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 about their reactions to our job postings. It’s easy to find advice on this topic, but the volume is overwhelming and the information is often conflicting. We wanted to cut through the vast quantity of Think Pieces On The Internet to make some changes based on actual data. Our goal, unsurprisingly, is to identify ways to increase gender representation on Automattic’s engineering teams.
This was a fascinating process, and we are truly grateful to the 71 people who responded to our request for feedback. Given that we had this level of interest within just five days speaks to the relevance of the topic, as attracting contributors to a research project can often be far more of a challenge. While much of what we learned (discussed below) lines up with research you can find online, listening to people share their individual stories was profoundly impactful on our interviewers. It also revealed further insights that we are eager to apply. Automattic’s hiring team has been able to make some immediate changes, but have much more to think about, and expect this to influence our ongoing efforts.
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 their expectations, and contributes to – or is detrimental to – your company brand.
Within that, we talk about diversity in hiring. Companies set goals, often publicly, commit to targets that are way in excess of their current demographics, without similar transparency on how they approach inclusion. Meanwhile, under-indexed people receive a volume of inbound interest, often for roles completely different to, or way less senior than the ones they have.
Message from a recruiter I received last week. Note – my LinkedIn profile is set to Colombia – 4,500KM away from this event.
With the volume of information out there, it’s hard to pick through what’s good and what’s not, what’s correlation and what’s cause. Much of the information is situational – what works in one context may not work in another – and conflicting.
Meanwhile, hiring processes have an information imbalance that makes learning from them hard. You know how the people you hired performed – after a long lag time – you don’t know how the people you didn’t hire would have done. You know how some of the people who applied found you, but you don’t know anything about the people who looked at your job posting and decided “nope”, or the ones who never found you at all.
In the product development process, we have a process for learning about the people we are trying to reach. User research. It’s something we do a lot of at Automattic, as we aim to understand the people we hope to serve with our products. It informs our roadmaps and prioritization, the way we present things, and how we talk about them.
To that end, as we reviewed our hiring process, we realized that the demographics of people we attract to apply are not inline with the demographics of the people we hope to hire. Whilst we have implemented a strong focus on metrics, and made certain adjustments, we’ve not seen the improvements we want. If this was a product, we would go to our users and ask them – so why not do the same here?
To that end, we are kicking off a user research project, to better understand the ways that people think about the process of finding a new job. Like all our user research, it’s compensated. Like everything we do, we share it openly – so whilst we will use the results to inform our process, we will also be sharing a public write up of the things we learned.
For our initial research, we’re looking for women and non-binary people (trans/cis/gnc) who may experience similar gender discrimination in the workplace, who have multiple years of experience in a software development role. If you’re open to participating, please fill in some information in our pre-screening form.
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 these two things are actually the problem. It really should not be news to people (men) — in 2017 — that women make up fully 50% of the population. And if that’s not news, then does a list of women change anything? Can they just continue to apply the same filters like “oh she’s not qualified”, “I’ve never heard of her”. Maybe they find someone who is “qualified” (which usually means “massively overqualified”) who they can offer an unflattering last minute invitation to, and then complain when she turns it down?
The phrasing of “qualified” is deliberate, because it is the phrasing that allows us to go from “fully 50% of the population” to “zero” and put the blame squarely on the people who apparently did not show up, did not do the work, did not “qualify”.
Except this isn’t the Boston Marathon, or some kind of standardized test: it’s a subjective and largely undocumented process. The word “qualified” is just a vague descriptor for a bias vector.
Regularly, I see some kind of list of women. Sometimes my name is on it, but mostly it is not. The only time being on a list had any kind of effect on my life was when it was a list of 👾🐊 harassment targets. Note: not a good one. It inspired a level of paranoia over who can know where I’m going that I still live with today.
But I understand — especially with more comprehensive lists — that being left off feels like being left out. That it can seem like — yet another — way for our achievements to be erased. Yet another way to remind us that we don’t, in fact, belong.
