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On being a female on a male-dominated engineering team

bryanaknight.com

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Re: On being a female on a male-dominated engineering team

#51

Post by JoeAltmaier »

new_corp_dev wrote: post #46
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The standard reply is, those industries are among the lowest-paid. And men are among the highest-offenders. So its a straw man. How about, we use instead any of the other 100 industries where men already hold the best-paid positions? We'll just swap 30 or 40 of them, so as not to cause as much pain to all those poor men.

We've built our straw effigies from the same bale, mine just happens to burn more cleanly.

What does that even mean?

At root, women are substantially absent from the most lucrative levels of the workforce. Something should be done about it, or we just have to admit we don't care that women are marginalized in our society. All the moaning about how no solution is pure enough in some ivory tower way, is beside the point.

Re: On being a female on a male-dominated engineering team

#52

Post by jonahrd »

RIMR wrote: post #42
new_corp_dev wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Helping people overcome whatever unique problems they face in order to reach their full potential is expected and encouraged. Offering them opportunities solely based on a protected status is not. I reiterate: if the industry sees a glut of women speakers who are there only because they are women, then the industry will have no choice but to acknowledge their token status. In the very same article the author laments…

>I reiterate: if the industry sees a glut of women speakers who are there only because they are women, then the industry will have no choice but to acknowledge their token status. This is exactly the problem that goes ignored when people argue that "reverse discrimination" isn't a problem. Treating people differently because of their protected status only serves to further divide. The interest should be on making sur…

And what if there's a young software engineering student who's inspired by this talk and decides to keep studying against her preconceived notions that this is a "field for men"?

Hosting more women speakers at conferences helps to fix the broken stereotype of software engineers all being white dudes, which in turns fixes the problem of fewer women and minorities becoming interested in STEM.

Re: On being a female on a male-dominated engineering team

#53

Post by programmernews3 »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #43
new_corp_dev wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's make it more fair: instead of men and women changing jobs, ostensibly causing a great deal of chaos, let's go with a parallel universe where your conditions are already in place. Or even better, let's use industries in our own universe that already has those conditions: education and child care. What sort of "special treatment" do men get in those industries? Well, in many day care services, the male employees…

The standard reply is, those industries are among the lowest-paid. And men are among the highest-offenders. So its a straw man. How about, we use instead any of the other 100 industries where men already hold the best-paid positions? We'll just swap 30 or 40 of them, so as not to cause as much pain to all those poor men.

Everything is a straw man for you.

Muslims are the highest offenders for terrorism - should we treat them different?

How about this - it is very radical and might be hard for someone like you to handle.....

How about we allow companies to hire people by merit.

I apologise if it is a horrible thing to hear for authoritarian, "diversity officer" supporting, communists.

Re: On being a female on a male-dominated engineering team

#54

Post by RIMR »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #44
RIMR wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's be honest. Are Bryana's employers trying to make the workplace more diverse? It doesn't seem so given that they have a 20:1 male:female ratio. It seems much more likely that they have chosen Bryana to represent them at conferences so that they can APPEAR to be more diverse. She's a token female in a majority-male environment. If they cared about equality, they would participate in programs targeting younger gir…

My local Engineering college is 25% women. The education part has begun already, and is picking up steam. We can do both. No good reason remains to delay corrective pressure in staffing processes.

So since we're making progress towards sexual equality, your suggestion is to introduce some sexual discrimination to the mix?

Also, your local Engineering college is not representative of the country as a whole. Even if equality of opportunity is picking up steam, that doesn't excuse implementing blatantly sexist policies to try to give women an extra boost...

It's like people think that women are less capable of success by virtue of being women, and need men's help to pull themselves upward. It's asinine and basically infantilizes women...

Re: On being a female on a male-dominated engineering team

#55

Post by davesims »

RIMR wrote: post #45
davesims wrote: post #32

As someone who was directly involved with hiring & managing Bryana let me set one aspect of this conversation to rest: Bryana's performance _across the board_ was top-notch, without qualification. She commanded, and continues to command, respect from her peers for both her technical contributions on a very challenging tech stack, and product savvy in an extremely complex business domain. I was on her interview and th…

Have you made any decisions about Bryana's responsibilities that were motivated by her gender, rather than her personal strengths? Putting your only female dev in the position of representing your company at conferences suggests that she's taken on the role of "token female". If this is coincidental, and she just happens to be the best spoken developer with the least stagefright, then clearly there is no problem. How…

> Have you made any decisions about Bryana's responsibilities that were motivated by her gender, rather than her personal strengths?

Nope. Fortunately for me, while I was in a position to make those decisions about Bryana (I've since changed gigs), her own excellent performance was the only thing I had to think about.

Look, I'll let Bryana's own career speak for itself, which I have no doubt it will, but for myself I'd have confidence putting her in front of any audience on any topic she feels comfortable talking about.

