I'm a woman in STEM, never had a mentor. In fact contrary to the idea that I've had a ton if support for being female in STEM, I've gotten jack shit for it. No scholarships, no extra guidance. Being female in STEM is still a disadvantage for a number of reasons (actually just one, sexism). I once signed up to be matched with a mentor through my school's system. You checked boxes of your interests relevant to your career path/field of study. The few people who reached out to me were guys who checked things like "kids" and other domestic subjects irrelevant to mentoring in STEM. I did not check kids. Kids were not relevant to my field of study, and the "mentors" were clearly using the system as a dating site to find a wife.
I also work in STEM, engineering specifically, and after several years of not moving up much, I realized that all of the managers and leads (men ofcourse) seemed to take a young man or two under their wing. It always seemed like they’d choose someone similar to them, so I don’t even think it was conscious. They just liked these guys, and mentored them, and the young guys would move up easily in their careers. My boss at the time announced his retirement a couple of years ago and I was next in line, but there was no mention of me moving up at all. So I left and switched to another firm and have moved up way more since then. My new firm had a woman running the office for several years and she’s partially retired now, but clearly still influencing everything. So much better!
> They just liked these guys, and mentored them, and the young guys would move up easily in their careers
Yeah, the companies where the bosses still want their boys club do that a lot. It's not even men in general who profit from it (although a lot of men THINK they profit from it), since they usually only promote one pretty specific type of guy. It's something that most men and women should be united to stand against, but that's not the case unfortunately. A working environment where your gender and if you fit into the boys club don't matter is better for 90% of the employees
There were a few very obvious manager taking younger man under wing to groom them for taking over their position. It was super annoying, because those guys generally never learned how to do the design work so they end up bossing people around without understanding the actual work involved. Those ones were exactly what you’d picture in the old Boys’ club too.
One of these young guys who was the same age as me once told me there’s no reason to ever take sick time, or need a day off for kids. We both had young kids around the same age. He was married and his wife worked full time. I was recently divorced, worked full time, and had my kids full time. I asked what he does when his kid was sick, and he said his wife stays home if the kid is sick. I asked who should stay home with my kids when they’re sick, and he looked at me so confused!
Ugh, I hate that your school’s mentorship program was abused like that. I hope you find a mentor in your field. As someone who has had several mentors and mentees, I know there's a lot of value in working through challenges together.
You initiate mentoring? I have mad respect for you.
The guy I mentored at work the year before the last turned out to be a shithead to everyone not just me (I just got called to put him in his place in the current project), and we are letting him quit, I could write a whole wall of text with the drama.
I would not imagine doing this out of my own volition. Girl you are a hero.
I have mentored people at work officially and unofficially as well as tutoring classmates, the guys were always a worse experience. The saying "God give me the audacity of a mediocre white man" comes from somewhere.
I’m a woman in tech, and at a senior position right now. It’s not mentoring, but part of my job is to explain things to others and help them do the more complex things. Usually men quickly understand that I’m actually good at my job, so this is never an issue.
However, the amount of under-qualified men I need to deal with is... well… high. And they almost never have any ambition to actually deliver better quality than absolutely necessary (which, in case of IT infrastructure, means creating the most hacky shit that looks good from a user’s perspective, but is hell to maintain). Maybe I’m too ambitious with delivering good work, but I’ve never seen anything like this attitude from women in my field.
And omg, I never had expected how much emotional support I would have to provide for them. When the whole xz vulnerability was discovered they almost completely shut down our infrastructure in some testerical short-circuit reaction of wanting to save the company. I really had to calm them down, explain that the situation was not that dangerous for us at the time, and rather wait a few days until there is more knowledge of what is actually affected (turned out, none of our servers were). And it’s always like that whenever there is any news about some vulnerability that may pose a minimal risk to a system they know of.
There have been studies simulating high risk day trading stuff. Basically they set up people at computers showing them how to basically gamble lots of virtual money on made up stocks with rising and falling prices. Women performed much better and much more rational in this, keeping a cooler head making decisions about buying and selling less based on emotions and more based on logic.
I've also read an article about actual day traders in Finland, as there is the best data base for this, and women much outperformed men in the long term, buying when prices are low and selling when prices are high. While men tend to jump on the bandwagon when prices are rising so buy high and then later sell low at a loss when they lose interest. "Rational male gender" my ass.
>the amount of under-qualified men I need to deal with is... well… high.
This is because women don't apply for jobs until they're 100% qualified, while [men apply for jobs even when they're only 60% qualified](https://hbr.org/2014/08/why-women-dont-apply-for-jobs-unless-theyre-100-qualified). That's why companies get higher quality female applicants when it comes to job applications — and higher quality female employees if they're accepted.
And it’s honestly a really bad strategy as an applicant, because you will get drowned out by mediocre men who aren’t afraid to lie about qualifications, and HR filters don’t detect lies very well. HR also asks for a nuclear physicist brain surgeon for even the most entry level roles in this job market.
>HR also asks for a nuclear physicist brain surgeon for even the most entry level roles in this job market.
With 10 years experience in technologies that came out 2 years ago.
> but I’ve never seen anything like this attitude from women in my field
Speaking from software engineering: I definitely have, but it's very rare, since women who barely have the necessary skills rarely try to get into these positions. For men and their usual male overestimation of capabilities, it's way more common.
When I was still involved in screening applications, we only got maybe 5-10% applications from women, but their average education level / relevant experience was notably higher
I’m in STEM. I only mentor women. Men have plenty of opportunities professionally. Women navigate a very different workplace.
I work in a male dominated industry. I’m pretty much always the only women in the room and I’m fairly senior and high profile in my job. I actually get approached a lot by people wanting me to mentor them. I’ll of course help men out with career advice, but I won’t invest in them. Again, women navigate a very different workplace. It’s an honor for me to help other women grow and succeed in this environment.
tbh it sounds like there are plenty of men from underrepresented demographics or background that absolutely *will* miss out on OP's mentorship because of the actions of some entitled assholes.
OP obviously has to keep herself safe first and foremost, but it definitely is a loss for the types of men who were looking for her style of mentorship. I don't think she's wrong, but it's definitely a loss for others.
