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

I approach this sort of writing with a stern charity.

Asking questions is never wrong. And I even entertain discriminatory assertions that have a compelling basis in reality. This is the charity.

But you damn well better be right, or at least not obviously wrong. If you have no compelling reason to believe what you preach -- if even the most cursory investigation would disposes you of a controversial and harmful if incorrect belief -- then you're just a bigot. This is the sternness.

So, let us evaluate your claims. Namely, that "you [women] shouldn't complain when it is difficult because you [they] are swimming upstream". I.e., that women are somehow naturally predisposed to poor software engineering.

Engineering requires a combination of technical aptitude and clear communication.

Let us first consider technical aptitude. It is instructive to consider other fields that over-lap with Computer Science and Software Engineering -- Mathematics (obviously important in CS and SE), medicine (requires systems-oriented thinking), and other sciences (requiring general technical skills).

Mathematics is more gender balanced than Computer Science. The most technically difficult aspects of Computer Science are basically applied mathematics. So technical competence cannot explain the CS gender disparity.

Medical Doctors are, on average, smarter, better credentialed, harder workers, and even better compensated than software engineers. And yet, the gender disparity among MD's is much lower than among software engineers.

Women outnumber men in several sciences, none of which you could reasonably call "pink-collar" fields without completely ignoring a good 20 years of history (let alone 100 years).

So, is it possible that women are somehow innately impoverished in the technical aptitude required in Software Engineering? I don't think so. But even if they are, this alone does not explain the gender gap in Computer Science.

Technical aptitude does not provide a compelling justification for your viewpoint.

That leaves us with communication. A technical genius who cannot communicate -- in code, in documentation, and in conversation -- makes for a dreadful engineer.

Perhaps innate communication ability explains the gap between men and women in software engineering? But all the women I know write much more clearly than you have in this post! And surely you are an excellent engineer.

So it seems I've run out of charity.

The problem is that it only takes one idiot to cause a problem... And the odds of at least one manager being an idiot approach 100%, as your company grows.

(In a place like Uber, though, the problem seems systemic.)

I said Carly Fiorina ran HP into the ground. And she did. No, HP was not "falling apart* before she got there. She's the one who had the dumb idea of merging with Compaq, a huge and costly merger that didn't benefit HP at all, and turned it from a company making extremely high-value equipment (medical and test equipment) into a company making crappy commodity PC hardware. She also helped run Lucent into the ground before she went to HP.

>For you to not acknowledge that is just bigotry.

I never said anything about it either way. To call me a "bigot" because I don't address something to your satisfaction speaks volumes about your agenda. I only pointed out that there's plenty of horrible male CEOs, meaning that CEOs of both sexes are frequently bad. I never addressed random anonymous internet posters, nor do I care to. The internet is full of horrible, vitriolic people as we see right here from time to time, and I see little point in even paying attention to them.

>soooo I really find your comment assuming anyone who is a CEO a sociopath offensive.

I find your defense of CEOs to be highly offensive. In my observation, most CEOs clearly are sociopaths, and the profession as a whole has deservedly earned that reputation. And anyone who's an apologist for the profession is likely a sociopath themselves, or maybe a useful sycophant. Whoopee, you found one that you think might not be a sociopath. The plural of "anecdote" is not "data".

>I just don't even know what else to say about your presumptuous attitude about all CEOs being sociopaths. I can imagine they must become disenchanted with people like you who never turn down an opportunity to judge them as a person despite not knowing them as a person at all but farther than yet, you are making absolutely baseless claims in that regard.

Oh gee, those poor, poor, multi-millionaire/billionaire CEOs!! Won't someone think of the billionaires!

Not quite sure why the difficulty of scheduling brain surgery or truck driving around children is apposite either. No particular reason (beyond ingrained expectations) why a woman can't do the surgery and her partner keep predictable hours and handle the children.