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

This is how you get good at it. If you don't like it as a hobby, maybe it's not a good job fit for you.

Hard to take this piece seriously. I've worked in tech and in journalism. Women are decently-represented in investigative journalism [0], and being successful in that means being highly motivated to work, 7 days a week for long hours, with "inanimate objects" such as documents, legal codes, and Lexis-Nexis, e.g. Jane Mayer [1] and Lucy Morgan [2]. Perhaps the reason why the OP can't recall of many women at her workplace building fiber-channel networks in their basement over the weekend is that:

1) It's rare even for men to do that. I went through engineering school; there were students like that, some of whom would later go on to excel. But many students such as myself weren't as obsessive yet were able to be successful and confident too.

2) There weren't many women in her workplace period.

Maybe the implication is that women can get obsessed with something like journalism because it's not the "inanimate objects" they're obsessed with, but the real-life people who are impacted. OK. I don't work at Google but I imagine that is a quality they would want in their workforce if they hope to make their computing services integral and ubiquitous to human existence.

I can identify with the OP's selection-bias. As a Vietnamese-American, I've gotten a few surprised responses from other Vietnamese about being a journalist. Part of that may be because there aren't many Vietnamese relative to other ethnic groups in America. And to a relatively poor ethnic group, a poor-paying field like journalism isn't super attractive to Vietnamese immigrant parents. There aren't a ton of (well-known) Vietnamese journalist heroes to emulate either; none so far have won a Pulitzer (in editorial journalism, at least). But why I became interested in journalist is easy: my high school had a great program, and it was fun.

From my vantage point, the idea that women could succeed and enjoy tech is far less hypothetical. For starters, women are represented well in STEM (just not computer science), and tech is a highly lucrative field today. But more importantly, unlike aspiring Vietnamese-American journalists, women have actual heroes and paragons of the field to look-up to. Not just the long-dead, such as Ada Lovelace and Admiral Grace Hopper. The engineer who (among many other huge accomplishments) came up with the very concept of "software engineering" was a woman [3].

I know the memo author's and the OP's point is not that women can't at all exceed in engineering. But the situation isn't that women have sometimes done well with computers, like a few WNBA players might be able to give NBA players a tough challenge. The situation with computers is that women have been pioneers. The memo's author does not provide sufficient evidence for us to believe that biological factors are what make engineering unappealing to women. So efforts to make engineering appealing to women are not just done out of an obligatory guilt-trip, but could be essential to a company's continued success and innovation.

[0] http://www.theinvestigativefund.org/blog/1761/investigative_...

[1] http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/08/30/covert-operatio...

[2] http://archives.cjr.org/united_states_project/lucy_morgan_in...

[3] https://medium.com/@verne/margaret-hamilton-the-engineer-who...

Doctors read through medical literature all the time.

I know plumbers who have fully decked out their house with incredible custom setups (e.g. hydronically heated walls), mechanics who work on their own cars on the weekend, contractors who live in fabulous homes they built themselves, and artists who work on their own projects during the weekend.

At the same time, many of my coworkers have interests outside of technology. It varies. A lot.

> (which might include sci-fi, fantasy, video-games, board games, certain types of discussions, and a lot more)

Hiking, sailing, martial arts, world travel, cooking, beer, animal rehabilitation.

> (which might include sci-fi, fantasy, video-games, board games, certain types of discussions, and a lot more),

Sci-fi and Fantasy movies have been mainstream for some time, and my non-engineering friends get together for board games as often as my engineering friends. Video games are played by 49% of Americans (Pew), equally split between men and women.

I've known men and women who have had cultural problems fitting into their teams, engineering and non-engineering.

Also in regards to the article, music is even worse than politics for % chance of finding agreement, if I brought up the latest \m/ concert I went to, I'd find maybe a couple of people in total who'd want to talk about it at my office! It'd be "how was it? Nice, ok, cool."