We think, in tech, that attention is valuable. I think the pervasiveness of the ad-based business model has corrupted our thinking here. Attention is not an inherently valuable metric — it’s only valuable when people act on it.
If you click an ad, it has value. If you don’t, it doesn’t. There is some nebulous concept called “brand awareness” that tries to capture attention as a metric. Overall you can calculate another metric called “return on ad spend”. Marketing is a numbers game, now.
But when it comes to diversity, we don’t have those metrics. We start to buy the idea that attention is valuable, when mostly it is not. Only some attention has a little value.
“Diversity attention” is at best worthless and at worst harmful. The only valuable attention is to work and/or impact. It’s easy to conflate the two — when I write about D&I it gets some attention, and that attention has (some) value. That value is a little higher than attention I might get for being “diverse” (better: “under-indexed”). The attention that has made a difference to me, though, has been the attention that focused on my work. Sometimes I worry that the work I have done on D&I has obscured that. I have become “Cate, woman in tech”, to the exclusion of everything else.
If I’m on some list by virtue of being a woman in a field with few women, and a few people have heard of me, it doesn’t mean anything. And if you aren’t, it doesn’t mean anything about you, either. I’m sure what you do is valuable, I’m sure you have interesting things to say. The amount of attention we receive does not define us — what is more important is who we are and what we do.
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. We dealt with it.
Someone at our event behaved inappropriately. We didn’t deal with it.
We failed to make $group welcome.
We failed to remember that $group exist.
Playboy magazine – that’s the last one. That’s a “gift” that most (not all) straight dudes would not give their wives or girlfriends. Let alone someone else’s wife or girlfriend. (Some day, maybe, most – not all – men might stop seeing women only as chattel. They might recognise that not all men appreciate that kind of gift, either).
Maybe Playboy is an appropriate gift for a frat party. Or a stag weekend. I wouldn’t know. Maybe your gay friend will pretend he’s fine with it, and the strip club. Maybe you don’t have a gay friend.
Is your conference a thinly disguised frat party? Do you miss the frat house so much that you had to recreate it, but disguised as a professional (and tax deductible event)?
Did you think your target audience and the audience of men who like to objectify women were one and the same. I guess the internet woke you up.
Forgive me – but if that is news to you in 2016, I’m not really interested in reading your apology. Because I expect it’s about the incident, and really, what I want to know is how you made it to 2016, living in the world, and this could in fact be news. I want to understand how you managed to be so obtuse. Have you met any women? There are things that I would like to be able to ignore. Maybe I could learn something.
I saw something really cool the other day. I saw a woman, on stage, in front of well over a thousand people, talk about the huge open source release she led, and the awesome features it contained. It was amazing. She was one of many women on stage at that event. There were enough women attendees that there was a queue in the bathroom.
I think sometimes we have been fighting so hard for things like codes of conduct that we forget that such things are not the goal – they are just a means to an end. The code of conduct is not the goal. The “woke” apology is not the goal. The goal is diversity, on stage, and off, of people who are included and allowed to thrive.
So, I’m not reading that apology. I have better things to do with my time.
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 keeping it real (this was something that I was inspired by in the podcast Camille and I recorded). This episode is my favorite because it’s the realest yet – it’s about going for something you’re not sure that you can do, and about the fear of failure when failure is a very real possibility.
This is because they are running a Kickstarter for Season 2. I love the podcast as it is, but I’ve now backed it twice (somehow I have 2 Kickstarter accounts? Who knew?) because I want to support them, and because if I love this low-fi iPhone-in-a-cup version how much more would I love a professionally produced version?
But then at a meta-level, I want to support women who set an ambitious goal. I just started getting leadership coaching and the first thing we did was we went through this thing called “Discovery” where I was brutally honest about some things that hold me back. At some point I wrote about how there are opportunities I am afraid to take because I am too afraid to fail at them. Like Diana and Lisa I am all about the incremental progress, the gradual growing of something. This episode was so real to me because it captured the same approach I take… and the limitations of that.