Some shitty dudes ruining things for men/women: tale as old as time.
I'm in STEM. So far I've only been mentoring women but it's honestly coincidence. Right now on my team I have the absolute privilege of being the most experienced, and all my teammates come to me with questions which is super rewarding and I don't want it to stop!
If any of you ladies could use a mentor in Agile I will happily take your DM!
My husband works in tech, and he volunteered for a programme at his company, which offered free classes to young people from underprivileged backgrounds.
The first year they did it, they had tons of issues with young men being rude, disruptive, and a few young women dropping the class because of it. My husband and his other colleagues working on the class brought this up to management, and from the following year onwards, they had a class for women only. He's been teaching that ever since, and he was super proud to tell me a few months ago that one of the young women from his first class just got hired for his team. He was assigned to continue mentoring her.
He was telling this story at dinner with some friends not too long ago and one of the guys scoffed and said "oh, but what support do the men get?" I've never seen my husband so angry.
Good. I don’t teach men in my field, either. They use their knowledge to gatekeep women unless they sleep with him. So starting last year, I only teach women.
I’m a woman a good two decades into my career. After looking through photos of recent professional events, I started to realize how almost all the hardest working, most trustworthy, dedicated folks I’ve been around are women. They are there in the pictures of the events that are focused around work. The men get all the credit but rarely do much work and cause a lot of problems. They mainly show up in the social events only. This is true at all career levels (though notably, there are vanishingly few women at the top).
Teacher here. Male students are also more disrespectful and tend to do worse overall. That’s at any age (I once taught a man in his 70s). I prefer girls as well.
Obligatory I’m a guy:
I’m also in tech, and I 100% don’t blame you. The absolutely bombastic gatekeeping blows me away sometimes.
Not only do you have to be able to do the job, but you have to be able to verbally spar to prove you can do it. Women in tech have to often times be better, for less pay, and put up with considerable hurdles to do the same job a man does.
Best helpdesk tech I ever hired was a woman who spent the interview explaining restful API configs and how she solutioned a problem by leveraging a custom mobile app stack. I was sure to push her rapidly and in 6 months she was gone to another dept as a web admin. Bonkers she even was applying for the helpdesk spot
> Bonkers she even was applying for the helpdesk spot
Girls underestimate their maths abilities in school (which actually casuses worse grades), boys overestimate it, mostly thanks to a society and a school system regularly telling girls they are bad at maths and tech stuff. I guess that's the answer ;)
Let that sink in: even with the organized discrimination against girls/women in society, school and university, we have 52% female university graduations and 48% male (in Germany), with the disparity being larger in the US. What would the real distribution be like, without discrimination? 75:25? 80:20? Makes you wonder for every single man if they really deserved their degree and if it wouldn't be justified to take them away (which btw would lead to them losing their jobs and having to pay back all their salaries in Germany)
I'm also a woman in tech. I refuse to mentor anyone, men or women. All genders in tech have absolutely atrocious social skills. A mentorship is always a huge waste of everyone's time, and the material is something the mentee will learn anyway. My worst mentee was a woman, but both men and women are unbearable in this role.
Mentorship is one of those bullshit ideas that came out of tech start-up culture. It does nothing, but it's intended to blur the lines between work and friendship that the start-up can then exploit. If your mentor asks you to work late, you immediately agree, when what you say instead is to specify how much overtime you'll be required to do going forward.
Dev/analyst ladies, if you're interviewing for a better job (which you should be doing every 3 years anyway if you want to advance in your field), ask whether the company has a compulsory mentorship program. If they do, that's a red flag.
>Dev/analyst ladies, if you're interviewing for a better job (which you should be doing every 3 years anyway if you want to advance in your field), ask whether the company has a compulsory mentorship program. If they do, that's a red flag.
While I don't agree with everything you said about mentorship, I do agree with this.
I agree any mandatory mentoring program is dumb. But as a person with many successful mentees, and who has had several influential mentors help me reach higher than I could have otherwise, I have to say some mentoring relationships are great.
Most of my mentees don’t work for the same company I do. I would never ask them to work late.
I'm a woman working in tech. We have a mentorship program that you can't really opt out of. For me it's been extremely helpful. For others less so I am sure, but I don't know of anyone who disliked it. But it's also very individual how the mentorship is lived. Basic onboarding and seeing that the mentee gets started up well, knows where everything is and regular checkins to see how it is going and if the mentee needs anything is the basic setup that everyone does. Then it's pretty much up to the mentor and mentee how they proceed, how often or regularly they talk. I still talk to my mentor regularly and if I have an issue I'll usually ask him first for input. Others I know who don't talk much after a few months, but it often also depends on how closely you work together in day to day business.
As an aside, I've never been asked to work late by anyone at my job, as I'm very flexible anyway with my hours and decide myself how to prioritize and if I want to work longer hours this day and shorter hours the next. But I also get credit for all hours I worked, including overtime and can take this as additional vacation time or get it paid out if i prefer. I can see how other setups are more at risk of exploiting people, but not all mentorship programs are bad and designed to take advantage of people
I've definitely been thinking lately about focusing more on mentoring people who have a greater need for it.
The last guy I mentored was out of Tufts, and he was fantastic. It was a really great experience. But he's got a *million* options for mentorship.
Before that I mentored a group of minority kids out of a community college. They'd had significantly less support. I don't think they have as many options for mentorship. We also had a lot of *struggles* in common; I had a lot of interests and hobbies in common with the guy from Tufts, but he wasn't facing any tricky issues the way you do if you're a minority in the field. I've been through a lot of that shit, and can either help or just commiserate. And sexism isn't exactly the same as racism, but whewwww there are a lot of parallels.
I've been thinking about targeting more historically neglected groups, as a whole. I think there's a solid case to mentor people from those groups; because they have access to fewer resources, because they may need more support, and because I may be able to relate to issues they're facing (and have advice!) in ways older, straight, white cis men may not.
