I read a lot about how important it is to get more women speakers (and PoC!) at tech conferences, and I agree it’s important. But one of the things I’ve found as a speaker, who is also a woman, is that I get invitations to fill what I refer to as “the woman speaker slot”.
The clues usually arise in the request:
It’s at an event for women.
They want me to talk about being a woman (often combined with being an event for women).
The lineup was announced already… and it’s a bunch of (white) dudes.
There is a section in the email that essentially says “if not you please help us find another woman” (optional extra: I am in no way qualified to speak on that topic).
They actually say, “I need to find a woman speaker” (optional extra: “because other speakers or sponsors are complaining”).
OK the first step to addressing a problem is to admit you have one. But it’s best not to admit it in your speaker invitation, or to leave it so late that you announced the problem on your conference website.
I used to get offended by the request to come and be a token. But I’ve decided to reframe it.
First, I feel no obligation to say yes to these invitations. I will do it if it suits me, and I won’t if it doesn’t. If I have some goodwill towards the organiser, I may help them find someone else, or I may not.
Second, I use it as an opportunity to practise negotiation. Instead of saying “no”, I say “I only speak at events where my travel costs are covered, and depending on the event I also ask for a speaker fee. Let me know what you are open to and we will go from there.”
Third, if I do agree to do it, I remind myself that the audience has no idea I was invited because I’m a woman. As far as they are concerned, I’m qualified. So if I rock it, that will be the end of my tokenisation.
I’ve not been giving many token women talks lately, which I attribute mostly to the second strategy. It is frankly amazing how many organisers think I will be willing to come and be a token women at their event for the sake of “exposure”. It is appalling how many of them think that I will cover my own travel costs to do so. It is particularly jarring when these organisers are large, profitable, tech companies.
Women events, talks about being a women in tech, and thinly-disguised recruiting events, are particularly annoying. There’s plenty to be said on fixing the problem of poor representation of women in tech, but there is one thing I am relatively certain will not fix anything, and that is asking women to do extra unpaid work. So when I am asked to do extra, unpaid work, for the sake of “women in tech” or “the community” (is this the community that harasses and doxxes my friends?) I say no.
Finally, when asked to help find other women to help with things like this, or diversity consulting etc, I ask if they will be paid, and if not, I say that I will not help. If you did the same, together we might make a difference. After-all, the data shows women get less flack for asking for others, than we do asking for ourselves.
Of course, I have been guilty of many of these things too. But now, when I look back at my time in Corporate Feminism what I feel proud of are those times when I was able to get other women recognised or rewarded.
In the way of a lot of books that are a collection of blog posts, Women in IT (Amazon) is a bit disjointed and the writing varies. It’s also very promoting of the BCS which is not an organisation that I am involved with – I had to take a course at uni for accreditation which I found completely pointless and vowed never to join (never let it be said that I can’t hold a grudge).
That being said, it’s great to see my friends Hannah and Anne-Marie in a book! And they are both very inspiring. And as a Brit, it’s nice to see more highlighting of British women in tech – most media on this is pretty US-centric.
Other than that, my favourite was the entrepreneurship section, which included Dame Steve Shirley – with the hilarious story of how the equal opportunities act meant they had to start employing men!
It’s a free book, and a pretty short read. So if you’re interested and have time? May as well.
I’m quoted in this New York Times article, which is awesome. And one of the things I like about it, is that it calls out that the published research doesn’t actually back up some of the points Wadhwa has been making. So it seemed timely to write up some books that I think would be a better read for people who want to learn more about this topic.
Unlocking the Clubhouse [Amazon] [my review]: Thorough exploration of why women don’t study CS at university, and what are effective ways to improve that. Notice the publication date.
Whistling Vivaldi [Amazon] [my review]: The definitive work on the effects of stereotype threat, and how it effects women and people of colour.
Delusions of Gender [Amazon]: Breaks down the difference between genetics and socialisation, explains how little of the difference between men and women we can attribute to gender, hormones etc.
The Male Factor [Amazon] [my review]: One of the most depressing but helpful books I have ever read, analysis of a mass survey that helps us understand how women are perceived in the workplace.
