How I, a woman in tech, benefited from sexism in Silicon Valley
The focus on individuals, of either gender, is short sighted. I&#x27;ve worked as an engineer in a male dominated environment, and a lawyer in gender balanced ones. When I think of what I&#x27;d want my daughter to do, I can&#x27;t help but think she&#x27;d have an easier time maximizing her potential in the latter field, where she doesn&#x27;t have to deal with the awkwardness of being the only woman on her team, or working only for men team leaders. Today, much of the pipeline in law is both gender balanced and gender blind. There are no programs to encourage girls to take the LSAT, no gnashing of teeth about not enough women graduating with JDs or applying to law firms. It&#x27;s not perfect (only a third of new partners are women, versus half of new associates) but we&#x27;re light years ahead of tech.<p>It wasn&#x27;t always that way. Fifty years ago, only 5% of women were lawyers (long after they were legally permitted to join the bar). People rolled out the same tropes--the work was too detail oriented and analytical for women, who preferred to work with people and children. They wouldn&#x27;t want to deal with the stress and long hours. Etc. That turned out to be bunk. Now, people who want to maintain the idea that women are predisposed to not going into tech have to resort to distinguishing what were archetypally &quot;male&quot; fields like law by redefining those fields to be women-friendly ones.<p>The legal profession fixed the problem of historic discrimination in the field by not being gender blind. Schools and law firms gnashed teeth about their gender ratios, like tech schools and companies are doing now. And while that may have been &quot;unfair&quot; to certain individuals at certain moments in time, it was the only way to fix society&#x27;s earlier sins.<p>A skewed gender ratio that is the product of past discrimination is itself a form of discrimination. If you want to claim to have leveled the playing field, then you have to actually level it and see if it stays level on its own. In law and medicine, that turned out to be the case. I don&#x27;t expect the situation will be different in tech.