
To a Future Woman In Tech - kevinSuttle
http://futurewomanintech.com/
======
elptacek
So I am glad to not be the first comment on this post, because I almost was.
Instead, I took a while to compose my thoughts and I'm going to take a whack
at writing them down. To start, I just deactivated my facebook account to get
away from exactly this type of rhetoric. Why? When I look back over my career,
it is striking that I have received no career enrichment from any of my female
peers or co-workers. Absolutely none. All of the help I've ever gotten has
come from men. Do I take a dump on that kindness by punishing them for another
person's bad behavior, or by assuming these guys only wanted to get into my
pants? I can't live like that.

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.

~~~
emily37
Well said. If I had read something like this when I was eight years old, I
probably would have almost immediately backtracked and started looking for
something else to do with my life. The author could instead tell her niece
that being a game developer sounds like fun, and then help her deal with any
discrimination as it comes up, if it comes up at all. But to start off a
person's career with the message that she is going to be discriminated
against, that she is going to be at a disadvantage, that she should watch out
for all those people trying to drag her down... that's just sabotage.

~~~
flurie
This letter was not written for an eight-year-old. The real eight-year-old is
used as an angle to garner sympathy from us, the intended audience, but the
hypothetical eight-year-old is a MacGuffin.

~~~
emily37
Yes, I would hope that the author wouldn't include "sausage party" in a letter
to her real niece. :) So let me rephrase: I don't see the point in making
broad statements about the presence of discrimination in our field, because
these statements will drive away people who might have had perfectly
satisfying careers in tech completely unhampered by discrimination. In my
experience, constantly being made aware of the gender imbalance has been much
more damaging than any actual gender discrimination. (Though of course I'm
sure many other members of underrepresented groups have not been as lucky.)

------
jeremysmyth
While I agree with much of this, I find the fact that it's signed
"bitchwhocodes" remarkably hypocritical. If gender is so irrelevant, why put
it up front in such an aggressive way?

~~~
tedks
Gender _should_ be irrelevant, but it is _not_ currently irrelevant. It is
highly relevant, and to ignore this is to ignore obvious reality, roughly
equivalent to jumping off a cliff because reality is subjective and you
believe that you can fly.

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.

~~~
rozap
Really? I wasn't aware. I thought I knew plenty of competent women who weren't
"bitches".

I guess I was mistaken.

~~~
tedks
[http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.0022-4537.2004....](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.0022-4537.2004.00381.x/full)

------
Peroni
Has anyone applied the reverse argument to nursing?

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.

~~~
jeremysmyth
It's a bigger problem than that, unfortunately.

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.

~~~
leovingi
I have always found that the argument of pay inequality doesn't really make
any economical sense. If a woman is as qualified as a man, yet is ready to
work for less pay, wouldn't that be an incentive to hire loads of women? And
if someone, regardless of gender, is OK with the salary they are being
offered, why should anyone else care if a separate group of people, who have
also accepted the salaries they got offered, are earning more?

~~~
UnoriginalGuy
Pay inequality does exist but it is mostly used in an intentionally misleading
way to "prove" the extent of sexism/discrimination.

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...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/christina-hoff-sommers/wage-
gap_b_2073804.html)

------
leovingi
While I find the general idea of the text acceptable, I do not agree with the
sentiment that somehow if you're a woman in the workplace, you just need to be
accepted for what you are and you should be provided with an "immediate
transfer of trust in your abilities." My experience is anecdotal and someone
else's will, of course, differ, but at our workplace, if you do a good job and
you are a team player, you will be accepted. No one, man or woman, somehow has
the right to be trusted until proving themselves.

~~~
nollidge
That's not the sentiment she's expressing, though. You generally give people
some amount of trust to begin with, right? That's all she's talking about.

~~~
leovingi
I can see your point and you are probably right :) But then again, it depends
on the field as well. In any technological field, you would get hired because
someone trusts in you. But once you start interacting with your team members,
you still have to prove yourself to them.

------
zekenie
This is awesome. Really powerful stuff. I wonder about one line:

"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?

------
guywhointernets
Sheesh, tone down the vibrant colors. Looking at this article is painful.

Luckily I can just strip the css from your site, but for an average user...?

------
ultramundane8
I'd be a little worried about introducing the term "sausage party" to my eight
year old anything who clearly has a working knowledge of electronics. It seems
like it'd be a very dangerous thing to search.

------
commanda
"I hope that skill will always be held in higher esteem than your gender - if
you had no skill, you would not be part of the discussion, and your gender is
simply a modifier."

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.

------
michaelochurch
Plenty of these problems are garden-variety nastiness that men face as well.
I'll take this one, which doesn't strike me as gendered:

 _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.

~~~
of
Even if the problem isn't gendered, like the one you pointed out, it becomes
gendered when encountered by a woman because of male privilege.

------
artursapek
What ever happened to "speak softly and carry a big stick?"

------
recoiledsnake
Regardless of gender, a game developer is not a great career unless you're
high up in the company ladder. Too much stress, being forced to work crazy
hours without extra pay starting months before deadlines, not great pay etc.

Once the novelty wears off, it's a hard crunch. <http://ea-
spouse.livejournal.com/274.html>

~~~
drd
It is always about women’s rights and animals’ rights. When somebody is going
to talk about men’s rights? All the things she talks about, I have seen
happening to male developers too.

~~~
dfxm12
Shouldn't you be pushing for a dialoge around the the more aptly named
_developers' rights_ then?

~~~
rmk2
He won't because then his "argument" wouldn't work the same way, where the
fight for women's equality is equated to the fight for animals rights. Then,
his anecdotal evidence of "the same thing happening to males" could not be
used to counter what is in any way, shape or form a systemic problem for women
in technology. Additionally, his "argument" builds on the false dichotomy of
men's/women's rights, whereas men supposedly need a lobby to protect them from
feminist advances. The idea is the same as talking about animal rights and
somehow decrying the lack of engagement in butchers rights to counter any
advances made.

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.

~~~
drd
I just simply think those people who always talk about a specific gender’s
rights in fact are helping to create more and more distance between two
genders in the tech world.

~~~
of
Dismissing these discussions and ignoring your male privilege actually creates
more distance between genders. If we ignore it things will continue idly on
their course. Everyone needs to talk about it for any sort of fundamental
change.

------
papsosouid
>"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 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.

