If you would talk with some actual women in tech, you would learn that many women choose not to become software engineers (and choose to leave at 2x the rate of men) because it is often a shitty environment for them.
You would also learn that plenty of people are working on making a more inclusive industry for reasons that have nothing to do with pushing down their own wages. I'm one of them.
It's often a shitty environment for men, too. Now the question is: Is it really that much more shitty for women, are there other factors at play for them leaving (or not joining in the first place), or a combination of both.
I'd say the latter: The environment is a bit shittier on average for a women and therefore should be improve to be equally shitty for all, but there are other factors at play here too.
There's also a distinction to be made between "things are shitty for everyone, and men tend to handle it better" and "things are shitty for women in particular because of anti-female sexism".
Like, construction work is also a shitty environment that's shittier for women. There's significant danger and hard physical activity, and for men are generally better able to handle that. The amount of women in construction may also be driven down by sexist behavior as well - I'm not familiar with how working in that field is.
If men are more willing to put up with shitty work environments because it makes them more money, that'll both create male-dominated fields and be a problem that anti-misogyny campaigns are useless against.
female construction worker and FOSS hobbyist here.
I've been to tech conferences and do residential construction for a living. I'm a member of the local VFD. I'm familiar with predominantly male environments. I wish there were more women doing the things I love to do, but oh well.
Predominantly male environments are much more verbally and physically confrontational than mixed ones, in my experience. So my presence is really awkward. No one feels comfortable ripping on the new guy if the new guy is a new girl who's a bit shy. Sometimes the awkwardness dissipates, other times it doesn't. If it doesn't, I leave. So I suppose that this is one reason why predominantly male environments tend to stay that way.
It's always felt like more of a group dynamics thing than pointed sexism when I've experienced it.
One more thing: just because a job is physical doesn't mean that men are better at it. This attitude is extremely annoying to me as it directly affects my day-to-day life. I train 10-15 hours a week, and I'm stronger than the out-of-shape old guys. This doesn't matter. They know so many tricks to make the work go faster. Work smarter, you know?
I'm not sure if there's any data on female construction workers and danger/workplace accidents, but I'm actually confused by your assertion that men are better able to handle danger. Like, I don't understand what that even means.
By "better able to handle danger" I meant that they're more willing to do risky behavior. Like, part of doing a dangerous job is deciding that it's worth doing, and men are more likely to do so in spite of the risk.
Essentially, I'm blaming part of the construction work gender disparity on the same thing that explains why only 14% of motorcycle riders are female.
>just because a job is physical doesn't mean that men are better at it.
Sure. I'm definitely not saying that women can't or shouldn't do physical jobs. Averages and distributions exist, though, and testosterone is a hell of a drug.
As for the danger part. It sounds like men are socially forced to accept danger and risk, I doubt most men really want to do it, but they are forced to be providers while us women are socially forced to be caretakers.
> I'm actually confused by your assertion that men are better able to handle danger.
When the poster said, "significant danger and hard physical activity, and for men are generally better able to handle that", they may have been saying that men are generally better able to handle the physical activity, and not necessarily the danger too. English is ambiguous about grouping clauses sometimes.
It's both, but "men are better at handling risk" is a really weird way of phrasing "men are more willing to engage in risky behavior". And that sentence was originally just about the physical activity, and then I realized that the difference in risk tolerance was also a contributing factor and I should mention that as well, and the phrasing vaguely worked properly so I kept it.
Sure, life is terrible. Sure, the patriarchal system we are embedded in is bad for everybody. But again, if you want to know what actual women actually experience, the right way to approach that isn't boldly stating your own answer. Try asking.
Unfortunately very few people have the experiences of both men and women in tech, which is what is necessary to get a comparison from someone who actually knows how much shittier it is as one vs another.
I'm not seeing why that's necessary. Historically, patriarchy is pretty obvious. Women were forced into specific roles for thousands of years, and that was clearly still happening during the lives of many people now in the workforce.
So I'm comfortable just taking women at their word when they say they're still experiencing problems. I don't need to carefully measure the exact relative degrees of shittiness. Worst case, I will listen to them and solve some problems that turn out to be for everybody.
"Mainly, most women have an easier way out by getting married so they don't have to do any hard work, physically or mentally. How do you think they survive otherwise?"
I'm not sure you actually have spoken to that many women, have you?
Your rush to dismiss very well documented problems as coming from “a die-hard feminist SV hedge fund kid who blows everything out of proportion because of political reasons” suggests a far more likely explanation: none of the women you've talked to feel comfortable discussing their frustrations with you because they're afraid of sharing that hostile rejection with the potential for negative career impacts.
Exactly this. If I want people to be honest, I have to create a context in which they are rewarded for honesty. This is especially true if I am asking them to do me a favor by spending time to educate me.
> Mainly, most women have an easier way out by getting married so they don't have to do any hard work, physically or mentally. How do you think they survive otherwise?
For majority I interviewed, it provided the women an extra job on top of a 9a-5p or crazy-scheduled job with pay varying from crap to good. A very, small number coild trade one for the other. On rare occasions, roles reversed with the guy being a stay at home dad or using a well-off woman to avoid full-time (or any work lol).
I worked in public-facing positions enough to talk to hundreds to thousands of women about their jobs, life, and such. I'm even in the South where higher percentage supports so-called traditional families where marriage is important. Vast majority of women I've met both work and got married. Many of them work ridiculously hard. A subset are stay at home mom's or married for money. They're less common to rare dependinv on area I was in.
So, my areas are where your statement had better chance of being true but was still wrong and sexist with a sample size of 1000+. Most women try to have a good job where they get stuff done with desirable pay and environment. Like the men do.
You would also learn that plenty of people are working on making a more inclusive industry for reasons that have nothing to do with pushing down their own wages. I'm one of them.