29
cwkjwok
2y

People/companies talking about ooh we want gender diversity we want more female software developers, IT professionals etc

You talk the talk, do you know how to walk the walk?? Do you know how to deal with female engineers?

I am a hardcore engineer worked and studied majorly with men for years. I lead, managed teams had my own company worked as a consultant for years.

Then I got into the IT industry as developer later. I was completely against the idea of being female would make any difference or you would be treated differently.

Finally I had my own enlightenment and stopped resisting that idea.

Some treatments made me think what are these guys doing? Don’t treat me like your sister. I am not your sister. Don’t see the femininity or looks. I am not a Merrilyn Monroe to say oooh you are great you know soo much. I am not paid for that act, I do my job! It’s same as yours mate.

Don’t underestimate me or try to preach me as if I am a cute little girl. Don’t show off and boost your ego next to other guys.

Now I regretfully I agree the ladies ranting about male dominance and getting different treatment in IT.

I am literally trying to avoid red nail polishes or red lipstick god forbid. Maybe I should put some fake beard and a belly, loose jeans with an energy drink in hand. Here comes the expert IT professional, already ticking a box.

Honestly you are not taken seriously most of the time. If you are a guy then they are all ears..And those guys talk about they want gender diversity blah blah

You feel like a ghost when you express your opinion. You are not taken into account even when you have a comment or suggestion.

Even humiliated by a guy giving me a speech about how to be a good developer next to a manager. Look buddy I am not a yesterday’s child. I am at your age. I haven’t come to this position by jumping around picking flowers in a field. If I was a man, would you dare saying those to me? There could be a street fight coming.

LinkedIn selfie takers with body show offs putting ooh I am an IT recruiter as a female I got into IT. You can do it too. (don’t get me wrong I respect that achievement that’s good) but those girls get thousands of likes and applauses, you are working in IT for years people say they are seeking for. Your technical post doesn’t even get 20 likes. Your encouraging comment on a guy’s post isn’t even acknowledged. You are not even taken into account. Am I a ghost or something?

Honestly I don’t understand.

What do you mean by gender diversity? What do you want here?

Leave this gender bullshit. Look at the knowledge you don’t even know what equality means. It’s not having even numbers of genders. It is respecting knowledge and hard work regardless. Listening and acknowledging without judgement. Looking beyond male, female or others

Companies that say we want to have more females, you don’t come and knock on my door either. You are already stating a difference there. Attract with indifference don’t come and tell me you are a female we want more females here.

I’m telling you this sector is not getting proper gender equality for 25 years. Talk is there but mentality is not yet there.

I am super pissed off and discouraged today. I don’t even get discouraged that easily. Now I understand some women in IT talking about insecurities. I am on the edge of having one, such a shame.

Don’t come at me now I would bite!

This is my generalisation yes. Exceptions apply and how good it would have been if those exceptions were dominant.

Comments
  • 6
    "Walking the walk" as you put it meant (and still means in a lot of cases!) diversity hires. Affirmative action. Hire a body to get that x/y ratio up regardless of merit.

    Thanks to that kind of bs that companies still practice today, people will always be surprised when people are actually competent 😂
  • 3
    @nitnip look I meant by walking the walk = treat equally
    And I do not agree that people are getting hired with positive bias, would not be competent and it would be surprising if they are.
  • 1
    Are you from the US? Just checking for a statistic
  • 4
    I think some of this (not all) might be the fact that guys act differently around females vs males. I have made physical threats around toward guys in a humorous context. Actually made friends that way. I wouldn't dream of saying that to a female. Its a "guy thing". I don't know how else to describe this.
  • 4
    "Attract with indifference don’t come and tell me you are a female we want more females here"

    I agree. I think it belittles the employee to know that they are being hired for something other than skills.

    "What do you mean by gender diversity? What do you want here?"

    This is tough to answer without getting into the stereotypes one would wanna avoid but - if we're crass: on average mixing men and women tends to lead to slightly more varying perspectives on things, and a better vibe in the team.

    Another important thing is not risking the snowball effect: if you don't have any female devs at all that can deter some candidates.
  • 2
    My place is becoming a sausage fest, but most of the candidates we got were male so that's just how it is. Of the female candidates, one was looking for a temporary position and was charging a gorillion per hour, one was extremely inexperienced, and the others didn't really fit the role.
    @Demolishun Yeah, that too. We've been throwing a lot of silly double entendre jokes around, it's fun. That's gonna be over when girls join the team, but hopefully we can manage to keep the fun atmosphere.
  • 0
    I think @NickyBones agrees.

    The thing is, there are men and women, and then there are _humans_, the next step of intellectual development. A human has a concise conceptual worldview that allows them to explore the environment and to solve problems. A human changes their opinion when new information is presented. A human won't even take your gender into account if that is unnecessary, e.g. in the work context.

    If you don't have that yet, you resort to stupid default gender roles (that are honestly just ooga booga) and magical thinking. This is how your colleagues live.
  • 0
    So, if you want to treat all genders the same, you should realize that under the hood personalities are identical as far as your interface concerned. But to realize that and look past gender, you should have basic conceptual thinking (X and Y look different, but inside they are the same).

