Accidentally in Code

Tag: women in tech

  • Friends, Allies

    Friends, Allies

    Credit Deviant Art / LashelleValentine
    Credit Deviant Art / LashelleValentine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    I have a slightly different one.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Things Being A Woman In Tech Is Like: Flying Economy

    Things Being A Woman In Tech Is Like: Flying Economy

    Wine Glasses at the Vines of Mendoza
    Credit: David Wilbanks / http://www.fotopedia.com/users/8pcck49cd9o7o

    Tell me that I am not alone, in sometimes wanting to run away to an unspecified location, thereafter to never encounter a nerdy boy again.

    It is at times deeply exhausting to live in a world where the other inhabitants think it’s a meritocracy but you know, and studies show, it isn’t.

    It’s like flying economy whilst your friends fly exec, except, somehow, and you’re not completely sure how this is the case, a good number of them are convinced you were flying exec too. And so they complain about the wine list, say the food wasn’t as good as last time, but don’t realize that whilst they got a good night’s sleep in their fully reclining seat, you’re not sure you slept at all, between the screaming child across the aisle and the child behind you who kept kicking your seat. Let’s not get into the trouble you had at security, but you’re trying to be grateful, because you did, after all, reach your destination without being strip-searched, you never drink alcohol on planes anyway, and it’s not such a big deal to remember to buy some food to take on board…

    But, two days later, you still don’t have your luggage.

  • My Career, Her Job

    UPDATE: I expressed myself very badly in this post. As a result, I hurt and offended some good people, and some of them were quick to let me know. I’m sorry. I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed by the response, but as soon as I saw the comments I knew I’d made a mistake. I appreciate people taking the time to call me on it.

    I never meant to disparage marketing careers, it was a mistake to use the phrase “women near tech,” and I didn’t define “job” and “career” well enough for what I was trying to say.

    I wanted to talk about tech careers in terms of how much mobility one has. How big is the cage, and how tightly is it locked? Does a marketing person at a software company have different options from a software engineer at the same company? Is it different if they work at an energy company, or when they become sufficiently senior? There are a lot of corner cases where this breaks down, and those places are (to my mind) the most fascinating. I’d been thinking about this idea for a while, of how different options make for a different experience, and jotted down some incomplete thoughts.

    I’m sorry. I did not mean to offend or disparage anyone. I need to take more care to work through these kind of thoughts and get some input from other people before I hit “Post!” I hope people will see that this was a failure of wording and not of intention.

    Every so often there’s some article/panel/thing on women in tech that drives me nuts, because I look at who is on it and I think, these are not women in tech, these are women near tech. This is my life. Don’t tell me what you think it’s like! On reflection, the distinction between women in tech, and women near tech to me is this.

    If she gets tired of being surrounded by the… terrible shoes, poor dress sense, low standards of personal hygiene, arrogance, patronization, or just plain feeling like the odd one out, does it require a change of job, or a change of career?

    (I would like to say here, that aside from how smart they are, the vast majority of my colleagues are extremely normal.)

    So Marketing at a tech company? Job. Software Engineer? Career. HR pro? Job. Technical program manager? Career.

    This means if a woman spends enough time in tech they essentially become a woman in tech, even if that’s not their background. Sales – still job, but progress to be CEO of a tech company and that would look more like a career change.

    Still a theory-in-progress, because I don’t want to be exclusionary, but I need some way to explain why when I went to a “women in tech” event where I only met marketing people working for tech companies, I left feeling very “not for me, probably won’t go along to one of these again”. I’ve no doubt that women near tech face their own set of challenges, and that women in and near tech have many things in common, but it’s not the same, and it’s helpful for me to have an idea of what differentiates.

  • A Crash Course in Leadership

    Leadership
    Credit: flickr / Dunechaser

    Disclaimer: don’t take any advice from me. I’m known for giving terrible advice, particularly when it comes to relationships. Also, don’t let me set you up. It invariably ends in disaster.

    WISE has enough money to last through January, I think. Then we’ll have to work something out, or stop.

    I’m not down with stopping, I’ll work something out. Watch me.

    Here’s my advice: no matter how good the cause, don’t be the driving force in starting (or restarting) a student organization. Particularly one with no stable source of funding. In fact, don’t ever be President of a student organization. Get involved, sure, but pick a clearly defined role and do it well enough that no-one will put anything else on you, but no so well that you give the impression of not having enough to do.

    The positive: I get to work with a great group of people, sometimes we get to put on events (like last week) that are truly useful and thought-provoking, and inspire debate. I get to feel like I’m involved in something that will genuinely make a difference, even if a small one, to some of the girls and women at the University.

    However being President involves a lot of rubbish things too. It involves the stuff that it says in our constitution, but also taking care of or finding people to take care of the stuff that other people aren’t doing or won’t do. I’ve worked out who I can rely on – and the people who you thought would, don’t always make the cut. Worse is, last week, I got two complaints and another person requesting to be removed from our mailing list, in a way that suggested she thought we’d scraped it off the internet (we don’t do that, obviously, if we have her email address it’s because she gave it to us). The complaints were just… I want to reply saying –

    WE KNOW AND WOULD LIKE TO IMPROVE THIS! But I have to tell you something – we have a handful of people and very little resources. We are doing the best we can. As a result of this, my policy is not to listen to complaints from people who don’t offer to help. Sorry.

    Then at the weekend I had to break to one of our execs that the application she’d spent so much time on, that we’d submitted ages ago and waited months to hear about? Yeah they totally ignored what we’d discussed prior to submitting it and that their “acceptance” of it was completely meaningless. Good times.

    You can probably tell, I’m frustrated. All the more so after reading about the lack of women in tech. Oh there’s a report? Super helpful! I’m so pleased!

    OK – sarcasm over. Do we need reports? Don’t they just say things that on some level most of us realize – we need action, and role models, and support networks, and inspiration… all the things that WISE is trying to do. Only we have no money, so that may stop after January. And everyone knows that my job is rubbish, so no-one wants to do it – so what about when I graduate? And I can’t do convert to a PhD like my supervisor and I wanted me to because I pay international tuition, and the university bureaucracy is anyway driving me so insane that I don’t think I want to anymore.

    However this post is entitled A Crash Course In Leadership. So here’s what I’m learning:

    • How to organize and motivate people – need to improve on this.
    • How to deliver bad news – but sometimes it’s best to keep it to yourself.
    • The importance of conviction –I am literally out a couple of hundred  dollars until our finances are sorted out. Because I believe in what we’re doing, even if I’m not always sure we’ll succeed.
    • The importance of team work – if it wasn’t for the others, I would have given up by now.
    • How to delegate, and how important it is that you do.

    Will this be helpful later on in my life? Of course. But right now I’m worried I’m failing. Which means I fail the team, which is too awful to think about. We are all doing the best we can, but sometimes that is not enough. Especially when the people who you need to support you, don’t buy in. Another important lesson in leadership, I think: you don’t lead in a vacuum.