HI, after a google for female developer, I’ve been reading a few blogs in the last couple of hours and am heartened by the number of fellow lady geeks out there! I, like a lot of people am on the verge of exiting the field due to the pressures you get as a female. I love computers and programming, came to it later in life than some (a postgrad after travelling), but felt lucky enough to have found a true calling. I do a lot of things that people seem to be saying women aren’t into, I can spend a saturday night in building a PC and installing some random Linux distribution, not to actually use it, but just to muck around with hardware a bit and then get the satisfaction of the install booting. 🙂 I like playing violent shoot-em-ups on my xbox, i constantly obsess over how things work, and how cool bridges and cranes and engines are.

Im my last job there were 2 developers, me and and another woman, and the visual designers were all men. I’ve worked with some great guys – I think there are a lot of very smart (if smart equates to intellectual) people in IT and I find generally that all the smartest ones who have done the coolest stuff, don’t judge you on your gender, but on your brain/enthusiasm/love for the same thing. Admittedly on first meeting people may make assumptions (like the salespeople mentioned above), but as soon as you clarify, they drop the assumption and all is good.

However, a major downside of my career has been that I get boxed into ‘people’ roles, partly because I pick up tasks that no one wants to do (I blame my parents old fashioned work ethics), but also I think (at the risk of being sexist) women, even geek women, have a more natural ability to communicate etc, so you end up team leading, co-ordinating, administering. I don’t want to do this and I hate it, but when I talk about what I want to do (technical/enterprise architecture, security), doors seem to close, people turn away. My feeling is its desirable to be a female developer, particularly in web etc (as this is seen as ‘softer’), but if you head for the jobs where you are telling male developers how to to design and build their systems… I know also that I am not an aggressive person, and have not fought hard for what I wanted, but I’m a nerd not a fighter 🙂

My current perspective is that that you feel that you push against the tide, then you lose a bit of your youthful idealism that you can change things, you are still having to push as hard, then you start questioning your happiness in your chosen career and this happiness issue seems to be a key factor in women turning away.

BUT BUT, I have been immensely encouraged by the things I have read, and have remembered that there are all sorts of stereotypes but there are also a lot of great people who respect others regardless of gender or anything else.

Apologies for bad grammar.