I work in a mostly male field, which is annoying, but isn’t full of bros so it’s not too bad. I’ve been lucky to rarely experience the misogyny and never had a lack of support. I think you have to pick your industry carefully and you may have to sacrifice your dreams for some peace. I don’t know how women sleep when their daytime is filled with those assholes.

I work in software support. In my current company, the rank and file are close-ish to half male/half female, but management is almost all male, including all the way up to the 4 founders/heads of the company, and most customer teams are male-dominated. I often am on calls with the network teams at customers, and it’s very common for those almost entirely male teams to ignore what I say because I’m female. I very often have to repeat myself many times, and even then it usually goes better if I bring a male on the call to say what I’ve been saying. However, I’m pretty lucky, because when I brought up that one call in particular got sexist, my male manager essentially said “That’s not ok. Should I talk to their leadership?”. I’ve never had a manager, even a female manager, respond that way. Previous managers always pretty much said to deal with it, which I’ve gotten pretty good at. Now, I will sometimes bring my male manager on calls so that when the team asks him a question, he can say I’m the expert and let me answer. It doesn’t hurt that I do have a deeper knowledge of the technical areas, and my manager knows it.

I am a journey level worker in a construction trade union. My union is basically a mysoginist white supremisist gang. You have to go through near constant abuse and mobbing to just exist. Even the more reasonable guys treat you like a pariah because they will get bullied if they don’t. You will always have to work way harder than those around you. The women I’ve seen have long term success came in through affirmative action (that’s gone now) all ended up with what I’d describe as Stockholm syndrome. They all worked until they were broken ( breast cancer, double knee replacements, shoulder joint failure) and tried to keep going stuck in the constant need to prove themselves mode. It’s not a merit based system it’s more of a weird alpha male worship structure. I worked on a job where all the guys had a picture of the foremans dick on their phone and we’re going around shoving it in eachothers faces and calling eachother gay. I’ve also seen a few women make it and get some level of protection by participating bullying and discrimination against other minorities. Punching down is always rewarded in this system. The best most talented women or black man will always be below even the most tore up unqualified white man and our tax dollars uphold this system. The money is great though.

I worked in tech (past tense, doing marketing) for quite a number of years. I didn’t do the technical stuff, but I did interact with the techies and I also spoke with the women techies.

My experience is that most techies are “my folk”. (I like geeks because geeks show passion in the things they do, without regard for lame and pathetic things like accruing afterlife points—some call these “money”—and strutting around like peacocks. With “pea” serving double duty there.) Some are socially awkward and need guidance, but most are OK.

But there’s always the really bad ones. The ones who got into the field because of the money and purported prestige. The ones we call “techbros” nowadays. Those are a completely different bag and you need to draw lines quickly and vehemently with them. And then redraw them constantly because those assholes do not take “no” for an answer and have no clue what “consent” actually means. (Summoning another post that you’ll recognize: they’re the “Hans” types.)

Managers in tech are almost all male and almost all absolute shit as managers, however, because they tend to be elevated techbros who think that the technical skills they have make them smart enough to do any job without formal study or training – and they’re wrong. They perform really stupid basic management errors (like thinking everybody is motivated by cash) and wind up turning places into Hell holes. It’s why I quit my marketing career in tech: not because of the socially clumsy nerds but because of the horrific predatory and incompetent techbros.

I compose music and study music technology. I’m one of two women in my year of 8. In my bachelors we had 100 students, 5 women, one nonbinary person.

It was rough. It’s the usual not being taken seriously. Some people even have quite extreme views and think a professor mentioning that “women should have rights” is indoctrination of his politics.

So it was rough.

But I’ve also met lots of lovely people. And the solidarity between gender diverse people is great. I’ve found different game dev and music groups for underrepresented genders which are lovely. I imagine there’s those types of groups in different fields :)

I used to work in one, and it wasn’t good. It was very macho, very dog eat dog, and women got targeted for bullying. Women were often the butt of “jokes” and were publicly humiliated for making mistakes. Tbf a lot of it was the organisation had a toxic, bullying culture.

A lot of men would openly make nasty remarks about “moaning feminists” and how “men’s rights are being destroyed by moaning women”.

On the plus side, lots of men really hated it. There were many that were fiercely protective of women and hated to see them mistreated. And like I said a lot of it was the inherent nastiness of that organisation

Worked machine repair. My boss hired me because he knew I’d work for cheap.

In my experience, men seem initially very uncomfortable working with women, so you unfortunately have to kinda prove yourself to be “one of the boys” in order to be fully accepted or reap the social benefits of the workplace (ie. get more hours, be invited to do things, etc.). You really do have to be more stoic to fit in.

More unfortunately, my boss was also a stupid asshole who loved to talk politics at work. That meant he blathered on about “punch card abortion whores” one day, and I finally spoke out against him and was no longer scheduled after that.

I loved that work. I loved my co-workers. It taught me a lot, and I wish I could find more local work in that field again.