[edanm]

"You also get the added bonus of seeing people's confused reactions when they ask you if you're in marketing, and you tell them that you are a developer."

This sentence really surprised me. How often does this happen? Female engineers are a minority, but I wouldn't have imagined it would be that big a deal to run into a female engineer.

[kingkilr]

I recently wrote an autobiographical paper from the perspective of women in technology for class. I found that women represent under 9% of the developers/designers at the company I work for, under 5% of the core developers on open source projects I contribute to, and under 3% of the contributors to those projects. So while I personally wouldn't make that assumption, it's probably not a bad one, statically speaking, for many software engineers.

[squasher]

Not sure that is the word choice you intended: It might not be a "bad" one it terms of your chances of being right, but it's "bad" in the sense that it's insulting, frustrating, and marginalizing for the underestimated woman.

[sh4na]

In 14 years, this has never happened to me. Never in a corporate environment nor in a geek conference.

Frankly, everywhere I worked, be it a startup or a huge corporation, I never felt discrimination or disbelief at what I do. In the corporate world, particularly in finance and insurance, there are a lot of female developers. They're around 60% of the IT staff, from what I've personally seen in the places where I've consulted at. In the startup and more "geeky" environments, female devs are very rare. Currently I'm going on the theory that the type of person that seeks an IT job in the corporate world is different from the one that goes to startups. The degrees they have are subtly different (Business CS vs CS), their professional needs are different (stable long term employment with low risk, low % of innovation, high % of project/code maintenance in the corporate world). To me it seems obvious that there are many more women leaning towards the corporate profile than there are for the startup profile. Why this is, I'm still working on that.

Regardless of how many women there are, I have never witnessed the sort of disbelief that that phrase shows. I don't know why she says this happens, maybe it's a cultural thing where she's from.

[selenamarie]

Happens mostly at conferences for me, sometimes at networking events. Especially if I'm at an open source software booth. I don't look like "a hacker", so prevailing stereotypes apply. Last year it happened at least once at each of 3 conferences I attended and staffed a booth at last year.

[naqabas]

I've gotten this a couple of times. I wouldn't think it would happen in the valley as much, but I'm from Texas where you really don't see that many female software developers.