Gender and management/technical track careers
June 11, 2020 11:38 AM Subscribe
I am a woman in a junior technical role at a big corporation. I have observed that the women in my org tend to end up in managerial roles relatively quickly rather than further building their subject-specific expertise. I am feeling myself being encouraged (via the assignments and projects I'm given in comparison with those given to my male colleagues of similar seniority) in the same direction. Is this a known phenomenon in the wider working world, and if so do you have links to further reading on it and its consequences?
Are managers paid more than subject experts at your company? Many places, corporate and otherwise, hire women because they're cheaper, across the board.
posted by Melismata at 11:56 AM on June 11, 2020 [1 favorite]
posted by Melismata at 11:56 AM on June 11, 2020 [1 favorite]
Super well known. While yes, managers are paid more than entry level dev, Sr or Principal dev positions make...potentially more. If you want to be a manager, this can be a good path for you, but if you prefer the technical role, then apply at other companies, and push back at this one.
And yes, male managers are definitely making more money than women managers. White men more than men who are BIPOC, and white women more than BIPOC women.
A good search term for this is "mommy track" and it is happening because there is a cultural assumption that women go on to have children/leave the company to care for family. This tracking of women into management positions is also sometimes lumped in with the "glass cliff" because if a person fails at the tasks, it will be attributed to their gender (or other marginalized status) rather than underlying problems in the company, or lack of support for the manager's authority.
Lots of women are given loads of responsibility with no authority, and for a variety of reasons, feel like there is no choice but to stay in such a role. This doesn't appear to happen quite as often as men.
There is ALSO the assumption that women are "just naturally better at the people stuff." Which contrasts horribly with the reviews women managers receive that they are not nice enough, not patient enough, are bitchy...when evaluated next to their male counterparts. (the studying of this kind of evaluation is often done by attaching a male sounding name and a female sounding name to a write up of a manager's behavior, having different people review them and recording the ways the reviews change by perceived gender....it's bad.)
posted by bilabial at 12:09 PM on June 11, 2020 [24 favorites]
And yes, male managers are definitely making more money than women managers. White men more than men who are BIPOC, and white women more than BIPOC women.
A good search term for this is "mommy track" and it is happening because there is a cultural assumption that women go on to have children/leave the company to care for family. This tracking of women into management positions is also sometimes lumped in with the "glass cliff" because if a person fails at the tasks, it will be attributed to their gender (or other marginalized status) rather than underlying problems in the company, or lack of support for the manager's authority.
Lots of women are given loads of responsibility with no authority, and for a variety of reasons, feel like there is no choice but to stay in such a role. This doesn't appear to happen quite as often as men.
There is ALSO the assumption that women are "just naturally better at the people stuff." Which contrasts horribly with the reviews women managers receive that they are not nice enough, not patient enough, are bitchy...when evaluated next to their male counterparts. (the studying of this kind of evaluation is often done by attaching a male sounding name and a female sounding name to a write up of a manager's behavior, having different people review them and recording the ways the reviews change by perceived gender....it's bad.)
posted by bilabial at 12:09 PM on June 11, 2020 [24 favorites]
it's a super well known phenomenon and is related to the expectation that women will naturally want to mommy (organize, shepherd, referee -- but not FIRE) the men who do the real work.
sorry no references other than my observed years of HR in big tech.
posted by fingersandtoes at 1:16 PM on June 11, 2020 [9 favorites]
sorry no references other than my observed years of HR in big tech.
posted by fingersandtoes at 1:16 PM on June 11, 2020 [9 favorites]
oh and by the way: resist, resist this pressure.
In fat times, there are jobs for everyone in tech. In lean times, middle management is highly vulnerable to layoffs, and tech skills stale quickly.
posted by fingersandtoes at 1:24 PM on June 11, 2020 [10 favorites]
In fat times, there are jobs for everyone in tech. In lean times, middle management is highly vulnerable to layoffs, and tech skills stale quickly.
posted by fingersandtoes at 1:24 PM on June 11, 2020 [10 favorites]
Also for meeting quotas for having x number of women in managerial roles to appear “diverse”
posted by Juniper Toast at 1:28 PM on June 11, 2020 [4 favorites]
posted by Juniper Toast at 1:28 PM on June 11, 2020 [4 favorites]
This is known as "being glue" in the community of people who think/write about engineering careers and management.
