dear female devs / haecksen, how many other female devs do you have in your team?
if not so many, how do you feel about it?
and do you get a lot of sexist bullshit or not so much?

would be great to hear your experiences.

the female quota among our devs is < 3% 😅
most of the time i don't think about it and just do my job and it's fine, but sometimes i think, it's a bit weird. also, there is this fear that people might not have trust in my skills. it can be good and bad to be "special"... anyway, having more female rolemodels / mentors / colleagues to have technical discussions with would be awesome.

2 out of 6 + 1 female manager.

We're fine.

@darksideofyay @kiki @voxera @AmyShackles @NoMad @catgirldev

in my whole programming career and all the jobs i had (about 15 years and about 10 jobs, altogether met and worked with about 100 programmers) two were female.

Not exactly a dev anymore. But it's often less than 1 in 5. (excluding myself, as I don't exactly fit with the feminine crowd... Although I guess the lack of feminine characters is the main issue and not the lack of tits)

There are actually more women in academia and research than industry. But I'd say that's cuz these women are the genius anomalies and there's no stopping them. (Except for me. I'm just here for the monies) Industry's definition of professionalism seems to be based on masculine culture, so the average Jane can't easily fit in.

I've never been on a team with another female dev. i worked at a coworking space and i met only 2 girls in 200 people.

the bs is real, but never explicit. there's the bad and the "good". the bad is not being taken seriously, being treated with condescension. the "good" is being punished less than others, being protected. i put it in quotes because that's not actually that good of a perk, but I've noticed I get a better treatment in my team (idk if they think I'm more fragile or smt). it comes at the expense of respect. I'd rather have equal treatment and less condescension tbh.

@NoMad yeah, that could be a thing. i can see this especially in management, not so much on my level... for me, it was tougher at the university tho. me and my 1 female fellow student often felt like idiots, not because we were less talented than the rest, but because we were more insecure about our knowledge and skills and our male students would brag a lot how smart they are. 😅 (but maybe that's also an age thing)
i can imagine this also possibly "filters out" some young women..

sorry btw if i assigned or assumed any wrong gender 😅 it was an assumption based on your avatars, (which in devrant are pretty heteronormative so it kinda makes you make this assumption)

Not a female. But I've seen only a few female devs. Worked with only 1 [in several projects], but I know at least 2 others in other projects.

Idc if I have to work with a female or a male. I'm working with a specialist, hopefully a good one. I'd also hire a hamster if it could write good code and triage the hell out of bugs.

The prob is... There are only guys applying that can qualify for the role...

Fwiw in the PerfEng team we kicked off 2 lame guys in exchange to 1 strong gal.

@darksideofyay can relate a lot to that.. sorry to hear that some assholes treat you with condescension, this is a really shitty feeling..
for me, the "good" shows rather on the level that some people (men) tend to overpraise what i do. e.g. if i give a technical advice or explanation or hold a presentation about technical details, some people be like "this was a really awesome mail / talk, very good work!!" XD
and at first this is a really nice ego boost, but then i think that they probably wouldn't have praised me as much if i was a dude.^^

@soull00t yeah i get that one as well. idk why but I'm always put on this pedestal for doing simple stuff. that might be more due to work ethic than anything though, they get a faster response from me than from others

@kiki yeah there are always these idiots, even if they are the minority. but they are bad enough.
i heard a talk with a female software architect and she said the reason she got into IT was that she went to a girls' school. シ

@darksideofyay that's also true XD at some point i realized some people from product management or other departments started contacting me more often than my much more experienced colleague...

@netikras there are many layers to the lack of women.

the first one is that women are not driven towards STEM, due to socialization. that one could be helped with representation, but y'know, kind of a cyclical problem.

the second layer is sexism in the workplace. eventually women give up because it's just too toxic. having someone else step in for us is a huge help. guys should speak out more.

the third layer is the loneliness of being the only woman around. that's another cyclical problem, to have less women giving up you need less women giving up. I've been holding on and i hope someday I'll be able to support other girls that come my way.

we can get there, we just need time and effort

@darksideofyay ++, that pretty much nailed it.

and yes, STEM women need to support each other

In America at least we push women toward more caretaker careers. On accident maybe? I've had a small number of female presenting devs in my career. We've got a few hardware engineers that are female presenting. But the ratio is never 50 50. I think it is getting better though. We contracted a woman senior that I'm onboarding, I've treated her no different than any of the guys but I also don't make sexist jokes. I've never heard any around the office as well.

