Get into development: Women IT about the "male" sphere and sexism
Last week, Google fired employee James Damore, who sent a letter to his colleagues that the problem of sexism in the IT sphere was greatly exaggerated, and the course towards gender equality in his company was a great harm to it. Damor was soon fired, but a serious discussion flared up around his letter: supporters of the ex-Google employee supported the thesis about the biological conditionality of professional skills and that increasing the share of women in the company may affect its competitiveness.
The argument itself confirms that the problem in IT still exists. For example, according to Stack Overflow for 2017, 88.6% of all developers are male. True, this depressing figure is changing: last year alone, the number of women in working out increased by 4%. This is good news, because research shows that the more diverse the composition of the company's team, the greater the chances of creating a truly thoughtful product and the more effective the creative team. We talked with several Russian developers about how things are in their companies and whether it is easy to succeed in professions that are traditionally considered to be male.
I studied at two universities. She started in Rostov-on-Don at the Faculty of Mechanics, Mathematics and Computer Science, received a bachelor's degree and transferred to the magistracy of the Polytechnic University in St. Petersburg at the Faculty of Physics and Mechanics. My choice was influenced by the elder sister. She always knew that she wanted to be a programmer, and since the first computer appeared in the house, she took it under her care. When my sister entered the department, I went to her dormitory, talked with her friends, who showed me Demidovich’s volumes by means of mathematical analysis, and thought: “Great, I'll try it too!” But then I had a bad idea of what programming was, just in school, mathematics was easy for me.
I have been working in mobile development for more than six years. In Yandex, I work in the SpeechKit team, we are engaged in speech technology: speech recognition, speech synthesis, voice activation. I work in a mobile team, I write SDK for iOS: I do it so that we can integrate our speech technology into mobile applications. I think our team has a high percentage of girls: two for six people. And all in all six girls out of 45 in the department.
There are obviously more men in development, but it was at work that I never encountered stereotypes on this topic. We work as a head, and analytical skills and ability to program, in my opinion, are completely independent of gender. My colleagues can hold the door for me, help carry heavy bags, but I think that this is a manifestation of politeness, it does not infringe on my rights. And outside of work there are stereotypes, it is true. Some people are very surprised that I work as a programmer. I remember my first major conference, which we arrived with a friend. We go to a large audience, there are a lot of people, mostly guys, of course. I turn my head, I see enthusiastic views from the audience, and I just want to say: "Yes, but I also program!"
When children in kindergartens are asked what they want to be, they usually do not say: “I want to be a programmer” because they do not know anything about it. A programmer does not just sit at the computer and knock on the keys, but creates something cool, almost magic. It is necessary to organize master classes, events, summer schools (such as “mobilization” of Yandex, for example) to talk about programming, to give it a try to write something yourself - then it will interest both girls and guys.
At first it was very scary for me to respond to vacancies and send resumes, but not because I'm a girl. I was afraid that I just did not know anything to go to work. I really did not know anything, but nothing, everything is taught. We all come and start doing from scratch - both guys and girls. I have doubts and uncertainties all the time, because I work with very smart people. In addition, in our profession it is impossible to know everything. To doubt oneself is normal, but one should not forget and praise oneself for achievements.
I have a specialized education, I studied at the Nizhny Novgorod State University named after NI Lobachevsky, at the Faculty of Higher Mathematics and Cybernetics. I knew from high school that I would be engaged in programming: this is what interests me, what I like. I started working in the third year, immediately became a programmer - there were no intermediate options. She found the job easily, it was in Nizhny Novgorod. Later in Moscow I got into the Delivery Club, and now I work at Skyeng - I am more attracted to work in a company connected with education than with food.
Now my position is called Senior DevOps Engineer, I am an infrastructure engineer. You know how in the series show system administrators: in sweaters, in glasses, they walk through the data center between the servers. My infrastructure maintenance team doesn’t look quite like that, but still, these are male programmers, sometimes bearded. It was difficult for me to join the team. I believed that among programmers there has long been no sexism and discrimination, but it turns out there is. Nobody expected a girl in a skirt to be able to do something well. They did not believe that I know my work. I was not taken seriously: the first month was always joking, people looked at me and did not believe that I was saying what I myself was thinking. But I was not offended, I continued to do what I was doing. Demonstrated that I know my job well, I was persistent. In the end, everyone believed that I was real, I would have to work with me.
