Girls just wanna Ho-Gram…no Bra-Gram… no wait I’m a Pro-Glammer… Wut?
April 27th, 2012
Having come from a life in show business where I was judged daily on the most superficial terms, I’m not readily angered or upset by sexist stupid shit.
There’s just so much of it. Everywhere. That I choose to ignore it.
“…Wut?”, I hear you say.
But here’s where I’m coming from. I have a great deal of respect for the women who are fighting the good fight head on. But that doesn’t work for me. I just don’t win in those situations.
Instead I choose to just be a positive example. Yeah, I guess that’s a passive agressive way of bringing folks to task. But focussing on all the negativity just brings me down. I don’t want to talk about all the things the boys won’t let me do. I don’t want to talk about all the things the boys tell me I’m supposed to be.
All I wanna do is ignore the haters and write awesome code.
But. I think I’ve been naive.
I keep hearing about stuff. Bad stuff. I mean, like the whole Sqoot thing right here in Boston. What year is this? Have ya’all been living under a rock? You can’t get away with that shit anymore. Or can you?
Now, at first I liked the whole bro-gramming meme. To me, it seemed like it started out as a self deprecating joke amongst the hipsters. Hell, I wanted to be a “bro” myself. Seemed like fun. But now, I think the fear is that it’s more of a battle cry to round up fresh tech talent from a pool of jerks.
Well, okay… if you wanna hire assholes then go ahead and add this to your adjective list along with ‘rockstar’, ‘ninja’ and ‘jedi’. But honestly, some guys are taking this bro-grammer thing to heart.
For the last three months, I’ve worked in a startup incubator space. I can stand up and see five or more separate companies with their own personalities all around me. The majority of folks are *wonderful*. And I’ve loved being in such an energized, youthful place.
But then you have your bros. The guys who stand up and pace, talking loudly on their headsets. The ones who throw around terms like ‘gangbang’ and ‘bitch’ to their male colleagues, ignoring the fact that they’re offending people sitting not three feet away.
Oh, and here’s the kicker. One of them upon learning that I was a developer said, “Wow. You’re a girl programmer? You should use that to your advantage.”
Honestly, most if the time I would let a comment like that go. But when weighed against everything else…
So, what do I do about it? What’s my responsibility here? There’s no HR department to complain to.
Honestly, do I need to do anything? These guys are alienating everyone around them. They’re not making the smart, necessary connections within the startup community that they need because men and women alike can’t stand them.
I will personally go out of my way to continue being an awesome rails dev with awesome rails dev friends and encourage them *not* to join “that startup”. And I have faith that they will implode and fail, and look like an ass doing so without my calling them out publicly to people who already hate them.
Ack, I’m back to being passive aggressive.
Entry Filed under: Personal,Professional,Ruby on Rails
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1. Pam | April 28th, 2012 at 1:04 pm
I love the sentiment here. I don’t see it as passive agressive, so much (loaded term), but just being an awesome person. Carry on.
2. BILLIE REDA SOWERS | May 16th, 2012 at 1:31 pm
LIANA,
I AGREE WITH EVERY DAMN WORD!!
BILLIE
3. searcher | May 26th, 2012 at 7:46 pm
Well I don’t know. i think maybe I was naive until recently, because I thought if you love programming all you have to do is work hard and sexism will never cause you any trouble. Looking back now I see that sometimes aggressive young men damaged my career, but not enough to discourage me.
Now that I am much older I am having serious trouble with young men. If you are a young women they might give you a hard time, but at least they find you interesting and they like having you around. If you are a middle aged or older woman, that is not the case.
I loved programming since I started 25 years ago and I still love it. I was so grateful to be able to make money doing one of the things i like doing. I never expected things to get as bad as they are right now.
I worked for a male manager half my age for the past 6 years. He did not hire me. He hired all the rest of his programmers, and they are all young men like him. I feel out of place and I have been treated very differently from the others, I feel.
My biggest challenge with this manager was getting him to give me projects. Whenever he did give me a project, it was a dud. So I did not get 6 years of experience in the past 6 years.
Recently he started threatening to fire me because he says I am at a very low level compared to the guys he hired. Well yes Iit’s true I am lacking good experience. But there is nothing wrong with me to prevent me from catching up.
He did give me a good project a couple of months ago, my chance to finally prove I am not a complete moron. But I don’t think anything will convince him.
My manager has been involved in open source on github for the past 4 years, but I knew nothing about github until last year when a co-worker told me about it.
Almost every important thing I learn has been from random conversations with co-workers. Fortunately, some programmers love to talk and when they do I always listen.
If not for my young male co-workers, there is no way I could have survived at my job this long.
Recently I used an open source library in my project and I found and fixed some bugs in it. I knew about forking from a co-worker — of course my boss would never have told me. But I didn’t know what to do with my bug fixes.
I asked another co-worker and he told me about pull requests. My boss knew I had forked and fixed some bugs, but of course he never told me about pull requests.
So I sent a pull request and it was accepted. This was my very first pull request so I was pretty elated.
But of course my boss is not impressed.
As much as I love programming, and as happy as I was to start getting involved in open source, I have started to think I should try to get out of this field as soon as I can.
My boss is so unhelpful and I am usually afraid to ask him anything. I would rather search in google for hours, and if that fails ask my co-workers. My boss gives me the “you idiot” look any chance he gets.
I have been crying hysterically to HR many times. They can’t do anything and I’m sure they are tired of it.
I am way way over 40 and therefore too old to get another job.
I was never a feminist and I hated the idea of blaming sexism for my troubles. But when you combine sexism with age-ism it can be pretty lethal. it really really hurts.
4. lianaleahy | May 28th, 2012 at 11:26 am
Dear Searcher,
Please don’t give up! I am over 40 and I have been where you are… many times. My advice to you is GET OUT.
Programmers (especially women.. even ones over 40 and with kids) are in high demand. If you’ve already been contributing to open source on your own, likely you’re the kind of person who would be a huge asset to any company. Believe it.
There is NO reason for you to put up with a job that does not make you happy. I *love* *love* *love* my current job and you can too. I promise!
Are you familiar with a website called devchix.com? Here you will find other women programmers just like you who will provide ALL the support you need in finding another job that you will love.
Best of luck!
Liana