a minor moment for women in the workplace
For those of us who work in the tech industry it comes as no surprise that suddenly, miraculously, we are no longer the far-left California-based boogieman that spent the last decade captured by cultural Marxism. Now, seemingly overnight, we are back to our roots of prioritizing free speech and acting as icons of libertarianism and rational thought and bla bla bla. While right-wing conspiracy theorists can now claim victory in a war that was entirely fought in their own media bubble, the rest of us can only shrug at the cynicism of the self-important blow-hards who ran our industry from the start and never cared about anything deeper than growing their own wealth and power.
But, amidst the whiplash of big tech being bad because DEI something something, except now we're good because DOGE something something, there actually was a diversity milestone in my career that quietly happened toward the end of 2024.
I have been employed in the tech industry since 1999. In my very first job as an "information technology officer" i had a boss who was a woman. You might think, wow, two women on the same IT team, pretty progressive for 1999! Except at the time i was still presenting as a guy. When i decided to transition, i came out to my boss - who was an out lesbian and exactly the kind of tough-as-nails woman you would expect to see in our industry 25 years ago - and she agreed to write me a reference letter using my new name so i could try continue my career as a woman going forward.
I landed a job at a small company where only i and the secretary (remember those?) were women. Eventually we hired another female developer and i enjoyed a short overlap before she left the industry and got into real estate. (She never stopped playing ice hockey and mountain biking, though, so you can imagine the type.)
5 years later i joined an office of around 30 men, and boy was that one of the roughest, crudest places i ever worked. Our internal IRC channel was extremely explicit, like 4chan level grotesque at times, women and gays were the butt of every joke, and the expectation was you just gotta man up to hang. So i did. Went out drinking. Joined their online gaming sessions. Laughed it up with the best of them. We eventually hired one other woman in a QA role, a tiny lady with a master's degree who stayed quiet-as-a-mouse and just did the work.
And so the story continued, 2007, 2011, 2014... Working in departments with 50, 100, 500 men and maybe a few women in QA roles, or product management roles, or graphic design roles, or anything kind of girly and soft and supportive. But little by little i started to encounter other female engineers. Not just lesbians, not just sporty tomboys, not just bookish high achievers, but traditionally femme engineers too! Like with lipstick and mascara and the kind of bangin' bods that would've been openly leered at during my earlier days in the industry. Even still, it was rare that i would ever work with a woman on the same team.
Then this whole social justice thing started, hashtag metoo, girlboss feminism bla bla bla, and all the male white knights desperate for female approval volunteered to run "girls who code" programs and promote "women in tech" groups. I think some of them might have been legitimately trying to change things for the better, but most of them came across as creeps to me. Never trust a man who says he's a feminist, he's obviously compensating. However, i do understand that i might have been biased from having worked so long amongst the most laddish of the bunch. I also resented a little bit the expectation that as a woman i should be involved in building up these groups because fuck man, i paid my dues, i'm done. But if i'm honest there was the shame of being trans overlaid with it.
Yeah, yeah, i know, intersectionality or whatever, but that just makes me feel even more guilty. You're saying i'm an even more special woman because i'm trans too? Nah, not in the tech industry i'm sorry. In this specific context, trans women are over-represented despite still being a minority of women in tech overall, and i believe it's because - certainly 25 years ago - we grew up with a degree of male privilege that granted us a bit more access into traditionally male pursuits as children, which might have led to us having an easier time not only developing an interest in STEM but also putting up with the casual sexism and general bro-ishness of the industry in those days. I feel like my experience isn't really worth putting out there for today's girls who might be interested in tech, whether cis or trans, because they are growing up in what is hopefully a much more supportive and less toxic environment to begin with.
And yet, we're still looking at women software engineers making up at best 20% of the workplace anywhere i worked. The usual race science apologists and totally rational centrists would say it's because the female brain is intrinsically hardwired for nurturing children and not solving hard problems, but their argument is too stupid to waste my time with. Trust me, working in a male-dominated industry full of men who think they are smarter than the average man i've heard it all, repeatedly. It's very tedious. Mansplaining is rife. The truth is the tech industry is still not a very welcoming place for a woman to work, although it is a lot better than it used to be.