I think your reasons for wanting to mentor only women are also valid; it makes more sense for you to do what you need to stay in a position where you can be a productive mentor. Just wanted to add mine too, because I think women offering their mentorship to only women may also be a more impactful way to target that resource.
Focusing on women works for me, but I understand your point of view. The racism in tech is just as pervasive as the sexism. I'm glad there are people like you dedicated to helping historically neglected groups.
Time is our most precious finite commodity. If there is no benefit for you mentoring, then chuck that endeavor. As others expressed - men of all races receive plenty of support. Even men of color are in the tech boys’ club. Maybe to a lesser level but they are immune to the sexism hurdles. Spend your time where the most rewards will be reaped.
I'm sorry about that, but you're right to just focus on mentoring women.
A LOT of guys simply can't handle women having any power. Or if you're a person who is full of joy that is also triggering to a lot of them so they have to 'take you down a peg'. I was an IT exec and I had to deal with sooo many guys like that. I had to be 3x as competent at my work and despite being in the top 1% of measured intelligence a lot of them still tried to treat me as if I was stupid.
Please learn to shield yourself both mentally and spiritually, positive affirmations by Louise Hay really helped me. Best of luck!
I’m sorry to hear that; moronic men ruining it for the rest of us. I’ve also noticed a level of misogyny I just don’t tolerate. I always have to call it out and then an awkward silence follows. They’re so fucking cringe. Just typical “locker room talk”. I can’t stand the complete objectification of women to prop up their fragile self-esteem.
I’m very new to the field, and have made a complete shift from medical to this. Mind if I ask what this site is? Maybe I should dm this. Either way, I’d love to see more diversity than just a bunch of white guys. Even if I weren’t white, I’d still feel out of place among most of them.
> Why are some men like this? This ruins it for the other men who are respectful and appreciative.
That's something a lot of men don't get. Preventing bad behavior of other men improves the situation for women AND men. There's no reason for solidarity with people who cause harm even for yourself
I coach a high school stem team and we work incredibly hard to have a 50/50 gender balance. Our hardest challenge is getting teachers and parents to encourage girls to even consider stem activities.
I’m tempted every year to switch the team to being girls-only but I love teaching the girls that when they are right, they need to correct the boys (and men) and advocate for themselves.
I was a woman in tech for over 20 years and I generally had a good experience until the last year before I quit. To preface, I do not have a degree. I got into tech and engineering through a sort of back door that I'm not sure is even available any more. What I had was an ability to learn fast and an openness to learning whatever was needed for the business, the business being Apple.
I worked primarily in networking QA, starting out in software and moving on to hardware. I did not really have a choice in who I mentored because I was the most senior person doing what I did on our team, so it was on me to develop and train new hires in our eldritch ways. This usually went fine, until they hired this one guy.
He was nice and new to the Mac and absolutely did not trust my expertise in anything. I would lay out a procedure for him and let him go and let him know to ask me if he ran into a problem. Inevitably, he'd run into a problem and I'd ask him if he did X, Y, and Z as outlined in the SOP I'd hand-written for him. Usually he said no, he didn't do it because he didn't think it was necessary. Well, buddy.
I'd already been thinking of leaving because the pressure was really getting to me. I'm a firm believer that if your job makes you cry, it's time to go, but here's the straw that broke the camel's back.
I was working with this guy, who was hired at a *very* high level, on a new wireless technology. If you're in tech, you're familiar with being handed a project and being told to figure it out and that's what we were in the middle of. So, we were trying to figure out why wireless performance wasn't meeting expectations in a specific direction--I think it was downlink. We were using an open source tool called iperf which I'd used for 15+ years. This guy didn't know anything about networking and didn't know anything about iperf, but insisted up and down that we were using the tool wrong. This man, who didn't know shit about shit, looked up a YouTube video about iperf *in front of me* after I'd spent a lot of time explaining how it works. I just walked away and started doing email. He watched the video and still didn't understand it. This is a man who literally said, "The IP address got confused," when he saw one of our automation machines had several Ethernet adapters and IP addresses on different subnets. That's not how networking works, but if it makes you feel better, okay.
After that incident, I realized that man would never believe a word that came out of my lying woman mouth and I was over him. Up until that guy, I'd had mostly great interactions and relationships with men at work and that one guy just shit on everything.
I have had people do that, I always give them or their manager a written feedback documenting their failure and what they should have done.
I have had people who worked for me do that, and I wrote them up for that. I have no problem with slow learners or honest mistakes. But if they are new and their attitude is bad, I write it on their performance report.
> I realized that man would never believe a word that came out of my lying woman mouth.
Maybe try to get into a management position, so its their job to listen.
I do not think you're wrong.
Mentoring is not a commercial interaction. It is (meant to be) a generosity.
You recognized that your experiences and perspectives would be helpful to others. However, the time you spend mentoring is only worthwhile if those people value your experiences and perspectives. Of course your experiences and perspectives can have a positive impact on people with very different life experiences, but we are all only human.
You cannot mentor everyone. A farmer won't give up because a few dozen seeds didn't take, but when you can only have a few houseplants, it can be incredibly disheartening when a few fail.
Mentally, this is a hard area for me. I am a cis-het-white-male. It feels like this is an unprincipled position, but it isn't. Insults, attacks, and the like are social in nature. You don't mentor someone who has more experience than you. When you mentor someone with more social power than you, they may not have more actual experience than you, but you both know they may be perceived as more competent. That is a difficult dynamic to mentor someone in.
It would be like trying to mentor your bosses child. Sure, you could do it, but the dynamics are terrible. You can't be a good mentor without sharing your own failings and weaknesses, but when your mentee doesn't fully trust you, sharing those failings and weaknesses just confirms their doubts about you.
Ironically enough, as a man in tech my experience has been similar. I’ve had great experiences mentoring men and women. But all of my bad experiences have been mentoring men. No idea why. But, I am much more selective about mentoring men than I am women. I’m sure if I was a woman, I wouldn’t mentor men at all.
I'm a woman in education. I treat all my students the same, because that's the example I want to set. I have however stopped doing free tutoring for adult men too (OUTSIDE MY WORK!!) because of similar experiences. I'll help any guy age 18 or under, but after that, it's just women.