There are people who are surprised that I am in development. When a new person comes to our team, we usually go somewhere together to have dinner and ask to guess what this or that team member is doing. Guess what I do is impossible. No one can even say that I am connected with the development, let alone clarify which sphere.
We are engaged in the automation of development processes and their acceleration. As an example, manual human labor does not scale, and we can do so that some of the work will be automatic, programmers will not be needed at all, or it will be easier and more pleasant for them to work. Our department all the other departments love, because we facilitate their work.
I'm not going anywhere and have no regrets. Our work, work in operation - this is what has the greatest impact on the development. Neither the administering activity, nor the leadership of any one team of programmers, nor the CTO, have so much influence on the acceleration of processes. DevOps is the best now.
There are women in development: there were a lot of talented developers among my classmates, although some of them left the profession - I studied in the early 2000s. My first technical director in Nizhny Novgorod was a woman. Regardless of gender, the developer must be continuously trained. Even if you are 30 years old, keep learning every day. Change approaches, review what you did a month ago, a year ago, get better. Then the rate of change in the industry, which changes by 50% every two years, will not affect you. Clever women become the best developers: those who are unfairly called nerds are the most successful here.
I am from Ufa, graduated from Ufa Oil University, to my surprise, there was a specialty "software". I graduated from the faculty of automation, so I work completely in my specialty - I am a QA-engineer. As in all Russian universities, education was partly obsolete (after all, everything changes every day in the design), but I was taught the basics.
Since my childhood, my parents have said that you need to be a technical specialist, that it’s cool to be an engineer. When the question arose of where to go to study, I chose between something related to oil - because my parents work in this area - and computer science and programming. As a result, I became a quality engineer, and I am very pleased.
Together with my friend, we cooperated, applied for work at OneTwoTrip, and as a result I moved from Ufa to Moscow, I was accepted to work with relocation. We have a fairly large team - there are about ten people in the department, besides me, there is another girl. I do quality assurance on four products at once and automated testing: roughly speaking, I write code to check the code. Provide quality. Everything that you see on the OneTwoTrip website is the result of the verification of our team, we approved it, we released it, it all works well, because we are there.
At my work I did not come across stereotypes. It always depends on the individual. I have not had any problems in the professional environment because of my gender. Yes, the people of the old formation, like my father's colleagues, are surprised that I am a developer. People far from the IT world, too, do not always understand. But in fact, female programmers are not uncommon: at the university in my group there were six girls.
There is no strong difference between men and women in IT. If you have a goal, motivation, you will achieve everything. If you are a girl, no one will put sticks into the wheels. Many girls are afraid, they think that this is a "male" profession, that mathematics is too complicated. Fear is the main obstacle. I think the whole thing is in education. We grew up in a society in which many women were raised in such a way that they do not think that they will cope with such a profession, but see themselves only as mothers.
It seems to me that in ten years everything will be different, and there will be more girls in development. I have a younger brother, he is ten years old, I have been doing programming with him, explaining something to him. I see that in his class there are girls who are also interested in programming and development. The situation will change. And we all grew up without computers, I didn’t have it right away.
To work with any programming language, the love of mathematics, the ability to build models, algorithms is important. I personally have always been interested in solving equations in a school, building algorithms, and so on. If there is a love for clarity and the construction of something like that, then you have a direct way to programming, regardless of gender.
I lead mobile development at KinoPoisk: I am involved in product and project management. Before that, I worked at Afisha, where I also worked on the management of Afisha and Afisha-Food applications. At that time, I did not know anything about it: I had my first smartphone in my life, the application market was only flourishing, and there was a chance to figure it out. Before that, I worked for a long time in custom development. And I studied at the university twice, both times at the RUDN University: first on technical specialty - applied mathematics and computer science, and then on management.
The number of girls in the development is now growing, but still they are much smaller than men. And since mobile developers are in principle much less than the rest, the share of girls among them is very small - the funnel is already.
