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August 22, 2019 09:35 pm

For Young Female Coders, Internship Interviews Can Be Toxic

An anonymous reader shares a report: Eyre (an anecdote in the story) is one of more than 1,000 young women college-aged or older, hailing from 300 schools around the country, who participated in a recent survey [PDF] about the challenges female engineers face while applying for technical internships. The study was conducted last fall by Girls Who Code, a nonprofit organization that educates and supports girls studying computer science, which has 30,000 college-aged alumnae and 17,000 alumnae potentially entering college this fall. The analysis was limited to young women in the Girls Who Code network who are studying or previously studied computer science and related fields. The results reveal that many young women, whom the tech industry is counting on to diversify its heavily male workforce, are put off by their first encounters with tech companies. More than half of the respondents said they either had a negative experience while applying for engineering internships or knew another woman who had a negative experience, such as being subjected to gender-biased interview questions and inappropriate remarks, or observing a noticeable lack of diversity when they interacted with company representatives during the interview process. Although the survey did not explicitly ask about sexual harassment and discrimination, respondents raised both issues in written responses at the end of the survey. They described instances where a male interviewer flirted with them during the interview, sent an unsolicited photo of himself, asked if they had a significant other, or made sexual remarks in their presence. The respondents also reported feeling dismissed or demeaned because of their gender. One respondent was asked why she would want to go into tech as a woman; in another instance, a male interviewer laughed when the candidate said she saw herself becoming a software engineer in five years.

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