Image shows a TODO list titled “Second Shift”. List items: prep K12 talk, blog on woman at the company, tweet a fun selfie with a hashtag. The last item is “FIX IMPOSTER SYNDROME” (all caps).
Corporate feminists and big companies love to talk about imposter syndrome because then they can shove it into the second shift work that women and minorities are expected to do.
It’s just an expected hazard, ladies, and don’t worry just fix thyself. Once you’ve made sure that we’re making the appropriate effort on the pipeline, of course – we all know that’s the biggest problem. Sometime between the talk you’re giving to those school kids and by the way we thought it would be cool if you wrote something for the company blog talking about how great it is to work here whilst female. PR will help you.
Your male teammate never mentions the blog post, but he does send back that code review you’ve been waiting two days for. He wants you to do it completely differently, and you sigh because you have three other branches on top of that, now. You stay late proving that his way won’t, in fact, work. What a waste of time. Better not include that in the talk.
You feel discouraged, and try to talk to your manager about it. But he’s just been to the company mandated diversity training. He tells you how much the work you’re doing on the pipeline is appreciated, dodges your question about promotion, and later sends you an article on Imposter Syndrome.
Imposter: one that assumes false identity or title for the purpose of deception.
Here’s the thing. Maybe you are, in fact, an imposter. Maybe you are a Hufflepuff trying to survive in Slytherin. You have so many great qualities, but they won’t ever shine when people keep calling you “mudblood” and putting bugs in your bed. Maybe it’s more Mean Girls.
If you have to be like Regina George to succeed, can you? Do you want to? What might attempting do to you?
I’m telling you this, because I was an imposter. I tried to succeed in a system that told me I would never be allowed to. Where I saw ten times as many women burning out and unappreciated close up as I did snippets of women succeeding at a distance.
I tried “working harder” and “being more confident”. It would sometimes work, or maybe I would sometimes get lucky. And then another reorg, another dude who thought that any effort at improving diversity was “lowering the bar” asking me to prove it again and again and again. The voice in my head that questioned whether I belonged, whether I could ever belong, got louder and louder.
Maybe I’m not good enough.
Maybe I can’t work hard enough.
Maybe I don’t want it enough.
I felt like leaving tech was just a matter of time, and how long I survived a measure of my own resilience.
Getting out of that environment, and working to shed the baggage I picked up when I was trying to be a Slytherin – learning how to have opinions again, learning how to be a decent person, and how to expect decency in others… well that was the best thing I ever did for my career.
I recognise the person who wrote the post about leaving. But I’m not her, anymore. I don’t feel that way. I remember it, but it’s not how I feel. I’m not an imposter anymore – I’m where I belong, working at the intersection of multiple things that interest me. I’m appreciated generally, and treated with respect by my team and peers.
The person I was when I wrote the leaving post couldn’t have imagined this. She had no concept that it was possible.
It is.
Maybe imposter syndrome is a sign. It’s telling you to get out – whilst you can.
And managers, consider that if you have capable people on your team with “imposter syndrome” – the causes are largely environmental, so you may well have given it to them.
Really it comes down to: 1) ask for less. 2) give back more. 3) recognise and appreciate.
Ask for Less
Prioritise more impactful requests, and explain why the initiative is impactful in the ask: E.g. “can someone give a presentation at [school]” becomes “We would love to send someone to give a presentation at [school], they currently have [% female students] up from [change] and have [some recent achievement that highlights why they are worth supporting].”
Do the research on what is required: e.g. “can someone give a presentation in [location] on [date]” becomes “can someone give a presentation of [time] minutes to an audience of [audience description], suitable topics would be [list of high level topics]. The event is based in [location], travelling from [office location] will get you there in [timeframe, suggested transport].”
Provide admin or events support: it seems some organisations think it is “scrappy” for engineers to do this. In my opinion, this is typically not “scrappy”, but inefficient. If it is at all cost effective, it is only because your engineers are working extra hours they would not otherwise on this, and very few engineers make good event planners (myself included). This was one of the things I really appreciated at IBM, and at a recent event at Facebook I noticed the engineers running it had a ton of help, which was great.
