Sexism that I've noticed has been very subtle. I work with some very intelligent people, so I can't imagine anyone is overtly sexist (ie. thinking that women can't do this job, would not hire a person simply based on gender etc.), but still, there are problems. It's hard to write about sexism as a guy without feeling like you're coming off as sexist, but hey, I probably am. Also, it's hard to write about things without generalizing, so I don't think that these apply equally to all organizations, or all members of either gender, but as a population (of people and of companies), my thoughts are:
For one, I think that recruiting is very masculine. "Solve impossible problems! Be a rockstar! Join the most hardcore developers in the world!". It works, but I think that men find a lot more appeal in it than women do. I think that things like mentoring and career growth are also important - not that that detracts from the end result of solving really hard problems, but I think that it presents it to a more growth oriented way. So I think that especially college recruiting should still focus on the fun, hard engineering aspect of the job, it should also focus on the growth side. We'll train you, you'll work with people - we want smart people, we'll make you into an awesome developer.
Aggressiveness. If I want a raise, I'll go and ask for a raise. If I want something changed, I'll speak up about it. If I'm not happy with things, I'll quit and find another job. I think that this trait is more common in men, but it has certainly led to my success - pay quickly diverges with this strategy.
Then there's the social aspect. Within the office, I think that everyone talks with everyone else on pretty equal footing. That said, while I'd be totally comfortable asking one of my male colleagues if he wanted to grab a beer after work, I'd be at least more hesitant to do so with a female colleague so as not to make them uncomfortable (being married makes this a little bit less awkward for me) and I think that's not unique. People don't want to come off as flirting with a co-worker, or make them uncomfortable, and so they don't go out after work except in a group (and have no other recourse when they are the only female developer in a staff of 50). The people who do go out though end up talking about work, and end up solving problems that they wouldn't have otherwise. They also get more opportunity to move between projects as their friends move around within the company.
Then there's the awful problem of low numbers. If you meet a crummy male developer, well, he's a crummy developer. If you meet a bad female developer, she's probably a significant portion of all female developers that you've met - and so at least subconsciously, I think that for many the association becomes that female developers are bad (since hey, 33.3% of all female developers you've worked with aren't that great).
Those are the main things I think. I think that all of these can be fixed, but I think that it takes conscious effort on the part of the company and the staff to get around them. I think at the heart of it is a bootstrapping problem - there are too few female developers because there are too few female developers, and as that changes culturally things will get better. We can definitely speed it up though.
As an aside, I talked to a professor once about sexism in the computer science faculty, and he said something really interesting: while the top few students in the class are typically men due to the sheer number of people (if 90% of students are men, 10% are women, by pure statistics the top 1% will mostly be men), very rarely are women in the bottom 75% of the class. He attributed this to a lack of ego - there's a real masculine competitiveness to the computer science faculty (the goal to be "hardcore"), which women were generally excluded from. Without this ego drive, they weren't too proud to learn.
I really like your point about how men are more likely to be reluctant to grab a casual drink (or even one-on-one lunch, I would say) with women to talk about work because they are worried it will be seen as "flirty." Based on my experience this can have a really big impact, but I don't see it discussed very often.
Being able to have easy, casual friendships and one-on-one conversations with your coworkers can be extremely important to knowing what is going on and what you should be doing to succeed. Like you said, there are opportunities that come up in these meetings that you just don't get otherwise.
I don't think this is even a conscious decision to avoid seeming flirty a lot of the time, wanting to do things outside of work with same-gender colleagues might just feel more natural. This can make it easy to miss the fact that women are being left out, and I think a lot of men don't even realize what a disadvantage this can be.
One reason for the reluctance of personal contact outside of work is the fear of a sexual harassment suit. There have been lots of stories going around how small things have been twisted into a "hostile" work environment. In a previous workplace, they got sued by a woman who claimed that one of the employees having a britiney spears poster in his cube constituted as sexual harassment.
Also, men tend to censor what they say when women are arround.
>Then there's the awful problem of low numbers. If you meet a crummy male developer, well, he's a crummy developer. If you meet a bad female developer, she's probably a significant portion of all female developers that you've met - and so at least subconsciously, I think that for many the association becomes that female developers are bad (since hey, 33.3% of all female developers you've worked with aren't that great).
This class of bias works both ways. When a man is wronged it's an injustice towards the individual. When a woman is wronged it's an injustice towards women.
About aggressiveness: It turns out that when women act aggressive, they are often treated differently than men who act the same way. This is a perfect example of where unconscious biases fuck up the system.
