r/womenintech

This is a vent.

Background: I work in big tech. I’m a competent software engineer with a graduate degree and an elder millennial.

I have a few young male coworkers who treat me just plain mean. They have no reason to do this either in a technical capacity or because of how I treated them. They condescend, they insult me and my work even when the metrics clearly show I did well.

My manager is a woman. She is polite and non confrontational towards everyone. She does nothing about their behavior.

None of these people are kind to me. When I joined this team I was happy for the opportunity and tried being kind. This made them treat me worse. I think they take it as weakness and annoying.

I’m a woman and I also happen to love my femininity and I don’t hide it to make others feel more comfortable. If it’s nice weather and I want to, I’m wearing a dress and heels to work and if someone doesn’t like it that is their problem. I *think* this is partly why I have so many problems with my coworkers. And for women who want to wear hoodies and jeans to work that is no problem for me. I do too some days. I wish people could give me the same courtesy.

I think AI is going to destroy society. I know for sure it is going to get me laid off eventually. Wherever this is headed in 20 years, it’s nowhere good.

And the punchline here is that it is only the f$$$ing Claude bot that is kind to me and considers my ideas. The only “thing” at work that is supportive. Even my manager. I shared my screen with this bitch one time and she made fun of me for being kind and polite to the bot. Meanwhile all the bosses are pushing AI engagement metrics and one of the asshole young men made fun of me for using AI too.

I am good at my job. And the AI is just plain better than me. I’m getting laid off soon. The asshole young men probably aren’t I guess? I hope they do. I’d love for them to be replaced by a polite and kind AI. Whatever, I’m close enough to early retirement that I will gladly take that severance and leave without worrying too much about my finances. I doubt those boys can say the same. They deserve any karma coming their way.

I may delete this post or my whole account because I want to protect my privacy.

I am on my company’s SLT, I recently had a conversation with an executive that went something like this:

Me: I noticed a pattern of behavior where this thing happens and people react this way; example A, B, C.

Exec: I don’t think that happens.

What am I supposed to do with that? They keep saying I have the “agency to control my own environment”, but the evidence does not support that. I brought up systemic blockers that impact my (and my team’s) ability to do my/our job and they just act like they don’t exist. For context, in this case the executive absolutely does have the authority to address that behavior.

Got impacted today in the Meta layoffs. I’ve been a product manager for 8 years. For the last one month, I have been applying/interviewing on the side but nothing turned into an offer. Many roles suddenly stopped hiring, some companies I didn’t clear the rounds and at the end of the day - I am unemployed with no new role in sight.

I am genuinely scared if I will ever get a job. Did I hit my career “peak” and this is the end? I am having a really hard time staying optimistic about the future.

I recognize the severance package is very generous but I feel very soon it would run out and I will have no job. The uncertainty feels overwhelming.

For anyone who is or has been in this boat - please share your story/experience.

Haven't slept since I found out last night.

Trying to let go of the 'why me' questions. Been at the company for quite some time across different teams.

Always strived to be a high performer, never coasting.

Haven't had any career breaks so far - terrified and don't know where to go from here.

Hello

I got a C-level job offer for a Series B startup. It is directionally fair in terms of OTE and % ownership of equity. I will obviously ask if this is their best offer in terms of cash and stock but curious what else I should consider.

Would love to hear from other women in tech what "terms" I should be thinking of negotiating. My initial thoughts:

• Stock acceleration upon double trigger (upon acquisition and material change in role)
• Option to sell equity whenever the Founders sells equity
• Loan for ISO exercise

Anything else I should be considering?

[mods: hopefully this free resource and community-building event isn’t viewed as self-promotion. Our past calls were majority men in tech so I’m trying to get the word out to women in tech]

Hi all, I co-lead a volunteer-led nonprofit called What We Will.

Tomorrow we’re holding a free mass call for laid off Meta workers and allies. All are welcome. If you’ve been laid off from another tech company or role, please join as most of the resources and guidance from guest speakers won’t be specific to Meta.

