[hannele]

Imagine how you would feel if, to stay relevant and in-touch with the major decisions at your work, you felt pressure to get involved in things that you have literally no interest in. Going on wine tours, maybe some yoga, trashy soap operas that the office loves to hate.

Which isn't to say that people would exclude you from their team if you don't get involved, but you couldn't say that you have the easy camaraderie that most of the team seems to have. You're a little outlier, you're not quite in-step, references fly over your head. And you have to be _so careful_ to be friendly, but not _so_ friendly that your co-workers think you're hitting on them.

Occasionally, you miss a decision that happened to be discussed at the cocktail bar over lunch - it was just a spur of the moment thing, forgot to invite you, didn't think you would be interested. You talk about how you would have solved the problem, but it's just not seen as graceful enough to be worth exploring further. Because you weren't involved in making those decisions, your name doesn't come up when being considered for lead positions.

You're at a company event, and you think you've escaped someone asking you about your spouse that must work there. Then, someone hands you the trash to take out while they tell a hilarious joke about the only things men are good for.

You can't put your finger on any one thing (ok, maybe the trash thing), but when another opportunity comes along in a different field, maybe you take it. You can't say you really enjoy your work anyways.

[malandrew]

This isn't even a gendered problem. The expected social activities may change depending on your gender (i.e. golf, beer tasting, cycling vs yoga, wine tours and soap operas), but getting into management requires people to be comfortable (warmth, "cuddliness", trust in good faith) with you then confident (trust in your competence) in you. You can't rely on competence alone and move on to roles where your competence matters less than how comfortable people are with you in that role. That's why these activities exist. They serve as a proxy for determining if there is a basis to be comfortable and then actually establishing that comfort with one another. You can't establish warmth from code or architecture. Mentoring yes, but not code or architecture.

The requirement for warmth enables politicking.

The interesting thing about the culture of projects like the kernel dev mailing list is that there is a strong culture of only caring about "Is the code from this person good?" and dismissing the question "Is this a good person (according to my own personal definition of what a good person is)?"

[hannele]

The parent comment from @js8 talked specifically about why women might self-select out of doing technical work, which was the point I was addressing.

I'm not really sure what point you're trying to make in contrast - could you qualify how politicking and 'warmth' is relevant to contributing to the brogrammer culture?

[malandrew]

I guess I misunderstood what the parent comment was about. Now that I've reread it, it's subtle, but I can see what it's driving at.

That said, now that I understand it, I feel like the parent comment being sexist toward both men and women to illustrate a false dichotomy.

It stereotypes women as being interested "wine tours, maybe some yoga, [and] trashy soap operas". I've met plenty of women in tech that have no interest in such things and I've met plenty of male engineers in tech interested in the first two of those three things. I don't know anyone in tech interested in the last item and to be honest I can't imagine a dominantly female tech industry establishing a culture where anyone is interested in such things. Looking at all the female engineers I work with that are great coders and great to work with and solve problems with, I can't imagine them really creating a culture that values social activities different from the ones I see my male colleagues participating in. They'd still play board games. They'd still read and watch sci-fi. They'd still hike and cycle. None of these activities strike me as particularly male oriented. They strike me as nerd oriented and they are incompatible with societies neurotypical social expectations for both men and women.

===

Strangely this particularly part of the comment caught my attention:

    "And you have to be _so careful_ to be friendly, but not 
    _so_ friendly that your co-workers think you're hitting on
    them."

What I found interesting is that it called my attention to something I had never noticed before and haven't seen anyone else point out.

When I look around at my workplace and previous workplaces, there are women who have a lot of ease fitting in and there are women who don't. Those that do remarkably well are often remarkably similar to the men who do well. They care about code in and out of work. Their interests outside of work are nerdy (hacking, making, sci-fi, board games, etc.). They spend relatively little time preening (social self-grooming).

