so basically its all the same shit men have to deal with too, just in a slightly different flavor
Ask a Female Engineer: How Can Managers Help Retain Technical Women?
231–240 of 510 posts
Re: Ask a Female Engineer: How Can Managers Help Retain Technical Women?
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I guess we disagree there.
Re: Ask a Female Engineer: How Can Managers Help Retain Technical Women?
#233Stop Focusing on Gender and focus on the work. Strike a balance where necessary, but focusing on the things that make people different creates a division by virtue of the differences being consciously observed.
Re: Ask a Female Engineer: How Can Managers Help Retain Technical Women?
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which one of these e-mails do you think a boss looking to seduce his employee is more likely to send?
I'm saying that it's unhelpful in this example to not be more clear.
I don't think so. I think using a more realistic example makes the point clearer.
Re: Ask a Female Engineer: How Can Managers Help Retain Technical Women?
#235Get everyone focused on thinking about the team's mission, role, and what it takes to get the job done. Drill that into everyone's head and stick to it. Let everything else go. A mentor once told me that business fundamentally revolves around making money, saving money, saving time, and making customers happier. I like thinking about work that way, as it has nothing to do with religion, sex, gender, age, height, phas…
Sounds like the convenient POV from someone already well represented in the industry. Dismissing issues of diversity as being tangential to the core business of, well, business, is sensible from an, ahem, business-perspective. And from a human perspective, really flawed and problematic.
Re: Ask a Female Engineer: How Can Managers Help Retain Technical Women?
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
> payment inequality Perceived or real? I'm yet to hear about a company that has policy to pay women less. Most have personally-discussed salaries though. If some ladies are paid less, they probably don't haggle as well. What should we do? Deny custom salaries and personal raises?
If only men predominantly "haggle well", is it possible that the ideal wage negotiation is modeled around an alpha male? It feels like rewarding productivity and giving equality in wage could be easily tied together, and benefit nearly everyone.
And how would we measure programmers' productivity? LoCs?
Re: Ask a Female Engineer: How Can Managers Help Retain Technical Women?
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, no kidding, nobody has a policy to do that. But there are several factors, including: 1. Women tend to negotiate less aggressively 2. Women who negotiate aggressively tend to be perceived worse than men doing the exact same thing 3. Implicit bias affects the amount of money an employer sees fit to offer in the first place As to what to do, here some ideas: * Massachusetts' law barring employers from asking abou…
1. That's not the problem of anybody except the person who does not negotiate aggressively. 2. People respond differently to men and women (a fact that seems to be true across all species). We don't have a clear, testable model for why this happens. 3. Implicit bias is not scientific and not relevant. Sorry for the lengthy write-up, but this should be called out for being farcical and/or psychologically dangerous. Im…
Well I suggested a handful of measures that don't involve "implicit bias training," which I agree is unlikely to work, but I question your claim that there isn't any evidence for implicit bias.
If you want to conclude that either women are just inherently inferior or else that they aren't but it's ok to systematically underpay them then I guess that's your prerogative but I'm not really interested in going down such a rabbit hole.
Re: Ask a Female Engineer: How Can Managers Help Retain Technical Women?
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 previous…
And if said boss isn't trying anything, he still ought to understand the signals it sends sufficiently well to either 1) not do it, 2) invite more people (and make that clear in the e-mail), or 3) make it something much more casual than drinks on a Saturday night.
If he doesn't understand that, he'll be the kind of manager that creates liabilities by leaving e-mail trails of questionable invitations that might get caught up in discovery if/when something happens.
Re: Ask a Female Engineer: How Can Managers Help Retain Technical Women?
#239Re: Ask a Female Engineer: How Can Managers Help Retain Technical Women?
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or it could be that "tech finds less value in women". 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.
> It's weird that every time a group doesn't fit into an industry or a culture, that group is not white men. Teaching, nursing, child care. Care to take a guess which group doesn't fit into those industries?
I wonder how they can genuinely maintain their position in light of this?