Glue is work that is less rewarded on the technical track, but necessary for the team to function. It naturally leads people into management. It's not necessarily a bad way to spend your time, but you should be aware you're doing it and what the consequences are for your career, especially if you're from a demographic that people assume is "not technical". And of course male-dominated spaces are more likely to expect women to do this work, whether they want to or not.
I highly recommend watching/reading the talk by the same name by Tanya Reilly. In fact, I recommend it so much I'm going to watch it again myself right now. So good!
posted by caek at 1:44 PM on June 11, 2020 [10 favorites]
Glue is work that is less rewarded on the technical track, but necessary for the team to function. It naturally leads people into management. It's not necessarily a bad way to spend your time, but you should be aware you're doing it and what the consequences are for your career, especially if you're from a demographic that people assume is "not technical". And of course male-dominated spaces are more likely to expect women to do this work, whether they want to or not.
I highly recommend watching/reading the talk by the same name by Tanya Reilly. In fact, I recommend it so much I'm going to watch it again myself right now. So good!
posted by caek at 1:44 PM on June 11, 2020 [10 favorites]
Here's on OK article from Harvard Business Review: The Subtle Stressors Making Women Want to Leave Engineering. It's not a perfect article - it sort of blames women for making these choices but it also acknowledges that women are shunted into these roles due to stereotyping around "professional" vs "technical" skills. But it's a reasonable starting point.
posted by GuyZero at 1:51 PM on June 11, 2020
posted by GuyZero at 1:51 PM on June 11, 2020
One of the things I thought about yonks ago when my $CORP was trying to track me into management was that managerial success is subjectively defined much more often than technical success is. Did I feel safer on the technical track where I had a chance of simply writing better faster code sooner than my competitors did, and pointing to it at ranking time? Yes, yes I did.
What I said to the HR crew was that they were mistaking verbal for psychological fluency, and that I didn’t find them fungible. After a pause to parse, they left me alone.
Then the group that had been pulling kind of got taken over by Promise Keepers and later collapsed under technical debt, so, good call past me.
posted by clew at 1:55 PM on June 11, 2020 [2 favorites]
What I said to the HR crew was that they were mistaking verbal for psychological fluency, and that I didn’t find them fungible. After a pause to parse, they left me alone.
Then the group that had been pulling kind of got taken over by Promise Keepers and later collapsed under technical debt, so, good call past me.
posted by clew at 1:55 PM on June 11, 2020 [2 favorites]
Do the women in your org continue to get promoted to higher management positions (senior manager, director, VP), or do they have a glass ceiling as a first-line manager? Are the women managers able to decide salaries & bonuses? Are they able to hire & fire? Would your current peers be shifted to report to you, so that you are their new boss?
In my experience, a manager role comes with the authority to decide promotions, performance review ratings, salaries, hiring, and firing. If that's the case with your company, then management is a legitimate career track. Then it's up to you whether you prefer the technical track or the management track. I have seen female junior technical staff that were promoted quickly and over time became executives at large companies. I'd like to go against the grain and say that it's not necessarily always a bad path.
The other answers refer to manager roles that have "responsibility without authority". Are they referring to project manager or product manager roles? I think of those as different career tracks from a pure-technical role. Product managers can have more power or less power than the technical staff based on the company, and their compensation might be equal or less than the technical staff. Some product managers go on to become leaders or start their own company. Other product managers get stuck under a glass ceiling.
I suggest you look at the actual authority you'd have in this role, to distinguish between "a role that's on track toward becoming an executive one day" versus "shunting you to the mommy path".
posted by cheesecake at 1:56 PM on June 11, 2020 [14 favorites]
In my experience, a manager role comes with the authority to decide promotions, performance review ratings, salaries, hiring, and firing. If that's the case with your company, then management is a legitimate career track. Then it's up to you whether you prefer the technical track or the management track. I have seen female junior technical staff that were promoted quickly and over time became executives at large companies. I'd like to go against the grain and say that it's not necessarily always a bad path.
