As a Woman in Tech, I Realized: These Are Not My People

Fast forward a couple of decades, and relative to pretty much all cis women of the same age, I have many more years of experience of playing around with technology in my free time, and many fewer years spent doing the "empathising" activities which the author refers to in the article - exactly the kind of activities which girls are often nudged towards. As a consequence I am pretty good with technology.

And yet the more that I grow as a person, connect with who I am, and grow in my options, the more I find playing around with tech less fulfilling than e.g. spending time on relationships. I'd spend evenings tinkering with Linux when I was 13, but I'd be unsatisfied as hell doing that today. And I envy women and girls raised in environments that were more conducive towards them engaging in empathising and self-expressive activities - if that were me, it's unlikely I'd have gone down a tech track.

We need equality and freedom, but men and women are biologically different.

And it's not a coincidence that my first HN comment in years of reading is on an empathising topic, not a technology one... Women can be great engineers, we just rarely care to become them, unless circumstances unnaturally push us towards it - I suspect this is why it is developed countries which have the fewest women in tech, as wealthy people have the most options to choose from. Of course this is all generalisations and averages and there are true exceptions on both sides.

For the most part I work rather normal hours now-- but occasionally I branch out and build stuff in my free time. I agree that it's not necessary and I could maintain my normal job in development without it. But I've also been able to parlay my hobby coding into new positions or profitable side work. It has given me more confidence and freedom.

Plenty of my co-workers don't build things on their own time. But as such I'm much more likely to be given the more interesting and challenging projects. I also likely have better job security. There are lots of benefits to being one of the crazy ones building fiber networks in your basement.

Nobody who spends significant amounts of time with valley programmers believes that the 10-hour-day 6-day-a-week people are, in general, spending all that time productively.

This seems like it could be a case where the feminine version of what is being considered has a tendency to be dismissed.

I have no issue with considering that this may be more prevalent in one sex or the other, but there's also a lot of room for people to overlook what does occur. Cooking is a good example of something that is highly technical and often requires a great investment of personal time, yet appears to have much better gender equality. Perhaps this is due to traditional cultural reasons, or perhaps it really is distinct from e.g. programming.