Accidentally in Code

Tag: women in tech

  • On Saying No

    On Saying No

    Keep Calm and Just Say No
    Credit: Flickr / Denise Dukette

    In the nearly four years I spent at The Conglomerate, I did a lot to try and improve the number of women working in engineering. It’s not clear how much effect this had. But I spent a lot of time and energy on it.

    Eyes open, I knew this wasn’t always the best career move. But sometimes we do things that we know aren’t the best career move but we believe are the right thing to do. Because paycheque and job title aside, we still have to look ourselves in the mirror at the end of the day.

    And I believed that the events, the Token Women talks, the mentoring, the interviews, they were the right thing to do. So I did them. A lot of it in the evenings, and on the weekends. But of course, some of it, during the day. Sometimes I worked late and made the time up. Sometimes I didn’t.

    Some of my colleagues were supportive. Some tolerated it. Some were “supportive” and talked good game but would make these comments so that I knew they thought it was a distraction from being an engineer. Some made comments about how these things discriminate against men.

    An aside, whilst we talk about distractions, the biggest distractions were actually things like being called a c*** by a colleague, or finding the word “whore” in a design document. Supporting a friend and colleague because she was being harassed. Trying to watch out for all the interns without letting them know too clearly what they need to watch out for. Or the tedious day to day of being undermined in a stereotypically gendered way. Did he have to repeat everything I said in that meeting? Did he really speak to me like that in front of everyone? Why the hell is this guy explaining the code I wrote to me, again?

    Showing up and giving a token women talk is not really that distracting compared to that. But I digress.

    Eventually I reached this point where I didn’t believe it was the right thing to do anymore. I looked at the emotional cost, and the time, and the output – and the output felt like luring capable women into environments where they would be mistreated – and decided not to participate in Corporate Feminism anymore.

    It might seem surprising that the most impactful thing I did for women actually came after that. But let me tell you what that was – I finally, must have been nearly a year later, wrote an internal G+ post about why I had stopped doing Corporate Feminism, and why. It’s lost to the ether now, but I remember that I wrote about no longer being confident it was the right thing to do, the exhausting judgement of my colleagues, and how painful it had been to try and get money for these things. That in an office rife with excess, I had actually spent time trying to negotiate for a car service for a speaker, been told “can’t she just take the tube?”

    Something actually came of this. Last I heard it was still going, and people used it.

    There’s something a little depressing about years of work and yet what really made a difference was 30-60 minutes writing a rant and posting it.

    And yet. That discounts everything it took to write that rant. That rant was a product of hard won and bitter experience. The rant was effective because I understood the system and could explain how the system worked – or didn’t. It was effective because people who knew how much I cared, and how much I had done, I wasn’t just whining – I had worked within that system, but I wasn’t prepared to anymore.

    Of course some people (men) thought it was whining, and wanted to share how they once felt unappreciated too. Unfortunately for them, I have a permanent 404 on worthless manfeelings. At the time I just ignored them. Now, I wonder why they thought that was useful? I had reached a level of frustration where I had given up nearly a year previously. Did they thing some comment about everyone being unappreciated was going to change my mind?

    This was the start of my – surprisingly radical – notion that it is not too much to ask that work for the collective be appreciated. The people who appreciate me know that I will do anything for them. But people who try and force random obligations onto me, well. I have yet to tell anyone doing this to go f*** themselves so I consider myself a very reasonable person.

    Saying no is a powerful thing. Refusing obligations and choosing your own priorities is an act of self care and an expression of hope. Saying no is an act of strength. A peaceful resistance. I embrace it, and as with all things, the more I do it the easier it gets.

    No, I won’t do unpaid work for your for-profit company. No, I won’t introduce you to someone else who might. No, I will not cover my own travel for your “diversity” event. No I will not enter into an open-ended “mentoring” relationship with you, person who found me yesterday – please come back with some specific questions. No I won’t let you speak to me like that. No, I will not be complicit in this system that I find morally repugnant. No I will not help you “hire more women” if I am not confident they will be treated well. No, I will not keep quiet for the “sisterhood” if this sisterhood is only cis-het-white women because this leaves many of my sisters out.