Guess what?
In 2024, i opened a change request to improve some code in a particular application. It happened to be an application where a young woman on a team adjacent to mine has been working, and due to various holidays and annual leave there wasn't anyone else on her team to act as a secondary reviewer, so i put my own boss as the secondary reviewer. And suddenly it hit me. After 25 years in the industry, for the very first time, i - a woman - had opened a change request, and both reviewers of that request were also women. Not because i had specifically sought out women to do the code review, but simply because they were the two best people for the job.
Think about that. Something software developers do every single day as a normal part of their work - open a change request - after 25 years i finally had a single instance where this process could be completed without male approval. Now, to be fair, there's been plenty of times where i bypassed review and just committed my own changes, or where i had one female colleague do a solo review because the change wasn't critical, but there's a degree of formality around having at least two other sets of eyes look at your change, and this is the first time all of those eyes have been women.
The thing is, this young developer on the adjacent team, for her this has now happened at the start of her career! And so for her this probably wasn't a momentuous occasion, it was just another code review. Click the approve button, move on. And when she's hanging out with her younger friends at the club, or when she's talking to her nieces at Christmas, or if she one day has a daughter, or friends with daughters, she'll be a living, breathing unremarkable example of an ordinary woman who happens to be a software engineer, a boring white collar job just like any other. And then those girls will see it as a possibility, and if they dig playing around with computers they'll get into it too, and who knows, maybe one day the demographic split will get closer to 50%. No doubt there will still be a bunch of butthurt men complaining that their jobs have been stolen by the biologically inferior sex, but hopefully most of them will come to realize that women are just people too actually so why shouldn't we get to toil our lives away in the same salt mines?
Representation matters.
Anyway, i have been wanting to celebrate this momentuous occasion for a few months now, but i kept getting distracted, and i figured this latest week of tech bros once again showing themselves to be the douchebags we always knew they were is as good a time as any.
It's very cold out and i am about 12 days from my flight down under. I have much to write about that, but for now i will share a photo from last weekend when i finally plucked up the nerve to go on a bike ride in the deep freeze.
Looking forward to a taste of that southern hemisphere summer.
But, amidst the whiplash of big tech being bad because DEI something something, except now we're good because DOGE something something, there actually was a diversity milestone in my career that quietly happened toward the end of 2024.
I have been employed in the tech industry since 1999. In my very first job as an "information technology officer" i had a boss who was a woman. You might think, wow, two women on the same IT team, pretty progressive for 1999! Except at the time i was still presenting as a guy. When i decided to transition, i came out to my boss - who was an out lesbian and exactly the kind of tough-as-nails woman you would expect to see in our industry 25 years ago - and she agreed to write me a reference letter using my new name so i could try continue my career as a woman going forward.
I landed a job at a small company where only i and the secretary (remember those?) were women. Eventually we hired another female developer and i enjoyed a short overlap before she left the industry and got into real estate. (She never stopped playing ice hockey and mountain biking, though, so you can imagine the type.)
5 years later i joined an office of around 30 men, and boy was that one of the roughest, crudest places i ever worked. Our internal IRC channel was extremely explicit, like 4chan level grotesque at times, women and gays were the butt of every joke, and the expectation was you just gotta man up to hang. So i did. Went out drinking. Joined their online gaming sessions. Laughed it up with the best of them. We eventually hired one other woman in a QA role, a tiny lady with a master's degree who stayed quiet-as-a-mouse and just did the work.
And so the story continued, 2007, 2011, 2014... Working in departments with 50, 100, 500 men and maybe a few women in QA roles, or product management roles, or graphic design roles, or anything kind of girly and soft and supportive. But little by little i started to encounter other female engineers. Not just lesbians, not just sporty tomboys, not just bookish high achievers, but traditionally femme engineers too! Like with lipstick and mascara and the kind of bangin' bods that would've been openly leered at during my earlier days in the industry. Even still, it was rare that i would ever work with a woman on the same team.
