"I don't agree that the reason there aren't many women in tech is because of toxicity"

When I studied comp sci not that long ago, I shared most classes with a female friend. One of her professors literally told her that women had no place in tech. This was a woman who did my machine learning course homework for me, implementing a reinforced learning algorithm from scratch for me because I was too dumb to get it, so yeah, she definitely had a place in tech.

This was not an isolated incident. FIrst semester, there were about 20% women in my class, about 40 women in total. By the end, four women graduated, and about 100 men. This wasn't because these women weren't interested, or weren't qualified. It's because they were treated terribly.

I've just last month had to fire a software engineer who flat-out refused to work for a female tech lead, and aggressively attacked her leadership and technical skills in a very personal, gendered manner (think: "I will not work for an emotional woman, she will not tell me what to do!"). This is a guy who has worked in tech for over a decade, and still thought this was okay. He was genuinely surprised when I fired him, instead of promoting him to this woman's position. Apparently, this is the first time this approach had not worked for him. In every other company he worked before this one, his behavior was accepted, and, apparently, rewarded.

These topics are obviously complex, and there are many different reasons why there are so few women in tech. But the claim that toxicity against women isn't one of these reasons is false.

"I've simply never met anyone who says they didn't work in tech because of its culture"

I know about a dozen women who have left tech because of how they were treated. I think one thing to do here is to just reflect on why you've never met anyone who told you that this happened to them.

"Constantly going on about how tech is toxic, and refusing to let people say that their experiences were actually quite positive seems like a sure-fire way to discourage women from working there."

Sure. But that's an odd argument. If there is a problem, it won't be solved unless people talk about that problem. Given that toxicity against women is a problem that actual women actually experience every day, the logical conclusion from your point would be that we should lie to women in order to get more women into tech, which doesn't seem like a sound approach.

"Only a minority of companies have toxic cultures"

How do you know that? It's kind of difficult to even ascertain that, because there is no clear definition for what a "toxic culture" is, but in my experience, once companies reach a certain size, they inevitably end up with a rule-driven, dehumanizing culture, and before they reach that size, company culture often depends on a single person's whims. So there is probably at least one measure of toxicity by which a majority of companies qualify.

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