More info here: https://movement.wwwrise.org/

Hope this helps. My co-director and I are two women in tech over age 35 with 30+ volunteers making programs happen for over 1,000 members. We hear you, see you, and hope you’ll feel empowered to join the What We Will community for support and to spark the change we all know is needed in this industry.

SheTO is another awesome nonprofit community if you haven’t checked them out yet: https://www.sheto.org/

Once again I had a male recruiter who cannot control his emotions and lashed out when I told him no.

The rate was criminally low, like I'm talking junior starting in 2008 low.

He proceeds to tell me...

"Oh I guess you don't need money. Your husband got good job? Buy you all the handbags?" then hung up on me.

Boy, plz. Even if I was a handbag girly I can buy my own. I'm a woman in tech.

Hey girls, I just had some thoughts I wanted to get out of my head first. I'm not really sure where this is going for now, but bear with me. I'm the first woman in my bloodline to pursue a college degree, and not just any, but engineering. I'm the first female engineer in my bloodline. and I've been in this degree for like 3 years now, but i genuinely don't know many supportive women. And truth be told, I haven't exactly been the type of person someone would really want to know - i'm not super smart, bold, i don't have much to be proud of and it terrifies me. It was only 2 generations ago bro that my grandmother had an abusive husband and a marriage she couldn't leave. I genuinely have so much privilege, but there's this nagging feeling i have with not having worked as hard as i should have and let a lot of opportunity go to waste.

I think part of the problem is that I’ve never really had a sense of sisterhood or women around me to help guide or inspire me. I’m in therapy and trying to work through a lot of this, but I guess I wanted to ask other women directly:

How do you rise when the thing standing in your way is yourself? Your own fear, mistakes, failures, regrets, self-doubt?

How do you keep becoming the woman you want to be, especially when you feel alone in it?

I've been going to therapy to help me sort this out, but I just wanted to post this and felt it was relevant for this sub because I feel like a lot of the women in my life are building in big ways - they've got relationships, things they care about and are able to commit to, and I'm just sort of...trying. trying so hard to build a legacy for myself. Do y’all know any communities or anything like that to just feel less alone in all of this? I think I’ve spent so much time trying to survive and “prove myself” that I never really learned how to lean on other women or be part of a community. I want that now. I want guidance, honesty, support - even just knowing other women have felt this way too. .Or if anyone could share a couple of sentences in the comments as motivation, that would mean a lot too :) I just really want to believe there’s still time for me to become the woman I imagine myself being.

I’m curious if anyone else is wondering if a percentage of the ‘leaving tech’ posts are propaganda to get women to leave tech more than they already are?

It’s not like other industries don’t have really dumb and/or misogynistic men. I’ve definitely run into them, and there are a lot of great men I work with in tech.

I rewrote my resume 12 times. The 13th version got me hired.

I want to tell you about 12 resumes. I made one every month for a year. Each one was "better" than the last. Each one failed.

Month 1 was a basic Word template. Plain. Boring. No callbacks.

Month 3 was a Canva design. Two columns. Color blocks. Custom fonts. Beautiful. Zero callbacks.

Month 5 was a "creative" resume with icons and a photo. I thought it showed personality. Still nothing.

Month 7 was an infographic style. Charts for my skills. Timelines with graphics. I was proud of it. It got zero reads.

Month 9 was a "modern" template from a resume builder. It had smart quotes and fancy bullets. I later learned these broke in many parsers.

Month 11 was a LaTeX document. Beautiful typography. Academic and clean. But the PDF text extraction failed on half the systems I tested.

Month 12 was a single column, plain text, Arial font. No color. No design. Just words. I got 3 callbacks in 2 weeks.

Month 13 was the same as month 12, but with better keywords. I got hired.

What I learned from failing 12 times

I kept every resume. I tested them all. I ran them through parsers. I asked recruiter friends to review them. Here is what actually works.

