The tech workplace has historically been unwelcoming and, at times, arguably hostile towards women. I obviously haven’t experienced this, but I have witnessed it. Even if I hadn’t personally witnessed it many times, the data has consistently backed this up, including via Wired’s new women in tech survey.
The takeaway I got was that many women are dealing with the disillusionment that I shared in my prior post, with an added layer of misogyny on top of the toxic mess that tech is right now. The unexpected thing, to me, is that it’s not as negative as it could be.
For example, the survey says 47% of women say tech is unchanged or worse for women over the past 5 years, but that still means 53% appear to have chosen an option indicating it’s better (though it’s not completely clear what the alternative options were in the survey). This is during a period when many (most?) large tech companies have openly abandoned their (albeit limited) DEI programs.
But overall the stats are still depressing, if not actually surprising:
More than a third of the women surveyed said they’d experienced gender-based harassment or bias at work.
This includes 21% who experienced it and another 15% who have both experienced and witnessed it. Some of the stories and pull quotes behind these stats are depressing too – as are, in a very different way, the quotes from women dismissing the experiences of other women, particularly the younger generation (“the early women of tech walked so that this generation could run, yet all I hear is how unfair everything is”), or expressing admiration for “Trump employing all the women he does.” 🤮
All this is to say, it’s worth a read.