Those that are most challenged and have the biggest difficulty fitting in and getting along with their colleagues don't share these traits. One trait I see in common with many of the women that have difficulty in tech culture is that the more closely approximate the gender roles and expectations that society at large sets for them; the most damaging of which is preening. Society has for a long time had a strong expectation for women to self-groom socially a lot more than men. Women are basically expected to wake up each morning and dress well, put on make up, etc. Those that don't do this will encounter friction socially outside the office and those that do will encounter friction inside the office.

The reason I find this observation interesting is that it's not even a problem exclusive to women in tech. Men that socially self-groom are more likely to feel like outsiders. An example of such high social self-grooming that would make you feel like you don't belong is wearing collared shirts, nice pants, nice shoes, possibly even a suit jacket or even a full suit. Interestingly, Greg Foster over at AirBnB even wrote about this exact type of discrimination in his essay "Does tech discriminate against suits?"[0].

Assuming this is valid anecdotal observation, there are two things to consider:

- For this particular phenomena, is this illustrative of tech discriminating against women or is it tech discriminating against the high self-grooming? (I'm not saying there aren't other ways in which women are made to feel like outsiders, I'm just picking one in particular that applies to men as well, but AFAICT seems to affect women disproportionately, since I've observed that women are likely to continue to highly self-groom in an engineering environment.)

- If it is, then is the problem with tech discriminating against male or females that are high self groomers or does the problem lie with society at large that imposes far greater pressure on women to self-groom outside the workplace. Put another way, should hacker culture be accepting and welcoming of high social social self-grooming or is it mutually incompatible like low social self-grooming would be in an industry such as fashion and design?

Anyways, the reason this original comment is additionally interesting in light of this observation, is that high social self-grooming by women (or men) generally contributes to feelings of sexual attraction, such that those women that do feel and give into society's pressure to self-groom likely have to worry far more about being friendly with their co-works than those that don't.

Anecdotally, and speaking for myself here, the female colleagues I feel sexual attraction for and that I possibly would attempt to court (were they not professional colleagues of mine) are those that are higher social self-groomers. Those that are low social self-groomers feel far more like professional peers than potential partners.

At the end of the day, the evolutionary reason for social self grooming comes down to status and mating. Men, especially men in Silicon Valley, don't have the same pressure from society to dress in a way that appeals to courtship instincts (the average male techie outfit of ill-fitting hoodies, jeans, sneakers and t-shirt doesn't get you that far in terms of attracting the attention of those attracted to your gender or gender identity).

I'm curious to hear other people's thoughts here? Agree, disagree?

Lastly, please don't interpret my attempt here to describe and predict as an attempt to prescribe. I'm thinking aloud in an attempt to be mindful and seek deeper understanding here.

[0] https://medium.com/@gregorymfoster/does-tech-discriminate-ag...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory

[js8]

I am not really convinced this applies more to say, programmers, than other professions (such as management), so I don't think this is the reason.

In any case, it doesn't matter really. We don't know what the truth is, and AFAICT no one is really looking for it (I unfortunately don't have enough (interest/(resources*time)) to do a study).

From small anecdata I have, I had several smart women told me that they want to quit because they themselves feel they are not smart enough or skilled enough to do programming. I have never heard of somebody wanting to quit (the field) because there was some idiot thinking they can't do it. In fact, having to prove yourself may actually be motivational.

And I think I am not righteous enough to claim that when a person says "the reason is that I don't feel I can do it", then there must be something in the environment causing it. It may simply be their preference, and I have to respect that. Maybe their thinking is delusional, but unless they clearly say, "this external reason is the reason", we can't do anything about it if we respect personal freedom of choice.

So yeah, we should do a study, ask women, why they don't want to do it, and if they say, "it's boring", just accept that as a fact of life and move on and stop searching for reasons in patriarchies and whatnot.

And I don't think it's quite morally correct to try to somehow correct people's preferences, however silly they might be. If they should be convinced for economic reasons (say, STEM is important), then it should be done with money.