This discussion is mainly for women in tech careers. Have you ever faced discrimination at any stage in your tech studies or career due to your gender? Or has any other woman that you know ever faced such issues? I will share some discrimination that I faced:
- A guy who was my teammate in a college project said to the teacher "Yes, we will finish the project ma'am". The project was for a hackathon and the hackathon had a rule that each team should have at least one female in it. So our team had three females and three males because the teacher had suggested the guy who formed the team to have equal number of girls. Now this guy when he said we will finish the project, he meant himself and the other two guys. He made that clear. He said that me and the other girls were not going to code and we did not because he never let us do anything, in fact the other two guys also did not do anything. But he made it look like only girls cannot do anything. Btw, this guy never got a tech job after college even though we studied computer science. He is in sales now.
- Next, a guy always tried to undermine any work that I did, any code that I wrote, he never used my code even if he was working on a module where he could use my code, he just wrote everything from scratch, he behaved like anything that he wrote was priceless and any code that I wrote was shit. He disrespected me but buttered people who were higher in the hierarchy. So he cannot respect people who are equal to him but he wants to butter people who are higher than him who were men mostly. How unethical.
- Then, a girl always tried to undermine my work, if she was blamed for something, she would put the blame on me. But this bad politics did a lot of good for her and a lot of bad for me, but never mind, karma comes back eventually. She did not treat men like this and even she treated some women nicely but she particularly disliked me even though I absolutely did nothing to her.
- Another girl bullied everyone that she disliked including me. Bullying included laughing at people's code, talking over people in calls, never letting other people speak, body shaming, etc. She did this only to women and not men.
Actually there are many incidents and instances but I want to keep the post light. I welcome you to share any discrimination that you faced as a woman. If you are a man, you can also share your experiences if any.