Reply to Google male engineeer saying female engineers shouldn't be engineers

Forum Index » Jobs and Careers

Reply to "Google male engineeer saying female engineers shouldn't be engineers"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Megan McArdle's excellent article on the whole situation:

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-08-09/as-a-woman-in-tech-i-realized-these-are-not-my-people

"No, the reason I left is that I came into work one Monday morning and joined the guys at our work table, and one of them said “What did you do this weekend?”

I was in the throes of a brief, doomed romance. I had attended a concert that Saturday night. I answered the question with an account of both. The guys stared blankly. Then silence. Then one of them said: “I built a fiber-channel network in my basement,” and our co-workers fell all over themselves asking him to describe every step in loving detail.

At that moment I realized that fundamentally, these are not my people. I liked the work. But I was never going to like it enough to blow a weekend doing more of it for free. Which meant that I was never going to be as good at that job as the guys around me."

"These preferences show up across cultures, and indeed, the less sexist a society is overall, the more you seem to see women splitting off into fields that emphasize people, and words, and caring. '

[b]In rich countries, women are not going to want to do boring jobs.

they want to do fun jobs taht still pay decently[/b]. [/quote]

Actually, you missed her point. The guys in the article thought their job was so fun, they did it on the weekend for free. She didn't have the same passion.

I kind of hate the article, because it will lead to more stereotyping, and I kind of have to admit she's totally right. In 20+ years in tech (the network/hardware side, which is far more male-dominated than software), I've never worked with another woman. I've tried to recruit, both in the workplace and with young girls at school career fairs. I've never been successful, despite proving to some software engineers that their skills were very transferrable. The fact is, the job is stressful enough that you *have* to find it fun. The field changes all the time; you're constantly getting your hands dirty; you spend a lot of time learning new skills on your own; and it's not family friendly nor filled with sparkling conversationalists. (I've never been in a meeting where anyone asked what we did last weekend.) But to some of us, it's intensely interesting work.

I'm holding out hope that the current generation of kids who grew up with tech with even the gender playing field a bit. No evidence so far at my workplace.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics