I saw this question on Geek Feminism a couple of weeks ago, and I don’t feel like I’ve come up with an answer that is satisfactory yet. The question is in parts, so I’ll tackle them one at a time.
If you’re a woman in CS, does it ever get better? If it got better for you, where and how did that happen?
Dan Savage and his husband Terry Miller famously told gay kids who are being bullied that it gets better. Their video inspired thousands of others to film their own videos, ranging from all sorts of individuals to the San Francisco Giants to President Obama. If you’ve watched a lot of these videos, you can often boil their message down to a few points:
- A lot of homophobia is rooted in ignorance and immaturity.
- When you’re the only LGBT person that you know about, you feel completely alone.
- When you’re in a situation where you’re surrounded by homophobia, sometimes the only solution is to get the hell out of there.
- Once you get the hell out of there, you have to find someplace that is accepting of who you are.
I think that there are a lot of parallels to the sexism that exists today in computer science and software engineering.
A lot of sexism in CS is rooted in ignorance and immaturity. As men start seeing more accomplished women in CS, it gets better.
When you’re the only woman around, you feel alone because you have experiences that aren’t shared by others. It gets better when you find another woman who is in a similar situation who you can talk to — it lets you know that you’re not alone.
If you find yourself in a situation where you can’t handle the sexism that you’re dealing with, sometimes the only solution is to get the hell out of there. I know that finding a job isn’t trivial and isn’t something that you do overnight, but then those LGBT kids have to wait until they’re 18 so that they can leave home too. Polish up your resume and portfolio like they’ve never been polished before, start applying for jobs, and get the hell out.
As you’re looking for a new job, remember that the interview is a two-way street. A couple of months ago, I wrote a long post about participating in an on-campus interview, and my last point was that you should ask questions about what’s important to you in your position. If you’re getting the hell out of a job because of the sexism that you’re dealing with, you should have a lot of questions about the team and its culture. Obviously you’re not going to ask, “so, how many sexist pigs do you work with?”, but there are plenty of questions that you can ask and observations that you can make that will help you understand what the situation there is like.
If you’ve learned to deal with it, how?
As ever, it depends on the sexism. Frankly, it also depends on you, too.
Sometimes you simply call ’em on it. How you do it depends on the situation and your relationship with those involved.
For example, one day, I was working in my office with the door open. A bunch of male engineers who I know pretty well were standing in the hallway chatting. One of the guys, who is single, commented that he always felt like he was behind on stuff: keeping his apartment clean, doing laundry, etc. Somebody said, “oh, you need a wife!” and the rest of the guys agreed vociferously. I got up, walked to my door, and simply stood there with an eyebrow raised. The single guy laughed and said that it wasn’t his idea, and the others backpedaled, including a couple who said that they’re also married to women who work in tech and that it’s a lot easier to manage when you’ve got two people to handle everything. I didn’t say anything, I certainly didn’t call them sexist, and it ended up being a funny anecdote for all of us.
Sometimes you work on it over time, and you build up your credibility so that the sexist behavior fades away. Credibility goes a long way towards fixing sexism that’s rooted in ignorance. I’ll admit that I’ve laid the smackdown on someone who tried to mansplain to me that the problem that we were discussing was NP-complete and what that meant. As if the mansplaining wasn’t obnoxious enough, he was totally wrong about it being NP-complete — in fact, it was only O(n²), and I proved it. He wouldn’t meet my eyes in the hallway for weeks afterwards, but a few months later, I heard through the grapevine that he had complimented my technical skills in a meeting.
One thing that you always always do when combating sexism is to be the change that you wish to see in the world. Do not display any sexism yourself. For example, don’t use your mom (or the more generic soccer mom) as an example of a non-technical user. I don’t care if your mom really isn’t technical. It goes without saying that you should avoid other stereotypes, -isms, and -phobias as well. Don’t display racist behavior, don’t display homophobic behavior. Your credibility in trying to address sexism is negated when you make a racist comment yourself.
If being ostracized and viewed as gross and weird for being feminist and female “never gets better,” why stay in CS?
I reject that it “never gets better”. It might not get better in certain situations. Buy me a cocktail sometime and I’ll tell you about the manager who wanted to know when I planned to get pregnant so that he could include it in his schedule for our next release. I doubt that he’s ever going to get better. But you can find situations where it is better, and you embrace them, and you try to make it better for other women too.
Even in a bad situation, one of the reasons that you stay in CS is because you love it. If you don’t love it, and if it’s a bad situation, you don’t have a good reason to stay. This isn’t to say that sometimes the sexism just gets overwhelming and you can’t take it anymore, and so you do go off and do something else. If that’s the decision that you make, that’s valid. There have been some pretty nasty examples out there. If I try to put myself in those shoes, I’m not sure if I wouldn’t’ve walked away myself. But, thankfully, I haven’t been that unlucky with sexism in CS.
I think that it’s incumbent upon technical women to make ourselves available for mentorship. It’s hard to find a technical woman for a mentor, especially ones who have been in tech for several years. So for those of us who have, I think that we should help out the younger women who are experiencing a lot of the same things that we did, and hopefully helping to avoid having women drop out of the field because they just can’t take the sexism any longer. I do this at VMware, mentoring some of the younger women on my team1 and reaching out to them when I think that they could use a hand. It’s also one of the reasons why I write this Q&A series of blog posts, to exemplify the behavior that I think that a senior technical woman should have.
Ultimately, I think that the way that sexism in CS gets better for us as individual women in CS is to find your tribe. Find the other women who have walked the same path that you want to walk. Find the men who aren’t sexist. Find the courage to get yourself out of a bad situation. It gets better, and it requires you to help make it get better.
- Men aren’t left out. I’m currently mentoring the newest researcher on my team, who is male. ↩
Bizarrely enough, one of the things that has helped me at least was the Air Force. (Note: I speak of mid-to-late 80s military, not the BornAgain Repository it seems to have become.) One of the bomber supers was a woman, one of the jet engine shop supers was a woman, etc. Not a majority by any stretch, but HIGHLY visible.
Also, these were not…um…shy women. You said something they didn’t like, you knew about it. They weren’t assholes about things, but they all were down with the idea that no, you don’t have to put up with offensive behavior, and you have not just a right to that, but backing regs that say you don’t.
It also helped the environment was one of “Does she do her job well? Fuck, she’s okay then.” Didn’t have to be friends, didn’t have to be best buddies. Just had to show up and do your job well. Everyone there had some kind of personality defect, everyone on the planet does. But, as long as you did your shit correctly, and pulled your weight, the fact you weren’t especially personable wasn’t a real problem. You just didn’t get invited to parties, and if you complain about that? Um…yeah.
