I’ve worked in the software industry for over 10 years now, in a variety of companies, and in all that time I don’t think I’ve never had a coworker who was openly gay.
Is my perception generally correct? Is there a proportionally fewer number of gays in software, and if so, why?
I don’t think I’ve ever worked in a particularly homophobic environment so I don’t think that would put off a gay potential employee. I don’t buy the “gays aren’t into computers” line, as I’m sure geeks are just as likely to be gay as anyone else.
I’ve tended to work in the embedded/firmware side of things so maybe that has had an effect. Are all the gays working in Java/C#?
Does anyone have any data which will throw some light on the situation?
I’ve worked at MS for over 15 years, as a Developer, and I’ve known enough gay coworkers in just about every possible discipline and enough at other companies that I work with regularly that I can only assume your experience is an exception. And no, none of “the gays” from my data example work in Java or C#.
There is a strong possibilty that you could have worked with plenty of Gay people over the years Elvis Chimney but they weren’t wearing their neon coloured bum-shaped badges.
It’s not like I’m expecting a bunch of John Inman stereotypes - but after a bit of time working with people you get to know them - you find out about their lives, families etc. It just so happens that none of the people I’ve worked with over the years have been guys with boyfriends or girls with girlfriends. Just thought it was a little strange that’s all.
I’ve been in the industry for over 20 years, the last 15 in Atlanta. I’ve met and worked with quite a number of LGBT software people here. Being in the embedded systems end of the business may be a factor – hardware types, in my experience, tend to be a bit more conservative.
I’ve been in the industry for 23 years and I’ve known plenty of gay and lesbian software engineers. I don’t know why you haven’t encountered any; it could just be random chance.
My thoughts as well. I’ve had several IT coworkers who were gay (male and female). In Spain people tend to be very open about information which would be considered personal elsewhere - I can join a new factory and know how many kids everybody has, which schools they go to, and where their spouses work before leaving for the night. But we also happen to have several words which can be used to avoid giving information that you don’t want to give and verbs which don’t require a subject: saying “mi pareja” (my partner) instead of “mi novia” (my girlfriend) can be used to avoid saying “I’m gay,” to avoid saying “we’re living together but not legally married,” to avoid saying “she’s the mother of my kid but it didn’t work out,” to avoid saying “we have a kid and live together but we’re anti-paperwork”… people can tell you how many children they and their partner have, where the kids go to school and where and in what job said partner work without ever revealing the partner’s gender. You may have known people who referred to their partners as “my friend.”
I’m wondering, Elvis, where are you? The first male IT gay I met was in Miami… there are places where the gay population is higher than in others. I’d expect to meet more gays in Madrid than in Badajoz, not just because Madrid is bigger but because Badajoz (with my apologies to people from there) is considered “the boondocks” by many folks, while Madrid is a people magnet (many of whom end up moving to quieter places later on).
Most of the places I’ve worked have been in and around Edinburgh, Scotland. Edinburgh has a fairly healthy gay community so I wouldn’t have thought that would be the issue.
Based on the responses here so far it seems that it isn’t an incredibly common situation at least. Maybe the industry in Scotland is overwhelmingly hetero for some reason, or it may just be coincidence causing me to get a false impression.
I work in a software company, and most of my co-workers are either middle-aged women, or married guys with kids. Not the stereotype of what software geeks are supposed to be like. It could be that both mine and the OP’s experiences are atypical, for some reason.
I have worked mostly small shops and I have not encountered any openly gay software engineers, but this is small sample. What percentage of the US is openly gay enough to have it come up at work?
suranyi: Most software engineers / computer programmers / engineers I know are as you described except geeks do get married and have kids. I am a geek, I have been married 16 years and have two great kids. Geeks usually get less geeky as they get older. Geeks tend to be smart and thus tend to get good paying jobs which makes having a family much easier.
I think you are thinking of High School geeks and just missing the fact that many of your co-workers would have been geeky in High School.
I think it might be more accurate to say that non-geeks get less cool as their good looks and/or athletic skills diminish. Or that geeky things like math and technical skills become more important. A person who can keep an IT department working pulls more weight than he did in high school.
It seems that the number of gay men I’ve encountered in software engineering is much less than the number I’ve encountered in the rest of life.
It’s WAY less than the number of gay people I knew when I worked in a library.
However, the women I know who do software seem to be more often gay.
It would surprise me greatly if gay men were equally represented in science/math/engineering versus english/theater/social sciences.
I wouldn’t call my fellow programmers homophobic at all, but it’s definitely a “locker room” type of culture. I could see how a gay guy would be more reticent to be open in this atmosphere, but the women are openly gay.
There is a guy who joins us for lunches/outings/etc who we are 100% convinced he’s gay, but it’s just never openly been said. Basically, he’s talked about his “roommate” but never his “boyfriend”.
Well, first, it’s not like someone’s sexual orientation is exactly a job qualification. How many single-parent plumbers do you know? One’s personal life is hardly relevant. I suppose in the sort of corporate culture where sharing information about one’s family and off-work life is S.O.P. it would come up, from openly gay people at least, but how often in the typical software-engineering environment do those sorts of discussions happen. In my extremely limited experience of such people, they are intensely focused on the job at hand, to the point that personal lives are not discussed.
As for the OP’s experience, out-of-the-norm life experiences are not exactly rare, given specific questions like this and the wide range of people contributing results. I’ve noted in the past in discussions of AIDS that the only two people I’ve known personally who were living with full-blown AIDS, as opposed to asymptomatic HIV+ people, were the farthest thing from promiscuous – one formerly a chaste wife (to a husband who wasn’t and who gave her it) and the other a 20-year-survivor who caught it from his first, and only, real lover. Obviously nothing like a normal sample, but my point in giving that example is that data points way off the normal curve do occur, fairly commonly.
ETA: No, I didn’t buy into the “gay <–> AIDS” meme; it’s simply that the personal example where I myself am an anomalous datum is “people I’ve known with AIDS.”
Interesting. My first inclination is to say “You’re kidding, right?”. Having worked at several Bay Area software companies, I can tell you that the only one in my list that didn’t have openly gay technical staff members was a garage startup that only had 8 people at its height, a couple of whom were working on a contract basis. The bigger ones like Oracle and Sun had gay/lesbian employee organizations which operated with management approval.
“Where are all the black software engineers?” is a more reasonable question, from what I can see. I’ve known very few. And a couple of those were UK citizens on H1B visa.
I worked with a programmer for years who was one of the best I’ve ever met, and he didn’t even have a college degree. He was probably gay; he wasn’t open about it, but had somewhat of the stereotypical affect.
He was an excellent programmer who could come up with innovative solutions to a variety of problems. You hear about the people who go to college and don’t really belong there; it’s too bad when someone as bright as this guy doesn’t get to go.
In addition there’ve been one or two others who might have been gay. That’s not many though. I’ve been doing this 21 years, and you’d think there’d be more.
Back to the OP: I have no idea whether there are any gay members of the software department (or anywhere else, for that matter) where I work. The topic just never seems to come up. Many people speak of spouses and family, so you might be able to eliminate some by default, but since same-sex marriage is legal here, that’s no guarantee either.
Of course, the previous paragraph may simply reflect my lack of social awareness. But there is a sense in which many family things, like religion, spouse, kids, schools, etc, are private, not to be discussed unless the person explicitly brings them up. I’m sure hiring regulations that forbid asking about them only reinforce this. It’s kind of the opposite of what Nava described.
When my co-worker went to the French office, he described how they’d spend the first ten or so minutes of their day being social. He just march to our desks and start work. Sometimes I think they’re better off.
