There is always at least one guy in a team that makes life difficult for a woman in a dev team. I feel bad for the amount of shit women have to deal with to survive as a software dev.
About 10 years ago, I was brought in as a contractor to train a team with 5 junior women engineers, one other junior man, and an older woman manager.
The other guy would constantly shit on EVERY idea presented by a woman. Like, in the 4 months I worked there, he never once said anything positive in any of their presentations or our group exercises, and he was like 25 years old and just as experienced as they were.
One of the woman programmers was exceptionally good and he shat on her the hardest because her ideas were usually adopted, but she was meek and the manager faught him (her subordinate!) for said junior woman's ideas. It was so fucked up.
On my way out, I had a meeting with him and talked about how he was being very dismissive of perfectly reasonable solutions, and he flat-out told me "women aren't very good at engineering, I'm a better programmer (he wasn't) and need to clean up their ideas first, I'll eventually run this group." I was like, holy shit, there's no reaching you.
> The other guy would constantly shit on EVERY idea presented by a woman. ... "women aren't very good at engineering, I'm a better programmer (he wasn't) and need to clean up their ideas first"
Sounds like a toxic narcissist. And sadly, really common - it's the sort of attitude that's often hiding in these "Group X rules, Group Y are lame!" controversies.
Just push back calmly and confidently, and you'll find that it's quite possible to keep these people in check. Ultimately though, I don't think their attitude is compatible with an effectively-functioning workplace.