That is something that civilian companies have problems with sometimes.
I know about 10 women who are engineers. About 7 of them are completely incompetent, 2 are marginally competent and one is good.
I know about 100 men who are engineers. About 40 of them are completely incompetent, 40 are marginally competent, and 20 are competent (and I work with them).
Not much to choose from if you are hiring women. Also, the stupid one are really stupid and mess up the culture. Be careful – don’t hire women.
I’m impressed. It took three days for the first sexist comment to appear. I thought it’d be on the first or second day.
To be fair, the sexist idiot did meet expectations in being an anonymous coward, so: way to meet expectations, dude!
Oh bless your heart. Here, have a cookie, now run along and play on the veranda, the grownups need to talk.
they’re so cute at that age, and they say the darndest things.
Good job attacking the messenger instead of trying to address the points raised.
Unless you went to a public school in california, you got a lot of advantage of being a woman. For example, at MIT, 1 in 4 women who apply get in, versus 1 in 10 men (26% acceptance rate vs 10% acceptance rate). There is some survivorship bias, but it really isn’t as pronounced.
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/admissions-2011-0404.html
I would love to change my stereotype (it would increase the applicant pool by 50%). The change in stereotype though that would have to be driven by anecdotal evidence rather than vitriolic personal attacks such as the one you attempted in the comment above (which, in general, women are better at, and that you just attempted – this is the trouble that women cause and I therefore try to avoid hiring them for any roles where one requires steady temperament)
You raised no points other than meaningless, unverifiable anecdotal evidence. (Pro tip: the plural of “anecdote” is not, as it turns out, “data”. Funny that. And since we’re trading stories, in the 20 years I’ve been a sysadmin, I’ve actually found the quality of the women to be more consistently high than men. Oooh, burn, just totally blew out your war story with mine!
Oh wait, even when it’s MY anecdote, the plural of anecdote is STILL not data)
In terms of your MIT “source”, you cherry pick one statement, and draw an unverified conclusion from it, as though the ONLY reason for those numbers is women being given an easy ride.
You of course, provide exactly nothing in terms of data to back your conclusion. You may be right, but since *you* are the one stating that MIT is giving women an easier time, it falls to *you* to provide the proof for your conclusion.
You then, after providing neither jot nor tiddle of evidence for your claims, go on and prove that you are in fact, the sexist moron Nadyne correctly pegged you as. The only “skill” she used there was reading your own words. But again, when one is hiding, one is braver than when one is not. “Internet Balls” is the phrase I use for Richard Craniums such as yourself.
(Also, you don’t know Nadyne very well. She’s *really good* at skinnin’ morons. You just picked the wrong target, that’s all. I recommend you stick to abusing people on facebook, it’s more your speed.)
Let me get this straight: you think that your statement about “mess[ing] up the culture” is making a point and isn’t a “vitriolic personal attack”, while my statement that you’re an anonymous coward is vitriolic. Perhaps you’re too young to recall /.’s use of that phrase for anyone who won’t reveal their name in comments threads. I’m clear about who I am, you’re hiding behind an initial and a throwaway email address that only appears to be used for blog comments. Good job playing the victim when called on your behavior.
Your assertion that “you got a lot of advantage being a woman” with regards to MIT doesn’t necessarily hold a lot of water. While the acceptance rate for women is higher than men, there is no information about whether the female applicants are less qualified than the male applicants.
Likewise, presuming that changing your stereotype would “increase the applicant pool by 50%” isn’t valid. If I make the assumption that you’re in CS (which I’ll do, since you’re commenting on this post, and I’ve assumed that your reference to “engineers” in your original post refers to software engineers), very few CS (or related) programs are turning out 50% female graduates, and the available pool of experienced engineers is certainly not 50/50 male/female. So addressing your sexism would potentially increase your available pool, but not by as much as you claim.
There is significant research that improving diversity across under-represented groups such as women and minorities improves outcomes for all involved, not just the under-represented groups. Check out Scott Page’s book The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies for an excellent overview of related research. The University of Michigan has a lot of research about the actual impact on the university (not just the students from under-represented groups) that diversity programs have on their Diversity Matters page. As a researcher, I vastly prefer peer-reviewed research to stereotypes and vitriolic sexist attacks.
Re: “there is no information about whether the female applicants are less qualified than the male applicants.”: When I was at MIT in the ’80s, the acceptance rate for women was similarly unbalanced vs. the acceptance rate for men. The Admissions office did do follow-ups on how well women students actually fared in their academics. Anecdotally, the results showed that (as Nadyne might expect) on average, women outperformed men on most of the metrics they collected, despite the acceptance rate mismatch.
I completely agree that diversity is a good thing, in general. If you are making a consumer product, evidently 50% of your market is going to be women and so it would be good to have a proxy customer. I would like the team to be diverse.
My concerns with women stand –
1. The median woman is just not smart enough on the same benchmark as men. Remember how most women don’t bench as much in the gym? They can (probably) but in general they don’t. Similarly, most women bench less when it comes to intelligence (on men’s scale), its less. Now, this is intelligence as evaluated by men, and it may not map well to the abstract intelligence needed to be a better engineer, but I think, in general, it does. Its a opinion not a fact.
2. Women are great for ‘blue – white collar roles’. These are roles which require largely redundant persistance, attention to detail and doing a lot redundant work. It does not require a lot of ‘change the world’ kind of things. Again, I am talking about the median. What Dr. Welch says in terms of sysadmin roles – women will in general make a good second sysadmin. Once you tell them what to do, they’ll do it better than most guys. You just need the guy to first figure out what to do.
3. Diversity is good. However, *most* women are ‘unknown’ quantities in their behavior and add enormous amounts of risk to the team. Again, this is about the median.
4. Do you think the average woman applicant to MIT is so much better than a male applicant? Again, we have no data. I think its highly suspect that will be the case, specially since most internal MIT contests are almost always won by teams with men. You can look those up. I found one here:http://maslab.mit.edu/2012/wiki/Maslab_2012
Again, I am not talking of extremes, just of modes/medians. There are exceptional women, but on average, they are not the right candidate for a job that requires analytical skills.
About being anonymous:
I am not convinced that giving my identity would significantly affect my arguments. How does it matter? Does that make my arguments ‘deeper’. I can imagine scenarios where it would, say if I was the admissions officer at MIT/Stanford. But I am not, and I am not using my position as adding extra heft to my arguments.