Women Don’t Ask [Amazon]: On women and negotiation, explains why it’s not always viable to just “ask for more”.
Nearly a year ago I wrote The Day I Leave The Tech Industry. That’s not when I published it… I sat on it for months. I worried that I was revealing too much of myself, that I would put it out there and… crickets. That I would feel even more alone that I already did.
That’s not what happened. It still gets traffic but worse (or better? I don’t know) it comes up in conversation. A friend talks about her next career decision, says “I keep thinking about your post”. It gets referenced when someone leaves. Turns out, I captured something that many of us felt. What an amazing thing, as a writer. What a horrifying thing, as an industry.
I think I wrote it on this miserable day, one where I didn’t sleep, got to my desk incredibly early. No-one else was there yet, so when I started to cry no-one saw me. I IM’d with a friend, who convinced me I should just go home.
Some guy was being a jerk. In fact the interesting part of that story is that my manager at the time noticed, and did something about it, and a few days later I actually felt optimistic in a way that I had not considered possible. Of course, there is a vast gap between a colleague who actually respects you and one who is problematic enough that anything actually happens to them. I’ve written about the patterns, about the “nice” undermining, some of which I’ve experienced, others only witnessed.
The thing is, when you have reached that point where you want to leave, it never goes away completely. It’s always there, and you come back to it on days where you don’t see any reason to stay.
I know this because I had first reached that point at least 6 months earlier. I had decided it was time to leave and I had made a plan. I checked off the practical things on that list – I relocated so that I was no longer on a work permit, I took care to get a short lease on my apartment, I consolidated bank accounts from countries I had lived in, I filed my tax returns. I responded to recruiters, trying to get a sense of what was out there, and I worked at building up my profile externally.
Finally, six months ago, I asked myself what I was waiting for? Why was I waiting out my job like it was a prison sentence? Because this had been The Plan I had made a year earlier? I had already given up my apartment, decided what I was going to work on… my fear was no longer what if I left but what if I stayed? What if I got just comfortable enough, but never actually happy?
I printed out my resignation letter. I didn’t bother with headed notepaper. I had a 1:1 scheduled with my manager. Before it, there was a meeting with a recruiter I hadn’t managed to evade, trying to get me to reconsider doing Corporate Feminism (something I had quit around the time that I decided to…quit). She asked me, “if there any way to change your mind?”. I thought about the piece of paper in my pocket, and said “no.”
My manager was nice, he had always been nice. His manager was also nice. I was amazed how well I had concealed my plan to leave. They were generous with my exit contract and by the end of that week… I was gone.
Since then I have been travelling (often to speak), and writing, and working on Show and Hide. I have not found the words to write long-form about the why or the how. I have made short quips about how “I only get mansplained to on twitter now”, or commented on no longer having to answer to a white dude. But short quips cannot capture the complexity of what it has meant to walk away.
The biggest freedom has been the liberation from the cognitive dissonance from a world that told me I had Made It as an engineer when I felt so unhappy. From the cognitive dissonance of an organisation that seemed to believe the problem was entirely a problem of graduation rates whilst I and my friends experienced otherwise. I do not recall when I last cried. I no longer worry that I am going mad.
But, this is what I expected. The unexpected has been vastly more interesting and encouraging.
I am more confident as a developer. I actually feel more capable.
I have rediscovered a joy of programming and engineering and testing and creating that I had forgotten.
I get to embrace the breadth of my interests, Show and Hide combines my love of photography with my obsession with mobile.
It feels like most of what I learned in the last 2 years I learned in the last 6 months.
I feel like what I do know is more appreciated, as I get to share more of what I’m doing technically.
I learned how to have opinions again. I did not realise I had stopped bothering, I guess there was always some dude telling me what I should think, mostly on topics that did not matter enough to fight about. This was weird, and hard, but gradually… liberating.
Of course it is not all joy. Some days the amount of bitterness I feel makes me sad. The vindication of finding other women with similar stories. The jealousy of those who thrived in a good environment. The inadequacy when something causes me to ask myself “should I just be more resilient”?
