Don’t become a programmer like me

I recently stumbled upon this Quora post by a concerned parent asking for advice in discouraging her daughter from becoming a programmer:

How do I convince my daughter not to become a programmer like me?

At first glance, I was furious. I couldn’t fathom why a parent would purposely crush her daughter’s dreams of entering an exciting and challenging profession — particularly since she was a programmer herself. My anger subsided somewhat as I read through the responses. I even found myself empathizing with the parent to a degree.

The discussion reminded me of a similar debate I’d had with my own stepfather when I told him about my career change to software engineering. His reaction was far from positive, and he warned me that “engineering is very difficult for women.”As if I couldn’t handle it.

I eventually realized that his negative reaction, however misguided, came more from love than a lack of faith in my abilities. He viewed tech as a discriminatory workplace, and he foresaw an unfair battle for me as a newcomer in a male-dominated industry.

To be fair, the more I delve into the tech world, the more I discover that many of his fears were well-founded. I’ve been lucky to have limited trouble with discrimination in my professional life. It seems that the situation for women and minorities is indeed worse in tech than in other industries. That being said, I still disagree with my stepfather’s opinion.

Avoiding the problem does nothing to fix it, and walking away from tech simply because it’s “not for girls” would make me as much a part of the problem as the concerned parent from that Quora post.

Gender bias isn’t a problem we can sidestep. We’re far from a solution, and I hope that sharing some of my perspectives on the issue can add to the public discussion.

My own experiences

The circumstances of my own life have sheltered me somewhat from having to address discrimination as a factor in my decisions. My mother is a tech consultant, typically the only female on her team. She had raised me to view a female boss,  even in a technical field, as normal.

Growing up, I was a tomboy with a goofy bowl cut and spent most of my time hanging out with the guys. I outgrew the bowl cut, but I never outgrew the notion that I was equal to my male peers.

Now that I’m entering the world of software engineering, I’m realizing that my experience as a woman in tech is not the norm. Everyone I meet seems to have a discouraging story to throw at me. Here are a couple of the anecdotes I’ve heard just in the last few weeks:

1. A female engineer and three male engineers walk into a meeting room to meet with a client. The client immediately assumes that the men are engineers and the female must be a designer or marketer. The woman has actually been an engineer for 20 years.
2. A tech entrepreneur hires a female engineer and gives her what he thought was the typical bump in salary relative to her previous job. A year later, he realizes that he had been unknowingly underpaying her relative to another male engineer in the exact same position.
3. A woman teaching at a coding bootcamp observes that women are intimidated to apply for senior positions because they subconsciously feel that they can’t go up against men, and so they end up applying for junior roles. Meanwhile, their male peers graduate from the same program directly into senior roles.

Moving forward

The movement has begun