Women in Tech: Take Your Career to the Next Level with Practical Advice and Inspiring Stories

by Tarah Wheeler

In 1984, 38 percent of computer science degrees were awarded to women. In 2014, less than 10 percent were. No matter how many role models, mentors, and larger-than-life superheroines exist in popular media, we are failing. We are failing to bring women into technology in the first place, and the number of women in technology is dropping every year.

Back home, I didn’t have to fight to get into more advanced math and science classes, and nobody cared that I was a girl—gender just isn’t as much of a sticking point in Jamaica, which has the highest percentage of female managers in the world.

Women interviewing for technical positions at companies are often drilled much further on their knowledge about typically male-oriented products—whether or not they’ll be supporting those products. I’ve heard that women were asked to draw a carburetor when applying for a web dev position at an auto dealer or to recite baseball statistics for a sports app mobile dev position.

interviewer will think you are putting on a front. There are several companies and technical interviewers I know who even make this a simple binary: if they’re in a suit, they can’t code. Or they’re in the wrong place for their project manager interview. Tech organizations discriminate strongly not just against wearing suits but also against people who could be described as “suits.” They assume you’re there to look good instead of think good.

We made a great hire of someone wearing a suit once! :)

Unfortunately, women who wear at least some makeup are generally seen as more professional and polished than women who do not. Though in my opinion it matters less in a technical interview, it does help to wear lip gloss and powder at least. I know it’s not fair or right; I’m telling you what I see succeed and what many others who’ve done research on professional women have found.

Lip gloss, really? I know my biases differ from mainstream on makeup, but recommending lip gloss surprises me.

Be wary of a situation where you’re the first woman on the team and you get the spoken or unspoken message that they’re glad to have you because they expect you to make the team grow up and act like professionals.

I had to hold my jaw up when I was talking to someone socially who actually said this. And it sounded like they were satisfied they had found one woman and were ‘done.’ I had to hold back telling them how horrible they were because of the relationships involved, but I thought this stuff was just in cartoon dysfunctional organizations....

There’s a serious problem with this assumption. In reality, one or two women will not civilize a team of brogrammers.

This isn’t the only problem, or even the most significant one. Your job description, and the reason she joined, is not to change other people’s ‘immature’ behavior. It’s to build. That’s a horrible responsibility to put on a team member, especially because it’s going to be implicit...and to be honest, probably resented by the ‘immature’ cretins on the team already. Ignore whether this ‘strategy’ might be effective and be fair to the hiree!

There is a big difference between a workplace that has not yet been able to acquire female engineers and is trying to do so and a workplace that is trying to change a culture that actively discourages or even prevents women from joining as engineers.

+1

If you find out after being hired that the perceived reason for your hiring was to make the boys grow up, start looking for a new job. That culture is broken, and you will not fix it. Even on the off chance that you spend hours, days, weeks, or months trying to get the others to behave and you somehow magically do, you’ve wasted your time on a task that gives you no extra money, takes up your emotional energy, and saps your desire to be in tech. You’re doing extra work for no extra pay.

Yes, this. Maybe also Glassdoor.

Children will interrupt your career plans. If you want to have them, go for it, but understand that doing so will incur a penalty on your career timeline. You are choosing to spend time with your children instead of your career, and it really is not possible to have it all. Fortunately, childcare seems to be trending toward a more equitable split.

Which is why employers should equalize (and perhaps enforce) parental leave, so we don’t put mothers behind fathers. And I agree that if someone chooses not to have any children at all, it’s very fair if their career ends up advancing a little faster due to not taking months/years off. I know that some disagree, but I don’t see how it can be any other way. I also believe it can be many times more meaningful than the career advancement delay to bring children into one’s family.

Also, let’s be totally honest: if you take a year off, that is a year of experience and skills you won’t have. Personally, I would be furious to find out that someone who’d left a career to have children and had less work experience and skills than I do was promoted over my head.

Begin thinking of yourself as needing a comeback plan. You’re going to plan in advance for how to come back with new killer skills parallel to the work you would have done but which are not a substitute for it.

Early-stage startups are not for you if you want to take substantial time off from your job to become a parent and expect to come back to the same role you left. I have never seen a primary caregiver parent with no nanny successfully found and exit a startup or do well in the first through tenth hired roles as a new parent, though I do personally know of one woman who had a lot of support and managed to sell her early-stage tech startup.

