[kazinator]

> What is now considered a male-dominated field, was once defined as “women’s work.”

Once? It's naive to think that these attitudes do not persist, albeit in somewhat disguised forms, perhaps.

At some universities, for instance, engineers regard CS majors as "wimps". Engineering is hard, CS is soft.

Moreover, think about how there is an attitude that some "softer" or "easier" programming is lower on the pecking order. While programming as a broad category may not be "women's work", web design (even with client and server scripting) is "for girls" and, say, writing drivers for a network switch is for "real men".

Oh, the hard/soft stereotyping in digital tech is alive and kicking!

[erroneousfunk]

I briefly did front end web design work many many years ago. Now I have a masters in software engineering, two books published in web scraping in Python and Java, and years of experience in back end Java, database architecture, data science, and all that jazz.

The vast majority of the recruiter spam I get, as a female, is front end web development or UI/UX work. I removed all mention of "HTML/CSS" type skills from LinkedIn, but that hasn't stopped it. I'm beginning to suspect that removing my photo from public profiles would probably do more to stop the inappropriate job spam than anything I could actually change in LinkedIn, however...

[amyjess]

> The vast majority of the recruiter spam I get, as a female, is front end web development or UI/UX work.

I'm transgender, and I can tell you that I got that kind of spam both before and after I transitioned. In fact, most recruiter spam I've ever gotten is wholly irrelevant to my skills.

You're getting that spam because the positions are in high demand, so there are a lot of them, and recruiters will spam all their positions to every single email address in their database.

They just plain have no respect for other human beings. Half the recruiter spam I get uses my old name, even though I legally changed it almost a year ago and changed it on my resume (which I posted to all job sites) a few months before that. I also list on every job site that I cannot relocate and I'm only seeking full-time work. Most of the recruiter spam I get is for positions out of town and for contract jobs. They never get it. I've written scathing emails to recruiters lambasting them for suggesting I uproot my life and move out of state for a shitty 6-month contract. I usually don't get a reply.

One recruiter took the cake. He emailed me about one such position, then called me the next day after I ignored his email, and I told him I wasn't interested in any contract work and that I don't ever want to do business with him. A few days later, he emails me again about the same position. I replied with a Cease & Desist notice making it clear that he is to have no contact with me from now on, and then he calls me again to try and convince me to take the job. I spent the next few minutes shouting at him and berating him for harassment. I planned to contact his firm's HR department about his conduct, but I never got around to it, sadly.

[erroneousfunk]

That's good to know! It's so hard to tell, having only the direct experience of being a single gender in the industry, what is normal and what isn't. I try to stay away from it, but some days, it seems like I'm filtering all my experiences through Medium blog posts about gender inequality and tech-conference-horror-story-of-the-day BS.

I might have to go back to front end work if that's really the hot thing everyone's clamoring for these days... (kidding! I love what I'm doing right now).

It's always interesting to hear about transgendered experiences in the sciences and programming. We need more points of view with control groups! ;)

[mreiland]

Maybe you should stop looking for gender inequality without direct evidence.

Crazy thought I know.

[erroneousfunk]

The point was that I wasn't actually looking. So many of the articles on HN, and on tech blogs/news sites around the Internet are about gender inequality. As a human being, I can only encounter so much of it before it starts to affect how I view and interpret events around me, without realizing it. "Are they asking me to be a speaker at this conference because I'll provide valuable knowledge to the attendees, or is this a 'token speaker' situation?" It gets to you, after a while, even if you're actively trying not too let it.

My whole point was that that situation is bad, and hearing experiences such as ones from MTF or FTM transgendered individuals in tech can be valuable. I don't see any reason for you to be a jerk about it here.

[mreiland]

I just watched you blame recruiter spam on your gender and you think the blame lies in all the talk online about gender inequality?

The blame lies squarely with you.

[seanccox]

This is unrelated to the topic at hand, but I'm trying to learn web scraping in Python and I'm looking for a source to use. Would you mind sharing a link to your book?

[Lawtonfogle]

>Engineering is hard, CS is soft.

I see a few reasons for this (at least where I went to university).

First, CS required less math classes. Harder than most sciences, but still not as much as the default for engineers. There was a correlation between who math a STE major required and how hard it was viewed. Psychology which didn't require calculus and had a watered down stats course was considered the weakest. Physics and Engineering was at the top.

Second, professors in engineering were far less forgiving (I took a few classes). They were stricter and while their work wasn't harder, they were far more likely to just give a 0 for doing something wrong. Also their tests had more chain problems (answer to question 1 is input to question 2), and every one I had always insisted you had to have the right answer (so if you had the right answer to question 2 using the wrong answer from question 1, you got a 0).

Third, there were easy computer degrees. Name a degree in Information Management, while not CS, was often associated and it did not require the most complex CS classes. There were not easy engineering degrees.

[_bfhp]

Who says that the categorization of CS majors as wimps by engineers is related at all to CS being formerly dominated by women?

Social construction of gender will seep into dynamics at any point where something can be argued as "weaker" than another thing.

[kazinator]

Indeed, and so how they may be related is through this common cause.

[lucozade]

I think the point is that it was a much more literal connection.

Specifically, programming itself was often considered secretarial work and, as such, was generally given to women.

Men tended to participate as engineers or mathematicians.

I don't think anyone would contend that CS is a female-dominated field although I take your point that some may consider it somewhat lower on the testosterone chart than traditional engineering.

[Dewie]

What do they think about math majors? It's similarly "soft" in that it is a study of entirely intangible and abstract concepts - nothing to do with manly machinery or contraptions at all.

What do they think about electrical engineers? Circuit board sewers...?

[mechg]

As someone who went to school for ME.

The general opinion was:

ME was harder than CS.

Math majors were unlikely to get a job.

Electrical and Chemical engineering were harder than ME (especially chemical)

Civil engineering was a joke. (Probably because our statics and mechanics of materials classes were so easy in comparison with ME classes).

These aren't my opinions just some observations of general opinions of undergrads.

[tonyarkles]

That definitely matches what seemed to be the prevailing perceptions for me when I was in undergrad. Whether or not they're actually accurate... hard to say, but that's how the people around me generally felt.