
The Benefits of Being a Female Software Engineer - garlicbreadftw
http://www.jeanhsu.com/?p=263
======
yuvadam
Sorry, I can't hear about gender in engineering jobs anymore.

The likelihood that you will see a blog post about the "benefits of being a
male software engineer" is exactly the same as the likelihood to see a blog
post about the "benefits of being a male social worker".

We do not need to artificially try to bring in more engineers of a certain
gender just because the numbers don't make sense.

And we do not need more blog posts calling out our oddities as engineers. We
all dress like dorks. We all have our quirks. Get over it.

~~~
FeministHacker
And this is precisely why we need still more posts.

You know why we don't need a "benefits of being a male software engineer"
post? Because every day is a "benefits of being a male software engineer" day
for male software engineers.

You should probably have a read of <http://amptoons.com/blog/the-male-
privilege-checklist/> . As a rule when it comes to this sort of material, if
it makes you feel uncomfortable and defensive, please think about why this is
before commenting.

I'd love to see a post about "benefits of being a male social worker", or any
other female-dominated field! As a feminist (3rd wave), I don't think equality
is possible without addressing the problems faced by men, as well as women.
Men in such jobs are routinely mocked by other men and subjected to ridicule
by our masculine culture society. And that sucks.

~~~
yummyfajitas
I admit, I haven't read the entire checklist. When the first item on it is
blatantly wrong, I kind of got turned off.

Go read about the advantages women have in hiring in the sciences:
[http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=12062&page=R1](http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=12062&page=R1)

Anecdotally, women are also given advantages in big corporate IT, but I'm not
aware of any studies. Corporations are generally loath to give away data on
stuff like this, who knows what lawsuits it might bring.

I only skimmed the rest, but I found 14) particularly amusing. The politicians
who stole my lunch [1], my freedom and my money all have a penis (just like
me). This is a privilege how?

[1] In Jersey City, where I live and work, Steven Fulops chased away the food
trucks to protect subway.

~~~
FeministHacker
The list is a generalisation across all fields, so discounting it based on how
something might not be true in your field is a bit short-sighted. #1 is true
still for many fields.

Of course, the link you provided wasn't for the general tech sector - it was
specific to universities, which have other aspects in play. Even within the
general tech sector, there are plenty of reports of questionable hiring
practices. I've found to be not uncommon for my gender (female) to be an issue
during interviews, and we've seen posts here in the past about this subject.
Further, women are often moved rapidly into management roles, and their
technical abilities treated as suspect.

And yes, I'm speaking as something big corporate IT, and it's no better. Just
looking across at our large (40+) server support teams, you can count the
number of women on one hand. The application support teams here are slightly
better, but only just. We're a typical shared services company in the UK, and
our competitors are all very similar.

As for 14, you've found a truth about privilege lists - they might not always
be things you like.

~~~
yummyfajitas
Which fields is #1 true for? Regardless, I'll assume you are right. Points 1-3
are irrelevant for the conversation we are having here (about women in tech),
so I'll keep reading.

4) is a matter of whether you personally adopt a collectivist viewpoint or
not. If women disproportionately adopt collectivist viewpoints, why is that
anyone's fault besides their own?

5) is probably on point. 6) may be true in general, but (much like 1-3) it
seems false in tech. Consider Leah Culver - "ooh, a girl that can program, and
hot", as opposed to "meh, barely competent".

7-14) may be true, but are similarly irrelevant to a conversation about women
in tech. Also, you still haven't explained how 14 is a "privilege". How does
Obama's penis benefit me, relative to a woman?

~~~
khafra
On 14, the failure mode is called "not carving reality at the joints." Because
.00001% of men wield large amounts of political power, whereas even fewer
women (at least, visibly) do so, political power is a male privilege.

There are certainly reference classes for "likely to wield political power"
that change the likelihood ratio by far more than "male."

~~~
FeministHacker
You're missing the point.

The issue is not the raw numbers, but the pychological problem - that people
like you are not in power, or not as equally holding power. That you are not
of the type of people who have power.

And yes, there are other privileges, like White privilege, middle/upper-class
privilege, straight privilege, cis privilege, not-abused privilege, and so on.
These intersect to cause more issues again.

~~~
khafra
The assertion that people in privileged positions can never see their own
privilege is refutation-proof; but when you start creating negative categories
like "not-abused" to privilege, it's hard to claim with a straight face that
anybody except the people actually in power are all that privileged.

Unless, of course, you're privileging gender privilege far above other types
of privilege.

...and I just hit semantic satiation.

