i love this site because it presents this romantic image of, like, a sex & the city bond between girl engineers.  definitely a noble goal!  it’ll happen, it’ll happen.

but for now… i work in a group of ten guys, and I’m the female.  there are a few others in my department but we’re so spread out we barely ever have time to get together.  we have the occasional girl lunch meetup and it’s awesome!  but seriously, I’m talking about like four women working with 100 men… and whenever we hang out together, the guys think we’re conspiring against them.

we do get along fabulously though.  when we can get together it’s great.

how is it where you work?  are you the only woman?  have you been able to seek out others and support each other?  I think a little sisterhood goes a LONG way in this world, I didn’t know what it’d be like until I got out of college, out of the girls dorm and into the workplace where I’d go weeks without speaking to another female.  it’s really nice to talk to someone and not feel like the different one.

I’m the only one. There are a few women up in management, but I’m not yet acquainted with any other women in the company.

A bunch of the women from my major created a mailing list for ourselves. It helps to have someone you know and who has a similar background (education, at least) to chat about, vent to, and speak tech with.

I work virtually most of the time now, so it is just me.  And it is very isolated.

In the past there have been a handful (3 - 6) other women in my company who were also programmers/software engineers.  That was very nice.  We mostly worked on different projects—can’t have all the girls on one project.

I am also a virtual worker.  Oddly enough, my company of consultants has less males then females (or perhaps equal if I really do the math).  I had a problem at my first job of being the youngest female with the highest education. There was about a 20+ age difference between me and many of my female colleagues.  I am better friends with them now then I was when I worked with them.

To balance out my social life - I found a ladies meetup group. This has introduced me to many business women.  In addition, it is for non-native Pittsburghers, so we all have moving around in common.  I try to make it out to an event at least once a month.  This has REALLY helped me in my work/life balance.

I work in IT and after 10 years in the profession am still the only female.  Luckily I get along great with the guys.  I know one other gal who does the same type of work I do, that’s it.  Sad to say, not to put these professions down or anything, but most of my friends are clerks, secretaries, etc.  Would love to actually meet and make friends with career driven, independant, intellegant women, but we seem to be far and few between.

My direct team has 3 girls, one of whom I share an office with. Each product group is split into 3 teams: a PM team, a Dev team, and a test team. The PM team has 3 girls and 7 guys, the test team is probably 40% female, and I’m pretty sure there are no female developers… I find it surprising that the women gravitated towards the PM and tester roles instead of development. I choose PM because it was a pretty social job that i still got to do fun technical things in. Unfortunately, I would surmise that a lot of women look at dev, especially where I work, as being out of reach for them… that you have to be a total ridiculous rock star coder to do it.

i hadn’t stopped to notice in so long...there are a few women in the same area as me, however, my husband is still tired of hearing about all of the men i ‘hang out’ with at work...can’t help it!  there aren’t many of us!

I’m the only one in my research group.  But I’m excited that we are starting a graduate student chapter of SWE in the fall!  There are so few of us girls in the ME grad dept., we’ve got to stick together :)

Right now I’m pretty lucky—I’m on a 25-person team of user experience professionals doing software design at Microsoft and we’re about 50% female, including our team leader. The development teams we work with are much more traditional (i.e.  10 - 15% female).

I’ve been lucky in that my gender never felt like a limitation at any company I’ve worked for. At my last company, I managed a video game production team of 15 people, and three of the other people on the team were women. Oddly, when I’m in management I actually find it easier to effectively manage men than women. I saw a really interesting video about communication styles that might have shed some light on that problem for me—it went into the differences between the way women and men tend to approach asking for things, and when I’m in management I definitely slant more towards the more direct way of communicating. Neither way is bad, but I’ve found that some people prefer to communicate differently. Have any of you run into similar challenges?

There are a lot of women in our group. We’ve got about 30 people total (mixture of scientists, engineers, programmers, students, and admin folks) and 13 are women. It hasn’t always been this way. It seems to be a bit cyclical.

Now school was a different story. My undergrad years were spent at a school that was all women at the time. After that I went to Purdue where I was usually the only woman in the geophysics offices except the secretary. Was quite a change.

Yes I am the only one on my team… but there are so many others… Our company’s site lead is a woman (a nerd girl) and its like a family at our site… We have community service projects at our job… And most of the nerd girls work on these programs...so that the time I can work with them and hang out… We just finish “Women in Engineering” program where we taught about 40 girl how to program LEGO NXT it was so cool….  So even thought I don’t work with any women… I find ways to keep in touch.

When I worked at a game dev company we had about 50-ish people at all and 5 of them (including myself) were girls.

No one has posted in awhile, but what the heck.
I have been working at IBM for 13 years and rarely work with more then one other women engineer in my department. Since I work on hardware, females are even farther and fewer between. It is rare when more then one or 2 women work on a project in hardware, unless we create one ourselves.  I have been going to and am now leading a lunch group of like minded hardware engineers and with the Layoffs and the transfer of or jobs going over seas, planning now requires a lot of external email addresses.  I have to go find more women in IBM so lunch would not be mostly ex-IBMers.
IBM have a w-Net and the w-Net is actively involved in girl mentoring and other programs.  The group is very software heavy.  Female Hardware engineers are, I don’t know, the geekiest of the geeks maybe.

Well, i’m definitely not the only girl at work so guys don’t really think of conspiracy theories and stuff. Anyway, most of my workmates are my friends but they’re not really the ones i talk to or go out with on weekends and stuff.

Regards,
Czarny
Placement financier

Me too,had a bunch of them at our workplace. Think girls are far off many than men right?

Regards,
MarieAnne
Commercial vehicle insurance quotes

This topic is very interesting. i like work with girls , excellent thing.. .  there are many beautiful and clever girls in my workplace.  we are good friends.  I am better friends with them now then I was when I worked with them.