See my comment above about "women in QA". Also, "no female engineers" is laughable because that is 1 anecdote. There are plenty of Indian female engineers. You know that right ?

"on my team" does mean anecdote. That's not laughable.

This is an American problem too. I've worked with a lot of women in QA who have CS degrees, and lots of male programmers who were shocked to discover that the testers they were working with had exactly the same qualifications they did.

In America companies, women who struggle to find software engineering roles due to discrimination are often able to get lower-paid roles in QA where they are less likely to be pre-judged for not looking like what people think engineers look like. The result is that 38.8% of American QA testers are women, compared to 14% of software engineers.

That’s interesting and holds true for me experience. In hindsight I think I’ve worked with more female qa engineers than female engineers

> less likely to be pre-judged

I wonder how much that has to do with the hiring managers also being women. (For the places where that’s the case.)

It is likely to have more to do with gender stereotyping, and attitudes towards the work itself. Women and men alike perpetuate gender discrimination: https://escholarship.org/content/qt8s94154n/qt8s94154n.pdf

Fields that hold fixed-mindset beliefs, where success in the field is attributed to innate talent, "being smart" or other unchanging characteristics, have significantly more discrimination against women and traditionally-marginalized racial groups than do fields that believe success relies on hard work and practice: https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.1261375

Or another possibility is men and women are wired differently, and the things that make a good dev (such as coming up with a novel solution to a problem) is different from the things that make a good QA (testing every possible edge case to make sure the thing does what the thing is supposed to do).