    Interestingly, this results in people (men) saying that I am not doing enough. That charge of “whining” again. First of all, I’m confident that me not doing enough is not actually contributing to a systematic problem. Deliberately, I choose here not to justify what I do do.

    But I have this radical idea that by saying no and by encouraging other women to say no I am in fact doing more than ever. That we are reclaiming our rightful space and autonomy rather than putting in a second shift of stuff that “feels good” but is at best pointless and at worst harmful, and definitely offers little to nothing in the way of actual progress.

    It’s my birthday this week and to celebrate for a limited time only Just Say NO to Thankless Emotional Labour t-shirts are available. Proceeds go to two amazing organisations, one in each of my homes (Europe / Colombia) and I’ll match up to 500 USD each [more detail].

  • Just Say No to Thankless Emotional Labour: The T-Shirt

    Just Say No to Thankless Emotional Labour: The T-Shirt

    just say no to thankless emotional labour tshirts

    Last year I turned 30 in Santiago. I didn’t like Santiago, and I felt bad about turning 30 – it’s hard when a major life milestone occurs in a time when you are feeling somewhat lost, so I dealt with this in my preferred way – I left.

    I went to Easter Island, and explored, started reflecting on something that one of my friends had told me – that turning 30 was incredibly liberating, because she gave fewer fucks. This is absolutely something I have found to be true over the last year. I have no time for bullshit games, and no space in my life for emotional vampires.

    Most of all, I have really embraced the idea that I started tentatively to explore whilst I was still at The Conglomerate – that I can say No to Thankless Emotional Labour. And whilst I hate to give advice, I am vocally supportive of other women doing the same.

    So, what better way to celebrate my birthday than… make a t-shirt with that phrase on it? Or rather, 8. You can buy one here. Proceeds are going to support two organisations, one in each of my homes. In Europe, Stemettes, and in Colombia, Colombia Dev (where it will go to support programming for women). I’ll match 500 USD to each.

    Last year for my birthday, some friends and I embraced this idea of “#ChooseMeMay”. It was a reminder to prioritise ourselves over imagined obligations. This year, all I want for my birthday is: a kettle, a Grover from Times Square to stroke my hair and tell me everything will be OK, and for more women to choose themselves, their ideas, their creativity, over nonsense obligations, whether real, or imagined.

    So, I’d love it if you bought a t-shirt. I’d love you to support these organisations, both of which are close to my heart. But most of all, fellow women, I’d love it if you said No to Thankless Emotional Labour, and chose yourself instead.

  • Book: The Truth About Burnout

    Book: The Truth About Burnout

    The Truth About Burnout I found the Truth About Burnout (Amazon) from this article, which I think gives the main takeaways from the book far more succinctly. I did find the book interesting and I’m glad I read it, but I wouldn’t necessarily encourage other people to. It’s a little dated in places (it was published in 2000), and what it goes into in depth is mainly fixing the experience within broken organisations. If you’re not dealing with a broken organisation, the summary would give you a good list of things to look out for in yourself, or so that you don’t become one.

    The concept of the Maslach Burnout Inventory was really eye-opening for me. There are six causes of burnout… and only one is overwork. When I was working in a job I hated, and wondering why I felt so terrible, thinking it couldn’t be burnout because my hours were reasonable and it turns out it totally could be. It was.

    The other five causes of burnout: lack of control, lack of reward, absence of fairness, lack of community, conflict in values.

    I’m currently watching the stats about the attrition of women in technical roles play out in my network, which is depressing. Leaving myself seemed less bad because I thought “maybe it’s just me” or “maybe I was just unlucky”. Now, when women tell me that the job they have is their last in the industry, and why, I connect those reasons to the five causes.

    Lack of control -> HR process. Opaque hiring and promotion processes.

