- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
Almost one in five men in IT explain why fewer females work in the profession by arguing that “women are naturally less well suited to tech roles than men.”
Feel free to check the calendar. No, we have not set the DeLorean for 1985. It is still 2023, yet anyone familiar with the industry over the last 30 years may feel a sense of déjà vu when reading the findings of a report by The Fawcett Society charity and telecoms biz Virgin Media O2.
The survey of nearly 1,500 workers in tech, those who have just left the industry, and women qualified in sciences, technology, or math, also found that a “tech bro” work culture of sexism forced more than 40 percent of women in the sector to think about leaving their role at least once a week.
Additionally, the study found 72 percent of women in tech have experienced at least one form of sexism at work. This includes being paid less than male colleagues (22 percent) and having their skills and abilities questioned (20 percent). Almost a third of women in tech highlighted a gender bias in recruitment, and 14 percent said they were made to feel uncomfortable because of their gender during the application process.
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In my ten years in the SWE industry I have never met anyone who thought or said that women were not capable, the fuck is this shit?? I have multiple women as part of my dev team and they are equally respected
One in five is mind blowing to me, who are these pathetic fucking bigots? I have no doubt there are many because people suck but in every job I’ve had I worked with women devs. Maybe it’s because I’m in the PNW
So, this may be part of the answer, but I’ve had similar experiences to you, except for one startup where just about everyone was like that. Place was basically a frat house - its office was right on the water (which was awesome) and they literally had a bunch of binoculars for oggling women paddleboarding and shit (which was not awesome)
It might be that most of us don’t experience this behavior because it’s condensed into companies that encourage this behavior? I’m no sociologist, but that seems to jive with what I know about echo chambers and whatnot
I think you might be right. I was at a conference one time where there was a super creepy presenter that made a whole bunch of “brogrammer” jokes. He was not asked to return and lots of people walked out of his talk.
Yeah I wouldn’t be surprised if people like that find companies with similar cultures and just all stay there so they can be shitty together
That’s partly it; the PNW does seem more open minded most times; but I bet the other part is you’re a guy.
This isn’t the sort of thing women tend to talk about with men, for obvious reasons. I bet those women on your dev team have some stories, if you could get them to open up about it.
My experience with it as a male is there’s cultural factors at certain workplaces which is why it’s such a sensitive topic for the employer. Like I work with a lot of engineers first or 2nd generation immigrants, incredibly diverse workplace, and a lot of times it’s cultural practices from “back home” where there were more strict traditional gender roles. A lot of them are self-aware of this and realize it’s programming, it’s not always some malicious thing, it can come out of the ways to show courtesy to women which in translation can be condescending. They’ve made it clear from leadership they don’t put up with repeated behavior that makes people uncomfortable though, people have been let go for it. What happens is the more subtle stuff you might not notice unless someone is open about it.
That sounds like an easy way to identify bottom performers.
Except, unfortunately, in the business world, some of the most well-promoted people are those who do almost nothing and take all the credit for themselves, who tend to be the exact kind of people those articles describe.
We don’t have as many safeguards against sociopathy in career-building, it seems, and the whole stupid fucking game seems rigged towards the interests of narcissists, sociopaths, and psychopaths, especially with the frequency they are represented in the C-suites in the US.
So these misogynistic chucklefucks often rise to the top.
Reminds me of the woman from Uber who wrote the book on microsystems. Had credit for her ideas stolen by some male supervisor like 90 times.
Frack you bitch!! 😎
😇
Good lord, the sheer amount of “nuh-uh!!” in the comments is insane (and yet also fully expected). It’s the same shit I’ve heard again and again and again in the blue collar industry where I work, as though just because some guy hasn’t personally witnessed one specific incident that somehow discrimination against women magically doesn’t exist, instead of coming to the realization that they’re just not seeing it, probably because they aren’t looking for it.
