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

I think what emodendroket is getting at is not that this stuff is unimportant, but that the vast majority of us have no occasion to address the egregious problems with any regularity, so we should also focus on the things we can affect on a day-to-day basis. While bad things do happen every day across the industry, at any given workplace (or more specifically, within an individual working group) they are fairly infrequent, and only a small number of people actually witness them or are otherwise in a position to take action.

In contrast, we do have opportunities every day to address the more subtle issues - talking over people, expecting women to take notes, paying more attention to ideas that come from men, etc. Even at a company where no woman is harassed or underpaid or refused a promotion, there are almost always things that can be done to make the environment less uncomfortable for women, and these are things that everyone can and should pay attention to all the time.

I think women perceive technical work as a low status. Many men do too. It just that may be men get more intrinsic value from it.

It's not up to the managers alone to retain technical women, it's up to everyone.

I've worked in this industry since the 1990's, which is enough time to see quite a bit, and I've definitely seen behavior hostile to women during this time, and also ham-fisted attempts to fix the problem which also breed resentment towards women, causing even more of the behavior.

This whole "situation" simply boggles my mind. What could possess a guy to send a dick-pic to a coworker, or a manager to demand sex in exchange for promotion? These people are clearly messed up human beings, and need to be fired. Most of the time they are, and it takes an exceptional bro-culture for them not to be fired. However, these obnoxious pigs aren't really the core of the problem, they're just the ones we think of first.

What I've seen over time is that most people have a double standard when comparing technical men and women. These are good people who respect their co-workers, and would never do something like mentioned above, but they still make it harder for women through either unconscious biases, different expectations, or different treatment.

For example, I worked at one pre-eminent bay area company where there I saw a lot of policies meant to help female engineers and managers succeed. They were very strict on any sort of harassment policies, and usually took action against inappropriate behavior. Yet, my female co-workers were frustrated. There was a double standard in engineering. Say you go to a design review meeting for a big feature. If a man was presenting, he had the benefit of the doubt of his colleagues, presented his idea, got critiqued it, job done. A woman giving the same sort of presentation doesn't get that benefit of the doubt as frequently, and her ideas are scrutinized more, sometimes in a condescending way. I've seen this play out myself, it's disgusting! It's also not just men, women are harsher towards technical women as well.

Women who noticed such problems and tried to point them out were either treated either as whiners, or management heard and over-reacted in a way which made the men feel threatened, which made the problem worse.

I really don't know what the fix is here, but I can't see how managers can fix a cultural problem. The culture of tech needs to change to be fair to women. Perhaps this comes from having too high a concentration of one gender, since male elementary school teachers share the plight of technical women, but that's just my speculation based on people that I know.

What I am happy to see is that the ratio of women to men in technical degree programs is much greater than when I was in college in the early 90's. I do college recruiting events for computer science grads, and if I was to wager a guess, the ratio is about 1/3, and approaching half at some schools. When women are more present in the tech workforce, and their peers have always experienced working with women, perhaps then things will change.

It is a continual frustration to me that the male-dominated tech community is so bad with these issues. Predictably, the top comment on this post that tries to move forward on a very real problem that has been empirically established is an appeal to stick with the status quo.

I'm sorry, but companies have always focused on making money. Saying that the way to handle this very specific problem is to focus on making money is an appeal to brush the problem aside completely.

The top comment, for good measure, even obliquely swipes at active events taken by small local groups to tackle the issue, such as Girls Who Code, because men might be silently stewing over their existence...[1]

I am opting for a top level comment here because my frustration is less with the comment itself than that the community as a whole has voted this comment to the top.

[1] Before I get kneejerk responses that the comment didn't specify the group, let me belabor the point that the context of this discussion is SPECIFICALLY women's difficulties working within the masculine tech culture, so MinorityCodingClub trivially translates to WomenCodingClub, which sounds an awful lot like Girls Who Code, which has been gaining prominence of late. It is a cowardly oblique swipe at these sort of organizations. It's a cop out not to name the organization that you have a problem with explicitly, an attempt to lash out at such organizations while maintaining the comfortable position of plausible deniability. Everyone gets it though. So I won't countenance "shocked and appalled" denials that organizations like Girls Who Code were the target of the swipe.

> Does software engineering have a gender problem, or a social validation problem?

The two are not mutually exclusive (and, indeed, can be mutually reinforcing.)