Being a female software engineer

Where "enlightened" = agrees with all my views, simplified into dumb animated GIFs?

The "What about the menz" trope is as sexist as the behavior it's pretending to decry. Calling yourself enlightened while stereotyping the opposing gender is sheer hypocrisy.

I'm a male dev who has been subject to some very unpleasant behavior because of my work... I didn't have the privilege of summoning my white knights with a simple retweet, as you see women do over and over again in any online sexism shitstorm. I was expected to justify my choices through logical argument, and just accept the fact that people said I should be shot for publishing a Github repo. There was no outrage over that, no brotherhood to back me up.

See, if women make less money because they ask for less, it's considered a problem that needs to be solved for women. It's the fault of society that women are conditioned to be insecure about their real value!

If men self-select into technical disciplines and don't develop appropriate social skills by being immersed in competitive, meritocratic environments, it's considered a problem that women need to be protected from. The best those men can hope for is a "re-education" from the feminazis, so he knows the leash is not optional.

Isn't it funny how female empowerment seems to require the men to do all the work in making changes?

That's what "What about the menz" is really about. It's a way for women to hold on to the privilege that when both a man and a woman are crossed, it's the woman's needs which are tended to first. Women and children first, it's been around forever, and it was practiced religiously. That's why 80% of the people on board the Titanic were men, and 80% of the survivors were women. Even when faced with a certain icy death, men across all of society agreed that women 'deserved' to be saved more.

The reason it's hard being a female software engineer is because people pay attention to you when you walk into a room. That has its upsides, and its downsides, and it's often not the kind of attention that you want. But you have it anyway. You can't decry the negatives, while continuing to coast on your own privilege of not being called out on your bullshit.

Thanks for responding to my late addition to the thread. You're right, of course... I may have missed a lot of it. And I haven't worked at gaming companies - not a lot of those in Boston, and the "kill yourself working just to get fired 2 months after launch" thing is not really my cup of tea ;)

I'll talk to a couple female ex-coworkers and see what they have to say. I hope I didn't come off as not believing sexism exists in the software world, because I absolutely believe it.

Anyway, thanks for bringing this up. I looked through your tumblr, and luckily do not see myself in any of the gaffes that you posted about (but I'll try to keep an eye out for things I or other coworkers might do without realizing). I am saddened that there are so many on the list. I can't believe there are men who still act like that in this day and age.

How much of this happening do you think can be attributed to how young the Ruby user base tends to skew? How often does it occur on the Python or Perl IRC channels?

50% is ... way off the curve. 20% is about average in the United States, but it goes down when you exclude roles that tend to be managerial to something like 14%, so your experience seems to to track with statistical norms. Just stay in the field, people need examples and role models... building up a base of role models is a really, really hard problem because it sucks for the first wave.

This problem was identified in nursing years ago (inverse). Nursing has great opportunities for growth, pay roughly equivalent to programming and shortages in every state so severe states are starting governmental programs just to get more nurses... yet less than 7% of nurses are men due to a variety of reasons, but the major one is lack of role models. Despite identifying it and trying to offset it, male nurses are still exceptional rare because they never broke critical mass on role models.

Although, thinking about it, that mark may be for the whole company and not just its eng. I think a lot of it depends on how much of an effort is taken to make females happy and to recruit them. Or if there is a female involved in the early stages of the company. Still that 15% mark seems low. It may be worth discussing with your management about how to make the workplace better and how to recruit women better. Maybe mentorship programs or hosting 'women in tech' events I have to admit this discussion makes me feel weird. It's a bit odd to think about people based on their attributes. It's like thinking about coworkers based on their height.

I don't think there are many large companies with 50%, but they at least have a significant amount of female engineers. I thought Google was at ~40% but I can't find the reference anymore (searching just shows Google+ stats). I know 10gen (MongoDB) has at least some female engineers just because one of them helps run the local python meetup