I think for women the cost of failure is often really high – we avoid it for good reason. And one of the ways we pathologize the ambition of women is to take normal fear of failure, and the self-awareness of things we know we aren’t good at, and label it imposter syndrome. But actually if you are going to be ambitious, it’s normal that failure is a possibility. To take it seriously, consider what would be the outcome, and do it anyway… well it’s inspiring to me to listen to two women doing that, and to hear them being so honest about their fears of failure, and the ambition that they admit to in private, if not in public. I really hope they succeed – but if not, well, I’ll keep listening anyway.
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.
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.
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 with things, and I saw activities from Month 1 starting to pay off. I paused and asked myself: “why does it seem like I know what I’m doing?” and the answer I had for myself was… “Oh. Management is Thankless Emotional Labour”.
Except… my job isn’t thankless anymore. What I do is valued. It’s also strategic – in terms of how we execute as a team, and what we build. Writing – and doing – “Emotional Labour” without the thankless prefix is something I need to adjust to.
So, three ways in which management is like “thankless emotional labour”: 1) work for the collective, 2) being an emotional thermometer, 3) technical work becomes mentoring and grunt work.
1. Work for the Collective
Work for the collective is stuff that benefits the “team” not the individual. It’s one of those things that women tend to be dinged for not doing, rather than appreciated when they do [see: Women Don’t Ask – Amazon].
Hiring is a good example. In the last 3 months I’ve worked on designing a hiring process, done countless phone screens, coached engineers on interviewing (we open sourced our prep guide!) etc. I actively worked on finding underrepresented people in tech, including offering anyone underrepresented in tech working on mobile a call about anything they wanted in February (my boss offered his time too, which was super kind). I met some great people this way and hope I was able to be helpful.
The result: one of the engineers on my team observed that hiring a new engineer had seemed painless. As I looked at him, remembering the day I did six interviews in one day, he followed up with “or maybe you just made it seem that way.”
I did. Because that’s my job, now.
2. Emotional Thermometer
Many women I know spend a lot of time thinking about and worrying about the emotions of the men around them. We’re conditioned to do it, men have come to expect it, and at darker moments it’s a way that we manage risk. It’s best captured by that quote from Margaret Atwood, “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”
At The Conglomerate, we did this personality test involving colors, and you have a primary and a secondary. Green: over-think (and engineer) things. Yellow: organize things. Orange: ship things. Blue: emote.
I like to describe blue as “baseline human decency” but another good description is “emotional thermometer”. It’s about only being as happy as the people around you are.
Most people at The Conglomerate are green or orange. I’m yellow with orange undertones. Which is fine, I know I value an organized way of getting things done. What I didn’t know was how weird that was. As a result, what I got most out of this exercise was a new understanding of how people judge or assume other people’s colors. People seemed to see organization, process, as a distraction rather than an enabler. When I listened to how people saw blue I was reminded of a weird and conversation I’d had with a manager I’d had, that had made me feel deeply uncomfortable. And I realised, he thought I was blue.
One of my friends observed that it’s probably pretty common for women to be assumed to be blue. To be assumed that their first priority is everyone else’s feelings rather than what they personally value. We often force women to do an impression of that, with a feedback loop where the consequences of not doing that are unpredictable but potentially extreme.
But as a manager, being tuned into the emotional temperature of your team is a strength. If you discover someone’s unhappy because you noticed something was up, and gave them space to tell you, you have better, more immediate information than if you wait for the point where they seek you out.
As much as I deeply, deeply resent “prove it again” on technical matters I’m willing to prove to my team week in week out that I’m worth trusting. It seems to me that a manager is only as good as their worst screw up. Paying attention to how they feel doesn’t seem like a bad place to start.
3. Technical Work Becomes Mentoring and Grunt work.
As things have calmed down, I have been able to carve out some time to do some technical work. This falls into the categories of mentoring, and grunt work.