The other answers refer to manager roles that have "responsibility without authority". Are they referring to project manager or product manager roles? I think of those as different career tracks from a pure-technical role. Product managers can have more power or less power than the technical staff based on the company, and their compensation might be equal or less than the technical staff. Some product managers go on to become leaders or start their own company. Other product managers get stuck under a glass ceiling.
I suggest you look at the actual authority you'd have in this role, to distinguish between "a role that's on track toward becoming an executive one day" versus "shunting you to the mommy path".
posted by cheesecake at 1:56 PM on June 11, 2020 [14 favorites]
Do the women in your org continue to get promoted to higher management positions (senior manager, director, VP), or do they have a glass ceiling as a first-line manager?
Conversely, are any of the very senior people in technical roles women?
Another aspect to this is that large tech companies need far more managers than they need high level engineers, so at my company management is a far more viable route to promotion once you reach the level where "manager" is considered a lateral move.
posted by hoyland at 3:21 PM on June 11, 2020 [1 favorite]
Conversely, are any of the very senior people in technical roles women?
Another aspect to this is that large tech companies need far more managers than they need high level engineers, so at my company management is a far more viable route to promotion once you reach the level where "manager" is considered a lateral move.
posted by hoyland at 3:21 PM on June 11, 2020 [1 favorite]
This is coming from a male. My 44 year technical career has been in the Financial Services industry and there has always been a greater percentage of women in technical and managerial roles (based on what I've heard in discussions with people in other industries). I think it's also fair to say that in technical areas there is an inversion, such that if an important problem or time critical need arises, it quickly finds its way to the SME (Subject Matter Expert) and/or technical expert in that area. So managers can make their reports' lives miserable, but project management, meeting attendance, conference calls, HR paperwork and flights to other cities tend to make it very difficult for them to keep up with the systems minutiae or technical architecture. And so the managerial power has to be used sparingly, and (as has been suggested) it is not unusual to hear of situations where people earn significantly more than their managers in such situations, and managers may get axed in lean times.
Likewise, the most valuable technicians will often be shielded from demands on their time, for fear of falling behind development schedules or delays in delivery of problem fixes. But it seems nobody is much worried about the demands on a manager's time (until maybe you get much higher in the org chart).
Because of the industry, I have often worked for female managers, and I have also worked along side female SMEs and excellent female technicians. I have no doubt that there were all kinds of dynamics going on that as a male I was insensitive to or ignorant of (e.g, I just recently read this article). I guess what I have been fumbling to say is that there are various forces at work in technical organizations that can advantage/disadvantage employees based on their skills and temperament, and it seems to me from the above comments that it only becomes more fraught when biases and politics and economics enter the picture as well.
My 2 cents, FWIW.
posted by forthright at 4:25 PM on June 11, 2020 [2 favorites]
Likewise, the most valuable technicians will often be shielded from demands on their time, for fear of falling behind development schedules or delays in delivery of problem fixes. But it seems nobody is much worried about the demands on a manager's time (until maybe you get much higher in the org chart).
Because of the industry, I have often worked for female managers, and I have also worked along side female SMEs and excellent female technicians. I have no doubt that there were all kinds of dynamics going on that as a male I was insensitive to or ignorant of (e.g, I just recently read this article). I guess what I have been fumbling to say is that there are various forces at work in technical organizations that can advantage/disadvantage employees based on their skills and temperament, and it seems to me from the above comments that it only becomes more fraught when biases and politics and economics enter the picture as well.
My 2 cents, FWIW.
posted by forthright at 4:25 PM on June 11, 2020 [2 favorites]
The consequences can be a serious glass ceiling. I have had a long and successful career in tech, and my advice to women is always the same: do not let them push you into management until you are fully ready. Management will always be there for you. Those years of honing your skills and instincts as a hands-on engineer won't, and skipping over them is shortchanging your future.
posted by ch1x0r at 5:42 PM on June 11, 2020 [7 favorites]
posted by ch1x0r at 5:42 PM on June 11, 2020 [7 favorites]
I have observed that the women in my org tend to end up in managerial roles relatively quickly rather than further building their subject-specific expertise.