Give Back More
Beyond the pipeline: provide events and support for the women who are there, rather than just asking them to take on the extra job of pipeline work. Cisco and Facebook have annual internal conferences for the women who work there. Extra training, mentorship and sponsorship programs are also good. The data’s pretty clear – stuff happens. But I think it’s easier to handle that in a company that shows they are committed to retention rather than one where they seem determined to pretend the pipeline is the main, even the only, problem.
Coaching and training: the #1 reason I have heard from women who don’t want to speak at events is fear. I have never seen any offer to help with this beyond “we have a slide deck someone else prepped that you can just use” (I always imagine that would lead to a terrible talk). This means that the burden falls disproportionately on the women who are not too terrified to speak, but some investment in training might go a long way to addressing this. E.g. “if you are not comfortable speaking, haven’t spoken before, or haven’t spoken in a while, we can arrange coaching with [expert] who will help you prepare.” – added bonus for the volunteer and their manager, these skills will almost certainly help elsewhere, too.
Book travel and take care of expense reports: not everyone will want this, but the offer will build goodwill, it is also really helpful for engineers with managers who are not supportive.
Recognition and Appreciation
Say thank you: I can’t believe I need to include this here. A timely “thanks for your participation in this event, here is some positive feedback we received, which I will share with your manager” goes a long way.
If hiring, recognise like hiring: If there are stats on things like: interviews conducted, resumes submitted, etc, include “external events” or “talks” as well and recognise in line with other hiring metrics.
If leadership, recognise like leadership: When considering promotion, or project allocation, if considering someone who planned and led an event or a program, consider that leadership not niceness.
I have been using the phrase “Corporate Feminism” to mean Company-Focused Diversity work, typically pipeline based. There have been other uses of this, much of it critique of Sheryl Sandberg including this analysis from a racial perspective. I don’t think we have an “official” definition and so hope that explains how I am using it here. If you think I’m wrong on this, please let me know!
I remember the moment I quit Corporate Feminism. A “thank you” thing for everyone involved in an event. My involvement? I had brought the idea over, helped organise it, co-hosted it. My name was called out in the middle, like I had done no more than anyone else.
We don’t do Corporate Feminism for the appreciation, of course, we do it because it is the “right” thing to do. However as I walked past my desk, dropped the piece of paper I had been given to commemorate the occasion in the recycling bin, and sat down and stared blankly at my monitor… my doubts about whether it was the “right” thing coalesced, and I decided I wasn’t going to do it anymore.
Of course, it didn’t happen instantly, it takes time to untangle commitments. I’d agreed to give a talk to a bunch of students which hung over me. I didn’t know what to say, all that I could think of was despondent. I’m introduced, “Cate is going to talk about her career”, and I said, “actually I’m going to talk about statistics”. I talked about how dismal the numbers were, and how the numbers were bad because the experience was bad, and how the numbers wouldn’t change unless the experience changed. And then, I offered a piece of hope that I didn’t at all believe in.
One of my friends said, “I thought you were going to end with ‘and then everyone dies’ but you didn’t, how did you do that?” and I didn’t say, “I lied”. It felt a little like a lie, though. It would have felt even more like it had I known that a guy was using that event to pick up girls.
Let me tell you a story about a girl. She switched into Computer Science, and when I met her she was super gung ho. Guys on her course gave her shit? Her reaction “Screw you, my grades are better”, and they were. Gave her a copy of Unlocking the Clubhouse (Amazon) and hoped she would do well.
I haven’t heard from her in a while. Last I heard, she had dropped out of CS. I don’t know exactly what happened, but I can imagine. When people tell you, show you, over and over again, that you don’t belong you come to believe it. Maybe some small disappointment will be the final straw.
Spend enough time on Corporate Feminism and you’ll build enough of these stories. The girls who email you enthusiastically, but eventually disappear. You’ll start to look at the bright young thing tempted from whatever she thought she might do before (law? medicine? chemistry? accountancy?) and wonder if she’ll make it. If you’re tempting her away from a path where she would be treated better, have a more fulfilling career?
Computer Science, programming, it’s not rocket science. It is, however, hard enough that the people who succeed at it would have been capable of succeeding at other things to. As the women I know, in general, are more well rounded (society drives this, to be fair), this goes doubly true for them. Large companies that focus on pipeline initiatives do so to increase their choice of female graduates to hire from – not all these girls that get pushed into the pipeline will get jobs at “top” tech companies. I’m not saying this is unfair, but with the resources thrown at many female students during their time at university, I’m not sure they all understand how different it will be once they graduate.
