To a Future Woman In Tech
futurewomanintech.com
futurewomanintech.com
A few years ago, I was pulling into my garage and because of whatever circumstance I have forgotten, my mind was grinding on the idea of prejudice. Specifically how the act of judging another person consumes resources in my mind that I am hesitant to commit, as I'd very much like to use as much of my mind as I can coordinate for more interesting things. This sounds arrogant, but I'm fine with that label and so let's move on. The way I think is the product of constantly having to not take on other people's drama in order to raise my standard of living. That's not the most elegant way of saying what I mean to say, but I'm a bit frustrated right now. The habit of not engaging makes me acutely aware that when I do engage, it is important to choose one's words carefully. I rarely get that right.
This is a blatant attempt to engage other people in a negative way. I fail to see the benefits such finger-pointing, but I am willing to learn that there might be some. It seems that if there were no perceived benefit to the actor for the act, but from here it just looks like fighting fire with fire.
As a woman in technology, I've seen some things. Mostly I just let it go. I don't think of it as having a thick skin (anyone who knows me will tell you, this is not a character attribute of mine). Rather I think of it as not letting other people's drama own any part of me. And that is what I think when anyone complains of anything, be it gender bias or racial bias or religious/political disagreement: nothing can own you unless you let it. Maybe this is what having a thick skin is supposed to mean. As I have said to my kids countless times, your anger hurts you the most. I can't find a clear source for this quote, but it goes something like, "Holding onto anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die."
This is not how you teach kids to deal with bullies.
If you asked 100 people if they perceived some disadvantage about themselves that impedes progress to their life goals, you would get 100 answers. And yet somehow there are 7bn of us, we build skyscrapers and send robots to Mars. Personally, I've had my fill of "if it bleeds, it leads."
Like every complex situation in life, things aren't slippery slopes, it's always you're-either-with-us-or-against-us...but I think the sincere frustration that both sides have on this is that there doesn't seem any perfect solution...OK, but there's still room to improve. And I've been someone who tends not to complain, but I've come to be more appreciative of those who do play the part of the squeaky wheel. Not everyone can wait for society to slowly evolve.
In terms of the OP, I think it's a good sincere effort to raise awareness. However, as this is a complex issue, I just think that mantras are of limited value and tend to polarize something that isn't helped by polarization. Also, too many colors.
It's from the Buddha: "Holding onto anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned."
You may "let it go," as you say. That's fine. However, why do you expect others to also let it go? The point of this post to me is that if we don't take action or responsibility, the daughters of today will grow to write these posts themselves someday. It won't change unless we are honest and we put forth the effort to understand the environment and circumstance that leads us to write these articles. And we have, what, one of these posts a month? Can we really ignore them... and keep ignoring them?
As a teacher, I admit that I don't share your ability to let others' circumstances not own any part of me. I do notice how these issues affect the women who chose to take my intro to programming course, or affect the lack, as it were. You just have to be active and look and ask for their experiences. When they come into office hours and ask questions they could have asked in class; I ask them why they didn't and more than one has answered "because I am shy."
Could they all be shy? That's certainly an explanation. I could look the other way from then on and comment how odd it is that women are so shy. Can I rely on this being a biological answer? Are women, as opposed to men, then just not interested in tech? Can I be satisfied? Maybe most are good stopping right there. But the anecdote alone fails to placate my understanding. And yet, if I look, I find evidence of something... more... problematic.
So, studies were done. Are women worse than men at math keeping them out of tech? http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/07/080724192258.ht... No. Are they less interested? Well, Sapna Cheryan's study of the stereotype threat in computer science is profound: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYwI-qM20x4 So, their interest is very likely to be prejudiced. So, it seems the correlation is weak. Is there a systemic bias that goes against women? http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.abstract Apparently, yes. And I have a handful more that show this. Which is why I anonymize the homework I grade and why conference/journal review should be blind (http://blog.davewilkinsonii.com/posts/conference_diversity).