Then this whole social justice thing started, hashtag metoo, girlboss feminism bla bla bla, and all the male white knights desperate for female approval volunteered to run "girls who code" programs and promote "women in tech" groups. I think some of them might have been legitimately trying to change things for the better, but most of them came across as creeps to me. Never trust a man who says he's a feminist, he's obviously compensating. However, i do understand that i might have been biased from having worked so long amongst the most laddish of the bunch. I also resented a little bit the expectation that as a woman i should be involved in building up these groups because fuck man, i paid my dues, i'm done. But if i'm honest there was the shame of being trans overlaid with it.
Yeah, yeah, i know, intersectionality or whatever, but that just makes me feel even more guilty. You're saying i'm an even more special woman because i'm trans too? Nah, not in the tech industry i'm sorry. In this specific context, trans women are over-represented despite still being a minority of women in tech overall, and i believe it's because - certainly 25 years ago - we grew up with a degree of male privilege that granted us a bit more access into traditionally male pursuits as children, which might have led to us having an easier time not only developing an interest in STEM but also putting up with the casual sexism and general bro-ishness of the industry in those days. I feel like my experience isn't really worth putting out there for today's girls who might be interested in tech, whether cis or trans, because they are growing up in what is hopefully a much more supportive and less toxic environment to begin with.
And yet, we're still looking at women software engineers making up at best 20% of the workplace anywhere i worked. The usual race science apologists and totally rational centrists would say it's because the female brain is intrinsically hardwired for nurturing children and not solving hard problems, but their argument is too stupid to waste my time with. Trust me, working in a male-dominated industry full of men who think they are smarter than the average man i've heard it all, repeatedly. It's very tedious. Mansplaining is rife. The truth is the tech industry is still not a very welcoming place for a woman to work, although it is a lot better than it used to be.
Guess what?
In 2024, i opened a change request to improve some code in a particular application. It happened to be an application where a young woman on a team adjacent to mine has been working, and due to various holidays and annual leave there wasn't anyone else on her team to act as a secondary reviewer, so i put my own boss as the secondary reviewer. And suddenly it hit me. After 25 years in the industry, for the very first time, i - a woman - had opened a change request, and both reviewers of that request were also women. Not because i had specifically sought out women to do the code review, but simply because they were the two best people for the job.
Think about that. Something software developers do every single day as a normal part of their work - open a change request - after 25 years i finally had a single instance where this process could be completed without male approval. Now, to be fair, there's been plenty of times where i bypassed review and just committed my own changes, or where i had one female colleague do a solo review because the change wasn't critical, but there's a degree of formality around having at least two other sets of eyes look at your change, and this is the first time all of those eyes have been women.
The thing is, this young developer on the adjacent team, for her this has now happened at the start of her career! And so for her this probably wasn't a momentuous occasion, it was just another code review. Click the approve button, move on. And when she's hanging out with her younger friends at the club, or when she's talking to her nieces at Christmas, or if she one day has a daughter, or friends with daughters, she'll be a living, breathing unremarkable example of an ordinary woman who happens to be a software engineer, a boring white collar job just like any other. And then those girls will see it as a possibility, and if they dig playing around with computers they'll get into it too, and who knows, maybe one day the demographic split will get closer to 50%. No doubt there will still be a bunch of butthurt men complaining that their jobs have been stolen by the biologically inferior sex, but hopefully most of them will come to realize that women are just people too actually so why shouldn't we get to toil our lives away in the same salt mines?
Representation matters.
Anyway, i have been wanting to celebrate this momentuous occasion for a few months now, but i kept getting distracted, and i figured this latest week of tech bros once again showing themselves to be the douchebags we always knew they were is as good a time as any.
It's very cold out and i am about 12 days from my flight down under. I have much to write about that, but for now i will share a photo from last weekend when i finally plucked up the nerve to go on a bike ride in the deep freeze.
Looking forward to a taste of that southern hemisphere summer.