This is something actual research has been done on, though I don't have any links handy. :(
I don't really understand what you're implication is. The poster I was responding to used the word aggressive to describe how men are "supposed" to seek raises and otherwise negotiate in the workplace, and said that women often didn't act that way.
You can replace the word aggressive with assertive if you think it describes the style of negotiation better, but that has nothing to do with my point.
The rockstar shit is a filter for me. If a company advertises itself as wanting rockstars, ninjas, "hardcore" people, or whatever brogrammer bullshit of the week is, I put that job advert to the bottom of my list. The thought of working around the sort of people who would apply because they consider themselves a hardcore ninja rockstar puts me off. (I spent more than enough time with homophobic macho fuckwits when I was at school, I'd rather not have to deal with them at work.)
There are gendered problems in tech: social bugs, really.
There's the putting-yourself-forward problem. I was at an event a while back and ran a birds-of-a-feather session on open source geo stuff (I'm an OpenStreetMap editor). At the session was a woman who is involved with a startup in the same area, but she didn't seem to have the confidence to run the session, even though her involvement in open source geo is much higher than mine (I just piss around editing maps). Ensuring that our community institutions invite women in is a good step: they don't have to accept the invitation, but many will. And that's good.
Another problem some women I know face: social expectations. They have to dress more masculine in order to be taken seriously at real-life gatherings. We as hackers like to say we don't judge people based on their appearances but based on their code. Then at the same time, we like to judge the "suits". I know women who have said they have to go home and change out of feminine wear (of all levels of formality) into jeans and a t-shirt in order for the hacker crowd to take them seriously. If a guy turns up to an event in a suit, people will just naturally assume he needs to wear it because he's doing coding in some kind of corporate environment. But if women turn up in a dress, they just get the presumption that they are in sales or PR or something. That's bullshit. (This stems from the geeky hackery idea that dressing nice makes someone untrustworthy. Sorry, no, I've worked with utter assholes who come to work in jeans every day, and I've worked with people who are awesome, ethical and never fuck people over who–gasp!–wear formal or dressy clothing.)
Is there an endemic problem of malicious deliberate sexism? No. That exists in some companies, sure, but I don't think that's the primary problem. Instead, there's lots of little nagging bugs, some of which stem from unconscious attitudes perpetuated by geek culture. The sexism problems such as they are consist of lots of little nagging bugs that taken together exclude women. Unless you are some kind of hardcore misogynist, fixing them will have generally positive side effects for everybody.
These nagging bugs pay back dividends in the long term if you are on the right side of them though, which was my point. Let's say that I get a 6% raise every year because I ask for it (either directly, or through promotion), while people who don't get a 4% raise. If someone starts out making $80k a year, after 10 years, the person not asking is making $118k per year, while the person asking for it is making $143k/year. Over the 10 years, that means that the first person makes about $1.078 million, while the second makes $1.198 million - a difference of $120k before taxes. After 5 more years of this, that difference turns into over $300k.
If I see a guy in a suit I think he is probably a recruiter or a PHB.
I wonder how much of the macho stuff you point out is unique to tech. I see way more aggressive posturing in sales for example, and all the sales departments I've seen are very well balanced gender-wise
Ah, it depends on context: in my mind, I was thinking about some of the user groups I go to where there's often a fair few enterprise devs who turn up in suits.
But the point stands: for a group of people who take pride in judging people on their code and skills, we seem to quite like judging people on their appearance.
We judge people who dress to manipulate, whether it's "trust me" or "pay attention to me". The fact that a cheap costume might influence others' decisions is a social bug, and I kind of resent anyone knowingly exploiting it.
A male friend of mine recently testified before a parliamentary committee on computer security. He wore a suit, as one might expect. If he hadn't dressed formally, the committee wouldn't have trusted him, even if he'd said exactly the same things (which consisted of being highly critical of a proposed government technology policy).
A female software developer friend of mine has gone home after work and changed into a less formal outfit before going to a developer event in order so that people don't assume that she is a marketing or sales person or just there to accompany her boyfriend.
Both of these are uses of dress to influence other people's decisions and attitudes. Are either one, or both of them, worthy of the resentment you describe? And why do we pick, say, dress out as something where manipulation for social ends is bad but, say, typography isn't? If someone is preparing a resume for a job and uses an inappropriate font (Comic Sans, maybe), I'll tell him not to do so. But if he wears a tie during the interview, is he trying to emotionally manipulate people?
> If he hadn't dressed formally, the committee wouldn't have trusted him
I can't blame your friend for accommodating their foolish demands. He treated them no worse than they deserved for it, and refusing would have made it a waste of everyone's time.
> gone home after work and changed
I guess I'm wondering whether she thinks her coworkers are incapable of judging her genuine merit, or something else is going on.