Open your eyes, gentlemen. Discrimination holds many forms, more than you’d think. Pay more attention to what’s going on around you at work. Maybe actually talk to the one woman in your workplace, and then actually listen to what she has to say (and to what she isn’t saying).
You want to prove that somehow your workplace is the exception to the rule? Then make it that way. Correct hiring practices that bias towards men (and this starts with how job ads are written up, by the way). Change how pay is structured in your company to a fixed, listed scale that is open and readily available to all employees. Have clear, consistent pathways to promotion to correct the gender bias. Allow for flexibility on working hours, or remote work.
And if you can’t do any of these things because you aren’t on a position to, then at least start the conversation. Be an ally. Recognize discriminatory practices when you see them, and push for change. In the end, you’ll benefit, too.
i am autistic as balls, but i grew up surrounded by women and have a lot of female friends. i am happily married to an attractive and extroverted neurotypical woman.
it is only working in tech that ive experienced complaints from women about my serial killer vibes or whatever. looking at someone in the face for too long, smiling too much, laughing at the wrong times, misinterpreted sarcasm… i can try to avoid women in the workplace, but that isn’t normal behavior either.
in no universe have i ever thought it would be a good idea to flirt with or be rude to a coworker. i have no idea how to improve but id love to figure it out some day. i work well with most people.
i have female friends who have received some frighteningly severe sexual harassment at work. weird comments, touching, sexually charged insults, things like that. most men don’t see it because it’s often done privately. if she speaks up she might win a lawsuit, but she loses her job and possibly her career. i have to wonder if the industry has simply been poisoned by this sort of thing.
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if people think you’re a creep, you won’t get comments about it directly to your face. my strategy to deal with passive aggression in a workplace is to pretend it isn’t happening. if i feel like shit about going into work then i’ll look for another job.
An unfortunate amount of men in the tech industry need a swift punch to the dick. I’ve spent years in IT jobs and have seen many deserving women passed up for promotions after being promised the job, women belittled, their input completely ignored, and have heard a fair amount of sexist remarks. Anyone who thinks women are less capable of tech work is a piece of garbage.
Being a computer nerd from childhood and growing up going to/organizing lan parties, gaming cons, being around that whole scene… you know about those weird guys who are just gross, uncomfortable around, naive towards women, sometimes feeling like their space is being invaded, thinking attractive women fake being nerds so they can get attention. The whole adjacent incel mindset as well. I’ve seen it take all sorts of forms, some perfectly innocent due to social isolation, potentially autism, just being intimidated by women especially if they’re attractive. Sometimes it gets truly malicious and gross, and those guys need dick punches.
Like I’d have a guy walk in to a lan party, completely disheveled looking and unkempt, smelly, and he’d get pissed that “we didn’t say there’d be girls here,” implying he would have cleaned up if that were the case. I forgive any sort of mental illness or autism related thing when it comes to this, but it’s not an excuse when it’s clear they understand it’s an issue. One guy once brought his freshman “Asian girlfriend” who could barely speak English, and would talk about their sex in gross ways in front of her without her knowing. That was a tough one because they were inseparable the whole time and finding a way to tell him to stfu without making her uncomfortable was a challenge. Someone blew up at him after the event and he never made it out again.
I just want to point out this is very much cultural:
- In my home country (Portugal) women were maybe half of the pupils taking IT Degrees and maybe half the programmers I worked with were women. (This is apparently also the case in many Eastern Europe countries).
- In The Netherlands, there were fewer women in IT but still quite a number of them.
- In Britain they were almost absent. Working as a freelancer (so in more places than a permanent employee would) in over a decade I’ve worked with maybe 3 female programmers (out of, I guess, 100 or so colleagues), all foreigners. In management, sure there were women, programming not so much.
Funnilly enough the most machist environment I worked in was in Britain and it actually had the highest proportion of women (none of which a programmer, most low-level management) but they were there due to gender quotas and were to a large extent treated as eye-candy by their own management, seemed to have been selected for looks and whilst some of the women seemed competent, others were not and were clearly playing that game.
