Facebook’s First Female Engineer Speaks Out on Tech’s Gender Gap

Take two groups of people. We&#x27;ll call group A the &quot;Bears&quot;, and group B the &quot;Foxes&quot;.<p>The Bears had a strong natural interest and affinity for computers. They were tinkering and playing with them despite society&#x27;s mockery that they were pathetic nerds. When they found out you could make great money, well, that was just a bonus.<p>The Foxes joined because they were told the industry was super rad and it paid really well. The Foxes were given advantages like additional Fox-only scholarships, special Fox-quotas in good engineering colleges, and lots of blogs praising Foxes and telling them how special they are, how they bring unique Fox-only insights to the table, and that The Bears have a conscious&#x2F;unconscious agenda against them.<p>Now ask yourself, which group would you expect to have more longevity in the industry, the Foxes or the Bears? What would a company have to do to keep more Foxes? Maybe special privileges, like conferences the companies could send the Foxes to that would tell the Foxes how great they are, promotion programs to ensure more Fox visibility, quotas for Foxes in senior management, etc. But the Foxes are still leaving in higher numbers so clearly the industry has a bias against Foxes, so funding for Fox-only programs must increase, until the number of Foxes is equal to Bears (and if eventually there are more Foxes then Bears, that&#x27;s just great!) What about the Bears? Well, the Bears better sit down, shut up, and remember that they are just Bears and there is nothing unique about a Bear. Some Bears internalize this and start advocating for the Foxes themselves.<p>And so it goes.

&gt; They’re more organized.<p>Here we go again.<p>Based on what? Where does this idea come from? Can you imagine if we all just accepted this as fact about men?<p>I know plenty of female programmers who absolutely hate this idea that women are &quot;more organized.&quot; The result is almost always that they get pigeonholed into the &quot;secretary&quot; role on a team.<p>This idea needs to die. It does no one any good, and it&#x27;s probably just false.

So it is okay for a woman to say that women are better organized, that they have more empathy, but as a man I cannot claim that men are better hackers?<p>I&#x27;m all for equality, but every single time I read one of these articles, I seem to read everything but equality. Being a programmer is a job, a male dominated job, at least in 2014. There are a lot of fields where men work which are female dominated, like a chef, or interior design, or fashion, or a nanny, or a nurse. You don&#x27;t see men throwing tantrums like this. And neither do great female programmers, they are busy making us feel stupid.

&quot;If you have more women engineers on a team, they tend to bring more diverse opinions, but they also tend to build a collaborative culture. And a result, things get done faster. They’re more organized. There’s more empathy, which makes for a better work environment. It’s just better all around.&quot;<p>If the genders are equal any combination of them are also equal.

Refreshing to read. Her answers are not carefully rehearsed and perennially regurgitated sound bytes you hear all the time.<p>From my observation, it seems this gap is prevalent mostly in engineering (not so much in HR, Marketing, Sales etc).

Some interesting things were said...<p>&gt; <i>Sanghvi - &quot;I don’t like being called aggressive. And that reputation has stuck with me. Any company that I go to, any VC firm that I talk to, everybody thinks of me as the aggressive person who can get shit done, at all costs.&quot;</i><p>This is a bad thing?<p>&gt;<i>Sanghvi -&quot;Men are just more comfortable with men than they are with women.&quot;</i><p>Aren&#x27;t women more comfortable with women than they are with men?<p>&gt;<i>Sanghvi - &quot;The first thing I would say is you need to live life with no regrets. Always ask yourself—when you’re doubting something or you’re afraid of something—ask yourself the question: “What would you do if you weren’t afraid and do that?” I say this because every decision in my life, everybody told me that I was a fool.&quot;</i><p>That&#x27;s some of the best advice to ever come out of a Wired article.

I am a bisexual male programmer. I don’t give a damn what sex you have, and I would prefer not to think about it at all in a work environment, since it’s not relevant. But the skewed gender ratio affects interactions amongst my mostly heterosexual colleagues, and I find it disruptive. This is also true of race.<p>Anything we can do to remove bias and create a non-hostile work environment for everyone is a win not just for our ability to function as a field, but also to serve as a benchmark of social equality for other fields.

<p><pre><code> &quot;If you have more women engineers on a team, they tend to bring more diverse opinions, but they also tend to build a collaborative culture. And a result, things get done faster. They’re more organized. There’s more empathy, which makes for a better work environment. It’s just better all around.&quot; - Sanghvi </code></pre> I don&#x27;t understand why it&#x27;s okay for a woman to make generalizations like this about the things they think women are better at, but it&#x27;s totally not okay for a man to openly voice their opinions on what they think men are better at.<p>If it&#x27;s not acceptable for men to voice similar opinions, why do we not call out women when they do the same?

Anonymous message boards truly are an ugly place. One very accomplished woman speaks out about her mostly positive but colored with some negative experiences in the tech world and the top comment is an anti-affirmative action rant (bears and foxes) that brings out a bunch of old tropes while completely ignoring the history of our industry.

The expectation that things work on merit and that you should be able to just work hard and succeed, seems to hit many people.<p>Unfortunately, real merit seems to go beyond one&#x27;s official role. You are better if you can move stuff forward and facilitate projects succeeding overall. If you can make things happen.<p>Schools never taught us to think about life that way.