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Ask a Female Engineer: How Can Managers Help Retain Technical Women?

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: Ask a Female Engineer: How Can Managers Help Retain Technical Women?

#61

Post by FreedomToCreate »

ashark wrote: post #43
gedy wrote: post #20

1) Discourage your work 'culture' from being built around aggressive tech code reviews/debates/arguments/chat where young males love to beat their chest 2) Some flexibility on hours/location when children come. Women have a harder 'stop' than men do on their child bearing age, which frequently coincides with moving into senior development roles.

> 1) Discourage your work 'culture' from being built around aggressive tech code reviews/debates/arguments/chat where young males love to beat their chest I'm sure whatever you'd like to replace these processes could be described in equally sweeping sexist terms going the opposite direction, you know.

Good to see someone can see the irony.

Re: Ask a Female Engineer: How Can Managers Help Retain Technical Women?

#62

Post by gedy »

latenightcoding wrote: post #34
gedy wrote: post #20

1) Discourage your work 'culture' from being built around aggressive tech code reviews/debates/arguments/chat where young males love to beat their chest 2) Some flexibility on hours/location when children come. Women have a harder 'stop' than men do on their child bearing age, which frequently coincides with moving into senior development roles.

Point number 1 is ridiculous and sexist. Oh yeah let's ship code that hasn't been reviewed because the young males in our company will act like chimpanzees, and those pesky technical debates let's scratch those too. Let's just use whatever piece of technology is trending today on HN

I didn't say "no code reviews" I said aggressive. I've personally seen a world a difference in response from (mostly) young female engineers when the review is less about "you did this and this WRONG, FIX IT" than talking through design decisions calmly and without the (passive) aggressive stuff.

Yes this can apply to males too, but my empirical observation is mostly more applicable to females.

Re: Ask a Female Engineer: How Can Managers Help Retain Technical Women?

#64

Post by oconnor663 »

ExactActuation wrote: post #56

These are both ridiculous. (1) can't take the heat, stay out of the kitchen. Women should be just as passionate about the work. (2) There's such a thing as a stay-at-home-dads and men that take care of their children. What ever happened to the chant of 'equality'?

> can't take the heat, stay out of the kitchen

If you feel like being controversial, at least do everyone the courtesy of responding to the most obvious counter arguments ahead of time. We all know what they are, and no one wants to rehash the same stuff over and over, unless we're going to hear something new.

Re: Ask a Female Engineer: How Can Managers Help Retain Technical Women?

#65

Post by TrueDuality »

jackhack wrote: post #40
songzme wrote: post #25

The most important for me is directing social conversations. Most people think that social event is a time for everybody to talk freely about whatever topics, but no. The point of social event is inclusiveness. I see this scenario happening over and over again: Social event starts off friendly. Gradually, the conversation starts turning very technical or very sci-fi, then women turned away and formed their own social…

And if someone in tech isn't interested in tech and doesn't like conversations about tech and feels excluded when others talk about tech... remind me again why they are in tech?

"Tech" is a very broad and very diverse term. If an employee is design focused and a group is having conversations about the latest Linux kernel API change there is a very good chance the design focused employee won't be able to follow the conversation making them feel left out. Not to discourage design field, they have their own deep technical niches.

Not everyone can participate in every thread of a conversation but it's important to change the topic often enough to allow people to contribute meaningfully to the conversation.

Re: Ask a Female Engineer: How Can Managers Help Retain Technical Women?

#66

Post by scandox »

amorphid wrote: post #53

Get everyone focused on thinking about the team's mission, role, and what it takes to get the job done. Drill that into everyone's head and stick to it. Let everything else go. A mentor once told me that business fundamentally revolves around making money, saving money, saving time, and making customers happier. I like thinking about work that way, as it has nothing to do with religion, sex, gender, age, height, phas…

This is a wonderful message for those for whom the Status Quo works. It's what we'd like to hear and allows us to ignore tiresome issues.

