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How Can A Female Engineer Remain Positive Despite What Seem To Be Discriminatory Hiring Practices?

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This article is more than 9 years old.

Answer by Jean Yang, MIT CSAIL, on Quora,

This is a great question and one that most women in CS I've known have struggled with. Here are some things I've found to help.

Learn to identify what's discriminatory about hiring practices. It's a lot easier to fight against discriminatory practices if you can pinpoint what is actually going wrong. One way to feel empowered is to educate yourself about the reasons women are being short-changed. This way, you can avoid these pitfalls yourself and/or help improve hiring practices so they are more fair. That said, please do not feel pressured to become the go-to person for all woman-related hiring questions. While it makes you feel so helpful and like such an activist, it can be exhausting. Make other people take on the responsibility of educating themselves about these issues.

Befriend other women. My male friends are great, but they live in a completely different world when it comes to how they engage with the environment and how the environment engages with them. I've found that my female friends in tech can be much better to talk to when preparing for and debriefing professional situations because they understand. Similarly, older women will give spot-on career advice because they have had similar experiences. I have also increasingly discovered that women are more than happy to help other women because we know how hard it can be. If you can't find women locally, find them virtually. Tech LadyMafia is a fantastic network of successful and supportive women.

Find woman-friendly environments. While there are some environments that simply aren't interested in gender equality, there are many places where the people are willing to do what it takes to get more women. I have talked to CEOs and people high up in companies who spend a lot of time trying to understand how to recruit more women and how to create an environment that is welcoming to women. These places would probably be delighted to hire qualified female candidates. Ask around to figure out what these places are.

Filter out the sensationalist, negative articles. The media tends to sensationalize things--and what's better at getting shares and clicks than articles that say women are doomed? Most of these articles aren't the most scientific if you look at them closely--they are often loosely-based on a questionable scientific study. Ignore those and focus on the positive articles out there. For instance, recently there was this article Tech women are busy building their own networks about how women support each other. The Atlantic recently had a couple of nice profiles on women computer scientists (Irene Greif and Radia Perlman) and Slate is doing a "Future Tense" series on women in STEM. I also recently read In Tech, Women Are Now Paid As Much As Men, Study Finds.

Stick with it. Many of the reasons people are reluctant to hire women have to do with the fact that there aren't many women: people are nervous about changing workplace dynamics; people haven't ever encountered technical women before so they don't really believe that women can be technical. The only way to change this is to get more women out there. Keep doing what you love and it will get better!

This question originally appeared on Quora: How can I maintain a positive attitude as a female engineer despite what I believe to be discriminatory hiring practices?. More questions: