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The Typecast Tango: Avoiding the Frontend Label as a Woman In Tech

JTK on July 11, 2020

I recently tweeted something off the cuff that seemed to hit a note with some people // Detect dark theme var iframe = document.g...
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Gretchen Shelby-Dormer • Edited

Going into my second job in tech, as a self-taught programmer, I found myself in a really crappy situation. The lead I had insisted that I should switch from my software developer role to a technical writer role because I was able to string together two coherent sentences.

He asked me on numerous occasions if I even liked coding, or if I just didn't like challenges. On top of that, my lack of formal education was also brought up privately a handful of times in a really condescending fashion.

I am a self-taught programmer and I have numerous side projects that I work on outside of work; I stay up to date with tech news, and I recreationally complete tutorials to learn about things I haven't had the chance to use at work.

There was such a lack of collaboration on that team that I was actually told at one point that whenever I asked a question, they thought I was implying something and insulting them.

I'm extremely lucky that my requests to moved to another team before the end of my probation were heard. My new team doesn't have weird aggression issues and it's super collaborative.

I almost quit tech completely because of that lead, but I'm so glad I insisted on making a space for myself and I'm thankful that the company I'm at was willing to empower me.

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JTK

Ugh, I'm so sorry to hear this happened to you! I'm glad you got out to a good environment

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Gretchen Shelby-Dormer

Same, thanks! Another golden quote from him was "all female programmers suck"

Not sure if you've encountered that one yourself, or something similar, but would you have any suggestions on how to handle that kind of behavior?

I'm still pretty green in terms of experience, but I found that staring at him with my mouth agape didn't do much 😂

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JTK

I wish I had more advice other than to ask him if Grace Hopper or Ada Lovelace sucked.

The truth is when people have a determined bias in their heads I don’t know how much we can do to change it other than thrive, and make their reality living with women and Black programmers and queer programmers unavoidable. I don’t know that I ever think they come around on their own, but I do think they eventually have to respect the power structures they interact with.

In a way I realize that’s shitty advice because for underrepresented people to gain power they have to be damaged all the time by people around them on the way up 🙃

I don’t mean to be too doom and gloom. I would never turn my back on this field or what I’ve accomplished but I guess I think we have a sustained effort ahead to make sure no one is getting comments like those that you are getting ❤️

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Nathan

Sorry to hear that's been your experience. I've had just the opposite experience, where my female coworkers are only willing to take on backend tasks because they hate JS, so I've been pidgeon holed into front end. But it hasn't bothered me too much since I used the opportunity to become highly specialized and charge a higher rate as a result.

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JTK

Glad to hear it it sounds like it worked out in your favor!

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Tsotne Nazarashvili

it does not matter what you can do! it's only matter of what you want to do. it does not matter what it is if you don't want to do it reject it right away say anything like "i don't do X", "i don't want to do X", "i don't know how to do X and i don't want to learn it..." if asked "why?" either explain what you don't like about X or say that you are more passionate about Y and your contribution would be more productive doing Y (this is called soft skills).

if woman (or man) that you know are "pushed" to do something they don't like tell them to improve soft skills and to reject stuff they don't like to do and to speak about stuff they want to do with colleagues and management.

someone who don't like to do X and says something like "It will probably take me like a year to even be fluid with X stuff" is example of bad soft skills never say you can't do something when you don't want to do it!

also everyone doing everything is wrong on so many levels i can't imagine why would someone want to do that... (of course if someone agreed to do it on the interview then he should do it. at this point it does not matter if it's good idea or not)
it's like one person building skyscraper because he can learn anything

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JTK

Politely disagree, people can and do get pigeonholed into certain lines of work

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Tsotne Nazarashvili

yes and you need to have soft skills to get kind of job you want and not the kind someone else wants to give you

i am not saying problem does not exist i am saying it's not that hard to overcome the problem on your own

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JTK

The behavior was from management, and I did leave

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Ben Halpern

Wow, really authentic post. Thank you!

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Nicolus

I'll offload front-end work to anyone, male of female, without any discrimination. I really don't care as long as I don't have to do it.