I'm so happy to be accepted in Dev.to, even when I'm just a poor beginner who needs help with her english writing. I feel bad today, and I wanted to share with you something that's happening in Mexico, if not in the entire world.
If you read one of my first posts, you’ll know I'm a beginner, a baby in code, I have a communications degree but what I want for life is create awesome things with code. I don't know where you are, but at least in Mexico having a bachelor degree is essential because of status, but in the tech environment a paper can't proof your abilities, if you can code, you'll show your code to prove it. Of course, if you can study a software career it's better.
Anyway, I got my degree 2 months ago and started studying on my own, searching for a job in a communications area but in a tech company, so I can be in the area that I wanted. A couple of friends freaked out, telling me that I haded to just get a job for communications and stay there, communications is a women's career, programming is for nerd men. We're in 2018, those comments shouldn't exist.
There are organizations like Epic Queen, Laboratoria, and Women who Code where women are welcome to become a developer, because the women on science, engineers, developers or involved in tech is increasing, but the mentality is that "it's a men thing". Instead of discussing, scream or have an explosive reaction with my friends, I ask them for an explanation, 2 men trying to convince me, for not saying themselves, why men are better than women in science/tech. This was some of their points:
Women needs take more time.
Getting ready, getting pregnant. They said that men in tech can forget the entire world, they don't need "love" or relationships like women, they can stay in a lab or an office for three days and get more results than a group of women who can't stand even a day. I know, what kind of people are they?Men have the skill of being a boss, a CEO, women don't.
"Obviously", the boss have to be manly to give confidence to the employees and make better deals, they don't worry about the company because a man is in charge, but if it's a woman, how can they be sure she's not gonna get "bipolar" and do something stupid, or during their period she's gonna fired everyone. I mean, how stupid can someone be?WE ARE FRAGILE.
They can't say their opinion to a woman because they're gonna hurt her feelings, and if they do that, we become a bunch of "bitches" (sorry for the word).
To work in tech it's needed passion, discipline, teamwork, and vision, according to me, any career, work, project or anything according to a professional life requires that to be successful, and it has nothing to do with gender.
In Mexico City, I've found a lot of mentalities, but most of the tech environment welcomes women because we are as good as men, not better, equal. I can't go ask for a job when I know the basic of the basic and get mad because I didn't get it, we are not looking for exceptions, we're looking the opportunity to proof ourselves, like every human on this planet.
At the end, I told my "friends" to search Safra A. Catz, Susan Wojcicki, Sheryl Sandberg and some other amazing women. We can do wathever we want, all of us, women and men, men and women, we're not under nobody, and even if I'm a baby developer I'm sure of something: I CAN CODE.
Thanks for reading me, just wanted to get this out of my chest.
Hugs & Husky love! 🐶👩🏻💻
Latest comments (78)
Brenda,
Thanks for creating and Ladies for being in this community. My startup is in the Fintech/Web3 space and I'm interested in chatting with women in the space; potential co-founders (dev, ops, marketing). If want to be a founder and be a part of an amazing, next unicorn, schedule 15 minutes to chat with me in the next few weeks. Here's my Calendly : calendly.com/eshepay-eshefinance/3...
Looking forward to hearing back💜
Yesterday, I started teaching my little girl-cousin some programming. I wanted to teach her Elm, but she is on Windows. I tried to set things up that was a nightmare (I installed cygwin and node, but had some mistakes), so I went with JavaScript. As it turns out she hasn't yet learned decimal numbers so I started teaching her that along with the last tutorial of JavaScript 30.
Another thing I need to teach her is speed typing. Because she is slow. I'm going with typing.com (in case you want to teach someone touch typing, it's very well suited for children).
I believe any gender can learn programming and work in that area.
As to their comments: I don't know if they are... but they sound like ignorant people. I wouldn't listen to their opinion. I wouldn't start changing their opinion also. Changing someone's opinions, as I learned, a hard unthankful job. Sometimes even impossible. Maybe I just know some stubborn people.
In the sort of cases you described, it may be helpful to rephrase what all can go wrong? into what has to go right?
Recognized business leaders have lots of inspirational quotes and everyone tends to think of how many multipliers of extra work they are capable of. Whereas, in my anecdotal experience, the most surprising things are what they don't do.
Well said Brenda! For more than 10 years as a software engineer I have seen a lot of talented women change jobs because of old attitudes about women in tech. The truth is we are always just as good, if not better, than most men in our field. Good luck!
Awesome post! I'm glad you didn't let your "friends" bring you down! One of my most favorite developers that I have worked with was a woman! She was years older than me and taught me a lot when I was starting my first project.
There is no reason on earth, women are not coding as good as men.
I worked with one that was much better. :-)
Just a few of Iron Ladies ->
Eileen M. Uchitelle (eileencodes.com)
Sandi Metz (sandimetz.com)
You can do it too!
Actually, I call all of them programming, I was just letting my inner snark fly free.
Interestingly all those languages you mentioned were part of my journey as a programmer. From BASIC on the VIC-20, through Assembly and COBOL.
So I do owe some gratitude to all those amazing women who made me the coder I am today.
Thanks for reminding me of our history :)
In the old days, electronic computers fell into two camps - analog and digital. These days, digital computers have taken over, mostly because of stored program capabilities, but both were originally programmed by wiring as needed. It's not what we today call programming.
The first stored program computers were, in turn, programmed by entering the numeric opcodes and supporting data directly into memory (often via a separate programming board). It's not what we today call programming.
Rapidly, though, Kathleen Booth (Britten at the time) developed the first assembly language in 1947, and assemblers were developed from this - you then programmed by writing symbolic instructions that mapped directly to opcodes. It's not what we today call programming.
Then Grace Hopper developed a high-level portable language, previously largely considered impossible, and this (alongside Jean Sammet and others' work) lead to the development of COBOL in 1959. It's not what we today call programming.
Later, Mary Kennth Keller and others developed BASIC, a simple symbolc language especially designed for teaching. It's not what we today call programming.
These days, everyone just does stuff in Javascript in a web browser. That's not what I call programming.
Oh, there were some guys involved too, I think.
There's plenty of role models to follow - people who definitely proved that you can code, whatever gender you happen to be. To pick some that aren't listed in the comments that I've noticed so far, try Barbara Liskov and Jeanette Wing, who together developed the underpinnings of OO. Liskov didn't stop there either, she went on to take Byzantine Fault Tolerant distributed system theory and make a practical implementation (an NFS server). Prior to this, BFT systems had been considered interesting research lines, but not actually practical. In case you might think that BFT hasn't really made it out of the lab, you might have heard of "BitCoin", which is itself a (very slow) BFT database. She was awarded an honourary doctorate from ETH Zurich - the same year as Donald Knuth.
Jeanette Wing, meanwhile, went through the research arm of Microsoft - ending up as Corporate VP - before turning back to academia. Her own research is in formal methods and she also created and leads the discipline of "Computational Thinking", which is to programming what the Scientific Method is to science.
These aren't role models for just other people who happen to share the same gender. They're my role models, and they should be role models for everyone.
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