Attempting to explain the drop in participation of women since the 80s is very necessary. The fact that 13% of undergraduate CS degrees earned by women in 2010 (http://www.cra.org/resources/taulbee) is an increase is both terrible and a tad optimistic. Yet, before we get excited and say the problem is solved, here's the entire graph: http://www.aip.org/statistics/trends/reports/spring07a.pdf In 2011, 57% of the entire workforce are women, 25% of computing workforce are women, around 9% of programmers are women. (http://www.ncwit.org/sites/default/files/legacy/pdf/BytheNum..., http://archive.aneventapart.com/alasurvey2011/01.html) So, we should be paying more attention, there is something wrong, and writing like the original post is part of that discussion and valuable.
Also, please don't tell your kids that they should "ignore them and they will go away." That's not how you deal with bullies... that's how you become invisible.
We have two children. The eldest is male, the youngest is female. It is either the case that the teachers complain more about my daughter's stubbornness than my son's or that I bridle more at it. Either way, it does appear to me that she is being made to feel more shame for her innate mettle than my son ever has. Not all of the bullies she deals with are peers; some of them are teachers, school staff and other adults. As we all well know, a certain amount of subtlety is required in handling bullies in positions of authority. Often in the very least subtle way of "sit down and shut up and obey" -- effecting the least dire consequence, given the circumstance. I, too, have read studies that show women become more "shy" as they advance through secondary school, as a consequence of social pressure. Less of that pressure comes from peers than from adults.
Reducing what I was trying to express to "ignore them and they will go away" has put the ball in the bleachers. Casting what I said into that ends the play. Nope. Very specifically, I'm trying to teach them the art of assessing the situation and deciding if there is any value at all in engaging versus walking away. But before I can do that, I have to teach them how to walk away, because their natural inclination seems to be to engage.
My kids are growing up in a bubble that I did not grow up in. There's something about this bubble that slaps erroneous labels on problems. Some of the problems aren't even problems. This is where emily37's observation resonates: it's sabotage. We can't go through life saying, "I'm not welcome here because of attributes that are beyond my control."
That's how you see it. They don't have to, and probably won't, see things the same way. Some of their problems might not be problems to you.
> But before I can do that, I have to teach them how to walk away, because their natural inclination seems to be to engage.
Let them engage! Let them both observe and be heard. They are very capable of coming to a conclusion. Your only role should be to ensure that they are heard, visible, and safe. Why would you first teach them to walk away? Why teach them that this form of engagement is negative? Inaction is valid, true, but we should not be afraid to act or suggest that some forms of aggression or anger are invalid.
> Reducing what I was trying to express to "ignore them and they will go away" has put the ball in the bleachers.
I got this message from this statement you made:
> Rather I think of it as not letting other people's drama own any part of me. And that is what I think when anyone complains of anything, be it gender bias or racial bias or religious/political disagreement: nothing can own you unless you let it.
Seems like a valid conclusion to make on my part. Be made out of rubber as though you can just brush off all forms of oppression. But, regardless of being made of rubber, an anchor tied to the waist can still sink you, perhaps regardless of what you do. It requires a collective change to reverse... something I believe your children can inspire.
> We can't go through life saying, "I'm not welcome here because of attributes that are beyond my control."
I wonder, in hesitation, just which attributes you speak of. Regardless, maybe... just maybe... they are within our collective control. The more these types of articles come out, regardless of your feelings that they be suppressed due to their negativity, the more positive discussions like ours will play out in front of your children's generation.
While my username might give away the fact that I'm speaking from a position of "male privilege" (and that is a choice I made without having to consider that it was male privilege, which is itself a symptom of my male privilege), I don't think it's helpful for someone to use their username to signal an aggressive viewpoint, at the same time as urging a more moderate approach (honey-badger comment aside).
Your comment reads a lot like a tone argument. That type of discourse is derailing and generally unproductive. :)
Yes, I agree 100% with what the creator wrote. I am really, really sick with women earning less then men, having to fight harder, having to endure sexiest jokes and inappropriate comments.
I really despise inequality.
So, that said, I now have a problem. What ever I could no say, to discuss this issue and the site, might come about as as some kind of relativization.
Because, I got sidelined by the twitter-handle. Whatever I had read to this point got covered in some judgmental-icing. My first emotion was sadness, that such an great site, such great words had been used for satire, as this was my first guess to what the handle meant.
Sad, I know. Wrong, I know. But this was my first reaction.
I think the choice of that particular moniker has more to do with the fact that women are rarely both liked and respected in any professional field. Competent women are viewed as cold; warm women are viewed as incompetent. For a woman to be competent, she must be a bitch.