The level of logistics to handle administrative HR for maternity leave hasn’t even been considered yet when there are only three engineers, a technical marketer, and a CEO. If you take six months of leave from that company, it will either shut down or you will be removed from the equity stock pile and replaced.

We did it at Umamibud/Discovereads! :) exceptional circumstances and strength of relationships to be sure.

Marissa Mayer, the CEO of Yahoo, is not the primary caregiver for her small children; she has nannies on staff and administrators to handle her personal life so that she can enjoy the time she has with her children. Good for her; she’s living her life as she sees fit. But don’t pretend that if you can’t hire a nanny and a personal assistant and you are the primary caregiver for small children that you can have Marissa Mayer’s life and be in an early-stage startup.

Seriously.

the reason there are zero female tech billionaires (Meg Whitman, CEO of Hewlett-Packard, is the only female billionaire connected to tech that I know of, and she is an executive and politician, not a technologist or programmer) is that only early-stage startup founders have the kind of equity that means they can hit the jackpot if their company succeeds (after having made the sacrifice of time and life it takes to get the company up), and in our current environment, women are not supported by venture capital and angel investors if they have the barest whiff of mommy about them.

I’ve been sniffed out on the baby front from a potential investor as a man as well. “I see rings on your fingers [2 of 3 co-founders], do you have kids? Are you planning to?” Didn’t get that funding, perhaps for other reasons, but this probably didn’t help (we didn’t lie).

I found that I really liked it (not thermo, but a lot of the other classes) after a while. It was a lot of problem solving and thinking with different perspectives to break the rules, build new things, and make services, processes, or products better.

I felt the same way (esp thermo)!

Recruiters are much lazier than stalkers,

maybe fifty million girls a generation go into STEM fields. If they drop out at each point in their careers at twice the rate boys do, we end up with two Fortune 500 female tech CEOs. If we pour countless dollars into education and the start of the pipeline, and we add, say, 50 percent more girls, at the end we still end up with … three Fortune 500 female tech CEOs.

Emailing someone and telling them that you want mentorship is likely to get you nowhere, whereas asking for specific help in that person’s skill set is likely to get you a response. Over time, getting help and responding with gratitude (and more help) without expectation of reward will evolve into a mentor/mentee relationship.

Booze is a good present if you already know the person enjoys and will drink that particular kind but not under any other circumstances.

Seen this misfire, though obviously well intentioned, you do need to know they’ll actually enjoy it.

One of the best CEOs I’ve ever heard of thought of himself as the support staff for his team. When his team of developers was sick, even though the whole small company was on a deadline for shipping a product, this man showed up late at night with matzoh ball soup and emptied the trashcans full of snotty tissues himself.

And damn well made sure that everyone (including himself) got sick too. :)

Then I thought about the kind of person I wanted to be and how earlier in the day, a girl had emailed me to thank me for being a role model. I took a deep breath and deleted the tweet. I wouldn’t have contributed anything but meanness to the world if I’d hit “Send.” Sure, I would have scored some short-term humor points, but that’s not who I want to be.

Yes. Snark and bringing others down gets likes, but makes the world less.

Do not schedule your work. Schedule your free time and activities. Do not touch work during your free time. Startups are fantastical beasts that eat your free time, your life, your relationships, and your emotional energy. You must recharge to be successful and have the capacity to push forward to each milestone. It is very common to let hobbies and interests die as you are moving in the bootstrapping phase for a startup. Schedule and maintain at least one mental hobby and at least one physical hobby.

Good advice. And if the startup isn’t swallowing up all unscheduled time (at least occupying your thoughts), you may not be as dedicated to the success as you might need to be. Even if it’s a lifestyle business, it’s going to be hard to go from zero to that without the all-consuming phase. I’m sure it’s doable, but probably rare, especially so in a venture situation.

Let us be honest; part of the reason Sandberg and Mayer are so powerful now is the money they made. We all have dreams of cashing out, and the startup world is the best way to do it. No one ever gets rich (in the Western world’s definition of that word) working as a corporate drone. You can have a very successful and secure life as a corporate worker, but you will never be independently wealthy, and even if you do get to retire, you will not be able to do so young enough to pursue your real dreams. Have the audacity to become someone you would have admired at the age of ten.

Not so sure about this paragraph. There’s a lot to be said for spending wisely to grow wealth. Those FIRE people seem to be onto something. And are we all trying to be rich and retire as soon as we can? Is that the person you looked up to at 10 years old? ;)