Real challenges for women in IT

Many words have been spoken and written about women in IT. In many cases I’d disagree with what has been promoted, and namely that “IT is man’s professional field” and related complaints, “white straight men occupied the sphere and don’t let women in” and so on.
As a woman in IT I didn’t experience that, despite my long and hard entry period to the field. I don’t complaint, because every professional sphere is highly competitive and requires every day struggle.

I have never experienced any mistreatment or humiliation from my fellow male developer colleagues, although many of them have different characters and reactions. However, I experienced difficulties with female colleagues. I think that women take everything very personally (some of them may fall in hysteria if their PR was rejected), and women may be way more abusing and vengeful than men. That’s why it always takes me quite a while (up to a year) to build communication with women colleagues.

Anyway, this is not a topic today. I want to raise some real issues with women in IT.

IT companies hire women because they want to show off
That’s a fuckin’ problem. And that’s what really happens. It’s pure gender discrimination, moreover it’s very humiliating when you’re hired just because of vagina. And it’s really hard to figure out during interview whether it is happening in the company where you apply to. I’m currently working in a team with +50% of women devs, and given that half of them have continuously been hired within last couple of months, it started to raise some questions, although HRs officially denied obvious things.

Lower salaries
It’s not a surprise, that women are paid less. From my experience, men in IT are paid more and are getting promotion quicker than women. This is very sad truth, and I don’t know why it’s happening. Maybe one of the reasons is that women are kinda used to overcritisize themselves, be less aggressive and persisting than men, and therefore they rarely ask for promotion or negotiate better salary. This is what women, in my opinion, should change in themselves and stop really blaming men. It took me a while to learn this lesson, but I overcame my fears and if I think that I deserve better compensation for my work and skills, I go and openly discuss it with my boss. If my expectations are ignored, then this is obviously not the right place to work at.

Women are not promoted
Lately HR from my company decided to organise a meetup dedicated to women and diversity in IT. Of course, it was expected that all women from different teams should participate, propose topics, organise the event, raise money to get some snacks and stickers. Basically everything was arranged by my colleagues, including their own financing (because company “doesn’t have money for that”) for the sake of promotion company’s values. However, when it comes to values, try to guess how many women in IT dep have management roles and/or were promoted during the last 12 months? Right, 0.
All management roles have been taken by men, and only men have been promoted during last 12 months. Very sad.

To sum up: yes, women experience biases and humiliation, but not in the sentimental way, as many of us might perceive. Apart from emotions and tearful complaints, real problems exist, and I think it would be great if women were treated in the same way as men. It would be good if women were more kind to each other and more persistent when it comes to negotiating better conditions for themselves.
And yes, I want to thank to my male dev and QA colleagues for their support and help.

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