Woman lawyer from Wall Street here. That’s about as “Old Boys Club” as it gets. When I left law to pursue tech I figured it couldn’t possibly be as bad as what I was leaving behind. I was so wrong. Silicon Valley is infinitely more difficult to navigate and less welcoming.

The major difference (in my opinion) is that the Old Boys Club owns it. They know they’re not welcoming to women and for the most part they don’t care. But Silicon Valley, for whatever reason, absolutely insists that they’re welcoming and that it’s all in our heads. The Old Boys Club was frustrating but Tech is infuriating.

Would you care to give some examples, what behaviour is so unwelcoming in the tech world?

Did you consider other reasons than sexism for the environment that you perceive as unwelcoming? E.g., I guess the ratio of introverts vs. extroverts is pretty different between Wall Street law firms and software developers.

Given the rampant discrimination against men that exists in the modern tech sector and that even stating "maybe women naturally prefer to do other jobs than tech" gets you fired, what exactly do you have in mind that would make it even more welcoming?

Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN. Your comment here broke several of the site guidelines. Would you please review them and stick to the rules when posting here?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Are you... insisting that tech is welcoming to women?

Hm. I guess it was all in my head.

What it means to be "welcoming" is rather subjective. But there has been widespread adoption of discriminatory policies designed to make women get offers more frequently than men as I have shared in a previous comment [1]. I think this is what was being referred to when the above commenter talked about companies being more welcoming to women.

The extent to which discrimination makes tech more welcoming is debatable. It does have the immediate effect of increasing the number of women in tech roles, but it does so at the expense of putting them in an environment where they know that their male co-workers were held to a different standard and vice versa.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21776455

Now you've crossed into personal attack in a way that will get you banned if you do it again.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: your comment history shows a lot of political and ideological flamewar comments, and we've already had to warn you about not taking HN threads into gender war. If you keep this up we're going to have to ban you, so please don't.

Perhaps the ironic, unintended result that you describe is part of the reason for her experience?

I'm not saying that law and medicine are perfect. But they were once just as stereotypically male as tech is now, and yet have radically shifted their gender balance. Fifty years ago people would no doubt have told you that women just weren't interested in becoming lawyers or doctors. Now a majority of attorneys in the US are women, and more women are enrolling in medical school than men.

> But they were once just as stereotypically male as tech is now, and yet have radically shifted their gender balance.

You say this as if the fields themselves decided, but it could just as easily be that women pushed in harder.

> Fifty years ago people would no doubt have told you that women just weren't interested in becoming lawyers or doctors.

Again, what was the difference? You've suggested a relative difference in sexism at the time, but I've seen no data suggesting this. It just looks like a guess on your part.

I think you are reading a lot into my comment that isn't there. I don't know exactly why women fifty years ago made the decisions that they did. You don't, either.

You're being vague and deflecting here. In one comment you suggest that the cause is law and medicine being relatively less sexist, and here you just say, "well, we don't know why they did what they did." Well, which is it? What basis do you have for your earlier point?

> You don't, either.

Why would you even say this? The comment you responded to didn't have me asserting a reason why. It's like you're attacking a strawman.

>. In one comment you suggest that the cause is law and medicine being relatively less sexist

I claimed that this is the case today. You are the only one of us making any assertions whatsoever about levels of sexism in the 1960s and 1970s, which are irrelevant to choices women make now.