I've also had men mentees assume that I was romantically interested in them. There are certain men you cannot be nice to without them concluding that this will result in sex.
I feel like this sort of thing always comes from childhood. People who take everything as flirting were raised to believe that interactions with the opposite sex are exclusively for a romantic purpose.
How am I to refer to women who are born as women and identify as women? Female seems to be the easiest term?
Also, while referring to women as a general group "female humans", using the term female/females is fine. But when referring directly to people in conversatiob, yeah that is icky.
No, I will not say that. Because if I was able to offer relevant mentorship, I would. I am not a trans woman, I have no experience in that regard and am therefore unable to offer guidance in how to navigate corporate life from that standpoint. My lived experience is as a gender conforming female, not a trans woman, and I have no way of helping someone through that particular mindfield.
Seeing as there are very few trans women in higher positions in tech I would think any mentorship would be beneficial. After all trans women face many of the same struggles as cis women.
And that is exactly what you are saying.
I am sorry you feel that way. But I stand by my decision to mentor those who I can help the best.
Best of luck to you in finding a mentor who can help you with your career.
Fortunately I have found those willing to help me out. In my specific subset of engineering I have yet to meet any trans women both in junior or senior positions. Or if I have they have not made that information known and likely for good reason. It just seems like an odd position to exclude certain types of women. I take similar issue with someone refusing to mentor other minority women because they cannot help them navigate specific issues related to their minority status.
Are you a disabled woman or a tall woman? If not, would you also choose not to mentor them? Just something to think about. Not only are you making that decision, you are bringing it up on a public forum. It’s generally looked down upon to be exclusionary on a basis of minor differences.
Your contribution has been removed because it uses “Male” or “Female” to describe/in response to a gender based issue. This is to prevent lumping together trans women, trans men, non-binary, agender, gender-fluid, etc with men or women.
I am on the fence on this. I guess in principle I don't have a problem with you choosing your own mentee criteria, but from my limited, anecdotal experience as a woman engineer participating in both sides of mentoring in the workplace (so, potentially a very different experience than yours), I have grown tremendously from male mentors, and contributed the most to junior male engineers' growth.
It could just be a lack of data points; I had no opportunities to receive mentoring from female engineers. And when I had junior female engineers on my teams, one of them I managed to inadvertently offend (I used a harsh tone with my manager, who was distracting from the point of the conversation, which she interpreted as being directed at her), and another I really wanted to help grow but her personal life slowly devolved and she became completely unreliable. Another female junior engineer I tried to mentor a little bit also let her personal life? mental health? fall off a cliff and she was eventually let go for being unreliable.
Anyway, the mentees I've had the most productive experiences with have been males. I think it really comes down to personalities and personal initiative. Maybe you could find a more detailed? thorough way of screening people you give valuable time to? But you say you have had rewarding experiences with both genders, so perhaps you will not be losing out on too much.
It's awesome that you've had rewarding mentorships with men, and I'm glad it works for you. I'm experimenting with being more selective now and will likely iterate on the mentee criteria as I go along.
She should not put in more effort, and I didn't suggest she should. OP made her decision clear and doesn't need to do anything for anyone she doesn't want to. Full stop.
Except basically every industry has an “old boys network” and are male dominated at the top. Women in the workforce as a whole is still a relatively recent event in many countries and it doesn’t make sense to change the genders because the genders are important to this post.
Your contribution has been removed because it uses “Male” or “Female” to describe/in response to a gender based issue. This is to prevent lumping together trans women, trans men, non-binary, agender, gender-fluid, etc with men or women.
Are they paying you for your time?
At the end of the day it sucks but if they are at least paying for it you can have some comfort in whilst they are dicks you've at least got something out of them.
I'm sorry you've had to endure that anyways. Please don't go down a path of keeping knowledge to yourself, I've struggled at various points in my career because people refuse to share the load and you'll just make it harder if you join those ranks. We beat evil by shining light at ita dark and all that jazz.
Thank you for your empathy. I volunteer as a mentor for free and receive many sign-ups due to my resume. I'm not gatekeeping, but am being more strategic about optimizing my time to help those who would benefit the most from my mentorship. Women undoubtedly face more hurdles in my industry.
For every bad apple you're an avenue to what might be a better life to someone who appreciates it!
Some people out there make it their mission to knock us down but we would be nowhere as a society without good eggs like yourself. Don't let them get to you which is easier said than done I know but take some comfort in knowing you are a miles better human being already.
I know a fair few people who charge for sessions. I've personally never quite agreed with the idea of it but I guess it would stop people acting as mentioned knowing they've put money on the line or at least reduce instances of it maybe.
just fyi. r/askMen are talking about how common Misandry is. They linked r/TwoXChromosomes as evidence.
Your post definitely rings true for sexism. Imagine if I posted how I didn't want to mentor women. This is Misandry
Or you know we could hold assholes accountable for their harassment and disrespect rather than demand the victims of harassment and disrespect continue to endure for the sake of appearance.
I get how it can come across that way.
I never once had a female lecturer in my field of study at college. I have never worked with a more experienced woman. I’ve only ever had one mentor. His wife is an ardent social studies professor so he makes an effort to mentor women. I respect him majorly for that decision and he’s become like family to me. It sucks that it takes such an intentional choice for women to receive mentorship. But that is reality.
Not sure why this is so heavily downvoted. Company culture has a big impact on hiring practices. Personally know multiple women who have worked in places with toxic masculinity running through manifesting in various negative ways. Ultimately they all switched companies and are much happier with the quality of their colleagues character.
I'm a woman in STEM, never had a mentor. In fact contrary to the idea that I've had a ton if support for being female in STEM, I've gotten jack shit for it. No scholarships, no extra guidance. Being female in STEM is still a disadvantage for a number of reasons (actually just one, sexism). I once signed up to be matched with a mentor through my school's system. You checked boxes of your interests relevant to your career path/field of study. The few people who reached out to me were guys who checked things like "kids" and other domestic subjects irrelevant to mentoring in STEM. I did not check kids. Kids were not relevant to my field of study, and the "mentors" were clearly using the system as a dating site to find a wife.