Unless you work for an employer that clearly operates a reverse bias to the rest of society (not impossible, but exceedingly rare in tech), I would assume that any 'women tend to...' feature in your organisation functions to their collective or individual detriment and will prove surprisingly difficult to resist. If you want to avoid that detriment you will probably need to actively fight against it, identify patrons/sponsors, find other women who have resisted etc. You might decide that it's not detrimental to what you as an individual want to do with your career, for example if becoming a subject matter expert leaves you absolutely cold and that's ok. You definitely don't have to fight every collective battle.
The same would be true if you replaced LGBTQ, disabled, or BIPOC for women.
(I noted the same thing in engineering, where women were project managers rather than technical experts. I did not want to be a project manager and resisted accordingly. The point became moot when I changed careers.)
posted by plonkee at 1:36 AM on June 12, 2020
Unless you work for an employer that clearly operates a reverse bias to the rest of society (not impossible, but exceedingly rare in tech), I would assume that any 'women tend to...' feature in your organisation functions to their collective or individual detriment and will prove surprisingly difficult to resist. If you want to avoid that detriment you will probably need to actively fight against it, identify patrons/sponsors, find other women who have resisted etc. You might decide that it's not detrimental to what you as an individual want to do with your career, for example if becoming a subject matter expert leaves you absolutely cold and that's ok. You definitely don't have to fight every collective battle.
The same would be true if you replaced LGBTQ, disabled, or BIPOC for women.
(I noted the same thing in engineering, where women were project managers rather than technical experts. I did not want to be a project manager and resisted accordingly. The point became moot when I changed careers.)
posted by plonkee at 1:36 AM on June 12, 2020
Response by poster: Thanks all, this gives me lots to chew on and think about. I would like to especially highlight the talk caek linked to, which really resonated and put words to a lot of the vague concepts floating around in my head on this topic, and provided concrete ways to deal with it. FWIW the women I am thinking of are front-line managers with hiring/firing authority (the PM-type stuff is on a completely different track), but I can't think of any women in management between them and our (woman) VP's office. I suspect there are other factors there specific to my company's structure/history as well, but it is quite striking.
posted by btfreek at 9:33 AM on June 12, 2020 [1 favorite]
posted by btfreek at 9:33 AM on June 12, 2020 [1 favorite]
Here at everyone's favorite fruit company, the Management and individual Contributor tracks are equal when it comes to salary/RSUs and whatnot, so there is no financial incentive to choose one or the other. There isn't really non-financial incentive unless you really want something on your resume to get that next job that asks for "must of managed an org of X size"
That said, I've have (anecdotally) noticed more women find out they like the management part better than the engineering part, so they go that route, while most dudes seem to want to stay ICs. In fact, I can think of 5 examples off hand of dudes who went into management for a time, but hated it, so they came back to being ICs. I have zero examples of women going into management who then later decide it wasn't for them.
Because we treat the tracks the same, these moves in either direction aren't considered "promotions", but just lateral moves. Your experience might be different in a company that treats doing into management as a promotion.
Also, based on come comments in this post: PMs aren't even in the same org as the engineers, so we definitely don't have the "the project manager is also the boss of people doing the work on the project" situation like a lot of places.
posted by sideshow at 11:11 AM on June 12, 2020
That said, I've have (anecdotally) noticed more women find out they like the management part better than the engineering part, so they go that route, while most dudes seem to want to stay ICs. In fact, I can think of 5 examples off hand of dudes who went into management for a time, but hated it, so they came back to being ICs. I have zero examples of women going into management who then later decide it wasn't for them.
Because we treat the tracks the same, these moves in either direction aren't considered "promotions", but just lateral moves. Your experience might be different in a company that treats doing into management as a promotion.
Also, based on come comments in this post: PMs aren't even in the same org as the engineers, so we definitely don't have the "the project manager is also the boss of people doing the work on the project" situation like a lot of places.
posted by sideshow at 11:11 AM on June 12, 2020
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posted by GuyZero at 11:41 AM on June 11, 2020 [2 favorites]