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

I'm young enough (born in the late 1980's) that during my entire time in the work force, I feel like I've only ever met ONE "real" manager. I've known many people in management roles, but I think we've definitely lost sight of what good management even looks like. If you're under a certain age, I wonder if you've even met a real manager before. From today forward, many of the people in management roles may never have met a real manager before too - how are they supposed to fill a role they've never seen before.

I think we need some good management role models, and we need to find a way to encourage people in management roles to grow to fill this.

I don't have any studies or hard facts to cite, but consider this - I feel like part of the role of a manager is to bear responsibility and deadlines, manage the workers and give them the access and tools they need to succeed. But what I see most often is managers (not doing the work) acting like slave drivers, pushing all of the responsibility and pressure of meeting the deadlines on the workers to stress about. I see lower level workers staying late after work, taking 'ownership' of their manager's responsibilities out of fear they will get fired. That's not what it's supposed to look like but unfortunately for most millennials it seems to be the common experience.

It is no secret that women in nations where software engineering is likely to be a significant source of employment are far more socially attuned than men are; whether this is by nurture or nature is grist for another mill at another time. It is also no secret that software engineers rank lower on social validation than doctors. Empirically, look at a sampling of org charts, and statistically, pure software engineers (not counting Fellow-type positions, for example) rarely call the shots. Not that they should as a rule: I'm pointing out the reality.

Regardless of the US reality for doctors, with the constraints imposed upon them by the dysfunctionally-broken US healthcare policies, the social perception of doctors is "doctors call the shots". The phrase "doctor's orders" carries enormous cultural weight behind it.

To empirically test a weak form of this hypothesis, compare the number of women managers who were originally trained as programmers to women software engineers. If there is a statistically significant deviation, then some Maxwell's Demon-like mechanism at work performs a sorting function that emerges this deviation, gradually exerting an inexorable pull upon women programmers into management. A stronger experimental confirmation of this hypothesis would require someone with far more training in such psycho-social factors discrimination to devise an experiment to empirically test.

I'm not discounting the very real challenges women software engineers face. Personally, I have not witnessed first-hand any of the workplace vibe-killers described, and I've been in a lot of different workplaces by dint of my wandering consulting career, but I can believe it happens because I've also seen some really bad behavior in the species, and generally I tend to attract clients with pretty solid corporate cultures. But women tend as a statistical aggregate to pay attention to the nuances of social rankings far more than most men realize, and especially men in software engineering realize.

In practice, that means making code review comments unclear and extremely passive aggressive. I'd rather have plain, clear statements than statements that on the surface are pleasant and helpful but that are actually meant to be emotional and professional shivs. I've been both.

> No one said to remove the opportunity to express one's love of geeky things or organic conversation during happy hour. They said to tone that down, and be more inclusive, so other members of the team can express their love of things they like.

The proposal is to prevent conversations flowing naturally according to the normal implicit rules of conversation and instead steer the conversation to "inclusive" topics. You know what I'd do in that situation? Grab a bunch of my coworkers and head off to the nearest pub to have the conversation we want to have. Congratulations, you've tried to help and made things worse.

> Meritocracy is a red herring.

This idea is both trendy and dangerous. Some ideas are better than others. I don't want to be around people who think that asbestos and plastic are both perfectly good materials for medical devices and that we should reach a compromise position to ensure that everyone is heard. If person A consistently proposes ideas that work and person B is genial, but constantly proposes ideas that don't work, A has more merit.

> And likely, fewer women want to be in tech because of the sexist attitudes

This argument is circular. You're defining literally anything that might make women choose to not come to "tech" as being sexist. Never mind that women get all sorts of preferences; never mind that women are paid more these days. It's all about how there are more men than women, therefore we have a "problem" that we need to "fix".

Historically, your argument has been used to suppress women and minorities. It's weird that every time a group doesn't fit into an industry or a culture, that group is not white men.