    Lack of reward -> In SV women make 86.4 cents on the dollar (the pay gap varies across the US and internationally).

    Absence of fairness -> Men promoted on potential, women asked to “be patient”.

    Lack of community -> Being on of few people like you, having to take on the bulk of the work of “fixing” things.

    Conflict in values -> Where do I begin, maybe with white men’s obsession with “meritocracy” and the hiring “bar”.

    My point: I have been thinking about the concepts in this book a lot, and I’m glad I read it as an exercise in taking the time to connect these things together.

  • Coping Mechanisms and Unlearned Skills

    Coping Mechanisms and Unlearned Skills

    One of the things I’ve been meditating on since escaping the tech industry is what skills do you not acquire when the main skills you are learning are how to cope in a bad situation? And do you have to unlearn them to go back?

    The thing about an environment where the main thing you are learning is survival skills: what are you /not/ learning as a result?

    The other thing about environments where we “cope” rather than “thrive” is that it becomes hard to think strategically. I think this is why it’s often seems to be a two-step process for getting from a bad place to a good one. Also, it’s a lot easier to recognise a “less bad” environment (a manager that treats me like a human being! No more of that guy who keeps creeping on me!), than a good one.

    Coping mechanisms are often not helpful in healthy environments. So one thing I’ve been asking women I know who have found healthy environments is “what coping mechanisms did you have to unlearn?”

    The answers have been interesting. It turns out:

    • If you’re listened to, you don’t need to repeat yourself.
    • If you’re not interrupted, you don’t need to interrupt.
    • If you’re taken seriously, snark can be harmful.

    I notice that most of these are about communication, but more than that, communication on a foundation of mutual respect.

    If we look at the way the tech industry treats women, and other minorities (let’s summarise: badly), it’s really clear this effects on the way we operate, too. How could it not? I worry about the internalisation of imposter syndrome, which I’ve been confronting in myself recently. I worry that when a guy patronises and talks down to me it barely irritates me anymore because I don’t expect better. I worry that I don’t argue at all, because I hate the arguing over nothing so much my capacity to argue at all seems to have disappeared. I worry that I don’t think I really know what a healthy environment looks like. And I worry that I too have coping mechanisms I would need to unlearn, if I found one.

  • Problems with Resources

    Problems with Resources

    ewaste pile
    Credit: Wikipedia

    Several of my computers have been hit with hammers. I tell them they should be flattered by the complement, but they still have dents in them.

    Computers in Dave’s office keep overheating. But I don’t think it’s anything to do with Dave having the heating on high.

    Many of my processes are failing with specific error messages, but I think it’s just because they want to spawn new processes.

    Dave’s programs just don’t seem to work well on some of my machines. But those machines should just Lean In.

    A bunch of my computers came unplugged, so I threw them out and bought new ones.

    I need to rewire my data-centre. Do you know anyone who will help if I buy them a cup of coffee?

    We threw out all the computers of that type, but it doesn’t mean we have any problems with them.

  • Pitfalls for Men Talking About Diversity

    Pitfalls for Men Talking About Diversity

    Odd one out
    Credit: Flickr / David Spinks

    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.

  • Discoveries About OSS Culture

    Discoveries About OSS Culture

    Danbo on Flickr II
    Credit: Flickr / Andrés Nieto Porras

    I was hanging out with an OSS-dude (OSS = Open Source Software) for a while, and I learned a couple of things.

    Firstly – don’t try and buy committed OSS types books. It’s a complete nightmare.

    Secondly – I’ve reached a better understanding of harassment and open source. And particularly the pushback, which comes from a place of “we all put up with this”. It’s not that OSS people think this behaviour is acceptable (although no doubt there are exceptions), it’s that they don’t know how to change it.

    Death threats are a common occurrence; he gets them regularly, even if they are rarely talked about publicly, and there are no public meetups around a project he works on in a city because there is a guy who is sufficiently threatening.