    If you don't have it, yes, you treat people with other gender than you differently, because you literally only see their gender.
  • 1
    @kiki I guess very few of us are humans then...
  • 1
    @NickyBones I think there are many, but their distribution is really uneven.
  • 0
    Within reason, people who really care about fair treatment tend to not draw attention to such stuff.

    A damn fine rant is made.
  • 1
    @jiraTicket yes What do you mean by that? What do you want here? was not a question it’s apparent what you state it is.

    That was a rant. People say they want diversity, then they treat you as you don’t count. They say they want female IT professionals, and go an applause duck face selfies “as I mentioned above”. But they ignore the females that are actually doing this job and their technical content.

    There are some udemy courses the intro video starts with women posing flipping their hair and a guy typing on a keyboard. As if an adult film is about to start, disgusting. Do you want guys to get turned on throwing models in the coding course intro so they buy the course??Apparently yes!

    There are some memes, photo shoots around where “coding” girls showing their x y z sitting in front of a computer and comments dripping saliva.

    You want equality, gender diversity, more females in IT.

    What do you mean by that?
    What do you actually want here?

    Hope it wrapped up better.
  • 1
    @Ceren I have a couple examples of "why am I invisible, and what can I do about it" that I have derived into a model in which your data point may fit.

    1) Once I was the only indian dev in the entire floor, with more than twenty techies. And I was invisible. Ignored. Underestimated. No wonder I left. But on the company I landed on, I was in the only nearly-entirely-southeast-asian team. It was a segregated company.
    And my Indian boss was a giant asshole, but we got results. On budget and on schedule.
    Other teams at first were "proud of our accomplishments" (condescending jerks). Then envious that we were the most profitable thing in the company. And when COVID strikes, we were the *only* profitable BU. That's when "you argue too much" becomes "why are you people so contentious?". They were exaggerating our pretty ordinary failures to have something to complain about.

    I will continue this in the next comment. But the next datapoint is a second-hand experience that I've only observed.
  • 1
    @Ceren , following my previous comment.

    2) In a further company, they had this nearly-all-female team. By the point I got in the company, the other teams were already calling them "the harpies".
    I asked why. "They are rude", "they are c***s", "they are presumptuous or snub", "they are worthless diversity hires" and some other bloody nonsense complaints.
    Never worked with them directly, but they surely weren't *loud*, nor ignored. A quick look on the balance sheets shows me quite what I was expecting - their BU had fairly good numbers.

    My model is this: When nonstandard people are few and far between, they are mostly ignored for they are "quirky" and quite irrelevant. When they band together, and have something valuable to show for it, they become an "other", and a "threat" that can no longer be ignored by the hegemonic majority.
    Where things go from there, I have not stayed in the same place for long enough to discover, and offer no thoughts on it.
  • 1
    @JsonBoa oh my god that is insane never heard such a thing. It is on another level. Some folks are really insecure, throw shit on others so theirs don’t show.

    In other hands on engineering industries that I have quite long experience in, women are rare again but respected and not treated like in IT.

    Where does this data lie then?
  • 1
    @Ceren I unfortunately have never had data to study the dynamics of my model in other industries.

    In a nearly baseless extrapolation, I would say that hardware engineering industries are building stuff since before the pyramids, and thus insecure jerks would have had time to explore the concept of "female coworkers" enough to reach an equilibrium, however unbalanced.

    In software, we have only been building cloud-native mobile-first buzzword-heavy gibberish for a decade or less, and the dynamics of "having women around" are still disruptive in a certain type of jerk's mind.

    But, again, very insufficient data here. Basically guessing.
  • 0
    @Ceren Mentality is not there yet, but that is the whole point of hiring quotas. They are not there so that "there can be more women or more people considered in minority", they are there to introduce diversity of thinking and approach and through that destroy the long lived idea of a "perfect male only developer world" so that people eventually stop looking at genders and nationality. We as humans need to be exposed to different things to start look at them as normal.

    Although it's definitely not fair when a qualified person doesn't get a job because of that (all else being equal) so that is the bad part part of it though. It's not a good solution all-in-all but there needed to be a starting point somewhere.
  • 1
    @arekxv do you guys really think women are hired just because they’re women? Just to get diversity?
    Please enlighten me if this is what’s happening behind the hiring doors? If you have really witnessed that, not assuming.
    Examples would be appreciated because this is equally weird. Everyone gets a project or coding test 3 stage interview etc are women skipped from these stages and jump to the last HR talk?
  • 0
    @Ceren I don't remember ever saying that so please don't put words in my mouth. I was talking about the hiring quota, not really searching to argue.

    If you want my opinion: In my company at least there is no hiring quota and there are female devs from junior up to a lead position and I am completely fine with that. I also do not see them being treated differently too much but it is still noticeable.
  • 1
    @arekxv yes I did ask your and others opinion with honest straight away questions. None of them were in an arguing tone. I appreciate the opinions and different views.
    I really wanted to learn the answers if these really happened or perceived like that.
    There is no “you said” used personal to you, if you revise the message. So I don’t appreciate the tone directed to me “don’t put words in my mouth” there is no you and me here.
    You are entitled to comprehend anything as you wish. My intentions assumed here is not correct.
    I wish to be out of this narrative now.
  • 0
    I don't know where you're from, but every girl in this app and that I've met in this field complain of the same things.