Of course the fact that I didn’t need to be more resilient is a huge measure of financial privilege. And I still, rationally, believe that we shouldn’t have to be that resilient. Or brave. As my friend Julie observed, “It’s nice that you think they’re all brave, but they shouldn’t have to be. They’re not going to the frontlines of a war zone. They’re going to write code.”
What does it mean to say I’ve left? Because after all, I still write code. I still speak at tech conferences. In some way I seem to others more in tech, because I am more visible in tech. Now that I no-longer work at a somewhat insular place, fear a PR nightmare around something I said, I can be.
Perhaps the meaning lies in the boundary it creates for me. The way it allows me to emotionally disconnect from things that would otherwise be more upsetting. I don’t have to care, I left. Of course it’s bad, that’s why I left.
And yet I still comment on the tech industry. I was re-reading something that I wrote about calling “male allies” out and empathy and it occurred to me that perhaps the point I wanted to make was that pointing this stuff out is in fact a compliment – it’s taking the time to show someone that you believe that they can do better.
That I still comment on the tech industry is that kind of compliment. I believe you can do better. Some days I even think we will.
I think one of the biggest problems for diversity, and for accountability of diversity, is one that we never talk about. Statistical significance.
Imagine there is a company with 1000 engineers, of which 20% are women. The company declares their numbers proudly, saying they are beating the latest US graduation rate for women in Computer Science and therefore doing exceptionally well.
But let’s suppose only 600 of the engineers graduated from US universities, 9o of them women. So actually only 15% are at all comparable to the US graduation rate.
Also this doesn’t factor in the year of graduation, which with numbers declining for the last 20 years is a… well let’s call it an oversight.
Now there’s the non-US graduating population of 110 women and 290 men. 27.5%! Impressive. But start breaking down by country – 20 from Canada, 10 from Romania, 30 from India, 30 from China… and we end up with some very small numbers it is hard to extrapolate from.
Or say there are 100 people who do not have a degree at all, of whom 2 are women. We can be pretty sure here that men without degrees are vastly more likely to be hired, but what can we extrapolate from a sample size of 2? If we share that data, will be people be able to figure out who the 2 women are?
If this company has a typical percentage of black people for a tech company – about 2% – there will be 20.
International Data
If we wanted to actually compare the percentage to graduation rates we would consider (at a minimum):
Year of graduation.
Country (or State) of graduation.
This would be a pain to compute, but the biggest problem there is that most of this data cannot be found, and the data that is there is not comparable. Sometimes Computer Science is grouped with Engineering, sometimes in IT. Many countries do not share this information, or it is buried away inside PDFs making it challenging to find. Participation rates are also often not comparable, in the UK, the BCS is curator of this kind of information and they tend to use a broader “IT” designation.
Accountability
One thing that I would love to see, that we included on the bingo card, is managers being held accountable for diversity on their teams. For example: tracking when women leave managers, prevalence of reports of problems etc.
So managers have 10-20 reports, which means in our example they have 2-4 women reporting to them, if the women are equally distributed. This is a massive if, unless our hypothetical company was manufactured 5 minutes ago (OK, it was) out of entirely new grads (even in SV, no).
Women tend to cluster, because more women means a better environment, and because women often talk to and warn each other of places best avoided. So our bad, sexist managers in this company, they have at most 1-2 women reporting to them.
So when a woman leaves that manager, she might cite a bad environment but she has every reason not to. If they just track how often women leave relative to men and women leave 50% more often… how long will it take to get enough data to indicate there is a problem? It’s possible to add other women to the team to see… but this isn’t a science experiment. It’s someone’s career.
So maybe even the loss of one woman triggers the manager being sent to remedial diversity training. They’ll probably figure out why though. And then they will know who to blame.
The Plural of Anecdote
There’s this common critique of writing on this topic, which has also been levelled at me, and that is that “the plural of anecdote is not data”. Which is true.
But when the numbers are this low it is really challenging to get that data for women, and near impossible to get it for other minorities in tech.
So if you insist that change can’t happen until we have enough data, we’ll be waiting a long time.
But if the plural of anecdote cannot be data, can it be trend?
I see some alarming trends.