    The threats and harassment are – seemingly – trying to assert dominance. The way that men assert dominance over other men is different from the way they assert dominance over women, and the difference in threats reflects that.

    There’s an attitude from some of “I put up with this, so why not you?” and the short answer is no-one should put up with it. Willingness to tolerate threats and harassment is a high bar for a career, let alone a hobby (but 50% of OSS work is actually done as part of someone’s job).

    But as I observe to him, the worst case is it’s a 6-foot dude, how worried is he? He laughs and says, “well I am a 6 foot dude”.

    As someone who is not a 6-foot dude, for me the worst case scenario is pretty terrifying.

    As in all cases where the argument “but [person / culture] is vile for everyone” it’s worth considering:

    • Do some groups have reason to feel more threatened?
    • Is this behaviour historically gendered or racial (even if you are claiming it isn’t this time)
    • Is it possible that people feel more comfortable exhibiting this behaviour to already marginalised people? (Less likely to experience repercussions, because marginalised people tend to have less power).

    In any discussion on Open Source, it’s worth linking to Ashe Dryden’s excellent essay The Ethics of Unpaid Labor and the OSS Community.

  • Tuning Forks in Human Form

    Tuning Forks in Human Form

    Danbo y el Kiwi
    Credit: Flickr / https://www.flickr.com/photos/anieto2k/5688981179/

    A few months ago three people told me I had been right about something. Obviously this brought me joy – I do love being right – but it was not all joy, because what I had been right about was bad news for them. I personally felt vindicated. But my friends were in a bad place and I worried for them.

    I think that anticipating disaster is part of being a good engineer. You look at the system, you consider what will go wrong, you weigh it up and make a decision: prevent, mitigate, or note and ignore.

    Obviously not everyone agrees with me. This line of thinking is what drove me to become an expert in unit testing the kind of code that most people do not test at all.

    Which is fine. I don’t think there is One True Way of being an engineer, and I’m sure there are benefits to having optimists around (although I’m not sold on delusional megalomaniacs). But it does mean that I have spent a lot of time predicting, and worrying about disaster, with mixed results.

    Some people will listen to you, and you’ll fix it together. And some people will listen, but the decision will be to leave it. Later, you can come back and say “hey you were right this wasn’t really a problem” or they might tell you “yeah I guess we never thought that guy would come back and fix that thing we knew was a terrible decision, and I’m sorry you lost 2 weeks of your life to dealing with it. But his poor decisions won’t be your problem for long because that project is moving and by the way you didn’t get promoted and he did.”

    Of course there are people who won’t listen. And when I think about that, I always think about one of my friends. Who complained about something for months. And eventually she decided she couldn’t take it anymore and walked away. And her manager, and his manager, they said, “we had no idea it was so serious, you should have said something.” But she had. They had just ignored it.

    As I have failed to walk this line between “passive” and “aggressive”, between “fine” and “dramatic”, and as I have watched my friends do the same, my observation is,

    If someone doesn’t want to listen to what you are saying, they will complain about how you are saying it.

    This is why tone policing is harmful. Because it derails the conversation – tone over topic. Because it’s victim blaming.

    But what deeply offends me about tone policing is that it is inefficient, and demonstrably pointless.

    Sometimes I’m told I should be angrier, or more cynical. Sorry – don’t have the energy. Sometimes that I should be nicer, try and “catch more flies with honey” – since when was catching flies the goal? 

    Look at the vast array of media that people consume and it’s clear that people connect with different things. I never watch violent movies, some people love them. People learn in different ways. I prefer to read, others like to listen. The thing that makes one man say “wow what a bitch” causes another to realise “oh, she’s serious”.

    The book The Male Factor is pretty depressing but worth a read on how men perceive things when women communicate. Two key takeaways on this topic are 1) men write off anything they don’t understand as a woman being emotional. 2) around 20% of men are predisposed to react badly to women.

