Think women in tech is just a pipeline problem?

It's more subtle: I don't think anyone is making sweeping uniform generalisations. i.e. "ALL MEN DO a" "ALL WOMEN DO b". I'm not claiming anything about specific individuals. but I am indeed claiming there is a general bias, at least in a statistical sense. For example, here's an arbitrary statistic from the UK in 2012 [1]:

> Just over one in 10 women – 13% – say their husbands do more housework than they do, while only 3% of married women do fewer than three hours a week, with almost half doing 13 hours or more.

So, given no further information about particular circumstances, if I were a betting man, I know which way I'd bet about this kind of thing.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/society/2012/mar/10/housework-gen...

(i mean, yeah, that might genuinely be an interesting question to look into, but surely that isn't at the top of our list of priorities, right?)

-1- Women have a lower salary, therefore their anchoring point is lower.

-2- There are few women in the department, therefore every woman feels threatened by every female applicant - they are fighting for a scarce resource.

-3- The push against sexism has resulted in men overvaluing women, while women themselves have no qualms about rating other women exactly what they think they are worth (which might still be less than they should, see 1).

-4- There may be a strong correlation in women who can succeed in a male-dominated environment for sociopathic psychological traits.

-5- There may very well be correlation (though no direct causation) between gender and expected performance, which combined with 3, results in women applying an unconscious bias.

Basically, you do not have an unbiased sample and can't make generalisations from just that article.

As someone who has faced situations where a gender microagression has caused workplace conflict, the above quote cannot be stressed enough. Just because you didn't have the intention to be biased or discriminate does not mean it did not happen. For some reason this concept eludes even the sharpest people.

We all have our biases. It's about time we owned up to them and put effort into mitigating them.

It's seriously a damn shame you worked yourself into a nervous breakdown. I can't possibly stress that enough.

I've spent about ten years working a couple of tech jobs. Over those years, I've probably put in a few hundred hours of OT (unpaid or otherwise). If we're pessimistic and call it an even 1k hours of OT, this means that I've spent an average of somewhere between 42 and 45 hours per week at work over my entire career so far.

I -and others in tech that I know- have never been required to work anywhere near point of burnout, let alone breakdown. Moreover, from what I understand of tech sector hiring practices during the Dot Com Era, anyone who could spell SQL and/or HTML could get a well-paying job in the industry.

Maybe those practices also included a near-universal culture of overwork, but -based on what I hear from a few folks who were working in The Valley at the time- I'm pretty certain that that's not true. If management was pressuring you to work those insane hours, you would have very probably found better treatment at another company. It seems like the lower hiring bar would have given a seasoned veteran quite some mobility during the boom. The situation after the bust is another story all together.

Since you stopped working in the industry in 2003 and claim over 25 years of industry experience, would you be so kind compare and contrast the work ethic and attitudes of tech company management during the Dot Com boom of the late 1990s to those of tech company management during the PC Boom of the 1980s and very early 1990s?

Thanks!