"In fact, having particular characteristics is comparable to a 5 percent boost in pay"
Looking the part is worth some money! This of course contributes to gender imbalances in software.
Looking the part is worth some money! This of course contributes to gender imbalances in software.
I'm fully aware that these metrics are easily broken. Best eng I ever met dressed and talked like a complete hillbilly. Best female eng I ever met looked homeless, and indeed, did a lot of crack at one point.
This applies to male engineers too, except there's other more important signals there.
So if your remark is, "In my limited experience I've worked with only 10 female engineers and the eight good ones all wore dark clothing and wear glasses. That's a funny and unlikely distribution!" then you're good.
If your remark is "I can determine if a female engineer is any good based on whether or not she is wearing dark clothing and glasses" then you probably have no business working in the field at all.
Which parts? The "men and women communicate differently" part or the "women are neurotic" part?
And if the former, do you take it as far as "Better not hire women, because it's all guys here, and we don't want to have to learn how to communicate with them?"
"Women are neurotic" is talking about the neuroticism trait. Women also score higher on average on agreeableness, for example. That's hard data, spoken in unflattering terms.
The former just means you need communication standards that are balanced.
An example a friend. Branches of her family are very wealthy almost old money. She could take something out of her closet and go to a party thrown by old money, fit right in and no one would suspect she's broke.
Don’t get me wrong, when I was younger it annoyed me much more. However now I accept that at some level it’s just part of the “human social dance”. Given that large societies, governments, corporations, etc all exist and can function shows that there’s something to it. Who knows, perhaps Neanderthals didn't do these social rituals and that prevented them scaling social networks and eventually dying out.