We all know what happened to Larry Summers when he expressed a point of view that women *may* not be similarly equipped to deal with analytical situations. Larry may have a lot of flaws etc, but the point is that him just expressing this personal viewpoint led him to be fired from being the president of Harvard.
1. On what measure are you saying that women “bench less when it comes to intelligence”? (And I must point out the amusing irony that you continue to make an its/it’s error throughout a paragraph in which you attempt to question intelligence.) For example, this story says that while boys outscore girls by 26 points on the math section of the SAT, girls get better college grades than boys. When considering why there is a gap in math scores, Hyde et al conclude that “the gender gap is likely in large part a sampling artifact”. Go read the whole PDF, it’s pretty interesting research. However, using these scores of intelligence wouldn’t address the “median”, since not all Americans takes the SAT.
2a. I’m pretty sure that John, unlike Yahoo! CEO Scott Thompson, doesn’t pad his resume. John, for all his faults, doesn’t have a PhD, and I don’t think he’s ever claimed to have one.
2b. The concept of “blue-white collar roles” is a relatively new one, and I don’t see any support for your statement that they’re characterized as roles which have a lot of redundant work. The best source that I found for this lists roles such as private detective, elevator mechanic, plumber, funeral director, real estate broker, and air-traffic controller. In fact, the definition for “blue-white collar” jobs are ones where a college degree isn’t required, but still pay above the median US salary. I wasn’t able to find a study to determine whether these blue-white collar jobs are more likely to be held by women than men. I only know that I’ve only met male elevator mechanics, but I know better than to pretend that my anecdote is actual data. If your assertion were true, it would follow that many of these blue-white collar jobs would be ones disproportionally held by women. Do you have data to back up this assertion?
(I have to note that I’ve got to be qualified to be a private detective. I’ve read all of the Nancy Drew novels and all the Trixie Belden novels.)
2c. Where is your data that proves that “you just need the guy to first figure out what to do”?
3a. How are most women unknown quantities and most men not? Every time you add a new member to your team, the dynamic changes in some way, and there is huge risk here.
3b. You keep on throwing around the word “median”, but I don’t know what context you’re using it in. Median woman? Median software engineer? Median [man | woman | person] who has just graduated from college with a CS degree? If it’s the first, it is irrelevant to this conversation, because the average man couldn’t hold a software engineering job either. If it’s one of the others, you should be more specific about what you’re talking about.
4a. I didn’t say that the female candidates were “so much better”, and I specified that we don’t have data on the relative credentials for subsets of the applicant pool. Often, when one brings up a perceived disparity in college admissions, it’s to imply (or outright state) that those in the under-represented groups are not as qualified (or outright unqualified) for admission. Why should the female candidates have to be “so much better” than the male candidates to be granted admission?
4b. Given that most of the people in that particular competition were male, it’s unsurprising that the winning team was male. It’s also worthy of mentioning that this is a competition run by the students themselves, not the university, so it’s unclear what the environment is for the competition. If they’re like you and say that you shouldn’t hire women, perhaps it’s not so surprising that both there are fewer women in the course than men, and that they’re less likely to win.
About your continued anonymity, being unwilling to put stand up for your beliefs calls all of your arguments into question. It’s easy to sling arrows and poorly-considered arguments when you’re hiding behind an initial. Man up.
If “R.” was, is, or might someday be in a management position in any place where there are laws against gender discrimination in employment, he must present the comments he is making anonymously (or refrain from making them at all). His arguments are vacuous enough; there’s no need to engage in the “if you weren’t a coward, you’d show your face” variety of ad hominem.
Anonymity is an element of freedom of speech; like the broader freedom, it is only meaningful if we stand up for it even when we think those making use of it are despicable.
If you didn’t want anonymous comments on your blog, that would, of course, be your call. I’m just suggesting that if you choose to allow them, it would be better not to use anonymity as a convenient way to bash someone. There are important uses of anonymity in the online world; it’s a value that is frequently attacked, and I guess I just don’t like seeing it casually trashed.
It’s an interesting question. In general, I’m comfortable with anonymity and pseudonyms, and I agree that there are plenty of valid uses of it. However, when it appears that one is only using anonymity to sling insults and vitriolic comments, I don’t see that as an “important use of anonymity in the online world”. I’ll also note my own bias here: having been online since essentially the dawn of time, and having been open about my gender in that time online, I’ve received enough threats of physical harm, including threats of rape and death (often, charmingly, together), to be immediately wary of an anonymous commenter in such a thread when that anonymous commenter is expressing such unabashedly sexist opinions. To be clear, I am not saying that R has threatened me in any way or even come near it, I’m merely noting that it is my bias in this particular situation.
Furthermore, given that I’ve addressed each of the points that R has brought up, I don’t think that it’s valid to say that I’ve used his refusal to identify himself as a “convenient way to bash someone”. I haven’t said, “you’re anonymous, thus you’re an idiot and have no point”, I’ve taken the time and effort to research the data to refute his points. I do not think that my responses to his comments would be different if he did own them, since the data about each of the points that he brings up is data that should be shared. While I don’t have a high degree of hope that R will actually be swayed by data and will instead rely on his antiquated stereotypes, anecdotes, and confirmation bias, I share this data in the hopes that it will be of use to others who read this post and its comments.
If it’s that he’s afraid of reprisal from his employer, hopefully his employer is data-driven enough to notice a difference in the number of women on his team (or the number of women for whom he has given positive interview feedback) to attempt to address this, since he’s stated that he refuses to hire women at all. It won’t be comments on a blog that do him in, it will be his own measurable bias.
On behalf of all women struggling to find work in the high-tech field, I want to thank you for perpetuating the sexism that closes the doors on us in the first place. I work in interface design, which is said to be a more gender-equal field. My experience shows it’s anything but. Because it’s mildly hilarious when someone is this grossly wrong, I’ll throw out a couple of data points for you to chew on:
• At my backwards, misogynistic/racist/homphobic rural high school in the 1980s and 1990s, they did IQ testing to track us for the gifted program. Each year for the entirety of the six years I was in this 7-12 district, the top 10 percent of IQs belonged to women. Mine, tested at 170, was one of the highest on record.
• All of the students tracked for AP math and science were women.
• All of the students skipped ahead in math and/or science were women. I was taking calculus I and II at age 15. I never met a boy in my six years attending that district who could keep up.
• Similarly, at high schools elsewhere in the region, of the top 10 students in each class, 9 were women, consistently, until the Millennials began graduating.