This is obviously not the best state of affairs, but it is the way reality is.
I guess I was mistaken.
I'm getting sick of the gender argument to be honest. Sure, women in tech are a minority. Sure we'd all like to see more of a gender balance. However I have yet to see someone actively retarding that balance.
Can you explain this further?
Nursing is dominated by females. Male nurses are considered a novelty and men in the industry are almost always described as male nurses. Nursing is an insanely demanding career and requires tons of skill and training. Why aren't men posting in outrage about the gender disparity in nursing?
Why can't it simply be accepted that programming is simply a career that tends to appeal to men more than women in the same way that nursing appeals to women more than men?
There are arguments that women get paid less in tech. My direct experience with women in tech (and I have plenty) is that if anything, they tend to be better paid due to the fact that female devs are in high demand and I've yet to see proof, even anecdotal, proving otherwise. I've also yet to come across a single, official complaint of sexism in the workplace within the tech industry.
You know, I'm tried of this straw man (excuse me, straw person) being brought up every time someone talks about women in computing.
Being a female developer in gives me a disadvantage. If I am mistaken for anything, it is a graphic designer, a secretary, an assistant or an intern.
Positions that are typically male are generally considered higher positions. When a man takes on a typically female position, they feel the need to prove the position to be 'manly'. When a female takes on a typically male position, they feel the need to prove themselves to be 'manly'.
Being a female developer gives you an advantage by having employers instantly agree to interview you in the hopes that your talent is enough to warrant a place on their team and simultaneously help dilute the male dominance in their company.
I don't know of any developer having a hard time finding interviews right now, btw. The industry is in desparate need of more developers.
Wrong.
> in the hopes that your talent is enough to warrant a place
Offensive.
The gate swings both ways here; getting an interview as a woman isn't any easier than getting one as a man at any place worth working in this industry, especially right now when the demand for quality is high. If they're lowering standards for their female candidates, that hurts the business and the people alike.
Etsy is doing it because they know they can ramp those engineers up with their existing staff without putting their business at risk, so more power to them if they're able to solve both problems at once and have it work to their (and everyone's) advantage long-term. If a company does it for the sole purpose of trying to balance things out without consideration of how it could affect both production and morale, they'll sabotage themselves and further underscore the argument that women aren't as competent to begin with.
Your second statement does not follow from the first. If we get 10 resumes of people who seem competent, any of them is likely to be fine. The ones who get interviewed are the ones who get hired. The fact that company policy is "all female applicants are to be interviewed" means we hire more women. Our standards aren't lowered as a result, we still don't hire incompetent women. The effect on the company isn't to lower standards, it is just to hire more women. The effect on women who apply is that they are far more likely to get a job than a man who applies.
Even if the intent means well, these types of threads are cluttered with resentment of these practices. If I knew that I was being interviewed because it was company policy to do so even if my skillset would have landed me there anyway, I'd feel weird about it.
Which is precisely what we do, and precisely what I said we do.
>Even if the intent means well, these types of threads are cluttered with resentment of these practices
Why shouldn't they be?
>I'd feel weird about it.
I don't blame you, I would too. The companies making these decisions aren't concerned about how you feel about it though, they are concerned about appearing to be "the good guys" in the eyes of the people who are making an issue out of gender balance.
I find it incredible that you consider my other statement offensive. I posed that statement as a counter-argument to your original point and you're taking my counter-argument and twisting it into a completely subjective retort.
There's a simple reason why this post got flagged off the front page almost as quickly as it appeared and that's because the entire debate is completely circular and pointless. I've yet to see a submission to this site that presents an attempted solution to this issue and the reason for that is because you can't solve a problem that doesn't exist.
I'm also not the same commenter as the parent you were originally speaking with, which could also be some of the confusion.
Or lower ones. Men make up 76% of the homeless, and 60% to 70% of the unemployed in America. They also make up 92% of worker deaths.
It's not a conspiracy. Men take more risks, and are more frequently rewarded or punished for them. Even within a profession such as programming this is true. Our society values people who take risks, because those people stand out.
The amount of active segregation is indeed frustrating.
> Why can't it simply be accepted that programming is simply a career that tends to appeal to men more than women in the same way that nursing appeals to women more than men?