I’ve seen how male-only environments tend to end up with this wierd disfunctional dick-wagging culture (though that’s not at all guaranteed), but if there’s one thing that specific case in Britain alongside my experience working in places were some of our colleagues were naturally women showed me, is that women need to be there on merit and thus accepted as equally capable colleagues, otherwise the result can be a lot worse than a “mere” macho dick-wagging culture were wannabe “young-bulls” in their ignorance think that “women can’t code”.
PS: I was thinking about it some more and just wanted to add that the only environment I worked in The Netherlands with almost no women (this was a small Software Products company of maybe 30 people and if I remember it correctly there was a single female secretary) did NOT have a “bro” culture at all. I suspect this was to a large extent because most people there were out of their of their 20s, plus the manager-owners were pretty decent guys (plus the Dutch culture itself) so it was a mature adults environment not a bunch of young-bucks dick-wagging and posturing.
A thing often left unmentioned in all the talk of machismo on startups (in the US) is that it’s a very ageist environment relying on young guys who are willing and capable of working 12h/day and that definitelly makes such companies tend towards the immature end of the spectrum.
Sounds like LTT. Lol
Every time a company appears to have any amount of frat culture there needs to be an investigation performed.
I swear, I’ve worked with career engineers and mathematicians who mysteriously forget how basic statistics work the moment this issue comes up.
I mean literally drawing two normal distributions overlapping on a napkin to people who could teach this stuff in universities, pointing at the top percentiles and going “alright, but if women are just naturally less willing or able to work in this stuff where are all these outliers that should still rank way above most dudes?”
Blank stares all around.
Confirmation bias is a hell of a drug.
I’ve interviewed dozens of candidates to hire entire new teams and the percentage of women showing up was very very low. I ended up with an extremely diverse team of mostly men. If i interview 50 candidates and only 3 of them are women, what’s the likelihood they are going to be better than all the others? I complained about this and nothing changed. And my opinion has never been that they are less competent, but it certainly looks like they are less interested in the topic, maybe becase it’s male-dominated. The women I managed to hire nevertheless are absolutely good devs and if anything they have a better work ethic on average.
Is that Kim Wexler?
Went to the site to get some insight and all I got was shovel full of shit. Where are they pulling these numbers from. I’ve been in the IT industry my entire life and I am yet to hear someone say “women are naturally less well suited”. I know it’s anecdotal evidence but equally credible as theirs.
Articles like these are not helping the situation either. They write how IT is wild west where women are constantly sexually harassed and abused. Of course fewer females would want to work in such places. Where do you live if situation is so dire no female can walk in with a keyboard without her being molested? That’s what I’d like to know. Those places need to be closed immediately.
Sexual assault is not the only kind of misogyny that could exist at a company. Also, no your anecdotal evidence is not equally as credible as a mass survey of women in the tech industry and women who have left it.
I have worked in tech for 10 years and until I started at my current company every single company I worked at I experienced and witnessed other women experience many kinds of hostile work environments and misogynistic discrimination. Differences in pay compared with male peers, dismissal of ability or ideas, people requesting to speak with male colleagues over me, sexual harassment in a few cases and even tolerance of casual sexual commentary on women in the work place.
This is commonplace. This is an article written by women saying that you aren’t noticing the ways that we experience discrimination in the industry. And your response is “I never notice this, so it musnt be real!”. Most women I know who go into tech leave eventually. It’s never because of the actual work itself. It’s almost always because of the attitudes of both their colleagues and often times customers and business partners. I’m very fortunate to be working IT for a women’s clothing company, and my boss and her boss are women and I’d say around 60% of my team are women myself included. I’ve yet to experience anything like I did at other companies.
Those 1500 surveyed can hardly be called “mass survey”, but it would be more credible if people surveyed were from various countries and companies. Hence my question about the source. Sample size is too vague and too small.