It is important to remember that completely different people get into the development. I go to the office floor of the Big Bang Theory, then suddenly I get into "Sex and the City". Someone is fashionable, someone writes songs, some like to go to "Simachev", while others go kayaking and attend the Grushinsky Festival. It's just a slice of society, that's all.
The human brain is very poorly understood, and, in my opinion, there is no reason to say that women are more or less capable of math than men. We just live in a patriarchal country, where I still see statements that a woman is a flower of life and she should be engaged in some kind of "compassionate" profession, or in everyday life. Some of the girls are being educated, and they do not think that it is even possible to work in rocket engineering.
I like the story about professional orientation - maybe such programs do not really orient anyone, but at least they make you think. But this, it seems, is only in the West. And we have someone as lucky. You got a good teacher, met the person who inspired you - well. And someone did not get caught, and he went much simpler. This is a big problem, and it is necessary to work with this in the first place in educational institutions.
Another problem is that not all graduates go to work in the specialty after the university, and the girls "blur" even more. I have many friends who have graduated from the most difficult universities and studied well, but they do not work: they married their fellow students, happily living and raising children. And it's not even a shame that they did not continue to work: their children will grow up very smart and will change the world for the better.
Probably, there are more success criteria for women: you have to be at work and have a family, and even better - do not depend on anyone. Then you are well done. And if somewhere I did not have time, then it is not well done. You have to keep up with a lot: to raise a child, and not to offend your husband, and so that your house is awesome, but also to work well, because they will not make discounts. This implies constant concentration, mobilization. Natural empathy and endurance probably helps me to cope with it.
I try to give myself the right to make mistakes, and if mistakes happen, do not let them crush me too much. They still, of course, crush, but not flatten. And I wish it all. We all have the right to make mistakes, we must allow ourselves to do this - well, we can also convince those around us that we can do this.
I graduated from the VMK (Faculty of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics) of Moscow State University and the School of Data Analysis, after graduating from the university I started working as a programmer. In the profession I am seven years old. For the last two years I have been working at Yandex, now I lead a group that develops algorithms and machine learning packages and develops infrastructure. At first, we only did MatrixNet. (a method of machine learning developed in Yandex. - Approx. Ed.), now we are dealing with other algorithms and tools.
I always liked mathematics, so it was logical to enter the IUD. When I was in high school, my parents said: "If you want to do math, go to the school." But I was a teenager, I wanted to make decisions myself, so I decided to enter the neighboring department. The first two years in our group there were three girls out of more than 20 people, but after distributing them to the chairs in my group, there were more, almost half.
It seems to me that for a successful developer’s career, the most important thing is to develop all the time, to learn something new all the time, explore related areas, understand incomprehensible things, and not be afraid to ask questions. If you work in a company, then you need to understand its infrastructure, and not just your project, look around.
I studied at the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute: first, I always liked mathematics, and second, my brother went to study there, and I followed him. I have been developing since 1996 and have been working at Yandex.Market for eight years. At first, I joined the group that developed the backend for stores and billing, then went on maternity leave, wrote the code and managed to return, and two years ago went into mobile development.
I like mobile development much more than server-based because you work for live users and in real time you can see that your product is beneficial. It was easy to switch: firstly, the programming language was not very different, and secondly, it was an opportunity to learn in the process. More experienced colleagues were very friendly and were ready to answer my questions.
It seems to me that in the 90s there were fewer girls in the design, but only slightly. Stereotypes are still alive. My sons go to a circle for Lego robots - so, in the group, the older one had only one girl, and the other boys were skeptical about her, I called them sexists. I think these are mostly parental stereotypes. At the same time, when my son entered math school, there were pretty girls there, and they were obviously cooler than boys.
At one of my first jobs there were problems when I got married, and in the course of the cuts I got rid of me - they thought that I would immediately go on maternity leave, although I had given birth to a child only after seven years. There was a case that because of marriage I did not get into an interesting project. But in most cases, if a girl is something, she will get a decent salary, she will find a job without any problems - a place where she will be respected.
It seems to me that many girls underestimate themselves. I also encountered this when I was a leader. A lack of confidence appears in those areas in which you are swimming - and if you know how to do better and why, then the right decision to accept and lobby is easy.
Photo: belkaelf25 - stock.adobe.com (1, 2, 3)