Eventually it's Versailles time and everybody has to have their heads cut off. So you need to balance this "focused" (i.e. ignore the problem) approach with a longer term plan.

Or rather someone needs to. Or maybe we should just accept getting our heads cut off.

Re: Ask a Female Engineer: How Can Managers Help Retain Technical Women?

#67

Post by ju-st »

sebcat wrote: post #32
gedy wrote: post #20

1) Discourage your work 'culture' from being built around aggressive tech code reviews/debates/arguments/chat where young males love to beat their chest 2) Some flexibility on hours/location when children come. Women have a harder 'stop' than men do on their child bearing age, which frequently coincides with moving into senior development roles.

> 2) Some flexibility on hours/location when children come. Women have a harder 'stop' than men do on their child bearing age, which frequently coincides with moving into senior development roles. Also paid maternity leave, funded by taxes.

Include paternity leave while you're at it.

Re: Ask a Female Engineer: How Can Managers Help Retain Technical Women?

#68

Post by cmdkeen »

matt_wulfeck wrote: post #31
gedy wrote: post #20

1) Discourage your work 'culture' from being built around aggressive tech code reviews/debates/arguments/chat where young males love to beat their chest 2) Some flexibility on hours/location when children come. Women have a harder 'stop' than men do on their child bearing age, which frequently coincides with moving into senior development roles.

It doesn't even need to be "young males beating their chest". I've been in plenty of hostile reviews with completely harmless, introverted, soft spoken INTJ-types who simply can't get past some nitpick because it doesn't fit into their perfect, logical world view and refuse to budge an inch. Our industry has a personality problem as much or more as it has a sex problem.

Oi - I resemble that remark!

I've also been on the reviewing end of plenty of types who think all small things are inconsequential nitpicks which excuses them from having to change anything. Then people moan about a lack of standards and consistency between teams...

I've also died in a ditch over naming conventions for unit tests - whilst not my proudest moment - it drives home one of the key points in the article, that good managers work with all their people to make a cohesive team. Everyone has things to improve on and can benefit from constructive criticism. Management is far harder than technical work as humans always have state, there's no such thing as a pure function for humans. Knowing how to coach, mentor, advocate for, protect, encourage etc is not something you are born with, and you can't really spin up an AWS instance of a team of humans to practice on.

Re: Ask a Female Engineer: How Can Managers Help Retain Technical Women?

#69

Post by [deleted] »

ashark wrote: post #43
gedy wrote: post #20

1) Discourage your work 'culture' from being built around aggressive tech code reviews/debates/arguments/chat where young males love to beat their chest 2) Some flexibility on hours/location when children come. Women have a harder 'stop' than men do on their child bearing age, which frequently coincides with moving into senior development roles.

> 1) Discourage your work 'culture' from being built around aggressive tech code reviews/debates/arguments/chat where young males love to beat their chest I'm sure whatever you'd like to replace these processes could be described in equally sweeping sexist terms going the opposite direction, you know.

[deleted]

Re: Ask a Female Engineer: How Can Managers Help Retain Technical Women?

#70

Post by ck425 »

latenightcoding wrote: post #34
gedy wrote: post #20

1) Discourage your work 'culture' from being built around aggressive tech code reviews/debates/arguments/chat where young males love to beat their chest 2) Some flexibility on hours/location when children come. Women have a harder 'stop' than men do on their child bearing age, which frequently coincides with moving into senior development roles.

Point number 1 is ridiculous and sexist. Oh yeah let's ship code that hasn't been reviewed because the young males in our company will act like chimpanzees, and those pesky technical debates let's scratch those too. Let's just use whatever piece of technology is trending today on HN

No one's saying we shouldn't have code reviews or technical debates, just that we need to avoid being overly aggressive. A lot of young males (including myself previously, and sometimes currently) can be very aggressive in presenting their views. This disenfranchises less outspoken people in our teams, particularly woman who generally can't be as aggressive without negative social ramifications.
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