Am really sorry you had poor experiences working for companies, but my statement still stands true. I have never heard someone say your opinion is invalid because you are a woman. I heard old people talk like that to their wives but even that has been very rare. And I have never said it’s not real because I never heard of it. I am well aware how real it is.
The fact article is written by woman means nothing, or at least it should mean nothing. You can’t go on preaching about equality and then expect something to have more credibility because it’s written by a woman because it talks about the way females are treated. I’d prefer to see the source of those numbers and testing methodology. Without those it might as well be made up.
Your comments reek of “not-all-men” or “all-lives-matter” bullshit. You aren’t listening, much like many of the men in the tech sector. Is your gripe that they put their first statement in quotation marks? Take that up with the editor of the article, not random people on the internet.
“Additionally, the study found 72 percent of women in tech have experienced at least one form of sexism at work. This includes being paid less than male colleagues (22 percent) and having their skills and abilities questioned (20 percent). Almost a third of women in tech highlighted a gender bias in recruitment, and 14 percent said they were made to feel uncomfortable because of their gender during the application process.”
As the person above you said, there is more than one way to discriminate against women than straight up sexual assault (which also happens, by the way). Just because you specifically haven’t ever heard that one specific phrase uttered before your ears doesn’t mean that discrimination magically doesn’t exist.
Also, what are you getting on about with this crap about how “the fact article is written by woman means nothing, or at least it should mean nothing” (nice grammar, by the way)? Are you suggesting that men are somehow more capable than women when it comes to recognizing (and by extension highlighting) biases and discrimination around women themselves? You don’t actually think that, do you?
I heard it a few times, most notably from another woman working in tech. All of them older people though.
I only heard few times very old people say something like that to their spouse and am not even sure it was serious.
Truth.
I could answer yes to half those questions as a man…
This is what makes me uncomfortable about going all-in as an “ally”. I’ve heard very dubious and unprovable allegations in my time. If you dig a bit, it always end up being very much indistinguishable from insecurity. Everyone experience being ignored and talked over in those meetings, how is the get-go explaination sexism? How can you possibly know? Don’t get me wrong, I know for a fact that some of those situations are real, but I have witnessed way too many ridiculous accusations to take this talking point seriously anymore. I am not talking about overt sexism here and bad"jokes", but at this micro-aggression concept where you can be labeled a sexist for… not agreeing with a woman?
I can tell you my experience as a man tho, I worked with incredibly nice men who were scared to say the wrong thing or to participate in some meetings because we worked with extremely vocals and repressives feminists, and you can definitely lose your job for being accused of any type of misogyny around here. The tone gets really hostile real quick too. There is no discussion to be bad on this subject, my experience is invalid because I am a man, to be ridiculed because I am ignoring very clear evidences on purpose, apparently. Next week I could write about being ignored due to my height and I would get laughted out of the room, rightly so.
Same as well here, I’ve been in situations were I propose ideas for months and then a higher up or older team members repeats my idea and then what? Should I start to grieve or what?
Same with being ignored for months on team meetings, gas happened to me as well until I got of it by a new team member. 19 months missing important information for me at least because people forgot to invite me. Should I start calling micro aggressions now?
Shit happens. Improvise, adapt, overcome
Are these courses taught in middle and high school to all students?
In the 90s, in middle school we had some basic computer classes that everyone had to take. In high school, both the computer programming and electronics courses were optional.
The optional courses had more men than women.
Are they still optional? Should we be making them mandatory for entry level classes so everyone gets exposed and even sees if they are interested?
Entry level science classes were mandatory.
Let me guess, they only surveyed Americans.
You don’t think this happens in e.g., European countries?
We won’t know until a survey is performed
Until then beatings will continue until morale improves
It’s not about what I think, it’s about reality.
The tech companies I have worked for have all been the most welcoming and egalitarian environments one could possibly ask for. Down to the level of having slack bots correcting anyone for saying ‘hey guys’.