• All the women went on to excel in STEM careers, except for the few who became attorneys. I work in interface design and technical project management, and I code websites and screw around with Linux for fun.
• In my design training program, graduates were majority women.
• At the entry level, there were slightly more women. By the time I was 25, men who didn’t finish college and were four years my junior were outlearning me by about $4.50 an hour for no particular reason.
• By mid-level, the gender split in my field switched to about 85/15 in favor of men. Men made up the majority of high-paid management positions as well, save for the token woman who was always put in charge of marketing. By the time I reached management, I earned 20K less than male peers, despite equal work and having never left the workforce.
• At senior level and out of work, I’ve yet to be hired despite a markedly above average resume, portfolio, track record, and skill set. The buffoons who can’t keep up in my field, meanwhile – including those who’ve sexually harassed or time-thieved their way out of multiple jobs in serial – snatch up the jobs like hotcakes. I still don’t have or want kids, and am still the primary breadwinner for myself and my husband.
We’re dumber? We have uneven temperaments and skills? I don’t think so, hombre. This is discrimination, plain and simple.
p.s. I’m not suggesting that my limited anecdotal experience constitutes a complete picture of female superiority. I only offer it to quash “R’s” hypothesis that women are uniquely but also uniformly incompetent when evaluated by IQ, STEM ability, or career aspirations and abilities. My IQ is irrelevant to me – I only offer it to refute R’s hypothesis that women are cretins when compared to men – and I think the IQ test is of limited value when judging a worker’s competency. It’s also been my observation that high IQ correlates negatively with certain social skills, but this, too, is anecdotal evidence.
It’s important to keep in mind that far fewer women than men enter STEM fields in the first place – they’re discouraged from entering at an early age, and ushered toward more “ladylike,” caretaking-centric pursuits like teaching, nursing, and social work. This is all the more evident as the Millennials move through college and the professional world, as that generation has been subject to extremely gender-segregated childhood culture (i.e. “princess syndrome” and “the cult of pink”).
Finally, I live in a backwards region of the country, so perhaps the achievements of female peers could be chalked up to the fact that my high school and the attitudes of its townspeople were still stuck in the 70s (with that decade’s emphasis on gender equality and “Free to be you and me”) even as the rest of the country was enjoying the 90s. Combine this with the fact that my region was also a popular destination for late 2oth-century yuppies to return to and raise families after they’d established and grown their careers elsewhere. Thus, perhaps we’d find that many of those early Baby Boomers passed their drive and ambition onto their female Gen-X offspring. I don’t pretend to have the answers, but it’s fun to ponder the questions.
You mentioned that you’re a designer. Assuming that Silicon Valley isn’t the backwards part of the country that you live in, I can tell you that my team is hiring interaction designers if you’re willing to move here. Ping me if you’d like more information about what it’s like to work here.
I’m not going to debunk this point by point, Nadyne already did a thorough job, I just wanted to tell you what a misogynistic prick you are.
You keep talking about the “median woman” and how she’s not as good as men. I’m sorry to have to break this to you, but the “median man” is a fucking moron and from your comments I can’t help but get the feeling that you’re very close to the median.
As to the analytical thinking part, do a quick Google search for ‘famous female scientists’ and stop bringing up this prehistoric argument. Oh and before you complain that some of the results show historic female scientist, when science wasn’t as complex as today, I’ve prepared this link for you. They’re not Nobel Prize winners, just your run-of-the-mill female scientists.
As far as handy anecdotal evidence goes: I went to a grammar school with a strong mathematics and physics focus; in general my female classmates weren’t better or worse than my male classmates, a few stood out, but they had a passion for this stuff.
Two last things:
1. It’s a sign of intelligence and thoroughness to write proper sentences and adhere to grammar rules; something you’re not very good at.
2. Not identifying yourself shows that you’re not willing to take responsibility for the things you write. There’s a word for that; ‘cowardice’, something very unbecoming of a man, if I may say so.
I see you have as much knowledge of product marketing as the capabilities of women in IT. As someone who works in the Advertising industry, albeit in IT, and likes to know more about the industry his employer is in, I can say that’s actually not the case more than you’d think. Consumer products are not just flung out upon the ocean of humanity. Really. I was amazed at how many of my preconceptions about the industry were just complete bollocks. But actually acquiring knowledge will do that to you.
You’re basically comparing apples and tachyons at this point. That’s not only an opinion, but one that is astoundingly ignorant, lacking even a semblance of backing in anything other than “this is what I feel”. Feelings are great for many things, such as proper toilet usage. For comparing gender differences in intelligence? Not so much.
BAAAHAAHAHAHA…and we now know you have as little knowledge of the sysadmin field as anything else. I’m also starting to think you’re a troll. Also, that’s not even vaguely close to what I said. If you’re going to misquote me, at least don’t do it when my words are *right bloody there*.
Most *people* are unknown quantities in their behavior. I’ve worked in small shops owned by a married couple where you QUICKLY realized that the prom queen was the one with the penis, and if you wanted logic, and reason, you never went near him. Again, this is all anecdotal, but you’re not even supplying those. You use words like “median”, but you provide no range so that word is meaningless without an actual scale to work against. Men are just as capable of the kinds of behavior you seem to believe the sole province of the double-x chromosome.
“Most”
“one”
Again, you’re making this claim, it is up to you to provide the data to support it. You DO understand the concept of supporting data, right? If the data supporting your claim is readily available, then it should be trivial for you to shower us with proof. It’d be the best thing you’ve showered us with to date.
You keep using those words sans any context which means they have no meaning.
Of course. Summers was just “some guy” talking over beers in his back yard. Not, say the president of Harvard in a discussion on women in science and engineering at a conference on the same, and he was not exactly in posession of a gob of good data for his hypotheses, (gee, just like you. Wow, I see why you like him). No, no, that wouldn’t matter at all.
Do you know what a systems administrator does? Do you understand that software programming also requires “persistence, attention to detail, and lots of redundant work?” Name the last code-base you’ve debugged and explain what the bug was, how you resolved it, and why the solution was androcentric.
Have you ever read up on the history of the IQ test? It’s pretty fascinating. When the test was unveiled, women outscored men, so they re-tooled it to include more numerical and spatial rotation questions. After the re-tooling, men and women scored identically.
Did you ever realize that logic, math, and spatial skills are developed, not inborn? Or that in most Asian countries, engineering and other STEM fields are considered to be “women’s work,” while the “high creative pursuits” of art and literature are reserved for men?
Your lack of understanding of basic mathematical concepts like “median” and “mode” belie your alleged gifts in high tech, by the way.
