<story><title>Being a Female Developer</title><url>http://www.andela.com/blog/being-a-female-developer/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mamoswined</author><text>Honestly having been a &amp;quot;female developer&amp;quot; for 10+ years my main thought on the subject of being that is it&amp;#x27;s just a job. And it&amp;#x27;s a job that&amp;#x27;s really not for everyone. I&amp;#x27;ve tried to sell a lot of people I&amp;#x27;ve worked with in other fields on it, both men and women, and there are a lot of things that keep people away from it. And most of them are not related to gender.&lt;p&gt;I also have learned to have a healthy suspicion of companies that seem too obsessed with the &amp;quot;women in tech&amp;quot; thing. I usually find they seem to just be doing it because out of causes you could pick in tech, it has little downside for the company and even serves as a recruiting tool.</text></comment>
<story><title>Being a Female Developer</title><url>http://www.andela.com/blog/being-a-female-developer/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>wmsiler</author><text>Unlike most of the other commenters, I&amp;#x27;m not a huge fan of this article. From the article, it seems the author hasn&amp;#x27;t really experienced much, if any, gender discrimination at work. That&amp;#x27;s great; it really is refreshing to hear stories of women in tech who are judged purely on their merits, as they should be.&lt;p&gt;However, her two takeaways from her experience are, &amp;quot;your skills will speak louder than your gender,&amp;quot; and, &amp;quot;to become a female developer, you only have to do what any other smart dev would do...[i.e. work hard].&amp;quot; I think the problem is precisely that many women have found these statements to be false. Many women that are smart devs have gone into the tech sector with good skills, but found that they are still judged unfairly by their gender. The fact that this women hasn&amp;#x27;t experienced that doesn&amp;#x27;t mean the problem doesn&amp;#x27;t exist for others.&lt;p&gt;Also, the claim that if you work hard and have good skills, then your gender won&amp;#x27;t matter has the (probably unintended) implication that if you do find others discriminating against your based on your gender, then you must not have the skills or the work ethic.&lt;p&gt;I really don&amp;#x27;t know to what extent gender discrimination exists in the tech sector, but I think we should be careful to avoid over generalizing from individual experiences and we should be especially careful not to suggest that discrimination only happens to the developers whose skills aren&amp;#x27;t good enough to overcome other people&amp;#x27;s stereotypes.</text></comment>