This, then, was doubt #1. The thing about the pipeline being so small, is that only the most bloody-minded and badass women survive. Working to broaden the pipeline seemed to me like working to lure smart, motivated women, who would otherwise have gone to happily do other things, into the acid that leads to the sewage plant. I could no longer convince myself that this was the “right” thing to do, in fact it had come to seem actively harmful.
Doubt #2 was how little Corporate Feminism was appreciated. Increased focus on “diversity” had mostly resulted in people asking me to do more stuff, but far from that it being appreciated I was mostly under pressure to say no more, and a nice no (suggesting an alternative person etc) is not zero overhead. I think people assume that this stuff is appreciated, that the Corporate Feminists get some kind of benefit or recognition from it, but in my experience that has usually been wrong (sometimes I have not even received a “thank you” from the asker, which did at least make it easy to ignore subsequent requests from them). I could count on one hand the benefits I received from my leadership in Corporate Feminism. I could not begin to count the hours I have spent on it.
Then, doubt #3. I believe that the best thing any of us can do as minorities in the tech industry to further the cause of minorities in the industry is to be excellent at, and happy in our jobs. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, as they say, and one of the most discouraging things for me was how few women I saw for whom this was the case. I asked myself, was Corporate Feminism a way to feel like I was doing something “meaningful”, and should I rather be looking for that in my day-to-day? Was it a way to dispel my “leadership” energy, which I felt was discouraged from channelling as a Software Engineer on that team?
A benefit to quitting Corporate Feminism was that it became easier to hide diversity work from my colleagues. The thing about spending time on any work thing that is not your core work, is that people will assume that it detracts from your day-to-day. If you do an event on a Wednesday and then work Saturday to catch up, people won’t notice you worked Saturday, but will notice that you weren’t at your desk Wednesday. Once I turned my focus externally, that was no longer an issue.
The other benefit was that I got to be more intentional about what I did want to do. For me, that meant 2 things:
Support the women who are still here. Mentor more actively, this includes women running pipeline events (from a slightly different perspective, my focus is helping them not supporting the event).
Be a more visible technical woman externally: speak at conferences, write more.
Like I said, none of us do this for the appreciation. That being said, I found when I went and focused intentionally with what aligned with my values the more that I felt what I did was appreciated. Every nice tweet, comment, email on my writing or speaking has contributed to this, so thank-you. It also influenced me to be better at reaching out, not just responding when women sought me out. It’s far better than when Corporate Feminism and The Need To Fill The Pipeline had me “mentoring” so many interns I couldn’t keep their names straight (is that really mentoring at all?)
I hope my experience is not the norm, and that the minorities who take on much of the Pipeline work that appears to be the extent of diversity work in the tech industry are appreciated and rewarded for their efforts. Some questions to consider:
How hard is it to get funding for retention-driven initiatives? How does this compare to getting funding for pipeline initiatives?
Is leadership in diversity initiatives recognised? E.g. is a diversity talk on interviews recognised in the same way that any other recruitment based work recognised? Is leadership of a diversity event recognised as leadership in general? Like many things done mostly by women (e.g. taking notes, organising), Corporate Feminism often falls into the category of “Thankless Emotional Labour”.
Is the organisation a “pipeline” organisation? E.g. only discusses the pipeline as a reason for lack of minorities, does not address internal cultural issues?
If the answer to these questions is not encouraging, and you decide to quit Corporate Feminism too, some suggestions:
Support external organisations. As a bonus, this will often help raise your profile and build your network outside of your current company, which can be helpful if you later decide you want a change.
Mentor, or even better sponsor, other minorities.
Share your own stories, and hard won wisdom. If you don’t want to, or feel safe, doing that under your own name currently, there are options (feel free to email me if this is a concern).
An awesome side project that you can write or speak about (seriously, seeing other women doing awesome technical things makes my day).
Just stop. Do your job. Enjoy your non-work life. Free yourself from the obligation to fix this, nothing will change until the experience changes, and focus on the pipeline is not the way that will happen.
Finally, as with most challenges that women face in the tech industry, other minorities face similar issues with compound effects. E.g. black women as “multi-norities” may feel pressured to practice Corporate Feminism as well as supporting efforts to improve racial diversity.
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