Say No To Bro Culture
71% of women have worked in a tech company with a strong “bro culture.”
“According to women in technology stats for 2020, only 29% of women of survey participants haven’t worked in companies where there was a boy’s club. The majority of ladies that have worked in male-dominated environments have felt excluded, unsafe, and uncomfortable.” (Source: TrustRadius)
The reason of the very harmful statistics that people tend to believe. “Men are prone to think more logical and analytical”. “Men are tend to be better with tech and computers”. I’m not saying that some statistics aren’t true. But how do the statistics apply to a single person? They simply don’t.
In fact, 67% of women in tech feel underestimated or not taken seriously at work. Imposter syndrome can be easily created by men as a vicious cycle in the minds of women in tech. Feeling outnumbered is intimidating enough, but feeling underestimated and overlooked increases those insecurities, causing women to succumb to their imposter syndrome and hold back.
The sad, ugly truth about being a woman in tech is, that most of the people, deep inside think:
You will never be as good as men are.
Their knowledge and experience are often indisputable. So why question their skills so hard? Female designers make beautiful, functional and appealing products. They can run incredibly insightful user testing. They are great at understanding user’s emotions and needs, because they are highly empathetic.
Here are some statistics I found online:
- Joint Venture Silicon Valley reported last year that men in Silicon Valley reported earning as much as 61% more than their female counterparts
- In the United States, the percentage of Computer Science degrees were awarded to women dropped from 37.1% to 29.9%
- In 2013, just 26%of computing jobs in the U.S. were held by women, down from 35% in 1990
Before the pandemic I attended a bootcamp. 20 year old Jewish young woman thought the world was her oyster. I grew up being told I can be anything I wanted to be In life. oh boy, was I mistaken. All my fellow classmates were at least 15–20 years older than me and they were mostly men. I didn't question it, Now researching the topic I realize it’s not normal, but its reality. I was labeled as a female younger version of them, just because I figured out what I wanted to do In life 20 years before them.
I started to hate the version of me that shrank, minimized my knowledge, doubted myself constantly, and ended up with less responsibility (intentional future lower salary) than I know I deserved because I am a young woman.
My experiences in and out of design are what make me a strong designer today. Despite my lack of my age and gender, I know what I stand to gain by asserting my level of knowledge and what I stand to lose by continuing to aim for less than what I know I am capable of.