~~~
FeministHacker
"The assertion that people in privileged positions can never see their own
privilege is refutation-proof" Actually, I never said this, and I wouldn't.
Most people who are privileged don't directly realise this, but it is common
for concerned parties to learn about privilege to begin to "check their
privilege" - to question how their privileges affects their interpretation of
something.

I am privileged in some ways, and not in others. Generally privileges are
treated as being different and hard to compare, because "oppression olympics"
(arguing some are more harmful than others) never actually helps the
discussion, and generally leads to people forgetting to check their privileges
- who am I to speak for the experiences of other minorities?

The fact that you act amused at "not-abused" as a privilege is part of the
whole problem, especially when you consider how this intersects with with
privilege (or lack thereof) issues.

The concept of intersections between privileges (or the lack thereof) is
important - that some combinations of the effects of a privileged society are
worse than others.

~~~
khafra
My amusement is at the application of the word "privilege" to a negative
description.

I currently enjoy not-superstitious privilege, not-being-kidnapped privilege,
not-being-forcefed-arsenic privilege, and many others that help me maintain my
status and position in ways I may never have thought of. But calling them
"privileges" is silly; it leads, as I said, to semantic satiation; and that's
part of the whole problem.

Many people here do not enjoy neurotypical privilege, but they don't use that
language, they try to describe the actual problems they face and the ways to
surmount them as efficiently as possible.

------
ajays
She doesn't mention it, but another great thing about being an engineer is
that engineers are quite egalitarian and the evaluation criteria is often very
objective (speed of the code, complexity of the algorithm, etc.). As a result,
women just have to be good at what they do, and there's hardly any
discrimination. In other fields, often, for a woman to just be good is not
enough; there is overt (or covert) discrimination, "old boys" networks, etc.

// male here, but with several female engineer friends

~~~
cowpewter
I don't know. Engineers in general may be more impressed with skill than non-
engineers, but as a woman in a technical field, I do feel constant pressure to
not merely meet, but exceed, the abilities of my male peers in order to
receive the same level of respect. I've felt it all my life, even as far back
as middle and high school, competing in math competitions and our school's
academic team, and being in the honors and AP classes.

It's not an overt thing. There's never any one comment or specific action by
an individual you can point at and say, "See! Right there! You aren't giving
me equal respect!" but the pressure is definitely there.

Also, the converse is true. Not only do you have to be better, to be seen as
equal, anything you do wrong is magnified. Would Leah Culver's "creative"
rounding method have been _nearly_ a big deal if she'd been male? I have the
feeling that while people would still have joked about it, it wouldn't have
been as widespread or for as long.

~~~
sokoloff
I think it's likely that your male peers, those who are interested in
excellence, are also feeling that same pressure. I'm not suggesting that
everything is equal, because it patently isn't, but the constant pressure to
exceed the abilities of your peers is common, and I believe is motivating and
even healthy. Someone's got to be the best at foo; if foo is important, why
should you be the best at it and let others be the best at bar, baaz, quux,
etc?

I've also obviously made mistakes and while the mistake spotlight is shining
in your face, it feels pretty magnified, especially if you're one who has
previously earned significant technical respect. For three years, I led the
group in our company responsible for post-morteming every production issue,
and reporting to our business leadership in a weekly meeting every issue that
cost us more than $2000. In all that time, and in the rest of my two decades
in the field, I don't think I've ever sensed a whiff of "you made that mistake
because of your extra X chromosome..." (unfamiliar with Leah Culver, but will
google now)

~~~
cowpewter
They probably do, but I even recognize the bias in myself. Even having
experienced the wrong end of it, I often recognize myself subconsciously
defaulting to less respect to another woman in technical matters.

Down in her comment <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2274993> pamelafox
linked a blog post she had written about it being good to be a girl in CS, but
_that_ post references a previous one she'd written in which she talks about
her experience in Model UN in school, where she found herself doing the same
thing. Automatically requiring other girls to 'prove' themselves more than the
boys before she had respect for them as a speaker. (That post is here:
[http://blog.pamelafox.org/2009/10/should-i-defend-my-cred-
ye...](http://blog.pamelafox.org/2009/10/should-i-defend-my-cred-yes.html))

I try to be conscious of it, but again, I know what it's like to be on the
receiving end. If this is a bias even other women _aware of the problem_ have
and have to consciously fight in themselves, how many others (men _and_ women)
don't even get as far as recognizing it?

