Shaming, prejudice and stereotypes: what is life really like for women in IT?

Then feminists from Tatarstan published an article about the oppression of women in Innopolis. It mentioned the headliner of the Stachka conference, known for his androcentric views.

The IT conference chat has been on fire for the third day, and it is still unclear how to put it out. Some people stand up for Saveliev, while others say: "Women in IT really are being oppressed; stop keeping it quiet!"

Inside our team, we decided to find out whether things are really as bad as they are described on social media.

As an example, let us look at how things are in our company kt.team, an IT integrator with a staff of 90+ people, 25 of whom are women.

But first, a bit of global statistics.

According to Stack Overflow data for 2019, men accounted for 91.7% of all IT specialists, and in

In CIS, it is even higher (93.9%). It is no surprise that the majority opinion is: "Women in IT are rare and exceptional."

They are attributed with strange character traits and a special mindset; they are seen as unusual and "not like everyone else."

We became interested in what stereotypes our female colleagues face.

Do they feel biased treatment because of their profession, or is this problem exaggerated? Jacquelin

Marketing Director: "We made a real effort to stay objective while writing this article - we interviewed women from kt.team (a front-end developer, an HR manager) and men (front-end and back-end developers). In the end, we could not even collect three stereotypes among our own people, so we had to go out into the field for prejudice, to people far from IT."

Fortunately, there is no place for such stereotypes in our team.

We do not divide people by gender, age, or other socio-demographic criteria; on our kt.team website you can see the whole team in person. And when hiring, we use standardized tests for all candidates so we can objectively assess the level of competencies we need. It is believed that gender, age, and racial diversity helps teams make more balanced decisions; this has been proven by research.

But despite this fact and hundreds of years of struggle for women's rights, the statistics say there is no gender equality in any country in the world.

The overall trend is encouraging - there are indeed more women, at least in IT specialties. This is also a stage that society has to go through, even if it comes with scandals and protests. Jacquelin

Marketing Director: "When we interviewed women for this article, the following opinion came up: "

Some, on the contrary, start to care and become a little more protective".

This shows that even now, in our enlightened and tolerant age, a female programmer can encounter all kinds of reactions. Can this be considered shaming? The question remains open.

But let us be honest: are we always equally kind to everyone around us?

Who among us has never once in their life joked at the expense of a classmate or laughed at a colleague or friend? And were those jokes always friendly and enjoyable for the person? This is probably also part of diversity - calmly accepting the clash of different opinions and viewpoints, because everyone has the right to fill their life with meaning in their own way.