Being female.

Do you mean it's challenging to remain female when you're working?

@electrineer 😂😂 lol

Oh, you mean it's the reason for your challenges.

*in the US

In the UK I think getting into a job is the reverse.

Admittedly I don't know how women find it once they have the job.

It's weird to read this in 21th century.

@atrabilious I totally understand the discrimination women face.

However, a bitch that ruined me used to say this every now and then. Initially I wondered she spoke the truth. Later I came to know that she is totally dumb and used the method of favours to grow up the hierarchy.

Thankfully I realised early that I was her potential target and she destroyed me completely.

So whenever I hear this phrase, it scares the shit out of me. Lol

Maybe the same would happen to a male surrounded by all females

It actually got a lot worse than 20 years ago because now you have to prove that you aren't a useless diversity hire for propping up the diversity statistics. Welcome to the 21st century.

On the upside (for you), being a black woman would be even worse in that regard.

@Floydimus

There are toxic, parasitic women who are not putting in any effort/knowledge, using "But I'm a female coder!" as an excuse for attention at every turn, feel like they should win every award, just for being female.

There's also a giant group facing discrimination and biased treatment. Women who aren't using a dev career for cheap attention, but are just really passionate about solving problems using code.

Both "women can't code as well as men" and "women are always the victims" are false.

Generalizations just tend to be false...

I think there are some truths though:

1. There are averages. On average, women face harsh bias & discrimination in tech industries.

2. Averages say nothing about the situation of individuals. Not every woman deserves better, not every man is privileged; It's just that the chance that a women will face discrimination is quite high.

3. Every time an injustice is addressed, the countermovement contains injustices as well.

@atrabilious - I watched as my (now former) senior manager rejected two dozen Resumes simply because the name was female sounding. Several of them I had asked to interview because they were far and beyond great developers. The struggle is real. If I ever start my own company … all HR submissions will be stripped of name and gender.

@devphobe I support that…but it would just postpone the drama to the interview.

The point of my rant was not generalizing, but something I have experienced. There are very few mediocre women in tech who succeed. Men can be mediocre and keep the seat, a woman who sucks, it deepens the bias in those around her.

I realize not all women coders are good, and I’m not suggesting they are, just the statistics go against us. You run into 1 or 2 bad women coders and it sets the trend vs 100 bad men coders and no one blinks. Maybe it’s a US only phenomenon, but I doubt it.

@bittersweet I agree.

@atrabilious That's the reverse of how it works with Indians: two billion bad Indian programmers set precedents that the other maybe half a dozen Indian programmers have to carry the can for.

@bittersweet This.

I thought female engineers would be surrounded by simps

The company I work for now has a lot of female engineers. Like almost 30%. One lead manager is female and builds woman only dev teams to make the workplace female friendly. Which I fundamentally disagree with segregation. I have been in a few cross team meetings with those teams and holy shit some of them are obnoxious, dismissive, and disrespectful. I have heard several say “it is hard to be a woman in tech.” If all of your peers are women, your boss is a woman, and you are still fighting to be a woman in tech the problem isn’t your environment.

It would be amazing if we could just stop paying attention to genitals for a while and build some damn software.

@irene but genitals are fun

@irene I agree with you on this. I think it is hard to achieve high positions for women in tech and bypass the bias. The answer is not to just exclude the other gender to try to avoid it. Problems get solved together. I have a woman on my team I have to fire next week because she’s not cutting it. I will not leave her on the team because she’s female…they still have to be good. I don’t have bad male engineers on the team either tho.

I still think the bias is real, but that doesn’t make me think all women are good either. Both can be true.

@atrabilious Oh the bias is definitely real. I wonder if devs got where they are because of their sex alone. Which is part of why all of the “go to the front of the line” hiring makes me so angry. It is somehow not obvious to HR that it is sexist prefer a candidate or adjust their pay because of their genitals.

If I know about sexist diversity hiring policies at the company, it gives me confirmation bias about a developers skills. Instead of thinking “she needs more experience” my initial thought is “maybe she didn’t get here on her own merits.” Then I remind myself “I can work with anyone regardless of skill level” to defeat the bias. It sucks and I’m probably not the only person that thinks like that.

I must’ve been rejected countless times for not having enough years of experience as someone who isn’t white, male and straight. Discrimination either way is stupid and counterproductive

@TeachMeCode I think that sort of thinking can often be confirmation bias as well.

There was an internal hire. Resumes landed on my desk. One was a standout candidate so I picked him. Then a candidate said that I didn’t pick him because of his skin color. 🙄

I had a meeting with upper management and I compared the performance reviews of both. I compared their dev experience. “This choice was very obvious.”

Now upper management saw him as an instigator. He jumped to an unsubstantiated conclusion. You know who doesn’t get promoted? People with a track record of workplace volatility. And he just earned that record.

Be very sure that you are correct about racism/sexism claims because being incorrect is always detrimental to your career.

@irene true but I was just saying out of all the jobs I missed, some might’ve been bc of discrimination. I’m not blaming anyone bc I have no evidence. That coworker was retarded for flat out accusing you of racism even though the other developer got to move on simply bc he was a much better performer and he didn’t want to come to face with that reality

@TeachMeCode I think he saw that only 1/4 applicants was light skinned and 3/4 were not. “There are four applicants so I must have a 25% chance”. Yeah that isn’t how it works. But yeah I would be very careful about accepting that confirmation bias because it generally is self sabotaging.