Women Don't Have Time to Learn Claude Code, Apparently

“I think that because…companies are hiring fewer folks, they’re hiring people that look and act like themselves. So age, gender, ethnic backgrounds, all of those are taking a hit, and I think that we will have stepped back quite a number of years in the diversity of what we do.”

That was Nikhyl Singhal in an interview on Lenny Rachitsky’s podcast, the #1 business publication on Substack. Singhal is a top product leader in Silicon Valley and “one of the most honest, unfiltered voices on what’s actually happening in product management right now,” according to Lenny himself.

If this is “what’s actually happening right now,” we’re not in great shape.

Lack of diversity in tech is nothing new.

Companies like Uber and Google have continuously displayed their commitment to protecting men’s reputations over women’s safety, and Activision and Riot Games have spent more than $150 million combined in gender-based discrimination lawsuits.

Not exactly a culture that can afford many steps back.

Singhal’s comment is a matter-of-fact observation. Though he acknowledges this backward movement as a problem, he then moves on, never even indicating that a solution is worth pursuing.

His comment that “hiring fewer folks” means reverting to homogeneity reflects the painful reality that for those in charge, concentrating power where it is already centered is the default way of operating.

Expanding their minds and their hiring practices outside their own echo chambers of identity is a virtue these leaders no longer have the luxury of signaling: AI is moving too fast.

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If you are a woman in tech who has been counted out of the AI shift, this is your

Top tech companies in the United States are still about 67% male and 90% male at the top. And as AI accelerates development at an unprecedented rate, new roles continue to emerge whose required skill sets change constantly.

This manufactured urgency exacerbates an old reality: women are hired on past performance, whereas men are hired on potential.

When I recently accepted a new job and negotiated for a more senior title than the designation that was offered, the hiring manager told me I lacked the “product-specific experience” necessary for the job, despite years of technical work in adjacent roles.

I later learned that this same man who told me I didn’t have the necessary experience had been hired into that same role a few years earlier without knowing what an API (a core part of the product’s functionality) was.

My experience wasn’t enough. His potential was.

In a world where job requirements are changing so rapidly that hiring based on past performance is impossible (you can’t hire someone based on experience with a tool that didn’t exist six months ago), this bias further expands the barriers that keep women out of roles for which they are qualified.

As the podcast episode continues, Singhal zeroes in on why the gender gap specifically is opening back up. When discussing the reality that companies are defaulting to hiring people that “look and act like themselves,” he says,

“I don’t think anyone’s intentionally doing anything, but I think when the pace is so high, the fact is that women are having kids in those power years and they just don’t have the time to allot to spending their nights and weekends in Claude Code…We don’t talk about it as an industry, but it’s absolutely true.”

Singhal’s logic:

• Men are hiring the best people for the job.

• The best people for the job are those spending their nights and weekends poring over Claude Code.

• And those people can’t possibly be women because they’re too busy having babies during their “power years.”

The sexism is blatant and yet overwhelmingly casual, one offhanded observation in a 90-minute interview.

Though his comment wasn’t intentionally malicious, this nonchalance highlights the very root of the problem: the implicit bias held as reality by those who sit in the most powerful seats on the planet.

Singhal’s statement made two things clear: parenthood is an inhibitor to career success, and parenthood is a single-gender responsibility.

Men are just as likely to have children as women, but no one assumes a father’s nights and weekends are spoken for. Singhal’s comment treats this arrangement as an assumed fact of nature rather than an arbitrary arrangement our society has constructed.

Is it really that unfathomable to imagine a world in which mom gets a few hours to talk to Claude while dad changes a diaper, makes dinner, or plays with his child after work?

Apparently, yes. Even in households where women out-earn their husbands, they still carry the majority of caregiving and housework. And in equal-earning marriages, men spend roughly 3.5 more hours of time on leisure per week.

Similar to the artificial neural networks it so reveres, the tech industry is catastrophically forgetting that our society has progressed (at least marginally) beyond a reality in which women are fully financially dependent on men and are expected to behave as such.

Companies can claim they value diversity (or, increasingly, not). But as long as leaders operate according to such one-dimensional tenets, underrepresented groups will continue to be boxed out: not because they don’t have time to spend learning Claude Code, but because the cultural expectation is that they need to and they can’t.

Does maintaining our jobs truly require unrelenting worship at the altar of Claude Code?

Or does building impactful products also involve deeply understanding the problems we’re solving and the people we’re solving them with?

Writers who have never been anything except writers are often bad writers because they’ve never experienced the stories they’re attempting to tell.

Builders who have never been anything except builders face the same issue: they attempt to solve problems they don’t actually understand.

The tech industry continues to be obsessed with changing the world.

And despite what its leaders assume about our nights and weekends, women are already there: building products, raising humans, and, contrary to Singhal’s belief, talking to Claude.

Nobody has ten years of experience with tools that are changing on a daily basis. The “potential” hiring managers keep reserving for men is, right now, all anyone has to offer.

And potential is not a gendered trait, it just gets distributed like one.

For once, the speed being used to shut women out has erased the excuse for doing it. So let’s prop the door open before the industry tries to lock it.

Buckle up, dudes. We’re building too.

We're grateful to Cassidy McDonnell for sharing her work here. She was told she lacked the product experience for a job, then learned the man who told her that had been hired into it without knowing what an API was.

She writes about ambition and the cost of chasing it at undiagnosed ambition. This story was first published on our Medium site here.

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