Accidentally in Code

Tag: allies

  • All The Shades of Unsurprised

    All The Shades of Unsurprised

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    Credit: Flickr / brett jordan

    We’re all outraged at Uber – again. Because it turns out that the company that tolerates sexual harassment from their drivers, and in the government they work with, also tolerates and enables it… amongst their own employees.

    And yeah, this was really bad, but it’s not like this is just Uber. I’ve heard similar stories from most tech companies and every woman in tech I know has a story like that. Often more than one. We all know that HR is there to prevent the company getting sued, not anything else. The only shocker here is how blatant it was – do they know what retaliation means?

    One HR rep even explicitly told me that it wouldn’t be retaliation if I received a negative review later because I had been “given an option”.

    It’s safe to hate on Uber, because we know they are evil. The challenge is not tweeting something supportive when it happens at a company you hate. It’s how you react when it happens in a company that you’re invested in, to someone sitting right next to you. Many men have sat next to these things, known they were happening, and said nothing. Plenty of white women have done the same to women of color.

    Perhaps we should talk about how even when the disregard for the law is flagrant, as it is here, it’s still better to write a tell-all blog post than to seek legal redress. Women know the consequences for that, and they don’t take them. Who can blame them.

    And maybe we should also talk about what will happen next. Nothing. Uber chose their “high performing” men over the high performing woman, and now they are on some empty PR blitz (HR is going to investigate! LOL) but it means nothing. Maybe they will have a harder time hiring women now. I don’t think any woman I know was willing to work there anyway, so how much worse can that get, really? Uber was built by the brogrammers, for the brogrammers. This is how it’s always been. This is how it will always be.

    Delete the app – great – but it’s still baked into Google maps functionality, so Uber will still be fine. VC bros don’t turn on their own kind because they continue to operate the way they always have.

    And let’s also talk about the bar we hold women to in these situations. You shouldn’t have to be a white woman with a best selling book to expect to be respected at your job. You shouldn’t need to have to document every interaction with your manager or HR department.

    Finally, can we please talk about why men let other men slide on these things? It’s because they identify with the dude who made a “mistake” more than the woman he harassed. It’s because they fear they too could make that “mistake” – people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. And so they let him make the “mistake” again and again and again. Please, guys, let that one go. You probably wouldn’t make that “mistake” with every woman who joined your team. I believe in your capacity to be better. This is not about you. It’s about him. There is no “high performing” manager who can’t be trusted to manage women – fully 50% of the population – without propositioning them. Understand that “we’re poly but my wife is more successful than me” is the new “my wife doesn’t understand me”. It’s possible to be poly and not be creepy AF, but this dude failed at it. Let him go. Firing people is horrible, but I could fire a manager like that and never lose a minute’s sleep over it. You can do it, too.

    As an industry, we need to take a hard look at ourselves right now. We have bragged about changing the world, and we have to accept that we have – and not all for the better. The fear of entitled white men does not just prioritize the fear of their litigation over that of the women they harass, it also drives this misunderstood argument of free speech – people can say what they like, you don’t have to give them a platform*. We’ve created things to allow people of similar interests to find each other, and the Nazis, well they have found each other, and they are stronger than ever. We have erased and hidden and diminished sexual harassment and assault until it has reached the highest office. We have encoded a white supremacist patriarchy in the platforms we have built and watched it thrive in the real world whilst disclaiming responsibility.

    It started inside the office – not just of the company you hate – but the ones you like, the one you work or would work for. When these kind of things happened, and nothing was done.

    * Let them RTFM and build their own – all the pieces are out there – this is the beauty of OSS.

  • Sponsors, Mentors and Allies

    Sponsors, Mentors and Allies

    Credit: Wikipedia
    Credit: Wikipedia

    I don’t think we talk enough about sponsors in general, whereas at every woman in tech event, oh, another mentoring opportunity.

    I’m all set for mentors, and have enough women who I offer support too that I can’t actively look for more. They are super helpful, but as I observed to the fabulous Jo Miller recently, “mentors give me perspective, but sponsors give me opportunity.” Sometimes we need to stop letting ourselves be over-mentored, stop trying to make ourselves feel better and find coping mechanisms to handle whatever situation we happen to be in… and instead find a better situation.

    Sponsors help find that situation.

    Sponsors can also be mentors, and they can be allies, but here’s the thing. They don’t have to be. Usually it may be better for them not to be the person you offload all your crazy on – that’s what your mentor is for (or even better! A friend).

    And most importantly, they don’t have to be allies. It’s great if they are, but if I think about the sponsors who have done good things for my career of late, at least 2 out of 3 have no idea what a microaggression is. One of them persists in thinking that the grammatical problems of “they” outweighs the problems of “he”. Obviously I disagree with him on that point, but I also think that for me the good things that he’s done outweigh that particular issue.

