As a Woman in Tech, I Realized: These Are Not My People
I have never seen any career that is so deeply tied to a certain culture as CS&#x2F;SWE and a certain culture that I&#x27;ll call X, to avoid any discussions on naming and so on.<p>I see far more diversity in tastes and interests in most other majors and careers, while in CS&#x2F;SWE, X seems to hold a monopoly.<p>CS&#x2F;SWE goes far beyond a career, usually becoming close to a religion or way of life. I rarely see doctors, lawyers, or most professions engaging in their practice outside work as a hobby, but in CS&#x2F;SWE, you&#x27;re evaluated by your hobbie-contributions on GitHub, your postings to HackerNews, etc.<p>There&#x27;s not a lot of room for people to be in CS&#x2F;SWE and not take part in all this non-work community.<p>And that brings us to X, a set of interests and values that permeate CS&#x2F;SWE workers, and frequently makes those interested in CS&#x2F;SWE feel unwelcome if they don&#x27;t take part in X.<p>It doesn&#x27;t matter if you&#x27;re a man or a woman (or any of the other identities&#x2F;genders&#x2F;etc.), if you don&#x27;t like X (which might include sci-fi, fantasy, video-games, board games, certain types of discussions, and a lot more), there&#x27;s a good chance that you might not feel like you belong in CS&#x2F;SWE (this isn&#x27;t universal, and I&#x27;ve seen many teams that embrace cultural diversity pretty well).<p>Sadly, for whatever reasons (I have my own hypothesis that the rise of male-dominated gaming culture in the 80&#x27;s and its further attachment to CS studies due to the overlap between coding and gaming is the cause) X is male-dominated. So even if men who don&#x27;t take part in X feel unwelcome, the impact is bigger on women, as they have a much lower representation in X.<p>One of the key pieces of information that led me to think like this, was this:
<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.randalolson.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;percent-bachelors-degrees-women-usa.png" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.randalolson.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;percent-bachel...</a><p>I don&#x27;t claim any authority on this, or even that this is correct. These are just my own (low-n) observations, and I&#x27;m pretty sure a good part (if not all) of it probably doesn&#x27;t stand up to reality.<p>So I&#x27;m probably all wrong here, but I&#x27;d love to hear your thoughts on this.<p>My gut feeling is that I shouldn&#x27;t post this, as the previous discussions here about this issue are borderline flamewars, from both sides, but I still have hope that some good discussions are possible here.