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by rayiner
4687 days ago
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So I went to an undergrad for engineering, and my freshman class was 72% male, 28% female, and my major was probably 85% male, 15% female. At my first job, we never broke two women out of a team that was maybe a dozen engineers by the time we left. At my second job, there was briefly one woman but the rest of the time it was zero out of 8-9 engineers. My law school class was 55% male, 45% female, and my firm was pretty close to even. My experience makes me believe that the reason that there aren't more women programmers is mostly that there aren't more women programmers. I think men and women, generally, interact socially in different ways. By the time I left engineering, I found the fairly homogenous and almost exclusively-male mode of social interaction rather tiring. It was refreshing to be in an environment with a diversity of people who had different ways of interacting socially. I don't think most of the typical canards really matter. Yes, programming is a nerdy profession that rewards people who can work solitarily for long hours on detail-intensive work. But so is law, so is medicine, so is accounting, and those fields have almost even ratios of men and women. I don't think there is anything about the work that deters women. |
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Yes. This is one of the things I dislike the most about the startup world. I grew up with strong female authority figures, most of my direct academic advisors were women, and the first startup I worked at had a female CEO and a female CTO... over the years I've discovered that I tend to fare better with female leadership.
With an exclusively male office, there are some days during which the only woman I interact with is my girlfriend.