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The one male nurse I know did feel the need to post in facebook upon graduation that he felt being a male nurse was manly. Being a male in a mostly female environment is an advantage for him, though. He is physically stronger, yes, but, often, patients think he is a doctor and will take his direction without question in situations that female nurses find difficult.

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 a disadvantage by being mistaken for another, equally respectable professional.

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.

The point is that I am never assumed to be a developer.

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.

> Being a female developer gives you an advantage by having employers instantly agree to interview you

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.

>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.

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.

The argument was not written as "10 resumes come in, any women in those 10 are guaranteed an interview." It was "Women get interviewed no matter what."

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.

>It was "Women get interviewed no matter what."

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.

Right. It's offensive to me that this is happening and I'd be concerned that my colleagues would be resentful that I had it easier than their male counterparts in getting through the door.

Wrong? According to who? I speak for the UK market, of which I have significant experience sourcing, interviewing, hiring and placing developers of all shapes and sizes over a number of years. As far as the UK market is concerned, my claim is categorically correct.

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.

Perhaps it was not your intention, but your post read as if women applicants are interviewed no matter what, and if they are deemed "good enough", they're hired for the sake of balance. That's what I found both incorrect and offensive, speaking from my own experience (though not based in the UK). Apologies if this was not the case.

I'm also not the same commenter as the parent you were originally speaking with, which could also be some of the confusion.

| Positions that are typically male are generally considered higher positions.

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.

> Female devs are considered a novelty and the term female dev is considered to be frustrating due to the term dev being appended by 'female'.

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.

Nursing is a reinforcing of traditional gender roles. It being female dominated is a bad thing to. This wasn't brought up here because this is about a girl who wants to be a programmer not a little boy that ways to be nurse.

You know, I'm tried of this straw man (excuse me, straw person) being brought up every time someone talks about women in computing.