I wrote a much longer thread about this on bsky but thought I would share over here that if you are struggling to wrap your head around seeing phrases like "masculine energy" in tech, I have two psychology resources to recommend (have also written with citations to both these researchers in my own work)
One is Vial et al. (2022): An Emphasis on Brilliance Fosters Masculinity-Contest Cultures
"an emphasis on brilliance has a negative effect on gender diversity because it fosters a workplace climate in which a masculine-coded, competition-based style of interpersonal interaction is perceived to be dominant"
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09567976211044133
The other -- you know I'm always going to recommend Cheryan! -- it's Cheryan & Markus (2022): Masculine Defaults: Identifying and Mitigating Hidden Cultural Biases
You may be thinking to yourself wow I wonder if anyone has ever directly studied brilliance beliefs on software teams and empirically measured them at scale with a couple thousand real developers & 700+ leaders and produced evidence about how brilliance beliefs & contest cultures are associated with lower team effectiveness and lower developer productivity, well
hit your girl up I did All That And More and I consult if your org needs LESS of this "energy"
I have also done a couple of really fantastic talks on this project for eng orgs, none of which are on video to share with you because obviously these are incredibly loaded and sometimes very emotional conversations for orgs to hold space for. It is just wonderful to see people's faces change as they realize that they have scientific support to collectively develop a more humane practice for tech excellence
Such moments are where I find my hope that we can build something better.
@grimalkina this is amazing, thank you!
@mnl thank you!!! This project was a tough one and I'm really proud of it (and a lot more data than is even written up in this preprint, still)
@grimalkina all add to the list for the morning, thank you.
@grimalkina These articles all look fantastic. Very much looking forward to reading them.
I'm recently retired, but I was a programmer for 35 years. The near-absence of women in sw dev was of course an observable fact, but at least for most of that time it didn't occur to me to question why that was. Only when I started to follow several clearly competent technical women on Twitter, and observe what I'm sure was only the faintest backscatter of the shit and abuse they received, that I began to have any real (although no doubt still minimal) understanding of what they faced.
@DaleHagglund thanks for sharing, it is always a little nerve wracking to post on those topics despite my professional expertise in them and I appreciate every affirmation that such sharing can help us build coalitions even through the imperfect filters of social media
@grimalkina Great stuff, thanks for sharing! I strongly suspect that these findings would replicate in academic research. Plenty of this kind of negative energy there, too…
@ElenLeFoll the Vial work considers this!
@grimalkina I am again extremely grateful for your work. It is another instance where the hammer hits the nail in the right spot and helps me put my feelings not only into words, but into numbers as well.
@grimalkina that gender and LGBTQ+ part is fascinating. I see there's a suggestion that is related to learning time "these developers may feel less able to spend time in learning practices." And I'm wondering is that specific to AI or is that a phenomenon that has been seen elsewhere (it feels like it might be related to stereotype bias, but I'm not sure)
@grimalkina I get the context is very much the masculine bias, and I know that has impacts on workplace support, perceptions and on self-confidence, but I hadn't heard about the impact specifically on learning before, although I can see an obvious correlation with the others, I had considered if that background radiation would increase learning (as I know there's a tendency for women needing to be more qualified than their peers before being considered as being equally competent )
Actually, I'm kinda wondering why this generally important work is correlated with 'AI'? Did somebody make an AI coding assist tool that's reliable recently?
@Orb2069 "correlate with AI" doesn't mean anything
if you read the paper you will see that this project is looking at what developers are experiencing when they are in environments of increasing automation, and how identity beliefs such as the ones I've described around brilliance exacerbate bad patterns in those environments. We also study how developers rate the quality of AI coding tools and such usage is widespread. I think these are important topics
@Orb2069 because adoption of AI coding tools is widespread, AND because even for developers who don't use the tools the *conversation about it* is widespread, it's an important scenario for testing how people think about their own skills and what they think *others* will expect (fairly or unfairly), as we write in the paper. Brilliance beliefs are an important component of this we think