
Why Aren't Women Advancing at Work? Ask a Transgender Person - davidgerard
http://thenewrepublic.com/article/119239/transgender-people-can-explain-why-women-dont-advance-work
======
nieve
I can vouch for the effect and it's far less subtle than I would have guessed.
I expected transphobia plus sexism in the office, I got less of the former and
far more blatant examples of the latter. I transitioned in the same job,
reporting to the same people and supervising the same people and my treatment
changed hugely:

• Guys I'd taught to use network tools months earlier (ngrep, paratrace, etc.)
were eager to teach me to use the same tools and suddenly started giving me
less credence.

• People in meetings (especially men) presumed I was from marketing or sales
even when I was introduced as tech lead.

• When members of another group needed access to code I'd written my boss
pointed them at me and told them I'd written it - so they came to ask me who
knew the code and could explain it. I spent north of 10 min trying to get
through to some very sincere, confused devs that no, there wasn't a "guy who
wrote the code" that I was hiding from them and I was the only person who
could help them.

• In meetings a male dev who reported to me started getting all the questions
and was expected to sign off on things. When I made the final call on
something people would ask him his decision.

• I lost two to three feet of personal space in elevators, break room
conversations, and hallway discussions with management types and got talked
over much more.

• I was happy that the invitations (I refused once I knew what I was in for)
to beer runs/golf/bars with scantily clad servers stopped, but so did the
"male execs go out in cliques" lunches. There's a lot of social currency,
inside information, politics and gossip when guys go out like that and _poof_
, your access is gone (or you never had it if you're a cis woman).

• Upper management stopped defaulting to believing me about deadlines,
security issues, redundancy, etc. My concerns were far more likely to be
considered overrated.

Every single one of these things I noticed _and_ had others mention to me.
Imagine the combined effect of 10 years of that on someone's career and you'll
understand why so few women have made it up the ranks in tech companies..

~~~
marquis
I'm a cis developer and consider myself extremely lucky to have grown up with
super-strong female role models in my family. When working for others and
overtly treated in unpleasant ways due to my gender I was able to laugh. I
started out in the mid-90s so by then it wasn't unheard of to have the odd
women executive. But ultimately I had to quit as I felt excluded from all the
things you comment on above. Now I run a team of devs myself, many of them
young males, and I am really pleased that they don't see gender in relation to
my role as boss/lead dev.

For me the issue still remains in sales and high-level corporate deals.
Recently I had the decision-maker of a very large company call me after a
boardroom meeting to apologize for being hard on me in regards to some
questions they had. During the meeting I was actually impressed by their
knowledge and interest and I had really enjoyed the meeting. So it was sad
when he called to say, "sorry for possibly making you uncomfortable". I don't
think this would ever happen to a man.

------
MaysonL
Accounts of some interesting natural experiments detailing some of the social
biases against women.

Money quote: '...another scientist said, "Ben gave a great seminar today—but
then his work is so much better than his sister's." (The scientist didn't know
Ben and Barbara were the same person.) '

~~~
JoeAltmaier
The article ends by admitting the possible influence of testosterone on
behavior, which could actually mean that Ben's performance was significantly
different than Barbara's. For what its worth, there's a reason folks change
gender, and it involves behavior and biology. If they didn't change, there'd
be no point to it. Behavior and biology are very significant factors in how
you appear and are perceived.

So we can say 'of course its gender bias' but how is that actionable without
knowing what part of that bias is due to what? Is it behavior, culture,
aggressiveness, what?

~~~
davidgerard
This fails to explain away nieve's comment above.

~~~
gwern
No, it doesn't. Think about the mechanism a little more.