Because programming was a field dominated by women until established as an academic field. Afterward, even then it saw a unprecedented rise in women in the 80s only to be followed by a sharp decline while every other math/science field had continued to rise: http://www.aip.org/statistics/trends/reports/spring07a.pdf You may fault the following as this is purely rhetorical albeit reasonable, but I find it difficult to believe that thousands of women who would have potentially studied the field suddenly decided upon a generational line that CS is an uninteresting pursuit. I align myself with Sapna Cheryan's conclusions of the stereotype threat in computer science as an explanation.
> I've also yet to come across a single, official complaint of sexism in the workplace within the tech industry.
I've come across many. The vast majority of aggressions I've witnessed go completely unnoticed and unreported among those that could do something about them.
There are, for better or for worse, traditionally male roles, and traditionally female roles. The argument (as you suggest) seems to go in one direction only - why aren't there more female (developers|CEOs|politicians)?
The problems are more complex:
1) One problem is related to the fact that society values male roles more than female. A traditional skilled "female" role earns considerably less than a similarly qualified "male" role. While this isn't immediately relevant to the current conversation, it crops up along with the "glass ceiling" argument about CEOs and other high-status traditionally male roles.
2) Another, and the one typified in the OP, is the mockery or prejudice that applies from men to those who take jobs in roles more typical of the opposite gender. You know the jokes about male hairdressers, and male nurses also have to overcome such jokes. The jokes that females in typically male roles have to overcome are similarly well known, and even less palatable.
Personally, I don't care about gender balance, numerically at least: I don't think the world needs more male nurses or hairdressers, or female developers or construction workers (more power to them if they want to do it though). I do think the world needs to accept (without orthogonal prejudice) when they make the choice and try as hard as I did when I started out in this career.
There is pay inequality caused by "unknown factors" (potentially including sexism) of around 5%. The rest of the pay differential is caused by known factors (e.g. taking time out of work for children, career choices, etc).
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/christina-hoff-sommers/wage-ga...
The world already has that.
Only when we put blinders on and look at the top end of the spectrum. Male roles like CEOs and politicians are attractive, so we only look at them, and decide men must be getting advantages women aren't. Look down, there's other male roles too. Like prisoners, the homeless, the people committing suicide, the people taking dangerous jobs and dying. 97% of work related deaths are men, and obviously nobody is pushing to fix that imbalance.
There's the stereotype threat and the common notion that women are bad a math. There's been a number of sexist comments and incidents within the field (http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Timeline_of_incidents). There's even a study the correlates geek culture with keeping women out.
There's this thing called the patriarchy, you mighta heard of it. It's not something as clear as the things above, esp. if you have become comfortable within the system. However, it is there. There's subtle unconscious biases from both men and women inside the field (as observed in this study http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.abstract).
Is that enough to convince you? Or do you need more, because there really is an abundance of data to support this.
* Male nurses will not be told "good for you" by someone finding out their profession.
* Male nurses are not assumed to be secretaries in meetings.
* Male nurses won't be judged by their body over their skill -- and as a result, they won't face cognitive impairments because of internalized objectification[1][2][3][4][5].
* Male nurses will not be perceived as "bitches" if they are competent at their job -- and they will not be perceived as incompetent if they attempt to be likable[6].
* Male nurses are not paid less, on average, than female nurses[7].
By ignoring these very tangible and well-demonstrated barriers to entry for women in a wide variety of careers (any of the above arguments apply to women attempting to be lawyers, doctors, or executives in addition to being "in tech" as you put it), you are minimizing women's lived experiences of these effects, and you are retarding the balance.
[1] http://pwq.sagepub.com/content/30/1/59.short
[2] http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11199-006-9140-x...
[3] That swimsuit becomes you: sex differences in self-objectification, restrained eating, and math performance. Journal of personality and social psychology [0022-3514] Fredrickson yr:1998 vol:75 iss:1 pg:269
[4] http://link.springer.com/article/10.1023%2FB%3ASERS.00000323...
[5] http://www.sanchezlab.com/pdfs/FredricksonRoberts.pdf
[6] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.0022-4537.2004....
[7] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1475-4932.2009....
