On sexism in the tech industry - rebuttal

Just because she didn't write as if her blog were an academic journal doesn't mean she isn't giving a serious topic the treatment it deserves. Her post exists to state that "the whole [.net] article is hyperbolic generalisation."

On a sidenote, her food blog looks delicious.

I think the original article touches on some good points, and I can understand the need for Laura to voice her opinion, but the author MUST have wrote the article with good intentions.

Personally, if I were really affected by an article I get in touch with the author, have a skype call and get all the concerns out in the open, and work together to revise the article so that both parties are happy with it. Then if the author didn't want to know etc, THEN I'd write the rebuttal.

I don't want to be harsh here, but Laura could have shared her input privately and together created a exceptional article with valid points and different perspectives, but instead when to route of going public and (potentially) damaging the authors name in the process.

We're all professionals, and can take criticisms, especially if they were voiced in a constructive way as a means to create something better. Laura's article begs the question whether her intentions are destructive, or whether her aim was to build and improve.

>Then there's the awful problem of low numbers. If you meet a crummy male developer, well, he's a crummy developer. If you meet a bad female developer, she's probably a significant portion of all female developers that you've met - and so at least subconsciously, I think that for many the association becomes that female developers are bad (since hey, 33.3% of all female developers you've worked with aren't that great).

This class of bias works both ways. When a man is wronged it's an injustice towards the individual. When a woman is wronged it's an injustice towards women.

Ehh... Yeah. The original article was kind of a pile of crap, but it's hard to give this any credibility either.

1) She's only worked for 6 months 2) She works in UX, which is actually pretty well represented by women.

My two cents from a woman who actually works in a technical position (I'm a developer) for > 10 years now. Also working in infosec, which is one of the least represented when it comes to gender balance. Note: this is all totally anecdotal.

IMHO, "Imposter Syndrome" is one of the primary reasons we don't have more women in the industry, and it's reinforced heavily because of the culture of most workplaces. Why? When you emphasize a "brogrammer" and "rockstar" culture it's hard to believe that you can step in there and be just as "good as the guys."

When I'm talking about brogramming culture, I am not talking about silly shit like they turned the woman's bathroom to a man's one (lol, they did this at one company I worked at) or that you need to stop making fart jokes etc. I mean the idea we are all super awesome rockstars that sling amazing code and everyone else around you is shit and an idiot for not knowing something that you (and the other guys) know. When you're already feeling kind of alienated for being different, this can be really intimidating (and it's worse when people point it out -- I was asked an interview for a programming teaching position at a university BY A PROFESSOR "how will you handle it if people don't take you seriously as a female?")

I struggled with this for many years. I always assumed everyone around me knew more about computers (they didn't) and their code was 100% perfect (lol, it wasn't).

The effect for me was I was afraid to ask questions and when I wanted to figure out something, I did the research/reading on my own because I felt I had to prove that I was 110% competent - imagine how much time I could have saved and how much faster I would have progressed if in those early days I had just felt more comfortable asking people for help.

Because of this, I think corporate environments are an easier more comfortable place for a woman to work in a programming job than startups and small companies (again, this isn't universal). Which is sad, because I love working at a small company. And the startup space could benefit from women (since there are so few people usually in a startup, esp if you're building a product that will be widely used by women, it is invaluable to have that perspective).

2) What can you do about it? Well, if you're a woman, and you want to be in the tech field because you love working with computers, and you continue to pursue it, you're doing something already. You're an example to every other woman. I think only in this way, eventually the gender balance will even out. If you're a guy, and you want to hire a woman to join your technical team, emphasize the collaborative nature and how much they will learn on the job. Hire for smarts and ability to learn, not just knowing how to write a rails app in one day and knowing how to debug a deadlock with gdb etc.