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There is always an in-group, it's just a matter of which one. I have worked at places where I was part of the in-group, and places where I wasn't. Sometimes it was nationality. Others, the school you came in. The gender divide is not a big issue in some places, while in others I've ended up talking to HR about harassment that I saw in front of my own eyes. I've been the shoulder to cry on, literally, in one of those cases. And don't get me started with discrimination due to sexual orientation. It's really easy to know when you are not part of the majority though: When you don't see any differences and everything looks cheery and happy, congratulations, you are not treated as a minority. We can't really boats about the industry when we have 15% women and about under 10% African-American. I've worked at a place where we had a large architecture meeting: 25 architects, zero women. The company boasted 50-50 gender split, but with vert few exceptions, you could make a great guess of role and gender. Guess that men sitting in an engineering pod are developers or managers, and that women are either QA or systems analysts, and you'll get it right. The testers had the same CS background as the developers, except they were paid a good 30% less. The rest of the women came from recruiting and HR. You could also guess which department they worked on just by looks too. I know four women that have dropped out of software engineering in the last year, just because the toll of being treated differently made them lose any love they had for the industry, and are now doing jobs that pay way less, but where they don't have to work twice as hard as a man to get half the recognition. One of them is rather unattractive by your typical standards. When she quit her last job, many people didn't even know she had been working there for years: She might as well have been socially invisible. Maybe you've been very lucky in your career, and haven't seen the discrimination, or maybe you really are part of the in-group and don't know about it. |
Disagree. We have amazing contributions from a variety of people from Europe, South America, and Asia. It's not perfect, and it should get better, but it's nothing to be ashamed about.
It's interesting how the NBA happily celebrates black culture and black people who represent their game despite the fact that they are overrepresented relative to the general population, but the tech industry basically never celebrates the contributions from a variety of immigrants and non-whites in its own industry.