
For Young Female Coders, Internship Interviews Can Be Toxic - vinceguidry
https://www.wired.com/story/for-young-female-coders-internship-interviews-can-be-toxic
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forgottenpass
> More than half of the respondents said they either had a negative experience
> while applying for engineering internships or knew another woman who had a
> negative experience, such as being subjected to gender-biased interview
> questions and inappropriate remarks, or observing a noticeable lack of
> diversity when they interacted with company representatives during the
> interview process.

Using statistics that lump "noticeable lack of diversity" into the same
category as "inappropriate remarks" really undercuts the message. It makes the
reporting appear dishonest and I had to read the rest of the article much more
critically. It feels like someone wanted to start that paragraph with "more
than half" to make the problem seem as big as possible, and then throw a run-
on sentence in the readers face hoping they don't notice two issues of very
different severity are conflated.

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tengbretson
I would consider the ability to reject a job offer from a reputable company at
age 18 over the tone of someone's voice to be more of a marker of entitlement
than anything else.

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t-writescode
Agreed. Either they need a better writer for this article to explain just how
this tone was actually a problem; or, they need to focus on more useful
details of toxicity than a story about the current “bassiness of someone’s
voice”, or lack thereof, revealing they’re annoyed.

~~~
DHPersonal
> More than half of the respondents said they either had a negative experience
> while applying for engineering internships or knew another woman who had a
> negative experience, such as being subjected to gender-biased interview
> questions and inappropriate remarks…

> They described instances where a male interviewer flirted with them during
> the interview, sent an unsolicited photo of himself, asked if they had a
> significant other, or made sexual remarks in their presence. The respondents
> also reported feeling dismissed or demeaned because of their gender. One
> respondent was asked why she would want to go into tech as a woman; in
> another instance, a male interviewer laughed when the candidate said she saw
> herself becoming a software engineer in five years.

These quotes were taken from the article. The problem seems to be greater than
just tone of voice.

~~~
MrUnderhill
Not to diminish the issue at hand, but your quote (or rather, what you left
out) makes it sound worse than it is. The full sentence is:

> More than half of the respondents said they either had a negative experience
> while applying for engineering internships or knew another woman who had a
> negative experience, such as being subjected to gender-biased interview
> questions and inappropriate remarks, _or observing a noticeable lack of
> diversity when they interacted with company representatives during the
> interview process_.

~~~
DHPersonal
I considered leaving it in, but I figured it would be a trigger point for
people to brush the rest of the sentence off as unimportant just because they
didn't like one part of it. I'm not sure if you proved my point or if I
inadvertently fulfilled my own prediction.

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Grustaf
I’m sure the interviews can be toxic for young female coders, but unless you
also pose the same questions to young male coders you can’t say anything about
discrimination.

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danmg
If you look at what people have to go through in 2019 for an entry level job
at the coding fields, everyone hates it and it's not just 'toxic' for female
coders.

Take a look at /r/cscareerquestions on reddit. People grind for 18 months at a
time on leetcode and interview prep, like how rich suburban kids prep for the
SAT, and then offer this advice up as the pro-tips others can use to get their
foot in the door of a high prestige tech company.

