Are there stats that there are more women who career change and come from bootcamps or don't have as rigid technical backgrounds? Are bootcamp graduates not technical enough or interested in technical subjects? These generalizations are unsettling to me.

There's a general flow of conversation in any social situation that organically arises from the composition of the group of people involved. Unless your friend's teammates are jerks, she should be able to easily influence the direction of the conversation. Perhaps instead of suffering from an issue because she is a woman, she is simply too shy. Maybe this industry or society at large is bad at including shy people general.

How would a manager even know where to direct the discussion if the person who feels alienated doesn't speak up during the conversation? The last thing I want is a manager to try to point the discussion to movies, pop music, fashion, makeup, or whatever else women are supposed to like. I would absolutely be offended.

OK, that makes sense, I thought you were talking in the general, not discussing a particular subset. But I'd argue the issue is more due to not having a 4 year degree than being a woman in a male-dominated field, though that certainly doesn't help. I don't know the statistics, are women in tech more likely to be from bootcamps than men?

However, this does remind me of a phenomenon in child psychology, where girls in a classroom setting are much more likely to participate in class if it's an all-girl class vs a mixed-gender setting. I believe the literature says this is largely due to some learned cultural behavior in early childhood, but I can't remember the specifics. I don't know if this phenomenon persists into adulthood to some degree, but your example reminded me of that.

The percentage of bootcamp grads that are female is much higher than the average across tech (~30% for bootcamps v ~15% across industry/university). I don't think bootcamps make up a large enough group for that to make it 'likely' that any given woman is from a bootcamp, but it probably means there's a few pockets where all the women at a company went through a bootcamp.

https://www.fastcompany.com/3050171/where-are-the-women-in-t...

I think this can happen to a lot of people, depending on the discussion. Personally, I've taken almost no CS classes; I'm a EE by degree and moved into programming (mainly embedded) on-the-job.

So when people start getting into heavy CS discussions about algorithms or whatever, that can alienate me to an extent too. I've read the basics and all and picked up a lot, but only what I really needed to know for this kind of work. I'm more interested in getting hardware to work and programming near the hardware level than some B-tree or whatever.

Another thing that really alienates me: when men at work talk about sports. I don't give two shits about spectator sports, and I think they're a complete waste of time. I'm a male, of course, but unlike many men I really hate sports and sports fanaticism. I don't see this too much at work (as it seems my attitude toward sports isn't that uncommon among men in tech), but I do see it now and then, especially with older and more outgoing/managerial type men.

So I don't think it's entirely a male vs. female issue: certain groups of people working together will frequently have certain common interests, which will not be shared by other people in that workplace. If I worked with a bunch of women and they all started talking about some current TV show, I'd also be alienated, because I don't own a TV or watch any current TV shows (except Game of Thrones...). Should I insist that women refrain from talking about TV shows? That seems a bit extreme.