An open letter on feminism in tech

An open letter on feminism in tech
modelviewculture.com

My experiences related to women in tech:

* Everywhere I've worked, it's been a boys club, but we'd LOVE to hire more women. Frankly, hiring is hard in general. When women have come in to interview, I can't speak for others - but I know in the back of my head, my biggest concern is, "Make sure you interview with the same standards as anyone else, but make sure you don't have some subconscious bias because she's a she."

* There are probably good female engineers, and not so good ones. One of the few "not so good ones" I know of (doesn't mean she'll never improve, just at the time) had to be super carefully managed out over a long time. There was no unceremonious firing, that's for sure.

* Is there even a "women in tech" problem? Or is it just "women in the workforce, no matter the industry"? The kinds of ridiculous behavior women are describing in these articles sound to me like they could happen in finance, sales, marketing, HR, or anywhere.

* On any of the open source mailing lists I'm on, I've never seen anything remotely close to, "Your pull request sucks you whre, try again". Are these just the mythical basement dwelling trolls of Slashdot lore reaching out privately via email?

Most of the engineers I know in tech are decent, upstanding guys. If anything, I feel like if any of us was pulled aside by a female co-worker and she described shenanigans of the sort I read about in these articles, we'd probably jump to their defense in a heart beat, almost maybe too easily.

What have the rest of you experienced?

*

Edit: I left the above (my OP) in tact. After re-reading it, and some responses, it's become clear to me that it gives off an air of, "I don't believe these reports", and that's not really what I intended.

I suppose my main point was that no, I haven't experienced it, and I think that's exactly what these women are saying - Just because you haven't seen it, doesn't mean it's not there. So really, despite getting some up votes, I think I missed the boat.

I was curious if others on my (the male) side have in fact seen it, but what does that tell us? Probably not much.

> The last few weeks have been very difficult for women in tech:

> Gurbaksh Chahal - then-CEO of a startup, was allegedly video taped violently attacking a former partner 117 times in 30 mins (He was finally fired some time after this was made public)

My reaction when I first read this: "wow, the guy beat up his company partner AND a woman, at that. What an asshole." Then I clicked through (note: he's still an asshole).

If you actually click through and read this, it is completely unrelated to tech. The partner that was attacked was a girlfriend. Not a company partner at all.

I'm not condoning the behaviour, obviously, but I feel like this article is setting the stage to create a "men vs women" thing in tech. If we spell it out, a full two out of five points the authors use to make their case can be summarized as:

A guy who has a temper problem and runs a tech company attacked a girlfriend who had nothing to do with the tech company. Everyone wanted to see proof.

Why is this particular instance difficult for women in tech? Why not everywhere? Why is this not used as an example of perhaps the stresses that people are under that cause them to behave this way? Is there a link to aggression and CEOs? This would be a better set of questions to take away from that incident than "if you work in tech and you are a woman, will you get beat up on a daily basis?"

> The last thing we want is for people reading this to be put on the defensive

The last thing I want is for people who want to bend the truth this much to be on the front page of HN.

The other stuff you wrote about? All great stuff. No one wants rapey emails. Even if you are fine as hell, you should be free from getting groped or otherwise harassed.

Don't adopt tangentially related stories to create a narrative that is more dire than real life. It just makes me shut off to anything else you want to say and then I don't want to work with you at all.

The more overtly unwelcoming behavior seems to crop up outside of the office at networking events and conferences (and IRC and twitter and the bottom of this page).

I will point out that of the various direct and second-level managers I've had since entering the industry in the early 2000s only three (out of a total of fourteen) were minorities.