    Larry Summers, I think, is one of the best examples of this. Said some very damaging things about women’s aptitudes for STEM, but was an excellent sponsor for Sheryl Sandberg.

    Ultimately, sponsorship looks like this. There’s an opportunity, and a white dude wants it, because there is always a white dude that wants it. But the sponsor advocates for the woman, or other marginalised person, who they believe will be better at it, who deserves this opportunity.

    It’s not that white dudes have what they want, and other people get what’s left over. Because what is left is mostly junior, and often thankless positions (see also: the Joan of Arc CEO). Sponsorship is about having power, and using it to advocate. White men have been doing it for each other all along. They don’t have a special word for it, because for them it’s mostly just “going to work”.

    And I think this is the hardest part for managers in the tech industry to grasp, however enlightened. Is that diversity means that if white dudes have to start competing with the rest of the population, it won’t always “just happen” that they are the best for the job. Sometimes they won’t be. Maybe, they never were.

    A woman, or other marginalised person, will be instead.

    Note: like many such things in the tech industry, women have it bad, but other marginalised groups (especially as one of my friends puts it, “multi-norities”, e.g. women of colour) have it much worse. One advantage white women have in this situation (of many) is they sometimes remind older white men of their daughters.

  • Friends, Allies

    Friends, Allies

    Credit Deviant Art / LashelleValentine
    Credit Deviant Art / LashelleValentine

    After my recent experiences, I’ve been thinking a lot about men. Not in the way where I think they are all misogynistic, sexually assaulting jerks (although yes, my idea of the prevalence of these things is off – I hope). But also just clinging to those in my life who I know have a healthy respect for other humans, for women, for me.

    Weirdly, it was easier to talk to my male friends about the creep-on-the-plane. They were just purely horrified and angry on my behalf. Women were more likely to comment on how I should have reacted, and have a more complicated reaction because of things that had happened to them, or other women they know.

    I’ve realized, lately, and I think I’m horribly slow to this, that men have a huge part to play in addressing the lack of women in tech, and so few of them seem to realize it.

    There is this range, from don’t care, to panic. It’s rare to see people at either side of it, although you do find them.

    Most fall in the middle, somewhere around well-meaning-but-not-actually-helping. The ones who don’t actually want to think it’s a problem, who will go to great lengths to ignore things, say things like “that guy is a jerk to everyone!”, or “some men have that problem too! So what are we doing about that?”

    Sometimes they are afraid it will take something from them, that if we have more women that will mean there will be less men. They worry they won’t make the cut, and have to deny it, hide behind some ideas of meritocracy, that aren’t really all that meritocratic.

    And then there are those that get it. Maybe they want their daughters, sisters, wives to have the same opportunities they do, maybe they are viscerally terrified that they cannot succeed without a diverse team, because they want to create things that work for everyone, not just nerdy boys.

    I’ve become convinced that right now, one of the best ways we wil see progress is to find these guys, and pull them towards the edge, until they are as angry as we sometimes are. Until they see it. Panic.

    I really think, that we have got towards the end of the benefits we will see from a bunch of dudes in a room. The next places that technology will revolutionize will require a broader view of the world. People expect more, demand more, you can’t not cater to 51% of the population because their husbands and fathers are actually making the decisions. That isn’t the case anymore, if it ever was. Women are the biggest users of social networks, the drivers of consumer spending. So you need to know what they worry about when you consider privacy, have some idea of how they shop (clue! Efficiency is often not the major goal).

    When we talk about the dream of getting women into tech, we talk about numbers. One third is the magic number. That was the case when I was at IBM, on my old team, on my current one. It’s actually awesome. But rare.

    I have a slightly different one.

    I want to have technical women that I don’t like. I want to work with technical women who I don’t think are amazing, and I want to not freak out about that. I want to have enough women around me that I build relationships with those I have stuff in common with, more than just a job title.

    There is this stereotype of what a woman in tech is like, near tech, not making, and wrangling engineers that she seems to despise. It bothers me when I encounter women like that. It bothers me that it bothers me. That we have this idea of what it means to be a woman in tech, and it doesn’t even seem to be technical. The idea that you have to be a certain way – usually some version of a nerdy scifi lover who never had a girlfriend in high school is just so limiting. To women, but also to some men.

    The boy is telling me about his day, and he says something about “loading things into your head” like he’s some kind of computer himself. And I say, “that’s not what I do. I mostly work by having feelings and I follow them around the codebase”.

    He thought I was joking, but I’m not. Thankfully we never made it to the topic of what must be wrong with me to work like that.

    Maybe it’s just, I’m not a nerdy boy.

    It would be nice if that was less weird, and less hard.