Introducing “Ask a Female Engineer”

My personal experience is that being very thorough in rooting out barriers to entry has a powerful impact, like water rushing downhill after a dam bursts. But you have to be incredibly thorough to get that effect.

1) do you think there are more men in engineering exclusively as a result of men being prejudiced against women?

Definitely not. Humans are complicated beasts, so it'd be pretty impressive if there was an exclusive reason. I do think, however, that EVERYONE is prejudiced against feminine behavior (with "women" just being used as short hand), not just men. I actively am aware of my prejudice against feminine presenting women or men and when I interview people I go out of my way to mitigate my biases through objective assessments.

On the other hand, at the end of the day I want to work with people who will have the same values when it comes to the company culture and similar ideas as to what good code looks like. We're all looking for allies at work and it's impossible to know whether someone 100% fits your idea of a "good" co-worker, so we use shortcuts...like how similar they are to us. And gender is one variable of similarity, so I'm sure it plays an important role in hiring decisions.

2) do you think your male co-workers are less qualified to be engineers because they were hired for their gender?

Slightly. It's not about being hired "for their gender", it's about tendencies in terms of they represent their abilities. A woman says she can do something, she usually has the relevant background/skill-set. A man says he can do something and he's likely to mean "I can teach myself this though I don't know the language or the relevant framework. I may also not have set up my environment yet..."

So. That's an uncomfortable trend with new male hires.

3) one of the engineers in this article said she felt uncomfortable being aware of being the only female. Can anyone explain what causes the discomfort?

If I'm in an all male group that I haven't been in before or that I know sometimes wanders off into unacceptable behavior, I'm readying myself (which is uncomfortable). I'm readying myself to keep talking after being ignored, to call out someone who repeats one of my ideas as if it's their idea, to call out a sexist comment or a boorish joke (I swear to god the amount of men who think the words bitch, slut, whore, etc are just dandy every day insults is insane), to politely decline to go open the door/get coffee/leave the room to perform a menial task, etc. It's uncomfortable.

At my work, I don't feel this way; I'm the only female engineer but it's really borderline irrelevant at this point. I'd be hard to replace, and I established very early on what makes me uncomfortable and the cofounders police that behavior now so it's nearly non-existent. Which is wonderful; I don't want to be a kill joy, I don't want to mother anyone, I don't want to be lone person complaining as everyone mocks me behind their back (aka being established as "that" girl; the very idea behind the statement being YOU are the problem for wanting to be comfortable at work and treated respectfully) I just want people to act like adults in an professional environment and to treat me as an equal who deserves my spot at the table. And I get that. But it took time and effort and support from the leaders of the company.

There are thousands of Men that are 'forced out' of technology jobs every day due to not making the cut during there interviews or leaving for a long list of reasons.

No one has shown that the general environment in technology focus businesses is more hostel to women then Men. It can be stressful and hostel to everyone equally. I believe that is the case. Woman have better options for careers in many professions with less stress and saner hours.

I think you don't see as many men "hounded out of our industry" because that's a property of how sensitive the person is and how much they're looking for drama, not really how many death threats they receive.

I have personally received death threats multiple times after making "controversial" changes to an open source project I work on (as in: good in the long term for the project, bad in the short term for users). And I stopped counting the number of times I've read I should "kill myself". But guess what, instead of writing long blog posts explaining I'll quit open source development because of death threats, I just ignore them and continue doing what's best for the project. So far I don't think I've died yet, so that seems to be working pretty well.

There's also the long tail of death threats you won't even find out unless you look for them specifically (like, going on 4chan to read users talking about your project there). I've seen some other contributors to similar projects getting personally insulted, called "greedy jews" because they asked for donations to buy research hardware, and also being heavily encouraged to kill themselves. They also don't make drama about it, and in fact they'd probably be quite unhappy that I'm even mentioning it publicly.

So yeah, if I were looking to create drama I'd have more than enough material to do so, and I also could probably get "hounded out of my industry" if I was willing to.

1. Did you have [what shouldn't be] atypical interests as a girl?

Sort of? I read a LOT as a kid. I bought a book randomly as a third grader on interesting sites for kids on the net; this led to my Dad teaching me how to get on the net and my older brother helping me set up my first web page for my "online pets" via AngelFire. It's a website, so one might think atypical interest for a girl. However, I soon was teaching myself basics (aka copy pasta) so my site (moved over to Geocities :P) could be the prettiest in these online communities...which were dominated by girls. The USE of our technical knowledge was very typically female (caretaking games of animals, story-telling, community driven, pretty-all-the-things, etc).

However, I also I played Diablo online and other video games with my siblings and Dad which is not considered normal for girls I believe. Comic books were also big in my house, so Batman was my favorite thing ever as a kid. Barbies and him had many a storyline together in my backyard.

2. If yes, did other girls discriminate against you because of those interests?

No. Not at all.