    For me, that book was the last thing that liberated me from any need to “be nice”. Since it’s clear that 20% of men will probably never find me nice, then I’m free from the need to try and appease them.

    Now I try and approach this stuff in a way that is authentic to me, and I encourage other women to do the same. If someone thinks their strategy is more effective, run with that and prove it. Genuinely, I wish all success.

    One of my friends is really feminist now, but as part of his journey to actually understanding he was blocked by multiple feminists, and now he owns that he was being a jerk and deserved it. He didn’t need every woman to be holding his hand and soft-soaping things to eventually get it, because he’s a decent human being and in time he learned.

    So yeah… I just can’t find it in me to worry about my tone or any other woman’s tone “alienating men”. Because if they are that easy to alienate, then if not that then something else. And if they are actually – like my friend – learning as they figure it out, then they’ll get there, in time. They don’t need me to hold their hand. And frankly, I have better things to do.

  • You Get What You Incentivise

    You Get What You Incentivise

    tulip stair
    Credit: Wikipedia

    It’s about 18 months since my friend Tracy wrote this post pointing out that whilst the tech industry evangelises data for decision making, there is very little available when it comes to diversity numbers. And about 12 months since we started seeing companies release their numbers. Helped along by radical shareholder action from Jesse Jackson Sr.

    This is progress, right? These things didn’t used to be discussed even internally, which is ridiculous because if you’re a woman on a team with more men named “Dave” than women, it’s the kind of thing you notice. Just because you don’t know the global, or local, percentage, doesn’t mean you don’t have a good idea of what is going on.

    These are good developments, but at this point perhaps it’s worth stepping back and considering – how far have we come, actually?

    Firstly, there is no consistent definition of what “engineering roles” means. My understanding is that it ranges from a narrow definition of ENG/UX/PM, through to a “everyone who reports into an engineering cost centre”. The numbers vary accordingly, but not everyone knows this – I’ve spoken to women who were comparing numbers at companies as part of their decision to take a job (or not) thinking that it was a different of percentages… when it was actually mostly a difference of definitions.

    Secondly, if we’re going to blame the pipeline of women and minorities with CS and related degrees, and by “we” I mean “tech companies disclaiming responsibility for the culture they have created” it makes sense to tie the numbers to roles where a CS degree might actually be a benefit.

    It’s not like there isn’t precedent for this – the ABI Top Company for Women awards use a standard definition for technical roles. Companies who have participated in this have that data. They have just chosen to release other – better looking – data instead.

    As with all processes and incentives, you get what you incentivise. What concerns me is what is what is incentivised in this scenario: padding the definition of “engineering role” to make the numbers appear better, and focus on hiring “diverse” new grads.

    What would we want to incentivise? Perhaps:

    • Hiring under-represented groups at every level.
    • Paying them equitably.
    • Building a culture where everyone is allowed to succeed:
      • Where they have equal opportunity to do equal work.
      • Where promotions aren’t delayed by gendered or racial feedback and expectations (hello, lawsuits).

    What I would love to see is firstly a standard definition of what “engineering role” means.

    The second, more revolutionary thing that I would like to see, is companies reporting not just the percentage of minority groups but the percentage of compensation going to minority groups (e.g. as determined via a standard measure, like taxation).

    This removes the incentive to pad out “engineering” with less prestigious, and less well paid roles to make the numbers look better.

    It makes hiring more senior people from under-represented groups, and paying those people equitably more important.

    And for people looking at these numbers when evaluating companies, it would be a helpful metric. For myself, I’d prefer a company with 15% women in “engineering” roles receiving 13% of “engineering” compensation than one with 18% women in “engineering” roles receiving 12% of compensation. We know there is going to be a gap – women are better represented at lower levels. But the size of, and comparison of that gap would be very telling.

    As in all things when it comes to diversity in the tech industry, we know that the data on people of color is even worse, and there is a racial pay gap as well as a gender one, generally.

    I suspect we’ll never see this data. Because yeah we saw some progress, but we saw a lot more PR.