As individuals, we are all flawed. If we look at the example of women being called abrasive (something for which we do have some data), for an individual you can look for reasons to justify it (“she said …“, “she’s abrupt“, “she really upset him“). But the problem isn’t that one women gets called abrasive… it’s that almost all of us do. The macro, not the micro. The trend, not the anecdote.
Assumptions Made
There are some big assumptions made on diversity data. Just two:
The US graduation rate (in Computer Science) is a good benchmark.
Women will leave as soon as they are unhappy.
I think we have evidence to suggest that both these assumptions are deeply flawed… but maybe we don’t have the data to suggest what to put in place instead.
I don’t have good suggestions here. Other than: observe the trends.
A man left an obnoxious comment in a professional document. A more senior man noticed the comment and replied, “<sigh>”, signifying—I think—that he had seen it, and that he didn’t think it was funny. But he didn’t actually address the comment being there, and so it remained there for me to discover several months later.
I heard on the grapevine that the guy who had made the original comment got a talking-to but not the guy who sighed. It was fine, somehow, to be a bystander.
I disagree. I don’t think the tech industry has an asshole problem so much as a bystander problem. It is the main thing I ask of would-be allies. Don’t be a bystander. Don’t just sigh. Do.
I didn’t expect to be a part of this conversation on male allies in the tech industry. For the longest time, all I wanted from men in the tech industry was for them to leave me alone, stop being obnoxious, be nice rather than “nice”, and let me get stuff done.
I read Lean In and looked around at the women I knew, and I noticed how, for most of us, it “just so happened” that a guy was promoted over them. It “just so happened” that he was the tech/team lead, or the manager. It “just so happened” that we hadn’t been promoted before our projects were killed. After I talked to the few women I knew who seemed to be thriving, I thought about the situations where I had thrived, and I observed a common thread of having a sponsor. Having a sponsor meant having good stuff to work on. It also meant that the obnoxious people, seeing someone looking out for you, mostly left you alone.
There’s an emotional cost to being pushed around, overlooked, belittled, and called names. I got tired of paying it. It’s time consuming, those grey-area events that you talk over with your friends (“Is that fair?”, “He means well”). Meeting with HR to go through the process of deconstructing every interaction you ever had with someone is time-consuming, draining, triggering, and risky. On top of that, all your actions will be critiqued, and you’re liable to be fired. They are not on your side.
I used to think that it must be so nice to be a white dude in the tech industry. No one demands your thankless emotional labour for the “greater good” (a.k.a. the pipeline). You aren’t representing your entire sex, fearing that a guy you work with might later say, “Yeah I worked with a woman once, I’d prefer not to again”. You can ask stupid questions. You might get called an idiot or a jackass or an asshole—but not a “dumb bitch” or a “c***”.
My embracing of the need for male allies stems from—most depressingly—a realisation that the obnoxious ones are never going to just leave us alone. I suspect this is because mistreating women (and other minorities) in the tech industry is such a low-risk–high-reward activity. The risk is low because obnoxious white men appear to suffer almost no social consequences. And the reward is high because, as I’ve observed before, it tends to be incompetent men who play these games, and so there are significant benefits if they can undermine and eventually eliminate their competition.
So how should male allies help here? It’s other men who have the power to create social consequences. It starts with refusing to be a bystander by calling things out. Ultimately, if men stopped working with, hiring, and funding those men who behaved badly, the effects would be dramatic.
And I’m tired of pointing this shit out: when I say, “Hey, does it really just so happen that all your leadership is men?” I’m seen as asking for something that would benefit me—even if it wouldn’t. But when a man points that out, he’s seen as offering to give something up, even though he’s unlikely to be called upon to do so.
Which really is another discussion of social consequences.
So I came to this concept of male allies, and I saw the value of it. And then… what? Well, we made a bingo card to playfully illustrate some of the ways men can help.
I’ve also reflected on the price of failure for would-be allies. In an article that Karen Catlin and I wrote, we pointed out some of the shortcomings of Vivek Wadhwa, a would-be ally. And we were criticised for that. The criticism came in two forms: that he meant well and so we shouldn’t have critiqued him, and that he meant well and so we must be wrong. But the way I saw it, if he was really that good, our two paragraphs of mild critique wouldn’t harm him, and our remarks would eventually be shown to have been premature.