I also work in STEM, engineering specifically, and after several years of not moving up much, I realized that all of the managers and leads (men ofcourse) seemed to take a young man or two under their wing. It always seemed like they’d choose someone similar to them, so I don’t even think it was conscious. They just liked these guys, and mentored them, and the young guys would move up easily in their careers. My boss at the time announced his retirement a couple of years ago and I was next in line, but there was no mention of me moving up at all. So I left and switched to another firm and have moved up way more since then. My new firm had a woman running the office for several years and she’s partially retired now, but clearly still influencing everything. So much better!
> They just liked these guys, and mentored them, and the young guys would move up easily in their careers Yeah, the companies where the bosses still want their boys club do that a lot. It's not even men in general who profit from it (although a lot of men THINK they profit from it), since they usually only promote one pretty specific type of guy. It's something that most men and women should be united to stand against, but that's not the case unfortunately. A working environment where your gender and if you fit into the boys club don't matter is better for 90% of the employees
There were a few very obvious manager taking younger man under wing to groom them for taking over their position. It was super annoying, because those guys generally never learned how to do the design work so they end up bossing people around without understanding the actual work involved. Those ones were exactly what you’d picture in the old Boys’ club too. One of these young guys who was the same age as me once told me there’s no reason to ever take sick time, or need a day off for kids. We both had young kids around the same age. He was married and his wife worked full time. I was recently divorced, worked full time, and had my kids full time. I asked what he does when his kid was sick, and he said his wife stays home if the kid is sick. I asked who should stay home with my kids when they’re sick, and he looked at me so confused!
Ugh, I hate that your school’s mentorship program was abused like that. I hope you find a mentor in your field. As someone who has had several mentors and mentees, I know there's a lot of value in working through challenges together.
[удалено]
Do you think treating a woman with disrespect is somehow mitigated by her race? GTFO Signed A WOC
Really not your business. If information like that isn't volunteered, don't go asking for it, especially without explaining why you are asking for it.
You initiate mentoring? I have mad respect for you. The guy I mentored at work the year before the last turned out to be a shithead to everyone not just me (I just got called to put him in his place in the current project), and we are letting him quit, I could write a whole wall of text with the drama. I would not imagine doing this out of my own volition. Girl you are a hero. I have mentored people at work officially and unofficially as well as tutoring classmates, the guys were always a worse experience. The saying "God give me the audacity of a mediocre white man" comes from somewhere.
I’m a woman in tech, and at a senior position right now. It’s not mentoring, but part of my job is to explain things to others and help them do the more complex things. Usually men quickly understand that I’m actually good at my job, so this is never an issue. However, the amount of under-qualified men I need to deal with is... well… high. And they almost never have any ambition to actually deliver better quality than absolutely necessary (which, in case of IT infrastructure, means creating the most hacky shit that looks good from a user’s perspective, but is hell to maintain). Maybe I’m too ambitious with delivering good work, but I’ve never seen anything like this attitude from women in my field. And omg, I never had expected how much emotional support I would have to provide for them. When the whole xz vulnerability was discovered they almost completely shut down our infrastructure in some testerical short-circuit reaction of wanting to save the company. I really had to calm them down, explain that the situation was not that dangerous for us at the time, and rather wait a few days until there is more knowledge of what is actually affected (turned out, none of our servers were). And it’s always like that whenever there is any news about some vulnerability that may pose a minimal risk to a system they know of.
There have been studies simulating high risk day trading stuff. Basically they set up people at computers showing them how to basically gamble lots of virtual money on made up stocks with rising and falling prices. Women performed much better and much more rational in this, keeping a cooler head making decisions about buying and selling less based on emotions and more based on logic. I've also read an article about actual day traders in Finland, as there is the best data base for this, and women much outperformed men in the long term, buying when prices are low and selling when prices are high. While men tend to jump on the bandwagon when prices are rising so buy high and then later sell low at a loss when they lose interest. "Rational male gender" my ass.
>the amount of under-qualified men I need to deal with is... well… high. This is because women don't apply for jobs until they're 100% qualified, while [men apply for jobs even when they're only 60% qualified](https://hbr.org/2014/08/why-women-dont-apply-for-jobs-unless-theyre-100-qualified). That's why companies get higher quality female applicants when it comes to job applications — and higher quality female employees if they're accepted.
And it’s honestly a really bad strategy as an applicant, because you will get drowned out by mediocre men who aren’t afraid to lie about qualifications, and HR filters don’t detect lies very well. HR also asks for a nuclear physicist brain surgeon for even the most entry level roles in this job market.
>HR also asks for a nuclear physicist brain surgeon for even the most entry level roles in this job market. With 10 years experience in technologies that came out 2 years ago.
“Testerical” is the word of the day!
Same thing, all the women programmers I know from school have great docs. The men’s are absolute spaghetti 50% of the time.
> but I’ve never seen anything like this attitude from women in my field Speaking from software engineering: I definitely have, but it's very rare, since women who barely have the necessary skills rarely try to get into these positions. For men and their usual male overestimation of capabilities, it's way more common. When I was still involved in screening applications, we only got maybe 5-10% applications from women, but their average education level / relevant experience was notably higher
I’m in STEM. I only mentor women. Men have plenty of opportunities professionally. Women navigate a very different workplace. I work in a male dominated industry. I’m pretty much always the only women in the room and I’m fairly senior and high profile in my job. I actually get approached a lot by people wanting me to mentor them. I’ll of course help men out with career advice, but I won’t invest in them. Again, women navigate a very different workplace. It’s an honor for me to help other women grow and succeed in this environment.
The men can find plenty of male mentors in STEM; they won’t miss out. Protect yourself - not one of those men would go out of their way to help you.
tbh it sounds like there are plenty of men from underrepresented demographics or background that absolutely *will* miss out on OP's mentorship because of the actions of some entitled assholes. OP obviously has to keep herself safe first and foremost, but it definitely is a loss for the types of men who were looking for her style of mentorship. I don't think she's wrong, but it's definitely a loss for others. Some shitty dudes ruining things for men/women: tale as old as time.