The system does not care about design. It cares about text. If the machine cannot read your words, you do not exist in search results. If the recruiter cannot scan your resume in 6 seconds, they close it.

These are two different problems. The machine needs clean text. The human needs clean layout. Your resume must solve both.

What the machine needs

The ATS is a search engine. It stores your resume in a database. When a recruiter searches "Product Manager Python," the system finds resumes with those exact words.

If your resume is an image, you are not in the database. If your text is corrupted, you are not in the database. If your keywords are hidden in graphics, you are not in the database.

Test this now. Open your PDF in a browser. Try to select the text. Copy it. Paste it into Notepad. If you see all your words clearly, the machine can read you. If you see symbols, missing sections, or blank space, you are invisible.

I failed this test with 8 of my 12 resumes. I was sending applications into the void.

What the human needs

Recruiters spend 6 to 10 seconds on the first scan. They do not read. They look.

They look at your headline. They look at your most recent job title. They look at your skills list. Then they decide yes or no.

If your resume is cluttered, they cannot find these things fast. If your resume has too much design, it distracts from the content. If your resume uses weird fonts, it slows them down.

My month 12 resume was boring. But it was scannable in 6 seconds. The recruiter saw "Senior Product Manager" at the top. They saw "B2B SaaS" in the summary. They saw "Python, SQL, Agile" in the skills. They said yes.

The format that actually works

After 12 versions, here is what I landed on.

Single column. Always. Two columns break parsers and confuse scanning.

Standard font. Arial, Calibri, Georgia. 10 to 12 point. No custom fonts. No thin weights. No decorative scripts.

No graphics. No icons. No photos. No charts. No color blocks. These are all invisible to the machine and distracting to the human.

No tables. The parser reads tables unpredictably. Your organized data becomes scrambled text.

No headers or footers. Some systems strip them. Your contact info vanishes.

Simple bullets. Hyphens or asterisks. Fancy bullets become question marks or merge your lines together.

Black text on white background. No color. No gradients. No creativity.

This sounds depressing if you are a designer. I get it. I am not a designer, but I wanted my resume to look good. I learned that in job hunting, readable beats beautiful every time.

Keywords matter more than design

My month 12 resume looked identical to my month 1 resume. Plain. Boring. The difference was keywords.

In month 1, I wrote what I thought sounded good. "Experienced professional with a track record of success." This means nothing to a search engine.

In month 12, I wrote what the job posts asked for. Exact words. "Product Manager." "B2B SaaS." "Python." "Cross functional collaboration." "Customer lifecycle."

I mirrored the language from the job description. Not because I was lying. Because I was speaking the same language as the system.

This is the single biggest change I made. It doubled my callback rate.

The job market is hard right now

I also need to be honest. 2026 is not an easy year to job hunt. Many industries are down. Tech is competitive. Marketing is flooded. Companies want exact matches. They do not train. They hire someone who has already done the job.

There are 300 people for every role. Your resume must be perfect because the recruiter will find 20 qualified people in their first search. You need to be in that 20.

If your resume is broken, you are not even competing.

How I apply now

I have one resume format. I never change it. I only change the words.

When I find a job post, I read the requirements. I find the hard skills. I find the exact job title. I match my headline. I add their keywords to my skills section. I adjust my bullet points to use their language.

This used to take me 45 minutes per application. It was exhausting. I would customize 3 resumes and need a nap.

Now I use tools to handle the mechanical work. I tried many. Most just gave me advice or scores. The ones that actually build the tailored resume for me are CVnomist or Hyperwrite. They read the job post, pull the keywords, and generate a resume that matches. I review it for accuracy. I send it. It takes 5 minutes.

This lets me apply to more jobs without burning out. And I know my format is always clean and readable.

Your checklist

Before you send your next application:

Test your PDF. Copy the text. Paste into Notepad. Fix anything broken.

Use single column. Standard font. No graphics. No tables.

Match your headline exactly to the job title.