I don’t think the social consequences of being a bad male ally are particularly high, but I can understand the fear of those consequences.
I came to a point of empathy with the many would-be allies who don’t really know what being a good ally looks like, fearing that they might get it wrong or be accused of white-knighting. Because the truth was that I didn’t really know what a male ally looked like either. Eventually I realised that—like a lot of intangibles—good ally work is often invisible.
For example, any of these gestures could go unnoticed:
If that document’s obnoxious comment had been dealt with at the time.
Or if a guy who was researching managers was told, “That guy might be OK, since you’re a white dude, and it depends on whether you’re OK with that”, and he replied, “I’m not OK with that” and went elsewhere.
Or if a manager noticed that a guy consistently undermined a woman on his team, and he proactively addressed it.
The effect of these would probably look pretty small. Perhaps it would look like nothing had happened, because in fact almost nothing would have happened. Instead, something would have been prevented. It’s not as if someone had come in with a cape to save the day. And yet without those gestures, our spirits can be slowly crushed, not unlike the way a river slowly erodes its course. Self-confidence isn’t annihilated in one bad interaction—it’s worn down over time.
One thing I’ve noticed in myself and other women is that we often trap ourselves in bad situations because we look at the data and say, “Hey, is it really going to be any better elsewhere?”
But the data tells us what we can expect over the course of a career, not the duration of a year.
If we think of the data’s findings as not what can be expected but what can be can tolerated, it’s not unreasonable to believe that would-be allies refusing to be bystanders could reduce the (micro-)aggressions within the tech industry and drive up the average tenure of women*.
Or we could just sigh. And keep longing to be left alone so we could get stuff done.
* Most things about women I think generalise to other minorities, but I have not found any data of retention of other minorities. Also I recognise that leaving the tech industry can be a measure of financial privilege which in the US especially is stark along racial lines.
Massive thanks to Ari, Brett, Jan, Karen, Marc, Marco, Nat, Phil who proofed and sent feedback, especially to Ashley for her fantastic copy-editing (and educating me about grammar!), and the many others who offered!
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.
As an Angry Internet Feminist™, every incident I point out has multiple parts.
I notice and say something.
Tone policing, on whether I should have noticed it. After all, it’s not that big a deal.
Someone uses “he” when they should say “they”? Not that big a deal.
Mild objectification of women in something that should be professional? Not that big a deal.
No women speaking at a conference? Not that big a deal.
Because the thing is, each instance isolated is not really that big a deal. So one sentence wasn’t inclusive? So what. So one guy thought he was funny when he wasn’t? So what. So that one conference didn’t actually get the best speakers because they limited themselves to <50% of the population (usually no PoC either). So what?
Here’s the thing that people who are telling me what should and should not bother me don’t seem to realize. It’s that I do understand that if it was that one thing, it wouldn’t be a big deal. But it probably isn’t even the only thing I’ve encountered that week.
Because whatever your feelings about “they” as grammatically less correct, when I sit in a room full of men, and only men, and someone says “he” when they could say “they” I often look around the room, and I’m reminded that I don’t belong.
Really, I get enough reminders. At the events featuring pizza and beer. When men think I’m lost, or something – anything – other than an engineer. Could you just change that word? Would it really be that big a deal?
And yes, it just a word, it’s just a tasteless joke. But it’s in your marketing materials and presumably more than one person looked at those. So if that wasn’t a big deal… what will not be a big deal for something less externally facing?
That guy, urgh that guy, who “jokingly” called his female colleague a bitch. What do you think he’s going to write on her performance review? Maybe that she’s “abrasive”.
Because these individual items that each taken individually are “not a big deal” have piled up and now I sit precariously atop a pile of tiny rocks, wondering when it will all come crashing down.
These things do not happen in isolation. The culture that culminates in the death and rape threats (just the most recent example) is built on a culture where women do not get paid what they deserve, where they are objectified, marginalized, and, most of all, ignored.
