Comment by webmaven
4 years ago
> Personal anecdote, at Amazon, my wife led a very challenging refactor of legacy code and didn’t get promoted, I built a shiny thing barely anyone is using yet, and got promoted.
How much of that is the effect of shiny vs. dull, and how much is male vs. female (apologies if my assuming you are male was mistaken, but it seemed the way to bet)?
That's an odd bet to make. At Google promo committees were desperate to promote women. There were entire schemes set up to encourage them to apply more, to give them special help men didn't get etc and that was years ago. Probably it's worse (less fair) now.
It wasn't just process, either. I saw severely unfair decisions go the other way. A woman in my team who everyone hated because she was dishonest, staggeringly unproductive and had a habit of upsetting other teams, sailed through promotion several times into management. On the other hand team members who created entirely new products from scratch or were the backbone of their team got bounced. The patronage of another (female) boss higher up in the management chain seemed the most likely culprit, along with a pervasive "everyone's gotta help women get ahead" attitude.
There were multiple factors, hard to know what percentage gender contributed, but I do think it played a role.