Code Reviews for Junior Women in Tech: What I Wish I'd Known Early in My Career

The thing nobody tells you about pull request feedback is how personal it can feel when you're already the only woman on the team.

When I started my first software engineering job, I thought code reviews would be the easy part. I had been through plenty of feedback rounds in college, group projects, professor critiques, even peer pair programming. So when my first pull request came back with twenty seven comments on a single function, I told myself it was normal. Then I went to the bathroom and cried for five minutes. This article is about what I wish someone had told me back then, the small things that would have saved me months of second guessing myself, and the way I eventually learned to read code review feedback as information instead of judgment.

If you are a junior woman in tech right now, especially if you are the only woman on your team, I hope this saves you a few of those bathroom moments. Searching for advice on code reviews for junior women in tech brought me a lot of generic feedback tips, but very little about the emotional and social texture of being the only woman in the room while learning your craft. So this is the article I wish I had found.

Key Takeaways

• Code review feedback is a craft you learn to read, not a verdict on your worth as an engineer
• Junior women often interpret neutral comments as harsher than they were intended, partly because of social conditioning around criticism
• Asking clarifying questions on review comments is a skill, and senior engineers respect it more than silent compliance
• The reviewer is not always right, and learning when to push back is part of growing into a mid level engineer
• The way your team reviews code says more about the team culture than your code

The First Time I Got Twenty Seven Code Review Comments

The function in question was about forty lines long. I had been working on it for two days. I had run all the tests. I had even refactored it once because I thought my first version was clunky. When I opened the pull request, I felt good about it.

The senior engineer who reviewed it left twenty seven inline comments. Some were tiny, things like use camelCase here or this variable name could be more descriptive. Some were bigger, like have you considered breaking this into two functions or this whole approach assumes the input is sorted, which is not guaranteed. A few were just question marks.

I remember staring at the screen and feeling a hot wave move up my chest. My first thought was, he hates it. My second thought was, I am bad at this. My third thought was, everyone is going to see how bad I am at this.

What I did not realize at the time, and what nobody had told me, is that twenty seven comments on a forty line function from a thoughtful senior engineer is actually a sign of investment. It means he read every line carefully. It means he wanted my code to be good. The number of comments was not a measure of how bad my code was, it was a measure of how much attention he paid.

But I did not know that yet. So I rewrote the entire function from scratch, addressed every comment, and submitted it again with a tiny apologetic note that started with sorry for the mess. He replied, no need to apologize, this is what reviews are for. That was the first piece of feedback that actually stuck.

I learned later that the engineers who got the fewest review comments were not the best engineers, they were the ones nobody bothered to mentor.

The Difference Between Tone and Information in Code Review

One of the strangest things I noticed in my first year was how differently I read review comments depending on who wrote them. The same comment, this could be cleaner, felt warm and helpful from one engineer and cold and dismissive from another. After a while I started to wonder if the comment was the problem, or if I was bringing my own context to it.

I remember asking a friend who had been a software engineer for ten years how she dealt with harsh sounding review comments. She looked at me and said, I just read them as if they came from a robot. The robot is not mad at me. The robot is giving me data. That reframe changed everything.

Code review comments are usually written quickly, between meetings, while the reviewer is also thinking about their own work. They are rarely workshopped for tone. A comment like this is wrong, fix it is not a personal attack, it is a busy person communicating efficiently. The hard part is that as a junior woman, I had spent my whole life being trained to soften my own communication. So when male engineers gave me feedback in their normal direct register, my brain interpreted it as anger. It took me a long time to stop translating this is wrong into I am a fraud.

A few small habits that helped me move past that translation problem:

• When a comment felt sharp, I waited an hour before replying. Almost always, it stopped feeling sharp once the adrenaline faded.
• When I genuinely could not tell if a comment was an opinion or a blocker, I asked. Is this a hard requirement or a preference turned out to be one of the most useful questions in my career.
• When the comment was right, I just said good catch, fixing now. Short, direct, no apology.
• I started keeping a tiny private file of review comments that genuinely taught me something. Reading it back when I felt low was a much healthier use of my time than spiraling.

Asking Questions Is a Skill, Not a Weakness

One thing that surprised me was how much senior engineers respected pushback. I had assumed that asking questions on a code review made me look junior, like I was wasting their time. The opposite turned out to be true. The engineers who quietly accepted every suggestion, even the ones that did not make sense, were the ones who got slowly typecast as fine, but not curious. The engineers who asked wait, why are we doing it this way got promoted faster.

There is a specific kind of question that works well in code reviews, and a specific kind that does not. Questions that work well sound like, I considered doing it this way because of X, but I see you suggested Y. Is there a tradeoff I am missing? That kind of question shows you thought about it, you have a reason for your choice, and you are open to learning. It moves the conversation forward.

Questions that do not work as well sound like, are you sure? or can we do something else instead? Those land as defensive without giving the reviewer anything to work with.