Can we talk about humour for a moment? Because I’m tired of these things being “jokes”. This guy thought that rape threats were satire. I will now explain why they are not funny. Humour requires an element of the unexpected, and there is nothing unexpected about a woman with an opinion being threatened with rape. It is an alarmingly normal occurrence. Online harassment is an expected part of being an Angry Internet Feminist™, and it is hard to distinguish between the guy who calls me some obscene word and is “joking” and the one who has intent.
So we add two factor authentication (did you know, Twitter has it?), and install security software on our websites. I have only experienced the very mildest levels of harassment, but make no doubt, if I was truly under threat, I have a plan for where I would go, and enough air miles and money to get me there. Call it paranoia, if you want. I call it being prepared.
There is no humour there. There is just yet another woman who is paying the price, in harassment, for having an opinion. For calling stuff out, when she saw it.
The data says that 40% women drop out of tech careers in the first 10 years. I didn’t know many other women on my university course, but of those I do, I am the only one still building systems and writing code. One is an environmental economist. Another a BA. I hear one became an artist, cool.
And I’m sure each of them went towards something compelling, to them. I’m sure they each made the decision that worked for them. I hope they have interesting careers and fulfilled lives.
But they didn’t stay.
Against the evidence, my generation of women techies, we thought we were different. We thought things were better, because sexual harassment and even assault was no longer a normal part of the working day (although don’t be mistaken – it happens). We thought things would be different, and we just needed to work hard and be awesome. We were wrong.
I’m reaching this point in my career where I’m starting to see my peers drop out. Make their backup plans. I wrote this article about knowing someday I would leave tech, and so many women said “this is how I feel!” and a couple of men said “wow it’s really bad that women feel this way, maybe we should do something”.
Because I hear variations on the same story, again, and again, and again.
It is hard to fix structural equality. And like many hard things the first step is admitting there is a problem. Could you just say “they” instead of “he”? Pay an expert to review your marketing materials? Could you just do the work to get a more balanced line-up at your conference? Stop making “satirical” rape threats? Could you stop telling me what should, or should not bother me? Please?
I’ll tell you what I think is a big deal. It’s when I watch a woman who I know to be brilliant, slowly lose her joy of making. It’s when I watch her give up caring about her career, and just go through the motions, because frankly showing up every day is hard enough. It’s when I see her leave.
Last week after a series of twitter rants, I wrote up what concerned me about the “Male Allies” panel at GHC (Grace Hopper Conference) this year. A surprising number of people read and shared it, and whilst (of course) some people disagreed, or thought that ABI (Anita Borg Institute) does so much good it’s not helpful to criticise them, it was in general well received.
Last night (Wednesday, the first day of the conference) was the panel. Of course, I went. Of course, I livetweeted it. Others joined in on the hashtag and there was a game of bingo (the person who shouted bingo, if you find me, I’d like to buy you a beverage) and you can find the storify here: I captured as much as I could but I’m sure I have missed some things.
To be clear, I did not create the bingo card. One of my friends did, and I’m so proud of her for being so brilliant, and so hilarious. And I wish I had had time to play but I was frantically typing throughout!
The Good
The best thing, is that I do believe that ABI listened. Barb Gee opened mentioning my blogpost, and affirming her commitment to tackle what I had characterised as the hard problems, saying she wasn’t in the business of window dressing.
Regardless of what these men came out with, and yes a lot of it was unimpressive, I think it’s good that they showed up. I hope that aside from this time on stage, they are spending the rest of the conference listening to the many fantastic women who are here in Phoenix this week.
Another good and helpful thing to come out of it, was bits of data. Intuit haven’t revealed their diversity numbers yet (encourage them to do that!) but GoDaddy did in advance, albeit with an extremely unfortunate title. Intuit did reveal the attrition rate of their female employees (8%) and we discovered the number of men at GHC this year, 483.