Youre right im wrong. i dont know the use of apostrophe’s either, ergo i am an idiot.
Yesterday, you were complaining that your points weren’t being addressed. Today, you’re complaining about a single parenthetical comment that expressed amusement at apostrophe errors, and ignoring all of the points that were raised.
if you’re going to attempt to distract, you really must do a better job. That was a rather lame attempt, even with the light bit of martyrdom.
I am being completely honest here:
1. Until a few years ago that is. I was the ‘least’ sexist person I knew. I would have women team members in my team all the time (gender was irrelevant, enthusiasm and interest was the main deciding factor).
2. After a few years of working, I started to notice a trend. A few individuals behaved liked detestable idiots, or were not smart, or were not ambitious. It seemed that there are many factors that could be ascribed to these deficiencies, and one of the common threads was being a women. To clarify, this is based on my limited anecdotal evidence.
To summarize, all other relevant factors being equal (for example, same educational level, same experience level) women in general seemed to be less desirable employees. This of course is a biased view of the world. I am aware of that. Unfortunately, this has been my experience. None of the women I’ve worked with have been amongst the top 5% of folks I’ve worked with. Maybe I’m not seeing the right things, but this is how I feel anyway.
3. My writing abilities, the misuse of apostophe’s and improper grammar, I think, are not a big deal and not relevant for this discussion. However, I recognize that it can be annoying to some people, specially the sticklers amongst you all. Apologies. I didn’t manage to get any private school education, but most of the faults are mine anyway.
4. Anonymity – As I said, I am not naive. I will not let a Larry Summers happen to me. He expressed an opinion (a benign research hypothesis, I’d say) and he was vilified for it. I have, not in any sense of the word, made any threatening statements to any of the parties in this discussion.
This is not data. This is anecdotal evidence, which may be no evidence at all.
1 and 2. “Confirmation bias” is what you’re describing. At least you’ve finally admitted that this is a “biased view of the world”, which is an improvement over your original “[b]e careful – don’t hire women” statement.
3. You’re the one who brought intelligence into the discussion. One indication of intelligence is writing ability, which includes grammar and the appropriate use of apostrophes. I don’t particularly consider myself to be a stickler, especially not on comments to a blog post. That said, if you’re going to question intelligence while making errors that appear unintelligent, I am going to call you on it. I further note that you haven’t actually brought any data to back up your earlier statement that “most women bench less when it comes to intelligence”. It’s odd how you have focused on my parenthetical comment, in which I merely expressed amusement and nothing more, instead of the substance of the point. For someone who has complained about having their points ignored, this is hypocritical.
4. I find it interesting that you reference the economist and ex-president of Harvard University Larry Summers as though he resigned (and was not fired, as you claimed) merely as a result of comments that he deemed “provocative” when he made them. Summers had many other issues beyond what you’re referring to as a “benign research hypothesis”, and his resignation occurred a more than a year after he made the remarks in question. One of the major issues was the incident surrounding Summers’ close friend and fellow Harvard economist Andrei Shleifer, where it appears that Summers shielded Shleifer from disciplinary action over the conflict of interest when Shleifer advised the Russian privatization program. The university paid more than $28 million dollars to settle with the federal government over this issue. That wasn’t even the biggest financial loss that happened during Summers’ tenure, when they lost a billion (yes, with a B) dollars in highly-risky interest-rate swaps. Summers didn’t just stumble and make a speech that some viewed as sexist. Summers tenure as president of the university was marred by multiple issues of multiple types. If you’re going to learn anything from the Summers example, I would hope that not losing a billion dollars would be at least as much of the take-away as anything else.
Even if we assume that his statements were a “research hypothesis”, as noted in the Boston Globe article about the incident:
And let’s not cry for Dr Summers. The university subsidized a million-dollar loan on his home, gave him a year of paid sabbatical, and then invited him to return to the Harvard Business School as a professor when his paid sabbatical ended. Where do I sign up for such a punishment?
I forgot to note: I’m also a product of public schools. I graduated from Owosso High School in Owosso, Michigan. My degrees, two BSes and a MS, come from Southern Polytechnic State University in Marietta, Georgia.
Without knowing anything about your team, this has no context whatsoever. What kind of team? programming? server management? Tiddly-Winks? All three are equally likely based on that statement. You keep not providing any context or data.
Same thing for the “least sexist”. As compared to whom? What kind of standard are you basing this on? “sexist” is an imprecise term on a *good* day, and the way you’re using it, it could mean you’re less sexist than a Star Trek character. Without context, things like “sexist” and “median” have no value.
see reply to point 1 about context. You seem to have an issue with it. You’re literally summarizing nothing. There’s nothing there to summarize. You’re simply restating your point that women aren’t as good workers as men. We know you think that, we’re waiting for something to back it up.
Public school product here as well. Even better? I never managed to finish my bachelor’s degree. Life kept getting in the way. So the whole “correct grammar is a sign of elitism” thing? Maybe you should stop with that. Just sayin’.
As Nadyne or anyone with ten minutes on Wikipedia pointed out, not only was that NOT the sole reason for Summer’s termination, but given the contents of the conference he was actually at, an astoundingly stupid thing to say. When you’re president of Harvard, there’s less tolerance for stupid. Funny that. At this point, your continued use of him as some kind of witch hunt example can no longer be seen as simple ignorance, but rather deliberate twisting of the facts.
Anecdotal evidence CAN be evidence, but you haven’t even provided good anecdotes. Even anecdotal evidence requires, you know, decent anecdotes. You have to give us something besides “I’ve met women, I know these things”.
I am not in computer science although I do work as a carpenter and so face some of the less savory gender stereotypes. My sister is a computer engineer and has also had to deal with some of the stresses from being a minority in the workplace. She often links some of her interest to me which brought me here.
Sadly there are a few R’s out there. I think their perception of women continues due to two main factors.
The first being, to complete any task effectively, you have to first comprehend the task completely. This is also true when assessing what other people are capable of. In terms of his assessment of women, I suspect that his inability to see the intelligence and capability of the women he has encountered tells a lot more about his own inability to comprehend another person than actually making an accurate assessment of the person themselves.
The other observation I have made about such individuals is that they tend to be threatened by women who are both capable and show strong assertiveness and leadership. Due to this they tend to only allow meeker and less confident women into their arena both at work and in other areas of life. His concept of women holds up a lot easier when there is no one around to challenge it.
I don’t consider his post here an effort on his part to get to know such women. He has remained anonymous and is in a context where it is very hard to refute any sort of written statement with actual concrete evidence.