@NoMad yeah i noticed the difference in academic spaces. it irked me how many women are getting masters degrees, and it hit me: they are getting kicked out of the industry. i talked to a girl about it, her career stopped after she had her child. and it's not just motherhood, it's all that casual sexism. hard to keep fighting this stuff, but it'd piss me off too much to give up 😂

@demortes it's like i said, it's not always explicit, and it's not about individual actions, it's more systematic. career progression for women sometimes feel like swimming in jello, and we can feel a bit gaslighted, like it's all in our heads. "is it sexism, are they jerks, are they stupid or all of the above?" sometimes it's an intersection, and people will deny sexism to the end of times 🤷

@kiki okay. <3 and i welcome your input on this topic very much, by women of course i mean all women, including trans...

Sigh I tried
I'm just all tired out and spent
Give me 15 mins
Maybe I can make up for it with a stupendous encore sigh

I’m the only female engineer on my team of three and my pillar of five. My manager’s a former dev turned engineering manager. My engineering director is a woman. The last time I felt discriminated against/harassed at work for being a woman was before getting into software engineering. 😅

I try not to assume that ratios of representation are the result of discriminatory practices and I actually kind of hate when companies feel the need to implement hiring ratios. I hate wondering if the reason I was hired was because someone needed to change their stats and being concerned that other people might think that’s the only reason I was hired and that it wasn’t the result of my ability. It can make you feel like you have to go above and beyond in order to prove you’re not just filling a seat.

4 devs, 2 backen and 2 frontend, 2 testers and 2 ux, 2 product owners one scrum master out of 25 total.

So about 50 %

Possibly one more backen dev on a week or two.

@TheWrongGod the joke you made was taken seriously. Cuz' there are some idiots out there actually saying that seriously. Maybe next time add a "/jk" or something?

@kiki "assigned male at birth"

God damn you and your sensual leg pics, YOU PLAYED US ALL!

... BUT, during the same time and people span mentioned in my previous comment, i also met exactly 0 male HR people.

Strangely enough my team is about 50/50, hell my tech lead is a female and my project manager is also a female. I was pretty surprised when I started working there, it’s just so rare

Almost a year ago, I left a job because I discovered that the men were getting paid $20k/year more than the women on the dev team. Us ladies had 6x the amount of experience as the men that were getting paid more, for the exact same software engineer position with the same amount of responsibilities.

@KittyCrumpet not the same amount of negotiating experience/skill, though

@AmyShackles
"It can make you feel like you have to go above and beyond in order to prove you’re not just filling a seat."

can relate a lot to that, i also feel like i have to prove to everyone that i'm doing an awesome job...

@Voxera wow, that's an insane quota 😄 a friend of mine is also currently the only male dev in a 6 heads dev team. guess it's like darksideofyay said, teams already containing women are much more attractive for other women...

@UnicornPoo @KittyCrumpet damn, that really sucks... it's sad how women are driven out of this field by incompetent idiots, poor management and unequal treatment and payment, and it's a vicious cycle...

we still have a looong way to go, as a society -.-

@NoMad "I don't exactly fit with the feminine crowd...Although I guess the lack of feminine characters is the main issue"

this made me think a bit...
i've been thinking this about myself in the past as well. somehow i often felt uncomfortable with other women (not all women), and i often felt like i could be more myself when i was around guys.
by now i think it's not because i'm "not feminine" but it's rather because our society has such a narrow understanding of how women have to be. and if you deviate from that, then something's wrong with you.... society should have a much broader understanding of how women, men, every human can be.

@soull00t this is indeed one perspective. Of course, everyone is [/"should be"] free to be whatever they want, regardless of their biological assignment.

But let's change perspective. Let's split feminity from women for now. Women are traditionally forced to be feminine. (Roles, survival, yada yada) Which is what third wave feminism kinda tries to focus on. The whole "women of all genders" is literally splitting feminity from having a uterus.
But femininity, on its own, is actually endangered. Not because of feminism tho. (I'd argue meninists are to blame for making it unattractive) You don't see many women actively want to be housewives anymore (With exception for those marrying for money. They don't clean or take care of kids.) and you don't see many aim to be protected by men (Or masculinity, including Dykes) and in general, the women who used to maintain house and provide stability for men (extreme feminity) are just vanishing and that's just sad. Let's just keep a few at least.

