About women in tech
If you are a man reading this post, let me start with the bad news: We don’t have a clue about how it feels to be a woman in tech. Actually, we don’t have a clue about how it feels to be a woman. Period.
One of my best friends is a great developer and team leader and she always have to deal with the issue of people don’t trusting her technical skills when they first met her. It’s like if in our field women need to do extra effort to be recognized as valuable members of a team.
And of course there is the problem that almost every women I have met in my life has dealt with a stalker, feeling threatened by groups of men yelling nasty things at them, having her ass grabbed by a random stranger in the street or being assaulted in even more horrifying ways.
While I can empathize with that I really don’t know how it feels to be a woman.
Why worry about it if I’m a man? First of all, common decency. But also I just don’t want to raise a daughter (or son) in a world where all rules for women are created by men, where people count her number of sexual partners to judge if she is a “slut” or not, where she can’t dress the way she wants for fear of being assaulted or again being called a slut, where she needs to double her efforts to be noticed as a good professional or where people would blame her if she is assaulted by a man.
So, what can we do to improve this as men? First of all, we need to shup the fuck up and start listening to what women have to say, maybe we can learn a thing or two.
Finally, I want to say thank you to people like Ashe Dryden and Shanley Kane who have raised awareness about the lack of diversity in our field.