How can this even be a thing? Outraged

But you have to get up the ladder, and as far as I can see, my department are more interested in removing the rungs to protect their own positionsite.

It gets better - it seriously does.

Working your way up the ladder makes it easier. Every woman you get onto your team makes it easier. Every harrassment case won makes it easier.

When the going gets tough I like to tell myself that we're trailblazers for the onslaught of concentrated female tech savvyness that's sure to follow in our tracks. A girl can dream, right?

Ebearhug, that is exactly what I said to some school friends I met for dinner.

Working in tech I almost forget that there are areas like being a Gp where women really do hold lots of influence and must del like equality has been almost achieved.

Seriously though I don't know if I would recommend the tech route to my daughter.

No, indeed there isn't. It only takes one or two condescending sysadmins or devs in order to turn a bright eyed young graduate into a flame spewing dragon crusading for gender equality in tech - seen it happen on myself and am now seeing it on my own graduate scheme trainees.

Looks like there are loads of women in tech frequenting the feminist pages of mumsnet at any rate.

Nothing like being a woman in tech to bring out any feminist tendencies!

Slightlyglitteredbrained if you are in the south east perhaps you can pm me where you work? Sounds great. Looks like there are loads of women in tech frequenting the feminist pages of mumsnet at any rate.

I work in a flat organisation with no special titles but I figure that by salary and responsibility and experience I am at the top of the tech range. I would like to be a team leader at some point but the kids are still little and I feel more like I want to lean out not in right now.

I think the guys I work with are lovely by the way. But I can go weeks without having more than a passing chat with a woman.

I have worked with 3 in current role (1 still here, others moved on), 1 sysadmin, 6 test engineers (1 was ex-dev); role before was, erm 7 female devs (inc 2 at tech lead/architect level - i.e. highest tech track role), 4 testers, sysadmins were in next room so not counting them, plus 2 team managers.

Looks like I have been hogging all the women programmers. Sorry!

Have always worked in private sector, don't know what public sector is like. Mix of big corp & very small co.

Love "Agile working".

At the moment there is only one other woman working in IT in the organisation where I work and we don't work together directly. It gets a bit lonely/odd in some ways the lack of female company.

That's why I like going to women in technology events.

I am mostly not deferential, but I do try and be constructive in my criticism. Unfortunately, we have a manager with almost no people skills, who takes any criticism as a personal attack, rather than looking at ways of doing things better.

What is your position, Toast? I've found it easier to get women on the team once I moved up to a place where I was in charge of it.

TBH the co-workers I have the strongest personal bond with are both men. They're my mentors and I like them enormously (and vice versa). I do really try to mentor the junior women around me, though, (no women on my own level of seniority around here either) and hope that in time I'll build some strong connections with them, too.

GreenTomatoJam and MagicalHamSandwich I have been working as a software developer for 14 years and I have only worked directly with one other woman in the whole of my career. At the moment there is only one other woman working in IT in the organisation where I work and we don't work together directly. It gets a bit lonely/odd in some ways the lack of female company.

I'm an agility coach among other things - challenge accepted, I'll see if I can sell this terminology to a few client projects here and there ...

What really bothers me about hiring or staffing women is that many of us just seem so ... deferential. This is something that I find really hard to sell in a setting where our clients often hire us because they're basically doing stuff wrong. I need people to be able to challenge assumptions and ideas. Men tend to do this way better IME (won't go into the obvious and less obvious reasons here). Many men even do this when they obviously have no clue what the hell they're talking about.

And this is precisely why stuff like the phone sock is so harmful. Women don't only need technical or math skills, they also need the confidence to see themselves as competent in their field in order to really excel or they will forever remain junior employees. Reinforcing stereotypes such as this is just so very unhelpful in that respect.

Actually, I'm making a change based off a metro article I read on the tube yesterday (30% club - 30% of boards to be women) - calling it Agile working, not flexible working - plays straight into software development hands using the word Agile :D

if it wasnt true, then it would be a parody.

But the sad fact is a significant majority do buy into the boys= maths and science, girls = art and being pretty.

That's Awesome Ham.