> I guess I'm wondering whether she thinks her coworkers are incapable of judging her genuine merit
Numerous female friends have had the same experience. I don't think it's about coworkers. I think it's more to do with idiotic dudes thinking that pretty woman in a dress just a priori cannot be a software developer.
Every form of dress is a form of communication, and has the potential for influence.
Even taking no thought and wearing the simplest possible thing communicates "I invested no effort in putting my outfit on today". Which can itself be a status play - the person doing this is saying, I don't have to dress to impress others.
I think that there is an important difference between suits and dresses. Suits are purely formal attire whereas dresses are formal, but are also designed to present the wearer as sexy. I don't think that there is any mens attire that is analogous to a dress. Anything that a man can wear that is revealing or sexually suggestive is really casual (eg. shorts and no shirt on a beach) or really cheesy/sleazy (eg. deep v-cut t-shirt and super tight pants).
The idea is that they know it's business, not personal. There's no potential hidden agenda about trying to bang your co-worker that there might be if you were single.
Because adultery is unheard of? I am not denying that when you are married or in a known committed relationship the tendency is to interpret things in a purely "two co-workers going to lunch" kind of way, but to assume marriage guarantees that end goal, at least in America, is probably a bit hasty.
In particular: "so many of the attitudes her work unveils are of an 'unconscious nature,' which makes beating them back particularly difficult" and "male leaders may think they are elevating women, not stifling them."
There's other research suggesting that "being made aware" of the problem helps male leaders adjust behavior.
There's significant pressure to not talk about sexism directly and just address this as a conflict between two individiuals (see antirez's rant) -- even though the research says that talking about about sexism and fairness concepts changes the behavior of management.
You may be the kind of guy who can do that, but after a couple of those outings one of you will probably start to develop affection for the other one, and that is why I would recommend sticking to a group.
With regards to what your professor said regarding the performance of women in computer science programs:
I think that generally when there is a minority group within a program, that minority does relatively well. So many people choose their program because it's the status quo for their gender/race/social status/etc. The people who choose a program outside of what is expected of them probably do so because they have a strong aptitude in that area or are very interested and motivated by the subject.
For one, I think that recruiting is very masculine. "Solve impossible problems! Be a rockstar! Join the most hardcore developers in the world!". It works, but I think that men find a lot more appeal in it than women do. I think that things like mentoring and career growth are also important - not that that detracts from the end result of solving really hard problems, but I think that it presents it to a more growth oriented way. So I think that especially college recruiting should still focus on the fun, hard engineering aspect of the job, it should also focus on the growth side. We'll train you, you'll work with people - we want smart people, we'll make you into an awesome developer.
Aggressiveness. If I want a raise, I'll go and ask for a raise. If I want something changed, I'll speak up about it. If I'm not happy with things, I'll quit and find another job. I think that this trait is more common in men, but it has certainly led to my success - pay quickly diverges with this strategy.
Then there's the social aspect. Within the office, I think that everyone talks with everyone else on pretty equal footing. That said, while I'd be totally comfortable asking one of my male colleagues if he wanted to grab a beer after work, I'd be at least more hesitant to do so with a female colleague so as not to make them uncomfortable (being married makes this a little bit less awkward for me) and I think that's not unique. People don't want to come off as flirting with a co-worker, or make them uncomfortable, and so they don't go out after work except in a group (and have no other recourse when they are the only female developer in a staff of 50). The people who do go out though end up talking about work, and end up solving problems that they wouldn't have otherwise. They also get more opportunity to move between projects as their friends move around within the company.
Then there's the awful problem of low numbers. If you meet a crummy male developer, well, he's a crummy developer. If you meet a bad female developer, she's probably a significant portion of all female developers that you've met - and so at least subconsciously, I think that for many the association becomes that female developers are bad (since hey, 33.3% of all female developers you've worked with aren't that great).
Those are the main things I think. I think that all of these can be fixed, but I think that it takes conscious effort on the part of the company and the staff to get around them. I think at the heart of it is a bootstrapping problem - there are too few female developers because there are too few female developers, and as that changes culturally things will get better. We can definitely speed it up though.
As an aside, I talked to a professor once about sexism in the computer science faculty, and he said something really interesting: while the top few students in the class are typically men due to the sheer number of people (if 90% of students are men, 10% are women, by pure statistics the top 1% will mostly be men), very rarely are women in the bottom 75% of the class. He attributed this to a lack of ego - there's a real masculine competitiveness to the computer science faculty (the goal to be "hardcore"), which women were generally excluded from. Without this ego drive, they weren't too proud to learn.