------
sthatipamala
Re: "Being Liked"

If I were to say "I like having women at work, especially when they make
brownies and are not bitches," I'd have an angry horde at my door.

But Jean Hsu thinks it is okay to say it because she is a woman?

~~~
Confusion
I'm going to assume both you and Jean Hsu wouldn't be serious when they said
that. In that case, if you were to say that, the angry horde would consist of
women that didn't know you and were taking your words at face value, because
guys have been known to actually feel that way. Those women would give Jean
Hsu the benefit of the doubt, because there are few women known to have
actually ever felt that way. However, with people you know, who understood the
broader context of what you were saying, it wouldn't (shouldn't) be a problem.

"I like some female colleagues among my male colleagues for a number of
reasons, but the fact that they tend to bring brownies definitely stands out
for me, because I love brownies." There, defused the entire problem?

~~~
sthatipamala
I agree. I'll gladly mince my words to avoid being called a sexist.

The issue here is that either Jean is being serious, in which case she's
undermining workplace equality, or she's abusing the fact that she can
facetiously say such things because she can get away with it. What is she
trying to accomplish?

~~~
Confusion
Well, clarifying what you mean to people that don't know you is not really
mincing words: a lot of implicit things can remain unsaid with people that do
know you, but that doesn't mean it should be possible to leave them unsaid at
all.

I don't think she's trying to accomplish anything; she's just being blatantly
honest and care-free, without taking into consideration how Joe Random may
(reasonably) interpret what she's saying.

------
alinajaf
> Less Drama

A male developer saying that would _so_ not get away with it :P

~~~
VladRussian
A male developer even thinking in terms of "More\Less Drama" ?

~~~
cookiecaper
Usually men use the term "politics".

------
VladRussian
only women can promote and oppose the same gender stereotypes simultaneously.

~~~
mikeklaas
Are you promoting or opposing that stereotype?

~~~
VladRussian
i just admire them [women].

~~~
fedd
'a woman can make three things out of nothing: a tragedy, a hairstyle, and a
salad'

a russian sexist proverb (maybe internatnl dont know 4 sure)

------
charlesju
Lets be honest here.

A lot of people are not going to like this type of post (as witnessed by the
response here), but like any news outlet, sensationalist news sells. Jean Hsu
is just following Gary V's advice and building up brand equity. There is no
better way than to use your various circumstances in life to build a
considerable amount of valley buzz.

Well played. I would do it too if I were in your shoes.

PS. Out of the last 10 hires I made for my previous startup, 3 of them were
woman. I believe that's higher than industry standards.

~~~
yuvadam
IMO, this type of _buzz_ is no more than flamebait. But maybe my view of
things is skewed.

PS. 30% women hires is pretty much the industry average.

------
pamelafox
I actually wrote a post with similar sentiments a while back - "Being a Girl
in CS Doesn't Suck": [http://blog.pamelafox.org/2009/10/being-girl-in-cs-
doesnt-su...](http://blog.pamelafox.org/2009/10/being-girl-in-cs-doesnt-
suck.html)

As for the casual attire, I think it goes both ways. I'm totally into casual
most of the times (to the point of wearing my head-to-toe footed pajamas to
work), but then the days when I want to dress up or wear a mini-skirt or
whatever, I feel like I'm standing out a bit too much and wish I was in the
pop music industry instead. But alas, I have no singing talent and no autotune
device, so back to coding I go.

~~~
bryanlarsen
Sometimes the men want to dress up too. If I wore a tie every day I'm sure I'd
hate the bloody thing, but it is nice to occasionally get the boost one gets
from dressing up. But a tie at work is definitely taboo, much more than a
mini-skirt, since it sends really strong signals.

The only time I've worn a tie at work is when I've had a funeral in the
afternoon, and when I drove straight to work after a party in Montreal. A suit
with that slept-in look sends signals, but it doesn't imply to your co-workers
that you have political ambitions.

------
edanm
"You also get the added bonus of seeing people's confused reactions when they
ask you if you're in marketing, and you tell them that you are a developer."

This sentence really surprised me. How often does this happen? Female
engineers are a minority, but I wouldn't have imagined it would be _that_ big
a deal to run into a female engineer.

~~~
kingkilr
I recently wrote an autobiographical paper from the perspective of women in
technology for class. I found that women represent under 9% of the
developers/designers at the company I work for, under 5% of the core
developers on open source projects I contribute to, and under 3% of the
contributors to those projects. So while I personally wouldn't make that
assumption, it's probably not a bad one, statically speaking, for many
software engineers.