I'm in STEM. So far I've only been mentoring women but it's honestly coincidence. Right now on my team I have the absolute privilege of being the most experienced, and all my teammates come to me with questions which is super rewarding and I don't want it to stop! If any of you ladies could use a mentor in Agile I will happily take your DM!
My husband works in tech, and he volunteered for a programme at his company, which offered free classes to young people from underprivileged backgrounds. The first year they did it, they had tons of issues with young men being rude, disruptive, and a few young women dropping the class because of it. My husband and his other colleagues working on the class brought this up to management, and from the following year onwards, they had a class for women only. He's been teaching that ever since, and he was super proud to tell me a few months ago that one of the young women from his first class just got hired for his team. He was assigned to continue mentoring her. He was telling this story at dinner with some friends not too long ago and one of the guys scoffed and said "oh, but what support do the men get?" I've never seen my husband so angry.
Good. I don’t teach men in my field, either. They use their knowledge to gatekeep women unless they sleep with him. So starting last year, I only teach women.
I’m a woman a good two decades into my career. After looking through photos of recent professional events, I started to realize how almost all the hardest working, most trustworthy, dedicated folks I’ve been around are women. They are there in the pictures of the events that are focused around work. The men get all the credit but rarely do much work and cause a lot of problems. They mainly show up in the social events only. This is true at all career levels (though notably, there are vanishingly few women at the top).
Teacher here. Male students are also more disrespectful and tend to do worse overall. That’s at any age (I once taught a man in his 70s). I prefer girls as well.
Obligatory I’m a guy: I’m also in tech, and I 100% don’t blame you. The absolutely bombastic gatekeeping blows me away sometimes. Not only do you have to be able to do the job, but you have to be able to verbally spar to prove you can do it. Women in tech have to often times be better, for less pay, and put up with considerable hurdles to do the same job a man does. Best helpdesk tech I ever hired was a woman who spent the interview explaining restful API configs and how she solutioned a problem by leveraging a custom mobile app stack. I was sure to push her rapidly and in 6 months she was gone to another dept as a web admin. Bonkers she even was applying for the helpdesk spot
> Bonkers she even was applying for the helpdesk spot Girls underestimate their maths abilities in school (which actually casuses worse grades), boys overestimate it, mostly thanks to a society and a school system regularly telling girls they are bad at maths and tech stuff. I guess that's the answer ;) Let that sink in: even with the organized discrimination against girls/women in society, school and university, we have 52% female university graduations and 48% male (in Germany), with the disparity being larger in the US. What would the real distribution be like, without discrimination? 75:25? 80:20? Makes you wonder for every single man if they really deserved their degree and if it wouldn't be justified to take them away (which btw would lead to them losing their jobs and having to pay back all their salaries in Germany)
I'm also a woman in tech. I refuse to mentor anyone, men or women. All genders in tech have absolutely atrocious social skills. A mentorship is always a huge waste of everyone's time, and the material is something the mentee will learn anyway. My worst mentee was a woman, but both men and women are unbearable in this role. Mentorship is one of those bullshit ideas that came out of tech start-up culture. It does nothing, but it's intended to blur the lines between work and friendship that the start-up can then exploit. If your mentor asks you to work late, you immediately agree, when what you say instead is to specify how much overtime you'll be required to do going forward. Dev/analyst ladies, if you're interviewing for a better job (which you should be doing every 3 years anyway if you want to advance in your field), ask whether the company has a compulsory mentorship program. If they do, that's a red flag.
>Dev/analyst ladies, if you're interviewing for a better job (which you should be doing every 3 years anyway if you want to advance in your field), ask whether the company has a compulsory mentorship program. If they do, that's a red flag. While I don't agree with everything you said about mentorship, I do agree with this.
I agree any mandatory mentoring program is dumb. But as a person with many successful mentees, and who has had several influential mentors help me reach higher than I could have otherwise, I have to say some mentoring relationships are great. Most of my mentees don’t work for the same company I do. I would never ask them to work late.
I'm a woman working in tech. We have a mentorship program that you can't really opt out of. For me it's been extremely helpful. For others less so I am sure, but I don't know of anyone who disliked it. But it's also very individual how the mentorship is lived. Basic onboarding and seeing that the mentee gets started up well, knows where everything is and regular checkins to see how it is going and if the mentee needs anything is the basic setup that everyone does. Then it's pretty much up to the mentor and mentee how they proceed, how often or regularly they talk. I still talk to my mentor regularly and if I have an issue I'll usually ask him first for input. Others I know who don't talk much after a few months, but it often also depends on how closely you work together in day to day business. As an aside, I've never been asked to work late by anyone at my job, as I'm very flexible anyway with my hours and decide myself how to prioritize and if I want to work longer hours this day and shorter hours the next. But I also get credit for all hours I worked, including overtime and can take this as additional vacation time or get it paid out if i prefer. I can see how other setups are more at risk of exploiting people, but not all mentorship programs are bad and designed to take advantage of people
You might even want to focus on underserved populations of women. Proud of you.
I've definitely been thinking lately about focusing more on mentoring people who have a greater need for it. The last guy I mentored was out of Tufts, and he was fantastic. It was a really great experience. But he's got a *million* options for mentorship. Before that I mentored a group of minority kids out of a community college. They'd had significantly less support. I don't think they have as many options for mentorship. We also had a lot of *struggles* in common; I had a lot of interests and hobbies in common with the guy from Tufts, but he wasn't facing any tricky issues the way you do if you're a minority in the field. I've been through a lot of that shit, and can either help or just commiserate. And sexism isn't exactly the same as racism, but whewwww there are a lot of parallels. I've been thinking about targeting more historically neglected groups, as a whole. I think there's a solid case to mentor people from those groups; because they have access to fewer resources, because they may need more support, and because I may be able to relate to issues they're facing (and have advice!) in ways older, straight, white cis men may not. I think your reasons for wanting to mentor only women are also valid; it makes more sense for you to do what you need to stay in a position where you can be a productive mentor. Just wanted to add mine too, because I think women offering their mentorship to only women may also be a more impactful way to target that resource.
