Something I’ve been for a while now is why this gender disparity is so strong in this specific area of engineering compared to all other engineering areas. People seem to claim it’s because of the “geek” stereotype, but that seems more like a symptom than a cause and I fail to see how it enforces this disparity, considering there’s nothing preventing a woman from being a geek too.
the actual reason? Nobody pushes women into the field of CS. Back in the 80s and 90s it was a similar thing, boys were fucking around with computers and software, not girls, it was considered to be a boys thing back then, and it still is now, because women are moving more frequently into higher expertise fields more often than not. CS while incredibly complicated, and difficult, is also just code monkey simulator at the end of the day. You could just write a PHD thesis on some mathematical shit and be as involved with CS while having been a mathematician instead lmao.
Nobody pushed me into this field, I followed it because I liked it. Same thing with kids messing around with computers in the 80’s. Nobody was pushing boys to do that, they just did. For some reason more men enjoy working with computers than women. I’ve worked with a few female coders, and they were good at their jobs, but women are definitely a minority in the field.
I probably would have gone into tech earlier if I’d had a female role model in tech. When my (male) friends started programming in high school, I was very interested and wanted to learn it too. But it literally didn’t occur to me that I could, until ten years later, when I was already far along in a study in the humanities. I ended up in data/ software development in the end, but it took me ten years longer because I didn’t realise earlier that it was a field I could get into if I wanted.
So long story short, it’s not just a matter of interest, there are societal factors that play a role too.
May have something to do with computers as they exist being defined by male psychology. Well, it’s understandable why swords, guns, rockets are, and same with computers.
Basically sending instructions to change state. I don’t know how can a computer exist which doesn’t work like this and is still usable for the humanity, but this seems to be psychologically a bit more of a male thing. Maybe there’s nothing problematic for women but aesthetics there.
If it’s something deeper, then maybe some analog optical\quantum\whatever computers of the future will push us to change paradigms for some drastic change in efficiency. And maybe those new paradigms will be more appealing to women.
Which is ironic, because women were the “code monkeys” of back when human computers were a thing - humans actually doing the computing by hand; and most of them were women.
I work on the City side of the development world. We’re always getting screamed at for taking 3 weeks to review a plan set by the same developers who want to meet with me every minute of every fucking day.
I’ve got 40 projects in my review queue and all of them are demanding a weekly meeting. When am I supposed to do the fucking reviews?
When you talk to your management and show them how overworked you are and ask for a helper. But don’t just say how much, show them in business lingo so they actually understand.
Fill out your calendar with the meetings and show management how you have no time for meaningful work because of meetings.
I’m on the Municipal side. City Council ain’t gonna raise taxes to hire more people.
I’ll get burned out and leave soon enough. The longest-serving person in the development department has been here just over a year, and we pay nearly double what other cities in the area do.
Senior engineers write enabling code/scaffolding, and review code, and mentor juniors. They also write feature code.
Lead engineers code and lead dev teams.
Principal engineers code, and talk about tech in meetings.
Senior Principal engineers, and distinguished technologists/fellows talk about tech, and maybe sometimes code.
Good managers go to meetings and shield the engineers from the stream of exec corporate bs. Infrequently they may rope any of the engineers in this chain in to explain the decisions that the engineers make along the way.
Bad managers bring engineers in to these meetings frequently.
Terrible managers make the engineering decisions and push those to the engineers.
People in the technical career track spend most of their time making software, one way or another (there comes a point were you’re doing more preparation to code than actual coding).
As soon as you jump into the management career track it’s mostly meetings to report the team’s progress to upper management, even if you’re supposedly “technically oriented”.
Absolutelly, as you become a more senior tech things become more and more about figuring out what needs to be done at higher and higher levels (i.e. systems design, software development process design) which results in needing to interact with more and more stakeholders (your whole team, other teams, end users, management) hence more meetings, but you still get to do lots of coding or at least code-adjacent stuff (i.e. design).
I’ve worked for startups too; everyone does everything all at the same time! Let the chaos reign! But it is fun in its own way.
I work for a large company now after the startup I worked for was acquired. Hierarchy, bureaucracy, layers, we’ve got it all. For worse and for better though, it allows me to focus and specialize on what I’m awesome at and furgeddaboddit (ahem! delegate) the stuff that I suck at to those who excel at those tasks.
There’s a lot of us neurodivergent folks in tech because it suits our needs better than a lot of other fields, and a lot of us just love technology
We’re more prone to being LGBTQIA+ than neurotypical folks, scientifically documented
Makes sense tech would have more trans folks as a result, we pad the numbers a lil bit
This is of course a generalization and actual ND/LGBTQIA+ presence is going to vary based on job, location, how insufferable management is, etc, and not all NDs are LGBTQIA+ and vice versa.
I wasn’t saying the latter but that’s an interesting idea. Not the former per se- the cis heteronormative gender and sexuality binary is bullshit and only exists bc religion (capitalism… moar serfs in fields) and generations of fear. There’s tons of fluidity in earlier civilizations and more in nature.
I’d just like to hear some comments from all the downvoters. Odd thing to get so defensive about Lemmy
In one notorious incident, Warren added a DWIM feature to the command interpreter used at Xerox PARC. One day another hacker there typed delete *$ to free up some disk space. (The editor there named backup files by appending $ to the original file name, so he was trying to delete any backup files left over from old editing sessions.) It happened that there weren’t any editor backup files, so DWIM helpfully reported *$ not found, assuming you meant ‘delete *’. It then started to delete all the files on the disk!
Of course there’s no point in trying to rationalize this 'cos these people use meetings to try justify their usefulness to the company (HR does the same with random activities), so you end up drawing red lines with invisible ink…
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