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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?

#201

Post by emodendroket »

SEJeff wrote: post #193
emodendroket wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, so, in concrete terms, how do you propose people treat their employees equally regardless of sex? Empirically that is not currently what happens, and probably not because someone twirling his mustache said "let's deliberately discriminate against women."

Excellent question! Here is my imperfect idea that is much easier said than done. FWIW, I do work as a software engineer at a very technical firm that I think does a stellar job getting this right. The biggest thing is the pay gap. Fixing the pay gap does make employees more equal as an employer trades money for an employees time. We have a long way to go to fix the current pay gap in tech at least. Also I have heard…

My issue with your post is this: obviously those things are very serious problems. But they are only the most egregious ones. I feel like any company not run by dolts can manage not to allow punishing women with the rationale that they might get pregnant and to stop blatant sexual harassment -- after all, these things are completely illegal. But even if we solve them there are still lots of more subtle ways that companies can be made less welcoming places for women than for men and addressing those probably requires much more conscious consideration.

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

#202

Post by cookiecaper »

jetsnoc wrote: post #116
spcelzrd wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

IMHO, tech is a hostile environment with a lot of poor managers. I think the Peter principle applies to a lot of managers in tech. Promoted past their skill set. Just because someone is a good engineer does not mean they will be a good engineering manager. Managing humans with needs, concerns, ideals and life goals is so very different than managing a code-base. Executive leadership needs to consider this when buildi…

I wouldn't scope this down to tech. Incompetence and professional disinterest is by far the norm across all industries.

Career meritocracy is, more or less, a myth. In technical fields, there is a merit baseline that has to be cleared, but after that, any further relationship between merit and position evaporates. That is inescapable. People sometimes think they've escaped it and found the promised land of meritocracy, but they haven't. That usually just means they have a politically-skilled manager who is good at keeping their belief in the fairy tale alive.

I agree that a good engineer is not necessarily a good engineering manager, but I don't believe there are good engineering managers who are not also good engineers.

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

#203

Post by emodendroket »

prolly_a_moron wrote: post #197
emodendroket wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think a male boss inviting a female employee over for "drinks" on a Saturday night at his home is nothing more than a "friendly gesture"?

Way more often than not, yes. Is your default position to assume there's an agenda behind every invitation?

No, of course I do not assume there is an ulterior motive behind "every" invitation, but there is a strong sexual undercurrent to the invitation we're talking about.

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

#204

Post by maerF0x0 »

GrinningFool wrote: post #107
SloughFeg wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 > gen…

Another article: http://qa.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2014/apr/09/g...

it seems the pay gap is more an age thing. When we say give women equal pay, we should be saying "give older women equal pay" . This makes me think its a lagging metric that will be solved as todays 20 somethings become 40 and 60 year olds. If we want to accelerate the solution its not to give young womena a raise, but older women.

Its also hard because depending on how the numbers are calculated it maybe fair to pay older women less once you account for a lifetime of choosing lifestyle over earning potential as many note women vs men typically do.

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

#205

Post by throwanem »

prolly_a_moron wrote: post #197
emodendroket wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think a male boss inviting a female employee over for "drinks" on a Saturday night at his home is nothing more than a "friendly gesture"?

Way more often than not, yes. Is your default position to assume there's an agenda behind every invitation?

You don't need to see an agenda behind every invitation to recognize the agenda behind this one.

For those genuinely unclear, it's a combination of things - the individual nature of the invitation, the private nature of the venue, the timing and explicit involvement of libations whose effects often include the lowering of inhibitions - all in all it's just a super sketchy thing to all of a sudden pop up in a previously professional relationship. Any one of those would be fine; any two would be a little questionable but probably okay; all three at once constitute a great big flashing neon sign that spells out "YOUR BOSS IS TRYING TO LAY YOU".