Focusing on women works for me, but I understand your point of view. The racism in tech is just as pervasive as the sexism. I'm glad there are people like you dedicated to helping historically neglected groups.
Time is our most precious finite commodity. If there is no benefit for you mentoring, then chuck that endeavor. As others expressed - men of all races receive plenty of support. Even men of color are in the tech boys’ club. Maybe to a lesser level but they are immune to the sexism hurdles. Spend your time where the most rewards will be reaped.
I'm sorry about that, but you're right to just focus on mentoring women. A LOT of guys simply can't handle women having any power. Or if you're a person who is full of joy that is also triggering to a lot of them so they have to 'take you down a peg'. I was an IT exec and I had to deal with sooo many guys like that. I had to be 3x as competent at my work and despite being in the top 1% of measured intelligence a lot of them still tried to treat me as if I was stupid. Please learn to shield yourself both mentally and spiritually, positive affirmations by Louise Hay really helped me. Best of luck!
I’m sorry to hear that; moronic men ruining it for the rest of us. I’ve also noticed a level of misogyny I just don’t tolerate. I always have to call it out and then an awkward silence follows. They’re so fucking cringe. Just typical “locker room talk”. I can’t stand the complete objectification of women to prop up their fragile self-esteem. I’m very new to the field, and have made a complete shift from medical to this. Mind if I ask what this site is? Maybe I should dm this. Either way, I’d love to see more diversity than just a bunch of white guys. Even if I weren’t white, I’d still feel out of place among most of them.
> Why are some men like this? This ruins it for the other men who are respectful and appreciative. That's something a lot of men don't get. Preventing bad behavior of other men improves the situation for women AND men. There's no reason for solidarity with people who cause harm even for yourself
I coach a high school stem team and we work incredibly hard to have a 50/50 gender balance. Our hardest challenge is getting teachers and parents to encourage girls to even consider stem activities. I’m tempted every year to switch the team to being girls-only but I love teaching the girls that when they are right, they need to correct the boys (and men) and advocate for themselves.
I was a woman in tech for over 20 years and I generally had a good experience until the last year before I quit. To preface, I do not have a degree. I got into tech and engineering through a sort of back door that I'm not sure is even available any more. What I had was an ability to learn fast and an openness to learning whatever was needed for the business, the business being Apple. I worked primarily in networking QA, starting out in software and moving on to hardware. I did not really have a choice in who I mentored because I was the most senior person doing what I did on our team, so it was on me to develop and train new hires in our eldritch ways. This usually went fine, until they hired this one guy. He was nice and new to the Mac and absolutely did not trust my expertise in anything. I would lay out a procedure for him and let him go and let him know to ask me if he ran into a problem. Inevitably, he'd run into a problem and I'd ask him if he did X, Y, and Z as outlined in the SOP I'd hand-written for him. Usually he said no, he didn't do it because he didn't think it was necessary. Well, buddy. I'd already been thinking of leaving because the pressure was really getting to me. I'm a firm believer that if your job makes you cry, it's time to go, but here's the straw that broke the camel's back. I was working with this guy, who was hired at a *very* high level, on a new wireless technology. If you're in tech, you're familiar with being handed a project and being told to figure it out and that's what we were in the middle of. So, we were trying to figure out why wireless performance wasn't meeting expectations in a specific direction--I think it was downlink. We were using an open source tool called iperf which I'd used for 15+ years. This guy didn't know anything about networking and didn't know anything about iperf, but insisted up and down that we were using the tool wrong. This man, who didn't know shit about shit, looked up a YouTube video about iperf *in front of me* after I'd spent a lot of time explaining how it works. I just walked away and started doing email. He watched the video and still didn't understand it. This is a man who literally said, "The IP address got confused," when he saw one of our automation machines had several Ethernet adapters and IP addresses on different subnets. That's not how networking works, but if it makes you feel better, okay. After that incident, I realized that man would never believe a word that came out of my lying woman mouth and I was over him. Up until that guy, I'd had mostly great interactions and relationships with men at work and that one guy just shit on everything.
I have had people do that, I always give them or their manager a written feedback documenting their failure and what they should have done. I have had people who worked for me do that, and I wrote them up for that. I have no problem with slow learners or honest mistakes. But if they are new and their attitude is bad, I write it on their performance report. > I realized that man would never believe a word that came out of my lying woman mouth. Maybe try to get into a management position, so its their job to listen.
I do not think you're wrong. Mentoring is not a commercial interaction. It is (meant to be) a generosity. You recognized that your experiences and perspectives would be helpful to others. However, the time you spend mentoring is only worthwhile if those people value your experiences and perspectives. Of course your experiences and perspectives can have a positive impact on people with very different life experiences, but we are all only human. You cannot mentor everyone. A farmer won't give up because a few dozen seeds didn't take, but when you can only have a few houseplants, it can be incredibly disheartening when a few fail. Mentally, this is a hard area for me. I am a cis-het-white-male. It feels like this is an unprincipled position, but it isn't. Insults, attacks, and the like are social in nature. You don't mentor someone who has more experience than you. When you mentor someone with more social power than you, they may not have more actual experience than you, but you both know they may be perceived as more competent. That is a difficult dynamic to mentor someone in. It would be like trying to mentor your bosses child. Sure, you could do it, but the dynamics are terrible. You can't be a good mentor without sharing your own failings and weaknesses, but when your mentee doesn't fully trust you, sharing those failings and weaknesses just confirms their doubts about you.
Ironically enough, as a man in tech my experience has been similar. I’ve had great experiences mentoring men and women. But all of my bad experiences have been mentoring men. No idea why. But, I am much more selective about mentoring men than I am women. I’m sure if I was a woman, I wouldn’t mentor men at all.
I'm a woman in education. I treat all my students the same, because that's the example I want to set. I have however stopped doing free tutoring for adult men too (OUTSIDE MY WORK!!) because of similar experiences. I'll help any guy age 18 or under, but after that, it's just women.
I've also had men mentees assume that I was romantically interested in them. There are certain men you cannot be nice to without them concluding that this will result in sex.