~~~
squasher
Not sure that is the word choice you intended: It might not be a "bad" one it
terms of your chances of being right, but it's "bad" in the sense that it's
insulting, frustrating, and marginalizing for the underestimated woman.

------
nimrody
Add to the list another 'benefit': Getting immediate attention from any male
dominated forum (case in point: HN).

Having worked with female colleagues (EEs), I have found much more diversity
than common behavior. These sort of articles certainly do not reflect my
experience (as a male).

------
city41
I'm very glad my girlfriend is not a developer (and she is very glad I'm not a
geologist). I quite enjoy the escape from coding that she provides for me.

------
bane
Until recently, I've found that claims of sexism in software were strange
(I'll share a story below to explain). If anything, I've generally found that
men tend to be thrilled at having women working with them, and not for the
seedy sort of ways that might be expected. Most of the male software engineers
I've known honestly wonder why their field has so few women in it -- known
that women are full and well as smart and capable as they. I've heard of no
(until recently) cases of misconduct, or uncomfortable work environments -- on
the contrary, I've usually heard that when a woman engineer claims that she'd
like something to make her environment better, her management will bend over
backwards to try and accommodate. I _have_ heard of the usual pay issues and
promotion problems. But in most cases it seems to just be a matter of not
asking for them.

At any rate, the lack of representation of women in software is a huge problem
in the field since it cuts off effectively half of the possible work force.
More importantly, software that might better reach the female audience doesn't
get written, services don't get created, etc.

Now the story.

My wife is a software engineer, her last job was a technical department head
at a company with about 40% female software engineers. It wasn't super high-
end work, but it provided services and data worth about $30-40million/yr to
some very major institutions, so it had to be rock solid.

Her immediate boss was a woman, and 3 out of 4 department heads were women.
Her boss's boss was a man.

Before that she worked for a $2billion dollar large company. In her
department, there were about 30% female engineers (though in another technical
department there were none, go fig). (her immediate super was a woman, but
later changed to a man).

Before that she worked at an e-commerce company, of the engineering staff were
women, her boss was a man, but his boss was a woman.

In every case they produced great, solid work, the companies were wildly
profitable, her career progressed fantastically -- and she never complained
about problems with sexism. Maybe she's been lucky, she never sought out these
places, but that's where she ended up. (it could be that having so many women
in the first placed altered the hiring dynamics so that they would tend to
hire more women later)

Late last year, at the company she worked for, they brought in a new COO and
within 4 months everything changed. Women managers were promoted up and over
or moved laterally into diminished positions. Men with no engineering
experience were brought in as department supervisors. My wife had her
department entirely eliminated and her staff placed under all new _male_
supervisors. One woman engineer was fired because she botched a minor product
management job while a male engineer was promoted to department head right
after complaints of rampant racism and sexism were formally filed against him.

My wife was devastated, she tried to stick it out, but the writing was on the
wall and after a few miserable, tortuous months, I convinced her to resign. It
was the first time she (or I for that matter) had seen or experienced such
rampant and overt sexism.

Three months after she leaves we find out from her former colleagues that the
COO was fired, and that 3 out of 4 major development projects have to be
scrapped (at a total loss of $7-9 million) and the company is running in the
red (in a recession proof industry).

If she had stayed her problems would now be over and she might have been able
to work the problem to her advantage.

But, the good side is that she's now trying to startup her own company,
brushing the dust off of long dormant engineering talents, and is happier than
I've ever known her to be since she's doing her own thing and writing her own
rules. Her job satisfaction appears to be off the charts and I don't think
I've ever seen her work so hard.

~~~
yummyfajitas
Honestly, your story sounds like a typical corporate power struggle which
happened to affect a department which was (by some fluke) full of women.

If you read about HP under Fiorina, you hear a similar story. Techies were
pushed aside and replaced by Fiorina's cronies (mostly marketers), and the
company suffered horribly. Such stories don't always end in disaster - a
certain investment bank recently brought on a new IT chief who is well known
for destroying a broken department and rebuilding a highly efficient one in
it's place.

The process also involves firing many managers and replacing them with people
loyal to him, pushing out lots of insiders, huge numbers of formerly
comfortable people quitting in disgust, etc.

The only unusual element in your story ("her staff placed under new _male_
supervisors") sounds like reversion to the mean - as you noted, "in another
technical department there were none [women]". Perhaps there are other
elements to the story that you haven't mentioned, but your description just
sounds like normal corporate politics.

