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/SWE and a certain culture that I'll call X, to avoid any discussions on naming and so on.I see far more diversity in tastes and interests in most other majors and careers, while in CS/SWE, X seems to hold a monopoly.CS/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/SWE, you're evaluated by your hobbie-contributions on GitHub, your postings to HackerNews, etc.There's not a lot of room for people to be in CS/SWE and not take part in all this non-work community.And that brings us to X, a set of interests and values that permeate CS/SWE workers, and frequently makes those interested in CS/SWE feel unwelcome if they don't take part in X.It doesn't matter if you're a man or a woman (or any of the other identities/genders/etc.), if you don't like X (which might include sci-fi, fantasy, video-games, board games, certain types of discussions, and a lot more), there's a good chance that you might not feel like you belong in CS/SWE (this isn't universal, and I've seen many teams that embrace cultural diversity pretty well).Sadly, for whatever reasons (I have my own hypothesis that the rise of male-dominated gaming culture in the 80'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't take part in X feel unwelcome, the impact is bigger on women, as they have a much lower representation in X.One of the key pieces of information that led me to think like this, was this:
http://www.randalolson.com/wp-content/uploads/percent-bachel...I don't claim any authority on this, or even that this is correct. These are just my own (low-n) observations, and I'm pretty sure a good part (if not all) of it probably doesn't stand up to reality.So I'm probably all wrong here, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.My gut feeling is that I shouldn'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.