I too (directly caused by reading MN FWR I might add) was responsible for the first two actual hires at my startup - one woman, and one man. I totally believe in hiring a woman if they're there, seeking them out if not, and luckily, all my co-founders believe in flexible working for parents which helps a great deal.

I can also say, that knowing the salaries we're all on, they are all comparable, and no-one is earning less because they are female.

Now we just need to get this out to the rest of startup culture.

Proud to say my team of programmers (in a corporate setting) consists of 50% women exactly.

Somewhat less grounds for pride is that this didn't simply happen but is the result of me being in charge of staffing them and both actively pushing for it and asking for more CVs of women when I get an opening.

There's one of them that I would like to eventually take over the team lead position. The current team lead is a man. He's not bad but nowhere near brilliant. She'd wipe the floor with him if given a chance. Not happening for the time being because ... politics. I'll get my chance to place her eventually.

I've only ever been private sector (public sector wouldn't touch me with a barge pole - for a few reasons) - spread all around the world too.

Actually, I'm probably not speaking the truth - I'm pretty sure that some of the people on my outsourced Indian teams were women now that I think about it. Still, I've very rarely shared an office (even enormous open plan) with another female tech.

Where do we all go? At Primary the top 3 in maths were girls, at Secondary, A-level maths was 50% female (not so physics.. was hounded out of that by the head of physics, to my shame now I'm older because the only other girl stuck it out and didn't have a good experience on her own). Then my CS related degree was 6 women to about 50 men (most of our classes were shared so it's hard to know exactly), and my career has been entirely male dominated until my current company where in a recent C-level meeting 50% of the people were women, and all had kids we shared responsibility for (except for one woman)

I've worked with female programmers. Both in private and public sector. That said now I think back on private sector job there was only one other.

Bah.

I just shocked DS1's teacher when I told her I'm a programmer (Rather more than that actually, but when asked that's what comes out of my mouth first) - because her husband is a programmer and he says he's never actually worked with a woman!

I thought back, and he's right - in 15 years I've only ever worked with one other female developer. I've interviewed one other, and I've worked with 1 female sysadmin, 2 female head of supports, 1 female tester (and one trans funnily enough), and 1 female tech support (who got sick of the harassment when on her hands and knees under a desk fixing things and defected to HR).

I think it's all crazy, but then my mum is a maths wiz who did Pure maths at Uni (and would have got a first if she wasn't trying to look after 4 young kids and commuting an hour each way to do her degree!). I score very even on those unconscious subject bias test thingies - and I assume that's why.

You can joke about it and be ironic once it stops being a thing. It's still a thing.

Um, ok.

That statement broke my bullshitometer.

"We will, however, look to continue our work to encourage women into STEM roles"

Blimey, it's unusual for the award for self serving bullshit to be given out so early in the year, but step forward 2016's winner!

Sorry, guys (I'm assuming you're guys) but ironic sexism is still sexism. And if you have to point out that something's a parody you may have just fallen victim to Poe's Law. Which is never a good thing because it suggests that there is a loud enough to be heard drop dead serious crowd out there who actually argues for real what you apparently think of as a joke.

In all seriousness: I could probably get away with walking into a meeting with said phone sock. But only with people I've worked closely with and only because my office nick name is 'the brain'. Try this with any new client and I would immediately be pigeonholed as the pretty but dumb one. (Actually that will usually happen anyway and last until I intellectually overpower them at the earliest opportunity for this precise reason.) Irony is a brilliant thing - but only if it's recognized as such.

tweet @EE as I did and you will get a miserable reply about it being a parody. At which point you could tell them to fuck off massively. But tell them that's only a parody.

Unbe-fucking-lievable!

I'm not a physics or maths teacher but I am a software engineer. I and many other women in my firm and my field work really hard to try and convince women to get into STEM subjects. At my firm we've successfully lobbied the leadership in making a concerted effort to recruit more women and even to finance efforts to encourage girls much too young for our workforce into these subjects. This is really the last thing we need!

Can we Twitter bomb them into submission?

Oh, and just for the record: I look pretty fucking stunning despite being intellectually brilliant, thanks ever so much!

Hooray!