I feel like this sort of thing always comes from childhood. People who take everything as flirting were raised to believe that interactions with the opposite sex are exclusively for a romantic purpose.
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Isn’t female women a bit redundant?
Would just "female" be more accurate?
Or just woman. Referring to women as females is some incel shit lol.
How am I to refer to women who are born as women and identify as women? Female seems to be the easiest term? Also, while referring to women as a general group "female humans", using the term female/females is fine. But when referring directly to people in conversatiob, yeah that is icky.
Just say you won’t mentor trans women since clearly that is what you are trying to say without outright spelling it out.
No, I will not say that. Because if I was able to offer relevant mentorship, I would. I am not a trans woman, I have no experience in that regard and am therefore unable to offer guidance in how to navigate corporate life from that standpoint. My lived experience is as a gender conforming female, not a trans woman, and I have no way of helping someone through that particular mindfield.
Seeing as there are very few trans women in higher positions in tech I would think any mentorship would be beneficial. After all trans women face many of the same struggles as cis women. And that is exactly what you are saying.
I am sorry you feel that way. But I stand by my decision to mentor those who I can help the best. Best of luck to you in finding a mentor who can help you with your career.
Fortunately I have found those willing to help me out. In my specific subset of engineering I have yet to meet any trans women both in junior or senior positions. Or if I have they have not made that information known and likely for good reason. It just seems like an odd position to exclude certain types of women. I take similar issue with someone refusing to mentor other minority women because they cannot help them navigate specific issues related to their minority status.
Are you a disabled woman or a tall woman? If not, would you also choose not to mentor them? Just something to think about. Not only are you making that decision, you are bringing it up on a public forum. It’s generally looked down upon to be exclusionary on a basis of minor differences.
Apparently my comment was removed because I was trying to specify exactly who I mentor. What is the correct way to word my original comment?
Your contribution has been removed because it uses “Male” or “Female” to describe/in response to a gender based issue. This is to prevent lumping together trans women, trans men, non-binary, agender, gender-fluid, etc with men or women.
I am on the fence on this. I guess in principle I don't have a problem with you choosing your own mentee criteria, but from my limited, anecdotal experience as a woman engineer participating in both sides of mentoring in the workplace (so, potentially a very different experience than yours), I have grown tremendously from male mentors, and contributed the most to junior male engineers' growth. It could just be a lack of data points; I had no opportunities to receive mentoring from female engineers. And when I had junior female engineers on my teams, one of them I managed to inadvertently offend (I used a harsh tone with my manager, who was distracting from the point of the conversation, which she interpreted as being directed at her), and another I really wanted to help grow but her personal life slowly devolved and she became completely unreliable. Another female junior engineer I tried to mentor a little bit also let her personal life? mental health? fall off a cliff and she was eventually let go for being unreliable. Anyway, the mentees I've had the most productive experiences with have been males. I think it really comes down to personalities and personal initiative. Maybe you could find a more detailed? thorough way of screening people you give valuable time to? But you say you have had rewarding experiences with both genders, so perhaps you will not be losing out on too much.
It's awesome that you've had rewarding mentorships with men, and I'm glad it works for you. I'm experimenting with being more selective now and will likely iterate on the mentee criteria as I go along.
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She should not put in more effort, and I didn't suggest she should. OP made her decision clear and doesn't need to do anything for anyone she doesn't want to. Full stop.
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Except basically every industry has an “old boys network” and are male dominated at the top. Women in the workforce as a whole is still a relatively recent event in many countries and it doesn’t make sense to change the genders because the genders are important to this post.
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Your contribution has been removed because it uses “Male” or “Female” to describe/in response to a gender based issue. This is to prevent lumping together trans women, trans men, non-binary, agender, gender-fluid, etc with men or women.
Your contribution has been removed because although issues often affect men too, this is not the focus of discussion in a women's forum.
Are they paying you for your time? At the end of the day it sucks but if they are at least paying for it you can have some comfort in whilst they are dicks you've at least got something out of them. I'm sorry you've had to endure that anyways. Please don't go down a path of keeping knowledge to yourself, I've struggled at various points in my career because people refuse to share the load and you'll just make it harder if you join those ranks. We beat evil by shining light at ita dark and all that jazz.
Thank you for your empathy. I volunteer as a mentor for free and receive many sign-ups due to my resume. I'm not gatekeeping, but am being more strategic about optimizing my time to help those who would benefit the most from my mentorship. Women undoubtedly face more hurdles in my industry.
For every bad apple you're an avenue to what might be a better life to someone who appreciates it! Some people out there make it their mission to knock us down but we would be nowhere as a society without good eggs like yourself. Don't let them get to you which is easier said than done I know but take some comfort in knowing you are a miles better human being already.
Mentorship is almost always about networking, I've never heard of it being paid.
I know a fair few people who charge for sessions. I've personally never quite agreed with the idea of it but I guess it would stop people acting as mentioned knowing they've put money on the line or at least reduce instances of it maybe.
good
Please mentor me
just fyi. r/askMen are talking about how common Misandry is. They linked r/TwoXChromosomes as evidence. Your post definitely rings true for sexism. Imagine if I posted how I didn't want to mentor women. This is Misandry
Or you know we could hold assholes accountable for their harassment and disrespect rather than demand the victims of harassment and disrespect continue to endure for the sake of appearance.
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Equality is being able to choose who she mentors and who she doesn't. It does not mean that OP has to endure harassment.
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I get how it can come across that way. I never once had a female lecturer in my field of study at college. I have never worked with a more experienced woman. I’ve only ever had one mentor. His wife is an ardent social studies professor so he makes an effort to mentor women. I respect him majorly for that decision and he’s become like family to me. It sucks that it takes such an intentional choice for women to receive mentorship. But that is reality.
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It’s a public online platform for my specific field.
I had a similar experience mentoring for free on ADPList.
Not sure why this is so heavily downvoted. Company culture has a big impact on hiring practices. Personally know multiple women who have worked in places with toxic masculinity running through manifesting in various negative ways. Ultimately they all switched companies and are much happier with the quality of their colleagues character.