Tag: women
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Sharing the Data: How Technical Women Navigate Their Career
In May, Automattic’s engineering hiring team launched a user research study to better understand how our approach to tech hiring resonates with women and non-binary folks who may experience similar gender discrimination in the workplace and are experienced developers. We asked participants questions about how they saw their careers and next opportunities, as well as specifically asking…
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Addressing Hiring Gaps Through User Research
The hiring hot take is a regular feature of every tech conversation. Newsletters. Conferences. Blogs. Twitter. We talk about hiring a lot, because the market is competitive, and hiring well makes a big difference. Hiring effectively goes well beyond the “quality” of people you hire – it sets them up for an experience inline with…
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Lists of Women Don’t Change Anything
I have mixed feelings about lists of women. Well I say mixed: my feelings on lists are, broadly, negative. I understand the appeal — either people genuinely believe that people not being aware of women is a problem. Or they think that with a list this can really, finally, be refuted. It seems unlikely that either of…
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#NotAllMen Like Playboy
So I hear that a conference gave away Playboy magazine as part of the event swag. The internet expressed their outrage, and there was an apology. I haven’t read it. I hear it wasn’t stupid, but… meh. Here’s the thing. There are some classes of problem in conference inclusivity. Someone at our event behaved inappropriately.…
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Ambition, Failure, and my Favourite Podcast
I was listening to the last episode of season 1 of my friend Diana’s podcast “Should We”, and the title of this one is called “Should We Actually Try?” I love Should We because I love Diana, and because there’s something about listening to a podcast where two friends who know each other well are…
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On Saying No
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.…
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Thankless Emotional Labour as Management Training
My first month as a manager I barely had time to think about how I didn’t really know what I was doing, because there was so much that clearly needed to be done. So I accepted that stuff was not writing code, and got on with it. Month two opened, and I kept getting on…
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A Story
When I worked at The Conglomerate, I used to interview mostly women. Not slightly more. We’re talking a 2:1 or even 3:1 ratio. Why? Well The Conglomerate was (probably still is) a Pipeline Organization. They believed that the problem with diversity was that they just needed to Hire More Women. And so they would want…
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Maybe… You Should Apologise
I ran a poll on Twitter this week looking for answers to a question I was curious about. I find the results interesting. On the one hand it encourages me how many people have apologised and it went well. On the other, the number of people who say “no reason to” makes me despondent. The…