Young female coders get strong support for facing tough culture

At the center of a brightly lit conference room inside the offices of a Silicon Valley software firm, a college student lowered her voice, leaned over to the woman on her right and made an admission: “I’m scared.”

The young woman, 21-year-old Michelle Ahn, is a junior at UC Berkeley. She’s a computer science major and an instructor with Girls Who Code.

And she’s afraid of entering the workforce not because she doesn’t think she can get a job or do the work she wants to do, but because she’s heard about what happens to women in tech. The stories of harassment, discrimination, assault.

“If that happened to me, especially just coming out of school? I don’t know what I would do,” Ahn said. “It scares me that I could put all this time and all this work into a computer science degree, and then five years down the line, I could end up quitting because of something like this.”

As Ahn spoke, Pratima Rao Gluckman, a user interface manager at cloud-computing firm VMware and a mentor for students, shook her head.

“I’m not going to lose another one,” she said. “I will not lose another woman to tech.”

In the midst of Silicon Valley’s latest reckoning with its mistreatment of women in the industry, programs aimed at pushing more women into science and technology fields are grappling with new questions and anxieties from young woman unsure about entering a world that seems to care so little about them.

One solution is surrounding young women with women who are more established in the industry — mentors and teachers who can help them feel less alone.

Having the support of other women, and watching them share their stories of mistreatment, is what prompted several female founders to come forward last month with allegations of sexual misconduct by venture capitalists, several of whom were forced to step down from their firms and apologize publicly.

These women cited people like Ellen Pao, who sued her former employer for discrimination, and Susan Fowler, an engineer who blogged about experiencing rampant sexism while working at Uber.

“I think it’s inspiring that these women are speaking up and showing us that maybe bad things happen but you can fight it,” said Burde Prerana Kamath, a graduate student at Indiana University. “Now I know more about what to do if it ever happened to me.”

Ahn and Kamath were among 20 college students who participated in CodeHouse, a days-long coding workshop put on by VMware, a Dell subsidiary, that challenged them to devise technical solutions to help make the tech industry more diverse.

For these women, the issue of diversity isn’t just theoretical. They have to live it every day, several said.

Ricky Trigalo, a mentor and development manager in the office of the chief technology officer at VMware, said she has run into issues with people assuming she’s a man — because of her name and technical abilities.

“I had someone call me and say, ‘I need to talk to the Ricky who helped fix my code,’ and I said, ‘That’s me,’ and he could not believe it,” she said. “‘No, I need to talk to the guy.’ It was unreal.”

For Ahn, it was the first time she had ever been in a room full of female engineers. Even her computer science classes, she said, had all been taught by men.

Between correcting each other’s code and practicing their final presentations, the women at CodeHouse — named that because all the participants stay together in one big house to facilitate a near-round-the-clock hackathon environment — swapped stories about being the only woman in their classes or at their internships.

Gluckman recounted an incident when a co-worker stalked her and several female colleagues.

“I called the manager and he was fired the very same day,” she said, as several young women nodded appreciatively. “That’s my personality: fight, fight, fight. What? We’re supposed to just shut up and take it? That’s another form of repression.”

Outgoing Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer voiced concern last month that all the publicity being given to women sharing their stories of assault and harassment at the hands of powerful technology executives and venture capitalists would scare away girls who might otherwise want to pursue a career in tech.

“I worry about the 18-year-old girl right now who’s reading these articles and is thinking: ‘Do I really want a career in tech? Is this what I really want to be a part of?’” Mayer said at a conference.

But the young women at CodeHouse said they’re grateful for these stories.

“In the short term, some people might be discouraged, but in the long term, it’s going to help so many women,” said Akanksha Bindal, 23, a computer science graduate student at Georgia Tech. “If there’s a problem, not talking about it is certainly not going to help fix it.”

None of the student groups created a solution that touched on issues particular to women in tech for the coding contest. Most addressed what is known as the pipeline problem, or a lack of women entering tech fields in the first place, with games, aptitude tests and mentor-pairing social networks.

But Sanjay Poonen, the chief operating officer at VMware who gave a lunchtime talk to the women on Friday, said by simply entering the field, these women have the potential to change it.

“We have to surround every bad example with nine, 10 good examples — examples of young women, young leaders doing well and being treated fairly,” he said. “I want these women to go on and inspire another generation of young girls, like my 11-year-old daughter. That’s when we’ll start to see a change.”

One of those women may be Ahn, who, days after the workshop’s conclusion, wasn’t as worried as she was before.

She found a new sense of confidence and comfort in meeting women like her and learning that she’s not as alone as she thought.

“It was great to talk to (the mentors) and realize you might face issues, and there will definitely be things that are different for us as women in the industry,” she said, “but at the same time, it’s nothing that can’t be overcome.”