I have heard of instances of gender discrimination from my girl friends but I've personally not experienced it. Does it become more visible as you climb higher in the ladder?
I think it depends on personality. Quiet, submissive women seem to have an easier time than outspoken women. A lot of men in tech like working with women, but only if we constantly agree and don’t give them a hard time.
No one likes to work with a person who gives them a hard time, regardless of gender.
Stopped reading after "quiet, submissive" 🤮🤮🤢🤢
It's been drilled into everyone to assume discrimination when they cannot see a different perspective. So unless someone has faced something that was blatant enough or is based on some documented evidence, it's hard to believe there is as much discrimination as ppl claim.
I want to hire a women but they never accept our offer 🤦♂️
What's the offer
Software eng offer
When I was an intern with two other interns, my manager had a hard time talking to me. He only had small talks with other male interns. One day he said “We need to be more mindful of what we are saying or we can get metoo-ed.”, while we were talking about my personal life.
Asking to learn, I only talk about work/ tech related stuff with manager on 1:1s. What to say about rest of the things?
Regular stuff. No reason to be friends with your co-workers, but you can still talk about your hobbies or the new Netflix series.
Insecure (due to the fact that they know they are not that smart) guys tend to discriminate against women more.
The question is flawed because gender discrimination happens everywhere and not always conscious or visible to women themselves. It could be that they feel less confident to fight for themselves for a salary increase. It could be that they feel they need to be over-qualified to move into a leadership role. It could be that they feel their voices are not heard. It could be that when they walk into a room, they are the only one woman in a room full of men and they feel very conscious. This is especially true for women who may not have been raised in western culture. Guys - all of us have mothers, and some of us have wives, sisters, and daughters. We HAVE to be their allies, fight for gender equality every day, and help raise self-confident women so that they can be our next generation leaders!
Yes but it's not necessarily a bad thing. It all depends on how you decide to perceive and respond to situations. Everybody has problems. You could attribute these problems to gender or immigration status or something else, but that's not going to make your problem go away. There are challenges that I've faced as a female engineer. For example managers would keep assigning UI work to me and the backend work would go to male engineers. I don't particularly like UI work and I'm good at backend engineering so this was not good for me. There were managers who inherently believed that women are not good at their job and that the rest of the team would need to carry their tasks forward. I had one manager call up my teammates and ask them to step in for my task and complete it for me because he thought I wouldn't be able to do it. A manager openly degrading you to your teammates behind your back is basically going to kill your image with the team. Managers who are biased in their decision making are usually really bad at everything they do and will eventually get pushed out one way or the other. The discrimination is a way for them to feel better about themselves because they are not really capable of doing anything on their own. There was another middle aged married man who kept looking for reasons to touch me with unsolicited hugs, etc. He would send me texts outside office chat with nothing particular to talk about. He would call me by nicknames that I really hated. But all my life I was told to be polite and respectful and no one really taught me how to fight back when such things happen. No one had ever breached my personal boundary before and I had no clue how to handle this. So I would respond politely even though it killed me to. Eventually I ended up complaining to my manager because I couldn't take it anymore and then everyone blamed me, including my parents, because I did not openly fight back. I'm indian and in my country boys are girls are not encouraged to socialize much as children. That conditioning reflects in work life now because whenever I move to a new team I end up getting isolated a lot by my male teammates because they are not as comfortable with me as they are with a male engineer. But I find that as long as I focus on completing my work and volunteer to help my teammates whenever I can, they eventually get over their initial discomfort. I've found that there are many people who go out of their way to hear my (and other good female engineers') opinions when I'm afraid to speak up (which also happens many times because women tend to get reprimanded a lot for breaking expectations). Sometimes they specifically ask for us to give an opinion in group discussions. Sometimes they ask us 1:1. For every person who openly discriminates against a good employee, there's usually 10 other silent bystanders who don't openly speak up but show their support in other ways, maybe by specifically asking for you to be assigned to an important project, or by ensuring that your salary is always on the higher end, or by giving you a coveted business trip as a reward for your hard work. I think women do get treated differently and working is difficult for us not because of people in the workplace but because of the lack of support in personal life. I've achieved a lot considering what is expected from a woman and all my parents care about is getting me married. All my life they've taught me to be independent and now they expect me to go be someone's wife. I have never been valued by my family for being myself and that has created a lot of anger in me with no outlet. The easiest way to let it out has been to jump on the gender discrimination bandwagon and I guess that's what many other young women also do. But I'm starting to realize now that blaming someone/something for my problems is not helping anyone. There's no point of crying about discrimination. All I can do is focus on the positive side of things and move on.
Thank you @engineyear for sharing your own personal experience with us. You’ve taught me quite a bit in your write-up. I totally respect your conclusion of being positive, but you shouldn’t have to deal with any of the uncomfortable situations you are unfairly put in by your managers. Sorry you have to go through those nonsense. I pledge that I will not be a “silent bystander” as you described. You sound like a very intelligent and confident lady - good luck to you.
My gf is going back to school to become a SWE after getting her degree in nursing. When she told her parents they discouraged her and told her all kinds of things and tried to burden her emotionally and financially. She doesn't talk to them anymore and she's much happier. Her first exposure to coding was a year ago and she already won first place at her second hackathon and is interviewing at Google! While working full time! It makes me wonder how many more women we would see in SWE positions if it was more socially encouraged.
Thank you for sharing your story. I'm sorry about your parents, I understand that is very frustrating
Women don't use blind
That's your perception.
Says who? Case in point - me.