2. Your source for #7 is ridiculous. There is absolutely zero proof that female programmers are paid less than males. My career is dedicated to helping programmers find work (both male and female) and my own direct experience with the thousands of people and companies I've worked with points to the fact that female programmers are paid more than average simply because companies are willing to shell out a bit more for a female dev in order to avoid the label of having a male dominated workplace.
"I hope that your initial interactions involve an immediate transfer of trust in your abilities, rather than starting off by always having to prove yourself."
I'm not sure I agree with this 100%. Shouldn't everyone have to prove themselves at first? Does anyone merit immediate transfer of trust in their abilities?
Luckily I can just strip the css from your site, but for an average user...?
This is the point that really rang true for me. I guess I will never know if people praise my ability because they're surprised that a woman's code can be so good, or if my code is truly good. I would love to be confident in the fact that I'm highly regarded and asked to speak at conferences because of my skill and not because I can be the token woman.
I hope that your initial interactions involve an immediate transfer of trust in your abilities, rather than starting off by always having to prove yourself.
That's not gender-specific. It's an outgrowth of the fact that there are a lot of arrogant, narcissistic assholes in our industry who automatically assume superiority over other people. It's annoying to deal with someone who thinks he could do your job, better than you, in half the time... but men deal with those shitheads as well. They get on everyone's nerves. It's not gendered.
That said, I think the rarity of women in the software industry is symptomatic of an unhealthy environment. For a variety of reasons, women tend to be less tolerant of bullshit in order to protect an ego.
I would like to see more women in technology, but I don't think the major battle, at this point, is dirty jokes or overt sexism. The guy who calls a woman a bitch because she won't get him coffee gets reprimanded and possibly fired (and he should, because that's just unacceptable). The current-day battle is the generally unhealthy environment of long hours, backstabbing, and low autonomy for the people actually doing the work... and all of those issues are genderless.
You do, for example, need a "thick skin" to survive in the software industry-- regardless of gender. You'll be called an idiot by a manager whose IQ is the square root of yours, over a mistake made at the end of a 12-hour day. You'll get rejected for jobs because you couldn't explain how to sort a doubly-linked list in a 30-minute phone interview. You'll have to debug code that throws a profanity-laden exception name disparaging a colleague of yours (or possibly you). When you take a set of very smart but mostly socially retarded people (engineers) and make them answer to less smart but devious and nasty people (executives) this is the culture you get. Male or female, none of this stuff is easy to deal with, and no one should have to deal with it at all... but, right now, it's the price of admission.
Gender is one weapon that people use in overall corporate nastiness, but one of the less potent ones by this point. It's not only focused toward women, for that matter. I've seen men get hit hard with gender-specific smears as well.
What keeps working in technology worth all the nonsense is the possibility for change. Change is what we do, and most engineers (male and female) are good people. We dislike cultures of authority and abuse. Left to our own devices (rather than put into a pissing contest by executives) we will almost always try for positive-sum, inclusive outcomes. Besides, programming itself is pretty neat.
Once the novelty wears off, it's a hard crunch. http://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/274.html
It's a typically deflective move that only serves to steer away from addressing the actual underlying problems (and is very much a symptom of the very same structures). If he were to see this as a question of human rights (which it is, or at the very least ought to be), men's rights wouldn't be separable from women's rights, simply because they fundamentally dissolve in a concern for overall equality.
"To be white, or straight, or male, or middle class is to be simultaneously ubiquitious and invisible. You’re everywhere you look, you’re the standard against which everyone else is measured. You’re like water, like air. People will tell you they went to see a “woman doctor” or they will say they went to see “the doctor.” People will tell you they have a “gay colleague” or they’ll tell you about a colleague. A white person will be happy to tell you about a “Black friend,” but when that same person simply mentions a “friend,” everyone will assume the person is white. Any college course that doesn’t have the word “woman” or “gay” or “minority” in its title is a course about men, heterosexuals, and white people. But we call those courses “literature,” “history” or “political science.”" -- Michael S. Kimmel, in the introduction to the book, “Privilege: A Reader”
Of course you could go indie, but being successfull there isnt easy either.
I suspect her experiencing this has more to do with being a web developer than being a women. Web development has always been regarded as trivial work, and not "real programming". And unfortunately a huge number of web developers have embraced that idea and decided "we ain't need no fancy book learnin". It is easy to fall into the trap of assuming anyone who says they are a web developer is probably incompetent.