One other thing, if you know anything about how conferences work, CFPs/speaking roles are something managed by the conferences, not companies. Questions of 'token' or otherwise are best posed to the individual organizers of the conference in question.

Re: On being a female on a male-dominated engineering team

#56

Post by new_corp_dev »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #51
new_corp_dev wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've built our straw effigies from the same bale, mine just happens to burn more cleanly.

What does that even mean? At root, women are substantially absent from the most lucrative levels of the workforce. Something should be done about it, or we just have to admit we don't care that women are marginalized in our society. All the moaning about how no solution is pure enough in some ivory tower way, is beside the point.

It means your hypothetical substitution situation is no different from mine, I just happen to have picked a substitution based on an existing situation that meets the criteria you chose. The fact that it disagrees with your worldview does not mean you can discount it outright.

Men and women deserve the same opportunities and treatment in all industries, but any situations where those opportunities skew one way or the other does not mean that the solution is more discrimination.

Re: On being a female on a male-dominated engineering team

#57

Post by RIMR »

CatDevURandom wrote: post #26
lordCarbonFiber wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel you are taking a very juvenile view here. One of the foundational axioms in the push for greater diversity in tech (and one I firmly support) is the idea that there is great value in a community of differing experiences and thoughts. If you accept that it's only logical to take female candidates over male candidates until the difference in their ability is judged to be greater than the advantages of adding tha…

> very juvenile view here What an absurd characterization. I get that you don't agree with this person, but what -- if anything -- did this person say that was juvenile ?

Clearly by not having the same opinion as lordCarbonFiber, they have demonstrated that they have the mental prowess of a child. Only stupid people think differently than social and political prodigy lordCarbonFiber. /s

Re: On being a female on a male-dominated engineering team

#58

Post by new_corp_dev »

jonahrd wrote: post #52
RIMR wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I reiterate: if the industry sees a glut of women speakers who are there only because they are women, then the industry will have no choice but to acknowledge their token status. This is exactly the problem that goes ignored when people argue that "reverse discrimination" isn't a problem. Treating people differently because of their protected status only serves to further divide. The interest should be on making sur…

And what if there's a young software engineering student who's inspired by this talk and decides to keep studying against her preconceived notions that this is a "field for men"? Hosting more women speakers at conferences helps to fix the broken stereotype of software engineers all being white dudes, which in turns fixes the problem of fewer women and minorities becoming interested in STEM.

And what if said young software engineering student reads Bryana's blog post and realizes that Bryana may only have been chosen to speak because she is a woman? What sort of inspiration would that be for other women to join STEM? How should anyone view speakers that have been invited to speak based primarily on their race or gender?

It would set the whole industry back by decades. Not because women got involved, but because they became token minorities instead of competent colleagues. For an entire generation, minority STEM students would face impostor syndrome in themselves, and have to work twice as hard to prove themselves because everyone would assume they got to where they are based on "positive discrimination" instead of merit and ability.

Re: On being a female on a male-dominated engineering team

#59

Post by neogodless »

new_corp_dev wrote: post #19
LesZedCB wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Encouraging and incentivizing a female employee to speak at a conference is not reverse sexism or sexism. It's simply providing a pathway to level the playing field. The cultural meme of reverse racism or reverse sexism is simply used to continue in our racist or sexist behaviors unapologetically. These are still cultural issues to deal with, despite the progress we have made on them, and therefore there is a real po…

All capable employees should be encouraged and incentivized equally, or based on their competence. Incentive based on protected status is discrimination.

"The cultural meme of reverse racism or reverse sexism is simply used to continue in our racist or sexist behaviors unapologetically."

If all capable employees were encouraged and incentivized equally, in all situations (i.e. all women attending conferences would be encouraged equally as men because the number of women speaking at conferences was equal to the number of men), then we would not have an issue with sexism in the industry.

We do.

Because of that, the industry raising up the females in the industry to attempt parity is necessary, whether or not it qualifies for the definition of discrimination.

Re: On being a female on a male-dominated engineering team

#60

Post by neogodless »

Lawtonfogle wrote: post #38
frandroid wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In critical race theory ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_race_theory ), the main tenet is that racism is the combination of discrimination and power. Everyone can do negative discrimination versus anyone based on race, but it becomes racism when the party that does the discrimination has power over the party being discriminated again. If you apply this schema to patriarchy, one cannot call positive discrimina…

>one cannot call positive discrimination "reverse sexism" or "sexism". Positive discrimination for one person is negative discrimination against another, of whom the discriminator has power over the discriminated. So it still fits as being a *ism. That is assuming you even accept the whole 'power + mistreatment' bit.

No - the actor in this scenario, the one with power - is not the male or female engineer, but rather the employer or conference coordinator. They may very well be male, but they are giving the female engineer, who as a class have less power then the class of male engineers a leg up in getting an opportunity to speak.

The male engineers experiencing what you call reverse discrimination are still in a position of power as a class.

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