On a more general note I find that women, or any minority, tend to work a lot harder both at school and in the work place and therefore achieve a lot more. I find that the people who are threatened by such behavior are generally those that would prefer to have a more lackadaisical approach to work and don’t enjoy being made to look bad. In other words, who has the most to lose from having such a motivated member of the team?
In any case people such as ‘R’ will squander valuable energy on pointless diversions and the best use of my time is to continue to excel at what I do. And, of course, support others to achieve excellence in their profession.
To stay on topic I have two main thoughts on women in male dominated professions. I think the workplace CAN improve if women stand up for themselves. This can be very daunting when you’re the only women on site and down right scary if you’re dealing with someone who is very aggressive. My experience is problems at work never go away on their own. Situations improved when I was willing to put myself out there and confront individuals who were bullying or trying to demean me at work.
The other thought is that with time things will get better due to an increase in confidence. This can take years to achieve, but once you have many successes under your belt it is a lot harder for someone to come along and pull the rug out from under you. When you know you’re good at what you do, and that your brain works just as good or better than your peers, negative comments hold very little weight.
I think for those of us who have done our time and worked our way to a more secure position can do a lot for those just starting out. Having someone with experience and authority at your back can make a world of difference as well is providing a positive role model. Even if we don’t work at the same place, having some system of support and someone to talk to who understands what you’re going through makes a huge difference.
“Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.” – Mark Twain
Well, that’s not the case then. We’re not dismissing his arguments because he’s anonymous. We’re dismissing his arguments because they’re, as you say, vacuous. The fact he’s playing anonymous coward just adds to the schadenfreude. If his name was Isaac Newton XXIII, I’d still be calling his arguments complete bollocks.
Ad Hominem is a rather specific thing, and one of the more abused terms on the internet.
What were some of the other common threads?
Do you think it is possible that you were less able to evaluate women than men: that is, that your “radar” for who would contribute most and work best in your team was less accurate across the gender divide? Based on your first post, you consider just 20% of the male engineers you know (and fewer of the females, though the sample size is too small to mean much) to reach the level of competent. If things really are that bad, being able to recognize the truly capable would be crucial; and if you were less effective at “separating the wheat from the chaff” among women than men, the result could be something like what you describe.
Speaking as a woman from an even more male-dominated profession that computer science, and from one that requires a significant amount more fast, decisive decision making where the stakes are much, much higher — as in, I’m a paramedic, and if we screw up our decision making process, people die — the men and women I work with provide an equal amount of really good medics and ones I wouldn’t let my dying child anywhere near. Also, if you got up in their face and maligned them on the basis of their sex, the women would be just as likely to beat your ass as the men.
The one area of our job you could legitimately say would be dominated by the men, lifting heavy stuff and heavy people, isn’t nearly as one sided as you might think, either. Personally, I can lift a lot more than most people expect of me. My limitation usually comes from a lack of leverage because of my height.
Re: Welch et al.
I can tell you a few anecdotal episodes.
I will give specific examples – person X was a colleague. Girl X was hired early in the life of the company, largely because as a underfunded startup, its harder to hire very good people. Girl X wrote completely crappy code, and as the company grew, she was increasing marginalized. X claimed this was due to her being a woman – made a big big deal about it (incuding press pieces). This was post her leaving. Her colleagues (including me) who had always treated her on the basis of competence felt cheated and not happy about this. X continues to do extremely stupid things now – basic business errors, smallthink, etc. Perhaps she is just not exposed to as much business scenarios, but there again, men are typically better informed, more ambitious and more self confident than most women.
There are other women in the org – mostly in non-core-engineering roles. QA (which, surprisingly, in most companies are over 50% women). I think a significant percentage of QA folks are completely redundant, and in general, the women were uber-stupid. How? They would do things such as write completely ill-formed incoherent sentences in the bug reports, they wouldn’t investigate further as to why something bad was happening, etc. Essentially a set of overpaid mouse-clickers. Also, note that QA’s are second class citizens in the engineering hierarchy, and this is where most women live.
There are in non-engineering roles -> product/project management, UI design, BizDev etc. Even in those roles, the women just seem to be ‘stupid’. For example, in product management, they wouldn’t understand how the numbers are chosen for an A/B test (I put it in a spreadsheet and the numbers came out), nor would they express any interest or enthusiasm in understanding how they emerged. There is an overarching lack of understanding and a willing to understand. There is also a lack of self-confidence that they’ll be able to figure it out.
In another scenario, I had a performance review with my report who was a women. She was in the bottom 30 percentile (something that should have been obvious to her). She broke down and started crying on hearing this. This happened again with another women in a meeting. I guess we have to become more tolerant to people crying in hallways and offices, but it is definitely additional mental strain for management.
At this point, I don’t really think this discussion is going to go anywhere. You gentlemen and women have a point of view and I have a point of view. These are going to diverge. This discussion is not interesting or useful anymore. I believed that I came in with a relatively open point of view (an explicitly expresed opinion, mind you). However, the conversations here have been largely about berating this author, something that hardly does anyone any good. I personally like to talk to people with an opposing point of view, and I had thought that you would too. However, I dont feel that is the case, and I shall refrain from posting here.
The ground reality is that this level of sexism exists, and it is built based on stereotypes that people have distilled from their experiences. As Coises points out, it is possible that it is a sampling error (the 1/10 and 1/100 were representative of the sample size, although they were not the exact numbers). Unfortunately, the vehement barrage of ‘shoot the messenger’ comments here (which, I understand, stem out of discrimination that the folks might have faced in the past) have made this a non-friendly venue for me to write here.
Your definition of “berating this author” is one that is rather precious. If using facts and data is “berating”, then yes, I suppose that’s the case. The thread has been lengthy, largely because you’ve made so many unsubstantiated claims which have required others in the thread to ask for more data and/or provide data that contradicts your unsubstantiated claims. There have been some insults leveled in your direction, although they’ve been pretty tame, and they certainly haven’t even hit 5% of the responses made to you. On the other hand, you have ignored many questions asked of you, and you haven’t responded to any of the data at all. Strangely, you seem to be lacking in the “steady temperament” and the “confidence” that you say is the province of women. It’s also strange that you claim that men are usually “better informed” than women, when the length of this thread is largely due to your unsubstantiated claims that have been proven false by this woman who has pretty good grasp of the relevant research and is also willing to spend a couple of minutes exercising a search engine.
