Stereotype threat can occur even at 'sane firms'. It has to do with a person's perception of herself and what people might be thinking, not the way others are acting.

If your issue lies with what other people MIGHT be thinking, then the issue is within your own self-confidence.

I agree that stereotypes are destructive, but only when they actually are present. One should be careful not to feel threatened by hypothetical thoughts from hypothetical co-workers before the fact.

Agreed. On the other hand, for a person thinking negatively about himself or herself, the absence of feedback will often be interpreted as negative feedback.

Being nice to our colleagues (male or female or other minority group) and giving positive feedback when it's appropriate tends to increase a team's overall morale and productivity.

That sounds obviously counterproductive. Did I misunderstand?

But I also think there's another, far more useful purpose for educating people suffering from stereotype threat about stereotype threat: they can then put a label to what is keeping them from getting their work done when asking their peers, mentors, or managers for help. And then their peers, mentors, and managers can pay attention to situations that might provoke stereotype threat, try to lessen them, and otherwise show a bit of compassion for the person suffering from it.

I say this personally: learning about stereotype threat cleared a huge communication roadblock I'd been having for years with managers and peers, and as soon as we were on the same page we were actually able to address some of the issues contributing to it.

For example, I'm self-taught, and while I have many years experience now and have done some significant projects, I still second guess myself quite a bit. (This is often called "Imposter Syndrome", see e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imposter_syndrome.) I found it tremendously helpful to discover that people I've looked up to for years have felt the same way, and had helpful suggestions for getting over the internalized anxiety.

Everybody has nagging fears like this. Learning how to see them for what they are and to avoid making things worse for other people benefits everybody.

People underperform because they're worrying about problem X (confirming stereotypes). Let's refer to this as problem Y (stereotype threat).

Education about problem X would be counterproductive; the article is suggesting education about problem Y.

As the author points out, it's largely due to the perception of the events at school or in a workplace than the true motivations behind them, which you might argue that a successful women engineer needs more mental strength to get through these barriers.

As you mention, there is a lack of quality talent and it would be in our best interest to bring out the potential in as many people as possible. It may be that society happened to turn off countless competent engineers due to these perceptions and social forces.

I believe the question is less on how do you balance the workplace, but rather how do you bring out the best out of people so that the pool of strong engineers becomes bigger.

Women don't have unique, unnecessary, gender-specific challenges because once the suits were mean to you?

Puzzling reasoning.

You had a rough time, and stereotype threat is a real thing and a real problem that we should fix. Those two things aren't mutually exclusive! The fact that your old job was f'ed up doesn't say anything about the problem being discussed in the linked article.

What is different about the women you have met, and I have met, I'm not sure. But I can tell you many such women exist.

I am sorry you encountered gender-policing behavior at your last job: that is exactly what I, as a feminist, am trying to fight against for both men and women. Saying that because patriarchy hurts everyone it isn't a problem to be solved, though, is unhelpful. It is a matter of "yes, and": it hurts men and it hurts women measurably more (https://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/dspace/bitstream/1808/258/1/Sc...) and in neither case is it acceptable.

It's not just at work: conferences, meet ups and most of all online I encounter attitudes every day that either demand I act like a man, just as you did. The difference between us is that they aren't asking you to do something that is biologically impossible, and reminding you in the process that you will never, ever be able to simply fit in to your chosen profession.

Do you really start thinking about how bad woman are believed to be at science and math every time you speak to a male colleague or walk into a room full of men? I don't know, I'm asking...

The difference between us is that they aren't asking you to do something that is biologically impossible

Are you suggesting that male programmer behavior has a biological basis?

It's not even that I think about it all the time; it's that I am subtly reminded of it over and over again. It is impossible to forget, because the environment and people around me reproduce them, mostly entirely unintentionally. Even just the lack of women is a subtle, ever-present reminder that I am doing something weird and kind of awkward.

It's not something that is easy to describe. I'd compare and contrast this with, say, science fiction conventions, which are usually 40% women and where I encounter none of the same awkward out-of-place-ness. Still uber-nerdy, still has lots of socially-awkward men, way fewer reminders of how many stereotypes I violated getting there.

As for the biology quip, I apologize for being unclear. I meant that telling me to "man up" would be like telling you to "be a woman": illogical. The only thing I was attributing to biology was gender itself (and even that can be mental, physical, both or neither.)

It's interesting that you're conscious of all this and yet it still effects you. In your case it seems to not be a case of stereotype threat but more a lack of self-confidence (re: "doing something weird and kind of awkward") or a need to fit in. If they started hiring more women developers would that make you feel more confident in your own abilities or have a positive effect on your job performance? If so why?

The whole experience is very lizard-brain; I can rationalize it after the fact and compensate for the dynamic when making decisions, but that doesn't completely get rid of the emotions in the first place. Like how just because you know a film is a horror film doesn't mean you don't startle when something jumps out at the screen.

I don't know for sure if it affects my performance, since I haven't performed tests on myself, but I believe the evidence I have read that suggests it probably does. I can't really explain the mental toll that that being a constant visible outsider takes, especially when people around you say things about the group you belong to without remembering that you are one. It's not crippling, but it isn't pleasant either; sort of like wearing ten pound weights all the time.

I don't think having more women around would make me more confident in my job performance, but it would make me more confident in my employment and leave more energy to devote to the job. Jobs, especially programming, include teamwork, camaraderie and talking with coworkers. It's a lot harder to relax and fit in when you don't entirely no matter what you do.

I don't want to give the impression that this is all in women's heads either. Groups of people bond over whatever they have in common, whether it is shoes, pets, culture or gender. Right now, if some guy in the work place says something sexist or talks about how weird and incomprehensible their wives are or talks about typically-masculine things like cars or football or scotch or how they hate GUIs or how people need to stop being such pussies or how the best coders are all men, they are signaling group membership by defining themselves against another group, which I can't help but belong to. Even if I don't say anything at all, just existing is enough to disrupt the maleness-centered bonding that would otherwise be going on (at best. At worst I get "complements" like, "oh, you're not like other women!" and they keep on defining group membership in a way that would exclude me if they hadn't made some careful and possibly-temporary exception in their mind.) Once there are enough women in a space, dudes stop trying to bond over how male we all are and we can start bonding over the work we do or the books we like or whatever the reason is we are actually there.

I think when there get to be enough women in a group it improves some men's performance too. There are some men who backlash when it happens because they have defined themselves by the masculinity of their groups. They are the ones who talk about how we don't need to worry about there being no women in CS and how the whole thing is biology; those opinions don't magically change when women do enter a field, even though they become pretty silly. On the other hand, other men can stop worrying about whether they are acting manly enough and stop spending effort to hide parts of themselves to better fit in to unrealistic masculine norms and focus instead on the work at hand.

Now I feel like a shmuck for having assumed the same of you. Glad you found a way to dismiss everything I said so you can keep believing whatever it is you want to believe.

... because ...

I've yet to see

Your personal experience does not form reality. Well, your own reality perhaps, but the rest of us live in a world where the sum of others' experiences prove what is made up or not.

I'm not saying there is a crisis, but you're saying that there isn't just because you haven't heard about it personally. Which is kind of like saying there is no such thing as three-toed sloths because you've never had someone talk to you about seeing one in person.