The Expected Bad
Pipeline. Pipeline. Pipeline. This is an ongoing annoyance for me, that I rant about regularly. When men talk about why there are so few women, they always talk about the pipeline to the point of completely ignoring the high attrition rate that comes from women leaving the industry. That attrition rate has come to feel far more relevant to me. The pipeline is convenient because it can be addressed by throwing money at it, and because it doesn’t require the level of introspection that examining behaviour within your organisation or doing the hard work that culture change requires. Of course the pipeline also asks that women work on recruiting girls into this toxic environment.
Lean In. Honestly I was a little shocked at how up front this was, the open admission that you just need to work harder and be much better than your peers to survive. Of course they neglected to mention that this is whilst dealing with the overhead of continual micro-aggressions (they’re just being nice!), the odd headline-incident, and adding in the time requirements for all that Corporate Feminism (pipeline!) too.
Cookies for trying. The Facebook guy did admit they weren’t exactly winning at this, but one point made in the GoDaddy article about their numbers was that 18% was one percent better. There are so many things to object to here. Firstly, is that 1% statistically significant? Can we get a p-value? Secondly, it’s not clear that the numbers released are comparable, as the definition of “technical woman” varies (some companies claim Eng/PM/UX, some are broader) and operating in different countries will have significant effects on your numbers (India and China do better, Australia and the UK seem to do worse, for example). Also claiming to reflect graduation rates when graduation rates have been declining for decades and a company is not entirely made up of new grads feels intellectually dishonest.
The Unexpected Bad
My conspirators were asked not to hand out bingo cards. Whilst as a speaker myself and someone who has been harassed as a result, I sympathise with the fear of heckling. But, I think they could have embraced it more. The bingo card was created because women thought they had a good idea of what these men would say, and if these men had come out with genuinely new and insightful things and no-one got Bingo, no-one would have been happier than us.
Unconscious Bias Training. Much was made of this, and now a version of it is being run at Facebook. Personally, I have read much of the original literature on this and when I interview I put in significant time to de-gender feedback (and even being well read on this topic, I often find things). But running it as a course, scares me. Firstly, what is the quality of the facilitators running it? What level of expertise do they have? Secondly, when you create an environment where you ask people to confront the thoughts that they don’t articulate, some of them likely articulate some of those thoughts – how is this addressed, and how do the women in the room feel when that happens? Thirdly, a study suggested that anti bullying education helped bullies be more effective, does that apply here? Without data, it will be hard to say.
I know a woman. There’s a joke that men care more when they have daughters, and it’s good for pay equality at companies when a CEO has a daughter. This came up repeatedly (not just daughters, but also wives and moms and sisters), and it’s pretty depressing. There are a lot of single men, and men without female relatives in the tech industry, and that requirement is not encouraging for hope that they will start to care about their fellow human beings.
Framing as rejection of men. There was a theme in some of the messaging around this panel that we needed to involve men in the conversation, like that was a point that needed answered. I don’t know any women that dispute this. It’s more a question of which men, where, and how. I think it’s good that these men had a conversation on a stage, but did it have any effect in reaching other, less enlightened men? Maybe, there is a better stage.
#MoreThanWords
TW: Mention of Sexual Assault.
ABI tried to engage with the community on Twitter last week, with the hashtag “#MoreThanWords”. When I think about men in tech using more than words, I think about sexual assault. Which is possibly because I’m jaded, or a cynic, or because I am one of many woman in tech who was sexually assaulted by a tech dudebro.
But I get their point. And I agree, that talking is insufficient, and real allies do.
Earlier this year (before I left), I wrote an internal rant on quitting what I termed “Corporate Feminism”, which was popular to the point where some women there still recognise me from it. Essentially because 1) pipeline (focus on recruitment over retention), 2) bad career move, 3) tiring. And one of the things that Alan, who was on the panel, does, is he listens to internal rants and he read it, posted a thoughtful response, and did something.
So I ran into him ahead of the panel and warned him of the livetweeting, and he mentioned that post and that people were taking advantage of what he had done, and continues to do (clearly, I should have quit Corporate Feminism years ago).
The point of this story is, I wasn’t particularly impressed by what these men said, and the numbers at the companies they represent are abysmal, so let’s not let them pat themselves on the back yet. But what really matters is what they go back to their organisations, and do.
The Concerned Feminists are watching.
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