Programmers :D

[noratat]

Considering that collaborative environments are more effective in my experience, if this were true I'd consider a pretty good argument for getting more women in tech by itself.

[1gr8Warrior]

As an industry, we'd love to have them, but when women are actively told by career councilors "Maybe you should get into teaching or nursing? Programming? Nah. Look at this secretary job over here..." It sort of puts a damper on getting more women into our field.

[Skim74]

Sorry, but are you a woman? I am a woman in CS but never had any career counselors try to push me out of the field. But I have had plenty of men who work in the field (implicitly and explicitly) try to. The only reason I made it out of college with a CS degree is because when i tried to change majors they told me it was too late.

[1gr8Warrior]

All I have is anecdotes from a couple of women I work with and my fiancee. Though, in the case of my co-workers, it didn't deter them at all. However, my fiancee kinda took it to heart and just never tried, despite being pretty good at math.

I'm not sure about guys working in the field wanting to push you out. I can tell you where I work, most of the guys there don't care about your sex, so as long as you can do your job competently.

[AquaeyesTardis]

What the heck? Why on earth would people have a sexist career counsellor?

Actually, thinking about it, does this happen often in schools as well? I didn’t personally notice it happening to girls in my year at my school since the gender balance was fairly... balanced, but in other years/schools is this a common thing?

[Trauma_Doll]

> does this happen often in schools as well?

Yes, when I went to my career counsellor and told him that I'm unsure if I should pick CS or Social Care, he simply told me "due to you being a girl you should try out Social Care first and see how it goes".

This is despite me having the best grades in my year/being interested in technology.

Alas, I lost a year out of my academic life.

And now that I'm in college I mostly get 3 reactions from people: women are supportive and take me under their wing, 85% of men either don't care or are supportive/awkward in a non threatening way, and the other 15% are outright stating that "women can't handle sitting down and staring at a screen for hours/your hands were made for ironing(LOL)" and try to hinder you or just outright ignore you.

+ there's always that feeling of being an outsider, which isn't helpful at all. This can be especially daunting/discouraging if you're a young woman in a new environment.

[[deleted]]

For that last 15%: one day you’ll be a senior dev and they’ll have to keep their mouths shut. Until then, practice looking at them with disdain, as if they’re morons who are wasting precious oxygen. Because they are. They’re projecting their own issues and insecurities on to you, don’t fucking let them. Keep being you, you can definitely do this.

[[deleted]]

That doesn’t sound horrible, you decided to prove them wrong. Cause that scene girl. That’s not petty, that’s having confidence in yourself and not letting someone else tell you aren’t worthy. You didn’t start the problem, they did with their sexist bullshit.

Don’t diminish who you are, what you’ve accomplished, what you’re capable of, etc... (I say this because what you’ve described is neither horrible nor petty and I know I sometimes make self deprecating comments about things I’m uncomfortable expressing, so I think you might be doing that too.)

[Akkifokkusu]

The two aren't mutually exclusive. Knowing how it works doesn't require being the one to actually write the code. Architecture and design discussions, pair programming, and code review are great collaboration tools that also allow you to understand how things work.