[Mezzie]

I currently work in a lingerie store after having spent a fair amount of time in 'professional' environments.

I'm less tired coming home from 8 hours on my feet dealing with the public than I was in professional settings. I don't have to hide everything about myself and my background (I'm a first-generation college student with a poorish upbringing) or constantly worry about what all my interactions with colleagues mean for my 'career'.

I will say my class background is more of an issue than my sex/sexuality, but my sex was way more of a problem in my teens and early 20s. The interesting thing is that being a techy child was fine, being a techy teenage/20 something girl SUCKED, and being a techy 30 something woman is fine.

[forgomonika]

Sorry to hear that. I get it. I've been there. I reached a point where I was in a big company and got promoted to a level where there were no LGBTQIA+ people above my level - and this was at a FAANG company. All meetings were all straight cis guys that were overly aggressive. It was so incredible exhausting to function in that environment. The only reason I lasted as long as I did was because I had a very good female boss that could navigate working with these guys that had no clue the problems they caused for the people around them because they "were just being guys." I learned a ton about all these mental gymnastics you have to do to work with people that made no effort to adjust to work with different types of people. It was painful.

I'm now working at a smaller firm and get to be a major influencer and decision maker in how the culture is getting laid out. It's mind boggling how much trauma/PTSD people bring to the table from working in offices that are really homogenized and lack diversity with them being the one that's different. I still can't get over how common it is regardless if it's gender, sexuality, education background, or disability. What I think a lot of people are missing in the DEI discussions isn't about trying to find diverse candidates but how to create environments where they - along with everyone else - thrives.

It's pretty obvious from the comments in this post how there's a strong vocal minority of people that refuse to engage and constantly battle how broken things are. I just hope they figure it out before it's too late. And if they refuse, I hope they remain ICs with very little influence and not included in significant decision making because this attitude is poison for so many people.

[Mezzie]

Yeah, I'm also gay and disabled (MS). So that's fun. Being female is less of an issue now that I'm old enough that men don't harass me as often, but tech spaces between the ages of 11 and ~25 SUCKED. The thing that stuck out to me was that there was no way to 'win' and the boys (because it was mostly adolescents and males in their 20s) projected their dating issues onto me HARD. And I know for a fact that I never 'led anyone on' since I've been out since I was 12 and very open about it. The gatekeeping was ridiculous (I'm a 2nd generation programmer and my grandfather was playing with electronics in the 1920s), and I also put up with rape threats and rampant homophobia (nothing quite like worrying about corrective rape if you want to go to a LAN party!)

The cultural homophobia and misogyny is one of the two major reasons I didn't opt for a CS degree (the other being I had too much pride to take intro classes to prove myself when I'd been coding since I was 5 because 17 year old me was arrogant as hell). This WAS 10-20 years ago, but experiences like mine do have impacts on the candidate pipeline for midlevel and senior positions.

And on the other hand, taking my tech skills into non-tech spaces is very well received. Libraries are always happy to have tech-literate people, and even in my current job, I've had 2 freelance dev projects dropped into my lap in the space of a month simply because I'm easier to work with and very familiar with the very feminine subject domain.

I'm very skeptical of DEI, ironically, because I've seen too much of it turn into grifts for upper-class and upper-middle class POC and gay people while ignoring non-visible differences or differences that might actually require behavior changes (disability and class, mostly). But there's definitely a cultural problem. And I say this as a woman who greatly prefers 'male' communication styles and was raised by a warehouse worker. I'm not pearl clutching - I've lived in a couple of the most dangerous cities in the US, I'm no shrinking violet.