Comment by knowtheory | Hacker News Reader

Comment by knowtheory | Hacker News Reader

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> Is it really conceivable that women are abandoning well paid careers in business and other areas to become yoga instructors? Or life coaches? Or re-training in psychology? Or starting their own home businesses on etsy or similar?

Yes. I know a number of people (some women, some not) who were excellent software engineers, sharp minds, good at teasing a part a puzzle who have left the field.

People balance quality of life together with compensation (and whether the opportunity is interesting), or everyone would be trying to become an investment banker.

It is certainly the case that if being a woman software engineer sucks more than being a man software engineer that calculus may result in clearly delineated differentials like the ones we see today.

While we're continuing with the superfluous anecdotal evidence, I also know of software engineers, some of them women, who are totally happy with their jobs/workplace, work their asses off, and see real tangible results of that hard work, whether it be from happy users of a shipped product or salary increases.

Quantifying what "sucks" about being a woman software engineer is borderline impossible due to the level of subjectivity involved. Even when one does, I'd posit that there is a sizable overlap between what sucks according to women and sucks according to men. At some point in the discussion though, other potential causes have to be at least considered when talking about why there's so few women engineers. Unfortunately getting to that point of is much less attractive and doesn't drive page clicks.

Of course that isn't true, being able to quantify people's experiences. Sociologists do this sort of thing all the time; there's a pretty well-established body of literature and practice and describes how you can go into the field, ask people questions (with interviews, focus groups, surveys, etc), and develop a general understanding of the field.

I'm not familiar with workplace/STEM literature around gendered experiences, but people may already be doing the research. (Makes note to self to look into this, to see if anyone is...)

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