Today is International Women's Day and as usual, this question would be asked

Why there are fewer women in tech?

I would rather show this advertisement and ask why all women are here? Why advertisements only cast girls/women when it comes to household chores?

https://www.facebook.com/BettyCrockerIndia/videos/397577058292642/

Recently on Twitter, I stumbled upon this tweet and it caught my attention.https://twitter.com/vaidehijoshi/status/1365732623998279682?s=20
because it resonates with what has happened around me & I could relate my career to it. I am not alone in this struggle.

I moved to Berlin in December 2017 and I got my first job offer in January 2018 and fortunately, I had to end the job contract in 3 days of joining when I discovered that it is not the codebase I want to work with. It did not take much time to convince them that I cannot give my best there even if I had stayed for a longer duration & ultimately they had to let me go & I was very happy about it. However, I had another job contract in 5 days and I was pretty much convinced about the role, the tech stack, & the team and I decided to join.

The Good Part: I was hired as a developer & I was one of the early members of the team & had the autonomy to work independently. I quickly became one of the key contributors to the team. I felt incredibly happy when the head of the product management sent out a private message in the Slack channel for every feature I rolled out to production stating the metrics about how much cost we saved by rolling out this, felt proud of myself when stakeholders applauded when I presented new features in the review meetings, wrote how-to's, technical/onboarding documentation(our services really lacked technical documentation), identified a lot of anti-patterns in the code, & proposed alternate solutions, improved developer experience, was part of the hiring process, eventually, I did more code reviews than code commits.

The Bad Part: As I was part of the hiring process and been interviewing developers, it did not take much time to realize that a male colleague of less/equal experience made more money than me. I'll never forget the feeling the day I figured out that the person I am mentoring, the person's Pull requests I am constantly requesting changes was paid more than me. I felt incredibly stupid for not negotiating more salary. It was humiliating to know that your company has forgotten about checking on people at the same level and consider raising my salary to match with his.
I was reporting to an Engineering Manager who was not directly involved in team decisions and ultimately the person wasn't aware of how I was working. My salary was not raised after one year and I waited another year and yet again the same situation, that's when I decided to speak for myself and ask for promotion and salary rise and I was told that this may not be the right time to discuss that. I was compared to a very senior employee and the expectation was set very high. I argued saying that you are comparing apples to peaches or perhaps broccoli. All the chaos because I reporting to a person outside of my team.
While this happened my contributions were recognized by my team. I was asked to lead a Task Force team. Meanwhile, I was reached out by the Head of Engineering to build a new system, and when they thought about the developer who could take over that responsibility they had me on their mind. It was satisfying to know that my work has been trusted.

Becoming the go-to person wasn't easy. Everything comes at the cost of your time, dedication, & hardship. I study, I try new things, give my 100% because I am passionate about what I am doing and I enjoy programming. When I am not relaxing or pursuing my hobbies I am mostly seen at my work desk. Everyone has a happy place and my desk is my happy place.

Getting to know about pay inequality was such a piece of shocking news. I self-loathed for days because it was demotivating to know that you are guiding a team member yet receiving lower pay than him. I decided to have a skip-level discussion with the Head of Engineering. After the discussion, I was immediately given a salary raise(I am still not happy about it) and promotion because I was told that they were not aware of my situation, and they didn't want to lose me. In the end, I had to ask for it. As much decisive as I was in team discussions I wasn't comfortable in salary discussions. I had to be assertive while negotiating because I had made up my mind that I have to get comfortable with these types of discussions too.

How much ever society has claimed to have moved forward, Ultimately it makes you realize that we haven't made enough progress.

If you are also under the same opinion that men are promoted based on their potential and women are promoted based on their performance then you are not alone in this journey.

Some stats 📈 germany-women-earn-20-less-than-men