The other thing I had to learn was that sometimes the reviewer is wrong. Not in a malicious way, just in a they did not have the full context way. As a junior, I assumed senior engineers were always right. They are not. They are just senior. They have more context in some areas and less in others, and one of the skills you build over time is figuring out where their experience helps and where it does not apply. The Google engineering practices documentation has a useful summary of how reviewers and authors should think about disagreements if you want a non personal source to point your team at.

The best engineers I have worked with are not the ones who never make mistakes, they are the ones who admit it cleanly when they do.

What Healthy Code Review Culture Looks Like

After my first job, I switched teams a few times, and I noticed that code review culture varies wildly between teams even at the same company. Some teams use reviews as a learning tool. Some teams use them as a gatekeeping ritual. Some teams use them as a passive aggressive battleground. If you are reading this and your reviews regularly leave you feeling small, the first useful thing you can do is name what you are working with.

Healthy review culture has a few markers I started to look for once I knew what I was looking for:

• Reviewers explain why, not just what. Use a map here instead of a for loop because it is more readable for this case is much more useful than use a map here.
• Nits are labeled as nits. When a senior engineer writes nit: extra blank line here, they are signaling that this is a small style preference and not a blocker. That label saves junior engineers from agonizing over whether a comment is mandatory.
• Praise gets called out, not just problems. The teams I have loved working on always had someone who would leave comments like really clean approach to handling the null case here. It costs nothing and it helps you build a sense of what good looks like.
• Reviews are timely. If your pull request sits unreviewed for a week, the team is telling you something about how they prioritize your work. That is not a code quality issue, that is a team health issue.

If your team's review culture is the gatekeeping kind, it is not your job to fix it as a junior. But you should know that the way your team reviews code is not the only way, and it is not necessarily the standard. If your reviews regularly leave you feeling small, that is data about your team, not about you.

The Long Game: How My Relationship With Code Reviews Changed

I am five years into my career now, and I review code almost as often as I write it. The thing that surprises me most when I review junior engineers' work is how much I want them to push back. I want them to ask questions. I want them to defend their choices. I want them to tell me when my suggestion does not work for their use case.

What I get instead, especially from junior women, is a lot of quiet acceptance. Every comment addressed without comment, every suggestion implemented without question, every approval thanked for as if it were a favor. That is not what code review is supposed to be. It is supposed to be two engineers thinking together about a piece of code. The reviewer brings experience, the author brings context, and the conversation is where the value lives. If you are doing all the absorbing and none of the responding, you are missing half the point.

This is the same shift I tried to write about in the day I stopped counting women in the room, and in many ways it is a sister story. The work of being a woman in tech is partly the work of unlearning silence in rooms and threads where you have every right to take up space.

So if you are a junior woman in tech reading this, here is what I would tell my younger self. Read the comments as data. Ask questions when something is unclear. Push back when you have a reason. Apologize less. Thank reviewers in your own voice, not in a deflecting one. And remember that the engineers who go furthest in this career are not the ones who never get review comments, they are the ones who treat every review as a conversation worth having.

You are not your pull request. You are the engineer who showed up to write it.

FAQ: Code Reviews for Junior Women in Tech

How many comments on a code review is too many?
There is no fixed number. A forty line function with twenty comments from a thoughtful reviewer is actually a sign of mentorship. What matters more is the tone of the comments and whether they explain why, not just what.

What should I do if a code review comment feels rude?
Wait an hour, then read it again. If it still feels rude, ask a clarifying question that focuses on the technical content. If you have a friendly senior on the team, you can also ask them whether the comment was unusual for the reviewer's normal style. Sometimes it is just how someone writes, sometimes it is genuinely off, and the difference matters.

Is it okay to push back on a senior engineer's code review comment?
Yes, especially if you have a reason. Frame it as I considered X because of Y, what am I missing? rather than no, I disagree. Senior engineers respect pushback that is informed and curious.

How do I know if my team's code review culture is healthy?
Look for these things: reviewers explain why, nits are labeled, praise gets called out, and reviews happen in a timely way. If your reviews regularly leave you feeling small or defensive, that is information about the team, not about you.

Should I apologize in my code review comments?
Try not to. Sorry for the mess or sorry I didn't catch that trains your brain to feel guilty for the normal back and forth of engineering work. Replace apologies with simple acknowledgments like good catch, fixing now.

What if I am the only woman on my engineering team?
Find at least one woman in tech outside your team, even if it is just on a Slack community or a mentoring app, who you can text after a hard review. Having someone who recognizes the social texture of what you are dealing with, not just the code, is one of the most protective things you can build for yourself early in your career.

One Last Thing

If this resonated with you, I would love to hear about your first code review experience. What did you wish someone had told you? Drop a comment below or send me a note. If you are looking for more reflections on tech life, travel, and the in between, you can keep reading on Info Planet. I write about what it actually feels like to be a woman building a career in code, with a lot of detours through cooking, skincare, and solo travel. You can also start with my last one on what no one tells you about being a software engineer if this kind of post is your speed.