I will note that, in my 10+ years in working for various large and well-known software engineering companies, I haven’t yet experienced a QA organization that was even 50/50 male/female, let alone female-dominated. I did some quick searching to see if I could come up with some actual data, but wasn’t able to find it. Perhaps someone else has better search-fu than I do tonight. I’ll admit to being tired after a long day and thus I didn’t put a huge amount of effort into it.
Regardless: it’s not that the messenger got shot, and it’s not merely a matter of diverging opinions. A diverging opinion is whether In’n’Out or Five Guys is better. (The only correct answer here, it must be noted, is In’n’Out.) You have made claims such as women are less intelligent, but have not provided any basis for this claim. There are many different measures of intelligence that could be used, and thus a difference in intelligence is measurable. This is not a matter of opinion, but one where data can and should form the basis of the discussion.
You can’t handle a debate when you were called on your vague anecdotes and countless unsubstantiated claims that you use as the basis of your misogynistic opinions. While it does suck to have your opinions trounced so completely, perhaps you could take the opportunity to reconsider your stereotypes and grow up into someone who is willing to change opinions when the preponderance of the evidence is not in the favor of your ill-formed opinion. Or you can flounce off and pretend that it’s because you were “berated”. Your choice.
To be fair, at my current (small, technical part of a larger, non-technical) company, our QA department is female-dominated. This is, of course, anecdotal and means nothing.
Did you do anything to improve the situation or just let her keep writing bad code? Why would you just let someone sit there and do that? From a leadership perspective, that’s a massive failure on the company’s part.
If you never gave her good evaluations or attempted to help her out, and just one day fired her out of the blue for substandard performance without even an attempt at corrective measures, I can absolutely see why she thought that. “I’ve been doing good work for a while, now suddenly I’ve been incompetent the entire time?”
You can’t tell someone “good job” for months/years, then tell them the entire time you’ve been lying to them and expect them to just accept that.
How do you know that? What, you’re still misleading her to keep in touch? There’s so many things wrong with just this paragraph alone. Pro Tip: Leadership is *hard*. Being in charge is *hard*. I find it appalling that a company would allow someone to twist in the wind that way and then just fire them once it became convenient to do so.
This isn’t even a good anecdote, it’s just sexist ranting.
Funny how you seem to never provide any actual details. Women are just stupid. It’s how they are. Bitches can’t think.
“It should have been obvious to her”. Ah, that’s the tell. “I”m not actually going to do anything to help her improve her performance, because hey, person I don’t like.” No one gets to be that bad in a bubble without a decision made to let them. But given your attitude towards women, I’m completely unsurprised that you’d pull this stunt. That’s the sign of someone who has no business writing reviews, something anyone with a good leadership grounding would know. That “if you can’t figure it out, it’s not my job to tell you” is always, ALWAYS the sign of machismo in charge.
That’s the kind of environment that no one with any self-respect needs to work in, male, female, no one. It is toxic beyond belief.
Nonsense. You came in to mansplain how bitches suck. Oh, you tried to be more polite, and used more words, but from word one, your only aim has been to show that women are intellectual lightweights only suited to jobs requiring neither physical nor intellectual strength. I imagine “receptionist” is your “perfect” female job. Oh, and keep of the babies. You weren’t open to anything but swinging it around to prove that men are just smarter than women, and really, if the owner of this site wasn’t a woman, and therefore too stupid to understand that, she’d have realized you were right because, well, penis.
Were you not talking out of your colon, you’d have gotten a better reception. I bet you get this reception a lot, don’t you.
You expect us to take vague anecdotes as proof that women are stupid, and are surprised the reception is less than stellar. You don’t get out much, do you.
(oh, and it’s perfectly acceptable to shoot the messenger when the messenger is being such a nitwit.)
I have to say, this is arguably the most laughable post put forward.
I think we have to really step back from this and evaluate how we look at CS. We have to realize within the IT spectrum, there are several layers of product from development, implementation, planning, maintenance and more. All of these areas have distinct and important skill sets that determine success or failure.
I am currently a Sr. administrator in an organization that is not as big as others (let’s say a touch more then a thousand employees US side, maybe 1/2 over again counting South America, Europe and Asia offices). In those offices we have various technical resource and development parties. Like you, that’s anecdotal evidence – which means my experience is my experience and is not universally applicable; there is no science or study to it. But through those offices and the functions we attend with other corporations in our field I can tell you that:
(1) Over the last ten years, the attendees to national CIO summits has been dominated by men at a more then 90% clip, and in some years 100%.. very few women escalate to that role… there may be various factors, but that is a statistically provable fact based on more then 500 organizations and our data that goes between us.
(2) Anecdotally, I can tell you that I’ve had the misfortune of having to be part of the termination of several team members, but sex rarely entered into this. You point out that many of these people were “not competent” to be in their roles; then again, I’ve ran into quite a few incompetent men who passed off resumes they obviously embellished or they lost their minds before they came onboard. It’s unfortunate, but it definitely happens. What this tells me anecdotally is that incompetence is not specifically tied to a set of sexual organs, but rather the individual.
In regards to your comment of grammar, I tend to agree, I’ll let others use that, I find attacks over grammar to be pointless if I get your jist.
That having been said, the problem is that you do make a blanket judgement saying “based on what I’ve seen, I’ve determined” and apply to all. This is a bad standard to follow in regards to assessing potential employees, and more then that, if you weren’t anonymous, that general statement would put you on the wrong side of the Equal Opportunity in Employment Act. You’d basically be saying “I don’t want women” yeah, that doesn’t work; if I used that standard in hiring or firing individuals, I would quickly find myself on the wrong end of a massive lawsuit.
But here’s where you really miss the point – and that’s in how you assess and work with people. The team I deal with is comprised of nine site administrators, 4 software engineers, a web design team and our network support staff. On this staff, we are about 20% women – I would love for that # to be higher, but frankly, we haven’t had applicants to those positions, which is more disheartening then anything else. (A recent stab at hiring a new developer resulted in 44 applications.. of which none were women). The subtle problem for women in CS is that they are disuaded early on that the field is a “guys field” and as such, there aren’t enough that really work through it.. and it raises skepticism unfortunately on those who do. But I have not had a single (out of the norm) issue with our staff who are women, or I should say, if I do it’s at about the same % I have with our male staff. I don’t know what more I can ask of people then to show up and do their job. I assess how well they do it by how committed and serious they are about their time and how they interact with others.
