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

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

#101

Post by Merad »

ExactActuation wrote: post #56

These are both ridiculous. (1) can't take the heat, stay out of the kitchen. Women should be just as passionate about the work. (2) There's such a thing as a stay-at-home-dads and men that take care of their children. What ever happened to the chant of 'equality'?

> can't take the heat, stay out of the kitchen. Women should be just as passionate about the work.

If you enjoy being an ass, at least have the decency to be honest about it and own it instead of pretending that it's "passion".

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

#102

Post by readams »

jrubinovitz wrote: post #33
DeusExMachina wrote: post #4

Am I wrong or all the issues seem to be not gender related but about management and they apply to both sexes?

If these are your issues as well, you can join in and help fix them. No one is trying to invalidate your problems; this is a call to action for better engineering management practices.

Except when you interview only women about reasons they leave companies, what you hope to discover is why more women than men might be leaving. This article offers no insight on that question.

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

#103

Post by buckbova »

gooseyard wrote: post #42
gedy wrote: post #20

1) Discourage your work 'culture' from being built around aggressive tech code reviews/debates/arguments/chat where young males love to beat their chest 2) Some flexibility on hours/location when children come. Women have a harder 'stop' than men do on their child bearing age, which frequently coincides with moving into senior development roles.

I'm male, barely progressive, of below average couth, and probably seem like a dinosaur to younger colleagues when it comes to gender issues, but I think your item #1 is without question the most endlessly frustrating and pointless source of tedium in the software business and its only gotten worse during the last 20 years. I've found myself finding more common ground with young women on my teams than with the young…

Code reviews may have grown in importance due to scaled back formal design documents and formal qa staff and processes.

> young women generally respond to it in a way that I like (e.g. they make a value judgement about what advice was worth taking and what wasn't and do it).

In my only 10+ years experience, I noticed women seem more defensive about their code being reviewed and I have to write long formal arguments if I'm suggesting any more than a trivial change. Then there will be a discussion afterwards and based on that it's 50/50 whether it gets done. Now I pad reviews with positives about the work to soften it in some probably transparent attempt to placate the reviewee.

With men, I review the code, make a suggestion, I usually get a note "sounds good, will do." That's not all men of course, there's always at least one guy who doesn't want his code reviewed at all, too good, doesn't see the point, etc.

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

#104

Post by spcelzrd »

DeusExMachina wrote: post #4

Am I wrong or all the issues seem to be not gender related but about management and they apply to both sexes?

You're wrong. Every industry has management problems. Women leave tech at a rate much higher than they leave other industries. The only conclusion is that tech is a hostile environment for women, or that women are intrinsically unable to perform in tech.

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

#105

Post by st3v3r »

ExactActuation wrote: post #56

These are both ridiculous. (1) can't take the heat, stay out of the kitchen. Women should be just as passionate about the work. (2) There's such a thing as a stay-at-home-dads and men that take care of their children. What ever happened to the chant of 'equality'?

"(1) can't take the heat, stay out of the kitchen. Women should be just as passionate about the work."

Being aggressive is not being passionate. Don't confuse the two.

If you can't get your point across without being aggressive or mean, then you have no business making it.

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

#106

Post by panoptispeech »

Humdeee wrote: post #55
latenightcoding wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Point number 1 is ridiculous and sexist. Oh yeah let's ship code that hasn't been reviewed because the young males in our company will act like chimpanzees, and those pesky technical debates let's scratch those too. Let's just use whatever piece of technology is trending today on HN

Can you point me to the part of the sentence where OP says not to review code entirely? You sound like you're just making his point.

The entire purpose of a code review is to highlight things that are wrong. You can't point out things that are wrong without someone being able to spin your comments as some kind of toxic masculine impulse to show basal-primate technical dominance through demonstration of superior shamanistic technical knowledge.

Pointing out a buffer overflow isn't sexism. It's pointing out a buffer overflow.

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

#107

Post by GrinningFool »

SloughFeg wrote: post #76
autotune wrote: post #39

The pay factor is definitely something that should be looked at more. I should not have find out, after talking to any woman in tech who has a passion for it, that they're basically just barely able to make it when others with the same duties at the same or other companies make a livable wage.

Young women in software get paid 7% more than young men. http://money.cnn.com/2016/04/12/pf/gender-pay-gap/ Where does this pay gap start to come into play?

While the salary trend in new hires out of school is an encouraging sign, your comment seems rather selective: the rest of the article you linked points out that in every situation other than "just out of college with no experience" the pay gap is real:

    > Overall, women hired for jobs in technology, sales and marking were offered 
    > salaries that were 3% less than what men were offered, but at some companies the           
    > gender pay gap was as high as 30%, the study showed.

     > Men received higher salary offers for the same job title at the same company 69% 
     > of the time

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

#108

Post by emilypi »

ExactActuation wrote: post #56

These are both ridiculous. (1) can't take the heat, stay out of the kitchen. Women should be just as passionate about the work. (2) There's such a thing as a stay-at-home-dads and men that take care of their children. What ever happened to the chant of 'equality'?

1. Heat is not the same thing as passion. It's possible to be passionate, but still run into problems when discussing technology with people who are so convinced of their correctness that there is no actual debate taking place. This happens much of the time with younger devs coming out of college who are, for instance, absolutely convinced that the best way to do [x] is to use [y] technology or [z] paradigm.

As a senior dev on a team of scala/haskell programmers, we see this often. Speaking over someone is not the same as being passionate. People speak over women all the time - I have been on the receiving end of it from devs fresh out of college as someone who's published papers.

2. They were talking biological imperatives. Women's ability to have children dies at ~40. If they want to have kids, they need to get on it. No one said anything about women being only mothers and men being only breadwinners.

Reading you're comments, I'm supposing you're probably the redpill type.

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

#109

Post by ck425 »

emodendroket wrote: post #85
DeusExMachina wrote: post #4

Am I wrong or all the issues seem to be not gender related but about management and they apply to both sexes?

> Especially as a woman, I worry about being labeled hyper-sensitive, or that my gender will influence a person’s reaction to my feedback (e.g. the perception that women are hysterical). [...] > The final straw has typically been something like my manager making an off-hand remark that is thoughtless and rude, or perhaps a project I care about deeply is axed, or I’m denied a raise, or someone I care about at work is…

I'd say they're issues that are harder for woman to navigate. Not because they're less capable I should add, but because what's considered acceptable behaviour is different.

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

#110

Post by emodendroket »

briandear wrote: post #91
emodendroket wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean these Silicon Valley firms keep getting caught in blatant sexual harassment cases. I think a lot of them need, like, basic remedial education.

The irony is that these are "progressive" companies.

Well, that's a whole different rant but, really, you read about grown men texting their female coworkers incessantly with crude sexual propositions and you have to wonder how they ever came to believe this was acceptable behavior.
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