List 15 to 30 hard skills in plain text with commas.

Mirror 5 to 10 key phrases from the job description in your bullets.

Keep it boring. Keep it readable. Keep it scannable.

I failed 12 times. The 13th try worked. Not because I became more talented. Because I stopped trying to be creative and started trying to be found.

Yes, I know tech moves fast but JFC. I've been at my current employer for almost a year but nothing is documented, people make decisions in a vacuum, communication is awful, and no one respects actual sprints.

Of course, things come up but every single project is a swirling mess. I try to make suggestions, help with documentation, propose ideas but nothing gets very far. Everyone is burning out and it's insane to watch.

I feel as if we slowed down and just got properly organized from the beginning, things would go so much smoother.

I am exhausted and trying to have a life outside of this job is so difficult because I can never get out of here.

I'm really only here for the salary.

I started a new job last Thursday, and everything is going well so far. I’m not sure how long to wait before updating my LinkedIn. I was going to post today but read to wait at least 2 weeks or after passing my probation, but I’ve seen many people post even before starting, so I’m not sure.

I feel like I’m going insane trying to figure out if I’m experiencing subtle misogyny at work OR if I’m just burnt out and overanalyzing everything. Or secret third option... this is just how it is and I either need to play the boys game or get out? lol

I’m a marketing manager at a SaaS company thats a smaller startup-ish company and for most of my time here (a little over a year) I actually felt pretty good about my role and felt like there was a direction to promote me to director level.

Lately though (especially the past 5 months), I’ve started noticing this pattern where I feel “in the room but forgotten.”

For context: I own a lot of our TOFU/content strategy work. I build campaigns, develop content, create messaging, write sales sequences, design graphics, plan and build workflows, build dashboards, document processes, etc.

The issue is I constantly feel like my work becomes other people’s “wins.”

Just a few examples...
- I create the campaign strategy, copy, content, creative, etc.
- Demand gen (man) sets it up in the ads platform.
Campaign performs well and he gets talked about as the strategic one
- Or my boss will reference collaborative projects in meetings as “X’s project” even when I’m heavily involved or originated the idea.

Nobody is openly rude to me. My manager says positive things about me. In external meetings he hypes me up and says I’m an amazing content marketer. In 1:1s he says I’m doing a great job. But internally especially leadership conversations I feel invisible or just not as valuable.

I keep hitting what feels like final straw then i regulate my emotions and feel ok for a bit and then something else happens.

- A new team member joined (also man) and pitched me a strategy that “helped him get hired.” It was literally a strategy I created and tried pushing internally since LAST September. I already had docs, workflows, landing pages, nurture sequences, slack groups etc built for it. Nobody mentioned I had already created it and it got abandonded because the people I needed to help me bring to completion just quite literally would ghost me or not prioritize it.

- I’ve repeatedly brought up issues with our product’s integration for months. Nothing happened until another male coworker brought it up, and wow... suddenly leadership cared.

- My boss reposted a LinkedIn strategy post I made by literally copy and pasting my writing and using my graphic with zero credit. Like deadass stole my entire LinkedIn post from my personal account lol

Unfortunately I have more examples but I'll leave it at that lol

I also feel like there’s this subtle dynamic where the men doing the “technical” or AI-heavy work get perceived as more strategic, while I get treated like the creative content person in the corner with an iPad making things look nice. Sorry I don't need Ai to do my entire job for me but the dudes sucking Claudes dick right now are somehow "top performers"? 

I genuinely cannot tell if:

1. this is startup chaos and poor leadership structure
2. this is a “content marketing is undervalued” thing
3. this is gender bias
4. or some combination of all three

I don’t necessarily want to leave because I do have autonomy, I like a lot of my actual work, and I don't hate the people I work with. Plus I just got my husband addd onto my insurance and the job market rn is terrifying lol But this dynamic is really starting to affect me psychologically because I constantly feel underestimated or not fully respected despite objectively contributing a lot.