    I have an issue with pop feminism, where it's mostly catch phrases and no real action. My college suffers a lot from this bs. It's the reason why i didn't join our main feminist group, it's too "girlboss woohoo! let's be CEOs" and no one discuss the nuanced issues we face
  • 2
    @kiki the problem with the "let's treat everyone the same from now one" mentality is that there are reparations to be made. wether we like it or not, people have created a social construct of women being inferior, and we are handicapped by that. if we leave it as it is, it's still unfair
  • 2
    @Ceren if we complain about sexism in this app, some will come to you with a very defensive tone. don't be discouraged, it's refreshing to see other girls talking too ☺️ i complain so much about this stuff that i feel like I'm a nag, but oh well
  • 1
    @darksideofyay I don't owe anyone anything. Not to slaves, not to women, nobody. Or should I now go after the English for enslaving my people for 400 years? Or should they come after my people for eating the brains and children of our enemies? Reparations is a stupid unsustainable aspect of cancel culture.
  • 0
    @Demolishun you don't owe anything, society does. it's not women's fault either that men are privileged, but men still have more opportunities than women. reparations wouldn't handicap men, they'd just make things even
  • 1
    @Ceren Sad to hear. Personally I don't recognise the sense of female devs being ignored or not getting credit for their work and input. In companies I've worked for it's been different. Our issue is rather the opposite: female devs sometimes get exaggerated amounts of positive feedback. Their work is sometimes highlighted extra - especially when it comes to selecting someone to demo the work of a dev team - people will push for a female dev more often than not. Which can lead to the "wow, here's a female who really can code" as if it was unexpected.
  • 0
  • 1
    @darksideofyay "He" doesn't owe anyone anything, "Society" does, but "He" is the one who'd end up paying the tax out of his pocket should your idea of reparations be put in action. It's dumb.
  • 0
    @darksideofyay I don’t know what to say to you. What you said is a blatant generalization that has no chance in hell to be even remotely true.

    It reminds me of my stupid psychologist friend of a friend. Their clients are mainly programmers, and they’re not liking them because programmers earn more than psychologists.

    And that person were presenting me the notion that the whole society consists of “programmers” (smartass cynical guys with unfairly high salaries) and “psychologists” (the good guys).

    Of your comment I get the same vibe. Though we are on the same page as we both don’t like oppression
  • 0
    @nitnip do you even know where your taxes go? do you care enough to look? I mean, you'd be surprised how much crap could get a budget cut and you wouldn't even notice

    i didn't even mean to pour money into anything, not in the case of women. for race issues, yes, cause slavery. but what i mean is that you're telling me to just accept that things will always be unfair, and balancing things out would be unfair *to you*. kinda selfish, isn't it? as long as the meta game works for you, you don't want change?
  • 0
    @kiki didn't get a word you said, i wish you well
  • 0
    @jiraTicket yes it is sad. I have been defending that like you because I haven’t come across much either, until I did.
    I hope not to come across again. But I figured it is unfortunately very much possible. I’m not scared or intimidated. I assert myself.
    The thing is you lose respect to that person and if somebody behaves someone else like that apparently they have an internal problem. If they reflect their own internal issues and insecurities instead of resolving within, spreading positive, kind and respectful energy they do flag themselves.
    Anyone belittles humiliates look down on people actually thinks they are not enough deep inside and this is a reflection of their insecurity.
    I had very rare 2 extreme cases and both didn’t do well for them. For me, I feel sorry for them and wished them well because they would eventually tumble down which they did.
    But I get very pissed off obviously. If you think you’re becoming a king by doing that nah..Peasant don’t spread ugly.
  • 0
    @darksideofyay I was talking about your idea of "reparations" as a tax, not about literal taxes.

    So now reparations don't mean pouring money into something? Fine, change the definition why don't you.

    Slavery? Where did that come from-Oh! OH! I get it. You just want to whine about things. Gotcha. Sometimes I forget the first world has this dumbtastic white guilt problem.

    By the way, throwing money at problems don't make them go away (even if it does make you feel like you're doing something about it).
  • 0
    @nitnip "reparation - the making of amends for a wrong one has done, by paying money to or otherwise helping those who have been wronged." that's the dictionary definition.

    i meant the "helping who's been wronged part." that could be new legislation, for instance, not necessarily pouring money anywhere.

    i mentioned slavery cause someone brought it up there in one of the comments, i guess they connected the word "reparations" with that. also, the one who mentioned taxes was you.
  • 2
    @kiki I got the "you're the bad guys because you earn too much" from guys I met/dated. So you're extra bad guy if you are also a girl. Because you make guys who earn less insecure, since they think their worth is measured by how much they can provide for you financially, and not (god forbid) their character, values and interests.
Add Comment