Excellent question! Here is my imperfect idea that is much easier said than done. FWIW, I do work as a software engineer at a very technical firm that I think does a stellar job getting this right.
The biggest thing is the pay gap. Fixing the pay gap does make employees more equal as an employer trades money for an employees time. We have a long way to go to fix the current pay gap in tech at least.
Also I have heard of managers who don't promote women as tech / team leads for fear they'll get pregnant and be on leave for 2-6 months taking care of their child. I literally told a guy at my last job that was not cool when he said that. Even though it might shake things up in the business if a valued employee is off work for a few months that is not the employees fault. Punishing them for what "might or might not happen" in the future is discrimination plain and simple. Discrimination of any form results in a hostile work environment and ultimately a less effective team.
Another common one is someone making unwanted advances or propositions. The only correct response on this from management is swift and firm rejection up to and including firing the unwanted initiator. Look at the recent mess with that female Uber engineer who was harassed so badly she finally gave up and left. She did the absolutely right thing and told the person not cool and then spoke with HR. Because the initiator was a "valued employee" they let it slide, further alienating the now victimized engineer.
I'm a dude in tech who knows what it is like to be treated poorly. We must be the voice for those without one (my wife calls me more of a feminist than she says she is amusingly). To do anything less is to be complicit in this injustice. See the "first they came for..." poem about the Nazis.
My issue with your post is this: obviously those things are very serious problems. But they are only the most egregious ones. I feel like any company not run by dolts can manage not to allow punishing women with the rationale that they might get pregnant and to stop blatant sexual harassment -- after all, these things are completely illegal. But even if we solve them there are still lots of more subtle ways that companies can be made less welcoming places for women than for men and addressing those probably requires much more conscious consideration.
And my problem with your response is that it still happens every single day legal or not. Let's fix the egregious problems for good, then we can focus on the subtle ones.
Take a solid engineer like Valerie Aurora or Sarah Sharp or even say Jessie Frazelle (in addition to the previously mentioned Uber engineer). This happens to other human beings, it is awful, it should stop. I would LOVE to work in a team with any of them solely to learn from them and grow my own skills. All of them have publically written about how they've been wrongfully discriminated against.
Yoire welcome to believe this isn't a problem and that it is common sense to not do these things and yet we still here the same story over and over and over. If my daughter wants to be an engineer I want her to be graded on the only thing that really matters, which is her intellect and ability to sell her solution as the best given the business requirements. Nothing more or less.
I think what emodendroket is getting at is not that this stuff is unimportant, but that the vast majority of us have no occasion to address the egregious problems with any regularity, so we should also focus on the things we can affect on a day-to-day basis. While bad things do happen every day across the industry, at any given workplace (or more specifically, within an individual working group) they are fairly infrequent, and only a small number of people actually witness them or are otherwise in a position to take action.
In contrast, we do have opportunities every day to address the more subtle issues - talking over people, expecting women to take notes, paying more attention to ideas that come from men, etc. Even at a company where no woman is harassed or underpaid or refused a promotion, there are almost always things that can be done to make the environment less uncomfortable for women, and these are things that everyone can and should pay attention to all the time.
> Also I have heard of managers who don't promote women as tech / team leads for fear they'll get pregnant and be on leave for 2-6 months taking care of their child. I literally told a guy at my last job that was not cool when he said that.
Has this ever made sense considering the ammount of turnover in tech circles. A guy promoted to tech lead for six months can probably get a decent salary bump elsewhere with that on his resume. And unlike the pregnant women, he isn't coming back with his knowledge and a newfound interest in job stability.
The biggest thing is the pay gap. Fixing the pay gap does make employees more equal as an employer trades money for an employees time. We have a long way to go to fix the current pay gap in tech at least.
Also I have heard of managers who don't promote women as tech / team leads for fear they'll get pregnant and be on leave for 2-6 months taking care of their child. I literally told a guy at my last job that was not cool when he said that. Even though it might shake things up in the business if a valued employee is off work for a few months that is not the employees fault. Punishing them for what "might or might not happen" in the future is discrimination plain and simple. Discrimination of any form results in a hostile work environment and ultimately a less effective team.
Another common one is someone making unwanted advances or propositions. The only correct response on this from management is swift and firm rejection up to and including firing the unwanted initiator. Look at the recent mess with that female Uber engineer who was harassed so badly she finally gave up and left. She did the absolutely right thing and told the person not cool and then spoke with HR. Because the initiator was a "valued employee" they let it slide, further alienating the now victimized engineer.
I'm a dude in tech who knows what it is like to be treated poorly. We must be the voice for those without one (my wife calls me more of a feminist than she says she is amusingly). To do anything less is to be complicit in this injustice. See the "first they came for..." poem about the Nazis.