Four percent!
Last week, I issued a challenge: guess how many of my 47 former coworkers were male and how many were female. It's been a couple of days and I've received some guesses.
Unfortunately, those guesses were all too high. The actual ratio was 0/47. It was a list of coworkers, and indeed, I was all by myself on my various teams through the years. If you add me to the list, then you get 1/48, or about 2%.
Since I wrote that post, it came to my attention that one woman joined one of the dev teams for a service I had supported after my pager monkey team split up. Basically, she wasn't on there when I was supporting them, but showed up shortly thereafter. We can be charitable and add her into the picture, and that gives us 2/49, or about 4%.
Wow, four whole percent!
Sure, there were women in eng, but you could go for a very long time without ever encountering one as a coworker on your team. The gap between zero and one is huge.
40%? Not even close.