out these places, but that's where she ended up. (it could be that having so many women in the first placed altered the hiring dynamics so that they would tend to hire more women later)
Late last year, at the company she worked for, they brought in a new COO and within 4 months everything changed. Women managers were promoted up and over or moved laterally into diminished positions. Men with no engineering experience were brought in as department supervisors. My wife had her department entirely eliminated and her staff placed under all new male supervisors. One woman engineer was fired because she botched a minor product management job while a male engineer was promoted to department head right after complaints of rampant racism and sexism were formally filed against him.
My wife was devastated, she tried to stick it out, but the writing was on the wall and after a few miserable, tortuous months, I convinced her to resign. It was the first time she (or I for that matter) had seen or experienced such rampant and overt sexism.
Three months after she leaves we find out from her former colleagues that the COO was fired, and that 3 out of 4 major development projects have to be scrapped (at a total loss of $7-9 million) and the company is running in the red (in a recession proof industry).
If she had stayed her problems would now be over and she might have been able to work the problem to her advantage.
But, the good side is that she's now trying to startup her own company, brushing the dust off of long dormant engineering talents, and is happier than I've ever known her to be since she's doing her own thing and writing her own rules. Her job satisfaction appears to be off the charts and I don't think I've ever seen her work so hard.
Regarding the part about being lucky at working in companies with a large % of women in It, there are a surprising number of women in engineering departments in large companies, especially when the companies are not actual software companies, they do business in other areas and have large IT departments to support the business internally. Because the culture in these is not really a startup culture, you really don't hear about most people in there. For the most part they aren't posting in HN or doing technical blogs or participating much in the "geek" community - and so this community doesn't actually realize they exist, and when people talk about the lack of women in IT, they're really talking about the lack of women in the open source and startup cultures.
In the end, it sounds like she had a really hard time, but she got out in time and in one piece, and she's more productive than ever, which is great. And good to hear that the COO got kicked out, it's good to know insanity doesn't go unnoticed forever. Thanks for sharing! Best of luck with the new startup!
That's exactly the kind of industries or departments she's worked in, non-tech in focus, but needing a large technical/development/engineering department to run things.
But yeah, I've definitely noticed at the large system integrator companies, there's a higher than usual (for startup geek standards) % of women.
Because if it was sexism, depending upon the state, the women in that company could own the company, after lawsuits.
We came close to collecting enough evidence, but the lawyers we talked to said we needed either a smoking gun, or more overt documentation to establish a pattern. Most of the outward sexism was verbal or in the form of indirect patterns of employee movement.
At one point we considered secretly taping conversations but it turns out those are illegal in our state, which is too bad as my wife related some cases that sounded like something out of a bad 1940's movie.
If you read about HP under Fiorina, you hear a similar story. Techies were pushed aside and replaced by Fiorina's cronies (mostly marketers), and the company suffered horribly. Such stories don't always end in disaster - a certain investment bank recently brought on a new IT chief who is well known for destroying a broken department and rebuilding a highly efficient one in it's place.
The process also involves firing many managers and replacing them with people loyal to him, pushing out lots of insiders, huge numbers of formerly comfortable people quitting in disgust, etc.
The only unusual element in your story ("her staff placed under new male supervisors") sounds like reversion to the mean - as you noted, "in another technical department there were none [women]". Perhaps there are other elements to the story that you haven't mentioned, but your description just sounds like normal corporate politics.
I think what finally made us conclude the sexist element was the speed with which it happened, and that red flags were raised with HR that only seemed to speed things up -- get rid of the complainers faster than they can complain.
> if you are a single female you can have first pick of a lot of really nice available guys
just nice and life-asserting. for me.
What differentiates the level of "drama" between the banking industry from the software programming industry? Is it because engineering is inherently more meritocratic and less egotistical? Or is there just too much money and power at stake when it comes to banking that one can't help but get involved in more politicking? Does the (presence or absence of any one)gender come into play at all?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2272748
(It's by the author of an article that made the front page earlier today.)
The few women I've worked alongside as a software engineer have been fantastic. Easy to get along with, able to focus on work tasks and still have a great lunchtime conversation, with no alpha-nerd pedantic B.S.
The women I've worked for (three) have been universally terrible. Each in slightly different ways, but all had a strange, overcompensating quality to them. I'll just have to say it: bitchiness. Strange, control-freak tendencies and subsequent drama.
I've worked for two great male bosses, two idiots, and one brilliant guy who was an asshole (but at least he could be reasoned with). I would take all but one of the male bosses over any of the female bosses.
My conclusion isn't that women are bad managers, or anything like that. Rather, I believe it shows that people with lousy people skills are distributed across both sexes, and promoting worker bees to management positions is not an ideal plan.
Edit: Almost forgot - I also had a female boss I would work for in a beat. I must mention that she was more of a tomboy - but still what a woman: pragmatic, ambitious, decisive, tough but fair. All the general qualities one would expect from a man, but with added softness of female persuasion and communication skills.
Oh, come on.
On the flip side of the coin, this also reminds me that I should probably shower.
But anyone remember the report a couple of decades back about water usage after the US Navy started letting women on ships? Having ladies around made the guys shower more often. Empirically, I can verify that, since getting married, I do tend to shave more often.
She's also discovering she prefers it in other women - as a massage therapist, regardless of how recently they've shaved she'll encounter it all, and it's pretty amazingly irritating stuff.
As a guy who enjoys massages and has hairy extremities: no matter how much oil is used, the hair gets pulled. One of the primary reasons cyclists shave their legs is for better massages.