~~~
bane
You bring up a fantastic point and it's certainly gave us things to think
about while it was all happening. I have seen that kind of thing happen in my
own career, but it's usually men replacing men with different men -- usually
to disastrous effect.

I think what finally made us conclude the sexist element was the speed with
which it happened, and that red flags were raised with HR that only seemed to
speed things up -- get rid of the complainers faster than they can complain.

------
Bvalmont
Pretty much the same benefits when you're a guy working in a company filled
with women. I just take the extra drama with the infinite supply of brownies
every day.

------
fedd
it's nice that jean wrote

> if you are a single female you can have first pick of a lot of really nice
> available guys

just nice and life-asserting. for me.

------
danac
Another relatively male-dominated field is banking (although probably less so
than programming), yet one can argue that there's plenty of drama operating
within those concrete towers.

What differentiates the level of "drama" between the banking industry from the
software programming industry? Is it because engineering is inherently more
meritocratic and less egotistical? Or is there just too much money and power
at stake when it comes to banking that one can't help but get involved in more
politicking? Does the (presence or absence of any one)gender come into play at
all?

------
benatkin
The part about her husband being glad he got married before moving to
California reminds me of this comment:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2272748>

(It's by the author of an article that made the front page earlier today.)

------
waynecolvin
Beggars can't be choosers perhaps but couldn't both halves of a relationship
being similar get ubalanced? Maybe just a little bit more understanding, or
opportunitiy, makes up for that...

------
georgieporgie
My (sexist?) experience:

The few women I've worked alongside as a software engineer have been
fantastic. Easy to get along with, able to focus on work tasks and still have
a great lunchtime conversation, with no alpha-nerd pedantic B.S.

The women I've worked _for_ (three) have been universally terrible. Each in
slightly different ways, but all had a strange, overcompensating quality to
them. I'll just have to say it: bitchiness. Strange, control-freak tendencies
and subsequent drama.

I've worked for two great male bosses, two idiots, and one brilliant guy who
was an asshole (but at least he could be reasoned with). I would take all but
one of the male bosses over any of the female bosses.

My conclusion isn't that women are bad managers, or anything like that.
Rather, I believe it shows that people with lousy people skills are
distributed across both sexes, and promoting worker bees to management
positions is _not_ an ideal plan.

~~~
JanezStupar
I confirm this experience and the anecdotal evidence I gathered is quite
similar.

Edit: Almost forgot - I also had a female boss I would work for in a beat. I
must mention that she was more of a tomboy - but still what a woman:
pragmatic, ambitious, decisive, tough but fair. All the general qualities one
would expect from a man, but with added softness of female persuasion and
communication skills.

~~~
jarin
It's funny how good female bosses are often described as "tomboyish". I'm
starting to think "tomboy" is just a synonym for "assertive but likeable
woman"

~~~
khafra
I always thought "tomboyish" meant "willing to climb a tree," with possible
overtones of "hair shorter than shoulder length."

------
tastybites
_They generally remember to shower every so often_

Oh, come on.

~~~
1337p337
_Most_ of them _do_ tend to be cleaner.

But anyone remember the report a couple of decades back about water usage
after the US Navy started letting women on ships? Having ladies around made
the guys shower more often. Empirically, I can verify that, since getting
married, I do tend to shave more often.

~~~
Groxx
Just to be a contrary example, both my wife and I shave _less_ now that we're
married (ie, never). Our skin is much happier, shorter showers, far fewer
razors going dull, and no more cactus in bed.

She's also discovering she prefers it in other women - as a massage therapist,
regardless of how recently they've shaved she'll encounter it all, and it's
pretty amazingly irritating stuff.

~~~
georgieporgie
_as a massage therapist, regardless of how recently they've shaved she'll
encounter it all_

As a guy who enjoys massages and has hairy extremities: no matter how much oil
is used, the hair gets pulled. One of the primary reasons cyclists shave their
legs is for better massages.

~~~
Groxx
That's true, and I have heard that about cyclists (in particular). I wonder if
it depends on the amount of hair. I'm not very hairy, and I've never had much
of a problem (a couple tugs, but after a few massages you don't notice it any
more). Also, if you ever get the chance, different kinds of oil act
differently, you might have better luck if you experiment a bit.