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

#206

Post by Chris2048 »

yourapostasy wrote: post #145
logicallee wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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: becom…

Does software engineering have a gender problem, or a social validation problem? 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. Empirica…

Putting "It is no secret" before a claim doesn't validate it, please provide some support/context for "[female devs] are far more socially attuned than men are".

Also, a phrase like "doctor's orders" is common, because most members of the public will have occasion to see a doctor, the profession having existing for a long time. There's no saying "CTO's orders", yet this is obviously a position of power.

Also, your observances wrt men and social ranking could easily be confounded if you don't have a complete knowledge of the filters on the men & women you see in IT.

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

#207

Post by openasocket »

songzme wrote: post #192
openasocket wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the only woman engineer on the team spends the night sipping on her drink quietly wishing she found these topics more interesting or wishing she took more CS classes so she could appreciate the intensity of the conversation Women might have different interests than men, but why do you think they might be stymied by technical conversation? She's an engineer the same as the rest, unless she was hired because of token…

A friend graduated from a bootcamp and she loves coding. But sometimes there are conversations that goes deep into SSDs vs HDDs, bitcoin mining, and other topics unrelated to work that alienated her and she couldn't participate. I was trying to share what I learned from speaking with a few of my friends. Put yourself in the shoes of a woman who wanted a career change and joined a bootcamp. You learned the necessary s…

OK, that makes sense, I thought you were talking in the general, not discussing a particular subset. But I'd argue the issue is more due to not having a 4 year degree than being a woman in a male-dominated field, though that certainly doesn't help. I don't know the statistics, are women in tech more likely to be from bootcamps than men?

However, this does remind me of a phenomenon in child psychology, where girls in a classroom setting are much more likely to participate in class if it's an all-girl class vs a mixed-gender setting. I believe the literature says this is largely due to some learned cultural behavior in early childhood, but I can't remember the specifics. I don't know if this phenomenon persists into adulthood to some degree, but your example reminded me of that.

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

#208

Post by SEJeff »

emodendroket wrote: post #201
SEJeff wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excellent question! Here is my imperfect idea that is much easier said than done. FWIW, I do work as a software engineer at a very technical firm that I think does a stellar job getting this right. The biggest thing is the pay gap. Fixing the pay gap does make employees more equal as an employer trades money for an employees time. We have a long way to go to fix the current pay gap in tech at least. Also I have heard…

My issue with your post is this: obviously those things are very serious problems. But they are only the most egregious ones. I feel like any company not run by dolts can manage not to allow punishing women with the rationale that they might get pregnant and to stop blatant sexual harassment -- after all, these things are completely illegal. But even if we solve them there are still lots of more subtle ways that comp…

And my problem with your response is that it still happens every single day legal or not. Let's fix the egregious problems for good, then we can focus on the subtle ones.

Take a solid engineer like Valerie Aurora or Sarah Sharp or even say Jessie Frazelle (in addition to the previously mentioned Uber engineer). This happens to other human beings, it is awful, it should stop. I would LOVE to work in a team with any of them solely to learn from them and grow my own skills. All of them have publically written about how they've been wrongfully discriminated against.

Yoire welcome to believe this isn't a problem and that it is common sense to not do these things and yet we still here the same story over and over and over. If my daughter wants to be an engineer I want her to be graded on the only thing that really matters, which is her intellect and ability to sell her solution as the best given the business requirements. Nothing more or less.

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

#210

Post by panoptispeech »

songzme wrote: post #199
buckbova wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The most important for me is directing social conversations. You want the manager to micro-manage a happy hour? Sounds like torture.

Yes, but how else would you build empathy and diversity amongst your team? Say you hired a minority who has different interest with the majority on the team. If left unchecked, the minority will always feel excluded (unless they have a strong personality).

If I were on a team where management tried to micro-manage conversion toward some ideal of "diversity", then believe me, "empathy" would not be the emotion I would be feeling.

Okay, make me unhappy. I'm just another toxic male. I can go, right? My leaving will just make the rest of the team more vibrant or whatever.

Well, I produce 10x more code than the rest of the team put together, so good luck.

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