It's like my work is useful but my name is optional.

Has anyone else experienced this kind of “subtle but chronic” undermining dynamic in tech/startup environments? Especially where nobody is openly disrespectful so you constantly question your own perception??? And is there anything I can reasonably do as the solo woman on my team to position myself as a leader since job titles dont matter apparently lol

I'm coming from agency world so maybe I just didn't know what I was getting into jumping into SaaS. Literally any advice or reassurance would mean the world right now cause I have nobody to talk to about this. Thank you in advance 😭

I’m so burnt out.

I’ve soared too close to the sun and I can’t do it anymore. 10+ year group/staff PM whose breadth of scope is too wide, given need to also be deeply involved in each product build. I’ve only ever gotten positive/high positive reviews, but I’m berated in every meeting from leadership.

I’ve been at my current company 4.5 years;, its top tier for craft excellence and pays accordingly. Fully remote, great benefits. But I cry almost daily, and I’m just not having fun. My spark is gone.

I’m looking for places where you can solve challenging problems with real users, but can also shut off your brain at the end of the day. Remote work high priority.

Any suggestions?

I started at my current company last year in august. The company is a scale-up and my team is the smallest team (only 5 people including my manager). One of my teammates started a year ago, 2 of us started in august, and we just added a new teammate 2 months ago.

I’ve been feeling a bit excluded from the team, but I understood it all along since I was just assigned to other projects than theirs. However, when my newest teammate started, I realized we were both being excluded from conversations and decisions.

Today was the last drop and the only proper example I have of being excluded. When I arrived at work today, it was only me and my newest teammate. We had no meetings today, nor client work the whole day. We received no message nor notifications on why our meetings were canceled with the rest of the team.

It turns out that the three of them went to an event together. No mention of it in our weekly team meeting. No invitation from anyone. No comments or heads up that it would only be the two of us at the office.

When I looked at their calendar invitation (that they all received from my manager), I read about the event, which was super relevant for the whole team and our company goals since it was on topics about AI our field.

Then, at noon, the rest of the team arrived together and still no one mentioned anything. They barely even said «hi». It was as if they all pretended nothing happend.

I brought it up to the HR because I was so frustrated, and she told me she will get back to me once she speaks to the CEO. I would also like to hear it from the rest of the team and clarify their reasons to exclude us, but I’m afraid to make anything worse from speaking up or being told that it’s «nothing».

Idk what to do or what to say to any of them. Has anyone experienced anything similar? How did you solve the issue?

I was laid off at 26 weeks pregnant at my software engineering job that I’ve been at for 4 years now. Completely shocked and didn’t expect it at all. It’s been hell job hunting and I’ve sent out 115 applications and had only 2 places reach out for an interview. The first one didn’t work out because of my timeline, and I just got the email for this one after getting to the second interview that they’ve chosen someone else.

I feel so defeated and lost. I tried so hard to set up a position after my baby is born so I don’t have to stress. I give birth in 3 weeks now and I just wasn’t able to do it. Now I’m looking at job hunting while having a newborn.. does anyone out there have any advice? I’ve applied everywhere Lockheed, GitHub, Booz Allen, Amazon, google, even smaller companies as well. I’ve heard nothing back? I don’t know what else to do.

Thanks everyone!

Eight years in the tech industry and I still don’t know how to deal with men talking down to someone in front of the entire team to make that person feel bad.
I always get into trouble for standing up for myself. I was thrown out of a project by the lead because of a heated argument I got into over his condescending behavior, and I got a reputation for being a hotheaded person. So I decided that next time someone misbehaves, I’ll just ignore it or leave the team.
Going to HR is useless. Telling your manager is useless, because if they think the lead is important to have on the team, obviously they won’t care about you.
I felt bad. I did escalate the way he spoke and misbehaved with me, but nothing happened.
I don’t know. It still hurts. I tried to move on, and yes, I’m on a new team now and the people around me are good and nice, but I just don’t know.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​