I was annoyed recently, because a conglomerate organising a conference pinged us (and every other group that might yield “diverse” speakers) to promote their CfP… three days before closing. I sent them a series of comments on how leaving it to the last minute like that wasn’t helpful. As Chiu-Ki put it “we’re not a magic solution that materialize women in 3 days armed with topics to submit”. They didn’t respond, of course.
Anyway, I was thinking about this again, because this week I’ve been at 360iDev. I’ve had a great time – I learned a lot, I met some great people, and my talk went pretty well. Also a lot of friends were here too, which is always great.
And like… compare and contrast. Because at this event there were women speaking, there were women attending, there were women volunteering. I don’t know what the percentages were, but what I noticed was that at every point there were women. I was never the only woman watching a talk, for example. There were people of color.
We were still in the minority, for sure, but I felt like we were better than welcome – we were expected. Which was pretty cool. I know the organizers have been working for a long time to make this the case (and have had a code of conduct since 2012, for example), and continue to (part of the reason they hosted our workshop was they thought it might yield more speakers for next year). And I guess all I can say is: it’s clearly working.
Earlier this year Chiu-Ki plotted to improve the number of women speaking at DroidConNYC, it’s been really great too see women tweeting about how much her encouragement made a difference. All that grassroots work, and it’s 22%. Which doesn’t seem that high – it’s certainly lower than I want to see – but it’s a great start, and one that I hope the organizers will build on.
Achieving this was a lot of work, and started months in advance. Not three days.
Lately I’ve been watching more men give talks about diversity. Personally I’m in favour of this, because 1) If women could fix this, we would have by now – making “diversity” a “woman’s issue” is a way of perpetuating the status quo. And 2) there is clearly a subset of men who won’t listen to women talking about this (or maybe anything), and perhaps they won’t listen to men on this topic either but it’s worth a try.
That being said, I’m seeing some things reoccur and I think they are problematic. So, I offer some suggestions.
1. Do your Research
White men in the tech industry benefit from assumed credibility in any number of areas: writing code, productivity, dubious management practises, and entrepreneurship being a few examples. Welcome to one area where this is not the case. You actually need to know what you are talking about – you need to have read the research, the articles, the personal blog posts and you need to have talked to as many women as possible, Women you are not related to, married to, and who do not work for you.
Think about how much research women do before asking technical questions.
2. Cite your Sources
I don’t care if you think you came up with it, on this topic there is almost certainly a woman or a person of color who said it first. Find them. Cite them. Don’t follow your talk with a blog post like this.
Think about the way that women get criticised for not being a “team player” when they own their achievements.
3. Skip the Pipeline
Everyone knows that girls in high school aren’t enthused about learning to code. It’s 90%+ of the communication from tech companies as they release their homogeneity numbers. Try for novelty, it makes for a better talk.
Given the extent of the problem elsewhere and the number of women who drop out mid-career, giving the pipeline no more than a cursory mention makes for a more accurate talk.
4. Diversity > Women
I’m not here for the fight to get 50:50… and the women are all white (and hetro and cis). We have data about white women, and it’s clear because white women have made massive gains in other fields that the tech industry is lagging behind. OK. Now learn about the challenges that people of color and particularly women of color face. Learn about the rampant discrimination against LGB and trans-people.
As far as I can make out, if jerks tell you “you’re being racist against white people” you’re doing something right.
5. Be Credible
Your keynote on this topic shouldn’t be the first time people discover you give a damn, you should be able to show a track record. Involvement in organizations that support inclusivity in tech, money donated to such organizations, money invested in women/non-binary/PoC entrepreneurs, better than average diversity in your team or organization.
Think about how much harder it is for women and PoC to make it through resume screening.
Seems Hard?
It is. Welcome to being a minority with an opinion. Now, do the work.
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.
Recently, I got to use the fact that I am a huge art nerd, to help a team I was on. It was awesome, because I actually felt appreciated – and there’s been something of a dearth of that lately, and because it was a showcase of the positive effects of diversity (something we had been careful to create). When you have people with vastly different lived experiences and interests, there will be unexpected benefits.
That is the argument for diversity, and why the classic example is that you’d be stupid to build any kind of social experience (especially one featuring location) without the input of women – because they bring a different perspective, one much more rooted in physical safety.