The problem with your assessment is how you make it. You decide because “none of the women I hire have been in the top 5%” that they are not good performers. I want you to think about that. Let me tell you right off the bat, we have had great issues getting good staff in a field office in Vietnam. I mean, a real difficulty. Would it be just of me to say “none of the people in Vietnam are any good at IT” because so far we haven’t found the right person? Probably not, it just means that I need to work harder at my hiring practices.
That’s really what you’re telling me too – not that it’s the fault of women, in general, but the fault of the hiring and vetting practices in place. Which impacts both men and women and the roles we assign to any employee.
In fact, I hate to say this, but let me tell you a secret of management: if you say X amount of your staff is “incompetent” then it is YOUR problem more then it is THE EMPLOYEE problem. A big part of the assessment of our skill set is finding, mentoring, and building up employees and staff to allow them to be the most productive they can be. That comes from training, providing resources, mentoring and setting expectations that allow a person to grow into a position where they can succeed. I’ve seen fantastic managers turn “good” but very green employees into incredible parts of their staff with the right combination of encouragement, frankness in calls for improvement, reward, and at times penalties for performance. Great managers can get everything possible out of an employee; more then that, they quickly remove cancers from a team and they help build team cohesion which benefits everyone involved.
I would love to say I am a “great” manager, but I know I’m not there … yet. But I’m working on it. Every day, I have to ask myself: what can I do to help those around me do more and be better for the company I work for? And yes, that includes my XY chromosome enabled individuals. There are days I will grouse about team members – and just walk around and grr about it; but in the end, I have to pick myself up and say: ok, what can I do about it?
You quantify a problem as “of women’.. that’s the wrong lens. The correct way is almost never to look at “of X” it’s always: what can this INDIVIDUAL bring to the team and what does this INDIVIDUAL cost the team. One of the greatest engineers I have ever know, a true, incredible genius was also someone I once had to recommend to put on a PIP for the simple reason that their ego created real issues in the performance level of every other employee who had to work with them.
Nadyne most effectively addresses the biggest problem facing women in CS.. there aren’t enough in positions of power to provide mentorship to lead other women to choose this as a career path. And women who are in this as a career path often do not unfortunately take enough time to mentor or to provide support to those coming into the field. It’s a spiral problem; the fewer women in positions of power there are, the fewer there are to mentor; therefore, a smaller subset mentoring (which may be at an equal % of men, let’s say though I doubt it) creates a significantly small group of mentors and those advancing the idea.. which leads to fewer coming in, fewer moving up, etc. etc. it becomes the slippery slope.
The end solution is much as is being proposed – more women to promote and mentor others entering the field and providing them resources. And that isn’t a sex issue.
In regards to “when are you having kids”.. let me say this: I’ve had two men on our teams take paternity leave in the last year; so saying “it’s a womens problem” is not always the only way to look at this- and frankly, with more and more team members working independently and through home based research and participation, it’s less of a question. Frankly, I don’t care if a designer is doing her work at 2AM when she got up to feed a kid… as long as the work product is good. Just the same as I don’t mind if the right idea for a fix to an HP3000 system strikes an engineer on a Sunday while he’s in the garden.. he can dial in and post the solution at that moment, then everyone benefits.
We’re far less of a 8-5 field then we have ever been.
I can’t agree with Chris that it’s the most “laughable” thread I’ve read but maybe one of the most disheartening. I thought people like “R” had become more professional years ago or at least were no longer in management. I know there is still discrimination, but thought it was much less outright nowadays.
I agree that Chris hit the nail on the head with his remarks about how R’s rants reflect back on R’s management skills. I also couldn’t help but have my jaw drop when R was upset at the women because they cried when they had no idea of their performance rating until their review. I’ve seen men cry under similar circumstances. Good managers give continual, clear feedback, working to mentor and grow their employees. They don’t sit in their office with a scorecard and call their employees in after a year to give them a rating.
Replying to R – Also telling was your replacement for names at the start of your post. First, I think there was some places you used “X” and meant “Girl X” (wouldn’t it have been clearer to name them “X” and “Y”?) but more importantly “Girl”??? In a professional workplace? Women are not referred to as “Girls”! EVERYONE knows that.
I do have one new comment to add (unrelated to “R” and his irrational rants). One theory I’ve always held is that the way school systems are structured are unintentionally part of the divide. Children’s formative years are early on. Elementary school teachers typically are people who favor the soft skills – they are education majors, sociology majors, English, art and music majors. I remember attending my daughter’s back-to-school meeting in 5th grade and the teacher talked said things like “Of course we ‘have to’ spend some time on math.” (with almost an ‘ilk’ in the sentence). Additionally, elementary school teachers are more often women than men hence through the years the students relate their women teachers with ‘ilk science’. Some schools have a different teacher come in for the math and science – typically the male science teacher. Hence psychologically we are reinforcing the concept in our children that women do english and art, men do math and science.
Not all of us are swayed. Like other women in the post I always loved math and science. My cousin Steve used to get the neighbor kids together to watch me do long division – they all thought that was cool. I was the younger child in the family and was the one to always ignore the ‘norm’. I was lucky in my first job (in Aerospace) that the head of the department was a black man who strongly believed in equal rights for all and encouraged equal rights hiring practices. I was hired as a scientific programmer and had all the difficult, highly technical assignments (that most of the men couldn’t handle 🙂 The same department head later encouraged minorities, including women, to move into management. I’ve encountered some discrimination (e.g., a man early in my career who harangued me, a woman, for taking a job away from some poor man with a family to feed) but the company supported women so he was easily squelched. Later after years of successes, as Roxanne said it’s easier to combate discrimination when you have built a solid reputation.
My first commercial job was with ASK Computer. The CEO, Sandy Kurtzig, was the first women CEO to take her company IPO. Obviously women were not discriminated there. Cute story – she originally named her software product Manufacturing Operations Management. The VCs told her that no CIO could get up in front of their management and ask for $2 million for “MOM” (the acronym). So she renamed it Manufacturing Management or “MANMAN” saying it took two men to do one mom’s job. I managed > 100 people there and two product lines.
Other companies I’ve worked for since have been balanced – I’ve seen little discrimination against women in the last 20 years and where it exists it’s more subdued. Although the women’s LinkedIn groups and this post indicate otherwise 🙁 Maybe I’ve just been lucky.
I hope I’ve helped and encouraged enough women along the way. I’ve been a Software Director, VP Engineering, and a start-up co-founder (yes, we all received equal founder shares and pay – and equal consideration and respect by our Board) where I was VP Engineering then CTO.
To “R” – if you worked for me, you wouldn’t have been there long! But you would have probably blamed it on having an incompetent woman (or girl) as a boss 🙂