Ask a Female Engineer: How Can Managers Help Retain Technical Women?

> 1) Discourage your work 'culture' from being built around aggressive tech code reviews/debates/arguments/chat where young males love to beat their chest

I'm sure whatever you'd like to replace these processes could be described in equally sweeping sexist terms going the opposite direction, you know.

Agreed - I am not female, and these are the same reasons I'd be unhappy with a job or leave.

Well, due to the outrageous skew in gender, I think you have to read these things more deeply. There are offices with 18 or 20 men and 0 women or 1 woman. That doesn't happen statistically - certainly not with the incentives of exceedingly high salaries and a field that is open to all (by means of a computer science undergraduate program.) Look at something that is much harder than becoming a software engineer: becoming an MD in the United States. It has far higher mental and educational requirements; it's simply harder. An MD can learn C++ (to code their medical application) much faster than a C++ engineer can learn even a tiny part of the MD's domain expertise.

Here is the gender breakdown of MD's:

http://kff.org/other/state-indicator/physicians-by-gender/

Women comprise 34% of MD's to 66% men. That is a statistical skew, but nowhere near the 93% male that programmers face. In essence when you reply to a comment here on HN you could carelessly say "he" referring to an OP without referring to their first name, whereas if this were a forum for physicians you would not make that assumption because it's not skewed enough for you to do so. (Here on HN there are lots of female engineers but they don't usually announce themselves explicitly.)

So software engineering has a gender problem. Now we're getting an interview about what some people cite for leaving an industry in which they can make six figures within their first five years, with nothing more than an undergraduate education or the equivalent self-learning of 25% of one.

So it is important to read the interviews extremely carefully and with a very open mind.

For example, what are some of the worst things about being a software engineer: insane hours; intense mental focus (it is impossible not to take your work home with you and I am sure many programmers routinely dream of the tasks they are working on); coupled with bull-pen open space offices:

However, open office plans[1] were not cited by the women in this interview. Zero mentions as far as I can see (I re-skimmed and also searched inline for "open').

The word hour or hours does not occur a single time.

So even though it appears that the issues cited are independent of gender, it is imperative to read these interviews very deeply. There could be more to them than meets the eye.

I don't know what it is, but it has to be in these interviews, lurking beneath the surface. Read more deeply.

[1] such as the monstrosity pictured here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_plan

I agree, maybe I should have said passive-aggressive. It's certainly also an issue from the physically 'meek and mild' types.