And you can actually represent diversity as a mathematic model and prove the benefits – as explained in The Difference (Amazon). But one of the points he makes in this book is that it’s not actually about gender, or race, it’s about the way people think. And that there are places where you benefit from homogeneity, because of reduced conflict – and that is in work that doesn’t require creativity.
The thing is, race and gender can be a proxy for different lived experiences – the personal safety example above – a horrifying number of women have experienced some kind of violence, so chances are, either we have, or someone we know has… and so we worry.
I’ve had a good experience de-branding myself, and found some benefit to being anonymous at GHC. One of my friends, by contrast, has found that by wearing company and university shirts she is no longer racially profiled as a shoplifting threat – something that had shop assistants trailing her around stores. This is a vastly different lived experience to my privileged little white-girl experience, right? When people follow me around stores it’s because I’m shopping like a fiend and they are helping me.
So when people see diversity, and see the benefits, it looks like my example above – someone (me) brought a different perspective, there was a clear benefit, everyone was happy.
Of course, that’s not often what it looks like. In so much of what we do in software, success is invisible, and people only complain when it is broken (not a bad thing – people should be able to expect a good user experience). So a more common case is probably, someone makes a case for something, or does something, and no-one complains about it, hardly anyone compliments it, and it’s easy to ask – did it really matter?
And when diversity isn’t appreciated, it looks like this – a person surrounded by group think, convinced that the status quo doesn’t make sense, alone, and unheard, wondering if they are going mad.
From this perspective, it’s clear that micro-management is a terrible thing for diversity (a failure of management in general, but especially in this respect) – because it doesn’t tolerate the slight chaos, and the necessary dissent, or any opinions other than those of the micromanager. A micro-managed culture is by definition a mono-culture, and the measure of diversity in that context, is how many of the people inside it wonder if they are going mad.
One of the things Unlocking the Clubhouse made me realise, is that whilst university felt like a monoculture, it wasn’t, it was just the group-think was so loud that it was hard to hear the dissenting voices. When I think of my male friends at uni, I suspect most of them came from the around 1/3 of male CS students who don’t identify with the stereotypical CS-culture (as opposed to around 2/3 of women). I’ve been part of a project to try and get that book into the hands of more university students in Australia, and it’s because I think many of them (around 2/3, haha) need to know that identification with the mono-culture is not a prerequisite, it’s a side-effect.
All of this is a good argument against my current pet peeve – you can’t plonk a couple of new grad women or other minorities in a team and call it diverse. The diversity comes from the dissent, which evolves over time – assuming it is allowed and encouraged, and managed constructively. New grads are less likely to have dissenting opinions, due to having less experience, and less likely to voice those dissenting opinions, due to their lower confidence (especially women).
The best manager I ever had, assembled a team and made a comment that at the time I didn’t realise was incredibly brilliant. He said that he had expected there would be conflict, but that if we figured out how to work together we would be so much better as a result. And then he helped us figure out our assumptions and all the ways in which we weren’t communicating effectively. And it was so painful to go through that, but he was right – so worth it.
The worst manager I ever had was a micro-manager with a habit of gas-lighting.
One of those teams reaped the benefits of diversity, and the other did not. Something that had very little to do with what people looked like (neither team was entirely made up of caucasian males), and everything to do with building a culture where differing opinions was expected and managed.
The metric of people looking the same is a bullshit metric you can game, at least in the short-term, given enough resources (1/3 of women in University CS do identify with the monoculture, for example). The real metric is people not thinking the same, which as it happens, helps create an environment where the first metric should also do well over the longer term.
Adding a couple of new grad women on a team does not make for a “diverse” team. Withhold judgement until they have been there for 12-18 months. And then ask, do they have respect, autonomy, meaningful work?
Because that team may well have developed into a diverse team. It may always have been diverse in opinion, and is now finally reaping the benefits.
I have a bunch of posts to write up from GHC last week, which was as usual, awesome. But the question I was interested in people I went with answering was – what are you going to do differently when you get back?
For me, it was a reminder about the takeaway I got from Whistling Vivaldi – that whilst women have it bad, they are not the only minority (or the smallest!), and our efforts in that direction would benefit from being more inclusive of other minorities.
So my change – make my own diversity efforts more inclusive.