Albeit, I can see that we are moving away from extremes and now everyone is a feminine in some regards and masculine in others. Basically, we're on a spectrum of feminity and masculinity in different aspects of life. I'm just saying, extremely feminine characters are now considered weak and useless and that's a sort of exclusion, specially for feminism that in it's core tried to protect women and femininity both.

I also include flamboyantly feminine, often gay, men in my... scroll of incoherent rant above. 😬

No other female devs on my team, but we have a female BA. Since going into tech, I've usually been the only woman on my team - including the current role - and once the only woman in the whole (small) company.

It's usually bearable if either a) the men aren't dicks or b) there's a woman around in another role to remind you that civilised people exist. I've definitely been in a place without either, but that's long gone now thankfully!

@NoMad are they though ? Or are they sick of the nurtured hypersensitivity ? That's actually a valid point. Also acknowledging the differences between men and women emotionally has already been a source of consistent headache in all other parts or life now we add sue happy people to the mix displaying the same propensity for differences. I don't think women are dumber and some can hold ground with men but much of the problems in the last century have derived from this very issue and this can't really be ignored and there is no simple answer. But as before the other comment was a joke. This one isn't because this subject exacerbates a lot of other problems. Problems which have been forming our country in the direction of the film idiocracy only worse

@Frederick I love how a propagandist created things like incel and qanon to cover real problems up

@NoMad I don't think it's going extinct, i think it's shifting.

take my sister for example. she has a baby, and she's working home office. that type of work allows her to take care of him. her husband actually takes half of the responsibilities at home and with the baby, because they both work.

I don't see that role dying because children will always need care, and i think we value that more than other more career driven generations. what i do see is a new type of household, where both parents are present and working together

@darksideofyay I agree, technology and modern society makes it possible to be more equal, its just takes time.

@darksideofyay the whole concept of "equality" is basically shifting the extreme feminine and masculine to a more middle-ground. A man doesn't have to support (financially and otherwise) a massive tribe for his entire life or work to death, and a woman can actually be somewhat independent and have a career. But that is in contrast with what femininity has been defined as for centuries. If you want to limit the definition of femininity to glow-ups and appearance, you can but you'd be insulting generations of everyone's maternal ancestors, who actually tried so darn hard to live the role. (Because society would reject them if they didn't. Not saying it was good, just saying we're basically doing the same thing in reverse)

@NoMad i agree, femininity is such a broad concept, no woman will have the same definition. presentation is part of it, but so are gender roles, gender oppression, cramps, motherhood, sorority.

that said, presentation is used by women to receive validation in our society, to be seen as women. I don't think any woman believes femininity is exclusively about pink frills

@darksideofyay That being said, most of the performative femininity I’ve felt pressured into has been as the result of wanting to “fit in” with other women/not be a social pariah amongst women, not to please men.

@AmyShackles i mean, it's a very complicated subject to tackle in a social media post. it's the crabs in a bucket mentality, we pull each other down and no one gets out.

@darksideofyay this reminded me of the word "neurotypical" meaning "mentally healthy person". If we account for everything, there are more mentally challenged people in one way or another than mentally healthy, so the word is straight up incorrect. But it goes deeper: what is a personality trait, and what is a mental disorder? Where is the line? If we at least have some kind of criteria, yes, we can rule out something, but both international classification and DSM are shaky at best. What about disorders we don't know about? That whole neuroinflammation ordeal, also that latent HHV-VI present in the brain? Then, there is an ethical dilemma. If a person has a condition but does not suffer, is it a disorder?

I feel the same about the concepts of masculinity and femininity. We have broad cultural definitions, yes, but they are, in concept, just the same as pink frills.

Im alive and posting this right now because someone went through pain that most males (btw I’m a male)!can’t even imagine. Childbirth is one of the most painful experiences anyone can ever go through. This is one of many reasons why I don’t understand why society looks down upon women

@TeachMeCode what about schizophrenia and its oneyroid, the literal hell, the absolute maximum suffering, both mental and physical, that our brain is capable of feeling? Both men and women are at risk. Being boiled alive, injecting your bladder with glass fiber, being crushed by hydraulic press, all of that is less painful.

Why do we have to look down (or up) on people based on the pain they endured?

Including myself, 3 devs out of 22 devs.

@soull00t STEM in general needs more support.

@darksideofyay the classic family vs work problem, choose one sacrifice the other.

Hopefully in the year to come this Mentality stops being a thing.

@soull00t that problem is a general one. Lucky most of them are close to retire aka new management will come.

@soull00t left over from boomer times. Will remove itself over time.