Mentoring: helping someone else do their technical work. Helping understand and implement a pattern we’re adopting to improve our testing, or giving feedback in code review. The easiest way for one of my team to make my day is to ask me a technical question. Even if it’s something like “how do I fix this test?”
Grunt work: something needs to be done, but not immediately, and it’s not very interesting. Infrastructure stuff, clean up, (small) refactorings.
Both of these things are often unappreciated when done by engineers, especially women, because of the way work done by women is always devalued. Mentoring because of the same reasons as work for the collective, grunt work because it’s “not important” or “lacks impact”.
Actually, the most useful thing that I’ve built when I’ve spent time on technical stuff is not lines of code – it’s understanding of the processes followed on the team.
Thankless Emotional Labour Bootcamp
You can learn how to run a functional 1:1. You can learn how to perform empathy. You can learn how to demonstrate listening. But actually tuning into all these things is far less easy to define. Luckily for me (and my team), I spent most of my time in industry being forced to.
Before I had the realisation that management was emotional labour, after a day of doing it, I would message one of my friends and say “this is what I did today, how do I know if it’s enough?” I felt I had not created anything of value. As I approach the end of Month 3, I don’t feel like that any more. Partly because I have seen stuff start to pay off, but also because I have accepted that is what the job is.
This realisation, by the way, also explained why women move / get pushed into management. It was one of those things that I intellectually knew, but now… feel like I understand.
But the question I leave you with – if this stuff is valuable when done by managers, why isn’t it valuable when done by engineers?
I think it is valuable, but I also think that more of this stuff falls on engineers when managers aren’t doing it themselves. As a manager what you do, and what you reward, communicates what you value. So if you don’t do this stuff, or you do it badly, it’s very clear to your team that this is not valued, so when others do it, even when they benefit from it, they are unlikely to value it either.
Thanks so much to my friend Lara for listening when I felt like I had achieved nothing, and for reviewing and giving feedback on this post.
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 to show these women that other women worked there, and voila: put a woman on every interview slate. This could be a challenge if, for example, there were very few women in an office, and might get even harder if, say, a number of them were harassed to the point where they took stress leave.
So I did a lot of interviews. I could have said “no” sometimes, done a few less. But firstly saying no would have me characterised as “unhelpful”, or maybe “not a team player” (and I think the Team I was supposed to be on here was Team Female). Secondly, interviewing is stressful, and scary, and if me showing up and doing one sometimes made it a better experience for other women – because they saw someone else like them – it was something I would have a hard time living with myself not doing.
This was the kind of thing that I characterise as “Thankless Emotional Labour” – if you don’t do it, you’re judged. But if you do… well the only “reward” you might get is more of it.
Some standout experiences:
It’s Friday and I am frantically trying to get everything I need to do for the week, done. But I’m pressured and obligated into dropping everything and doing an interview in the middle of the afternoon, because otherwise the candidate will not encounter another woman that day.
I am the last interviewer on the slate. I arrive and the candidate has not been prepared for what to expect, at all. She’s had a terrible experience, is exhausted and has given up, I try and make her feel better and leave feeling wrung out myself, worrying about how traumatized she was by the experience.
I generally believed that the odds were stacked against women in that system, but I had no power over anything other than the 45 minutes I spent with them and how I wrote my feedback after. So I worked at building a rapport with people, and tried to apply everything I knew about bias to writing up my feedback.
This was a lot of work, but it was work I did because it was The Right Thing To Do. And something that was shocking to me once I left The Conglomerate – it was work that other people, other companies, appreciated.
A lot has changed since then, and now I’m a hiring manager. I have control and influence over way more than the 45 minutes to an hour I spend with people. Two big things:
It’s part of my job to set expectations with my team on how to interview well, and to value it.
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 question was designed to filter out men who are unaware, and I think some people used that to mean “would be self indulgent to apologise to someone who doesn’t want to speak to me”, and of course Twitter polls are not an exact science.
I started to think about this question because of two recent conversations.
The first one. Someone was telling me about how he’s worked in $Dude1’s organization, and $Dude1 was great on diversity so he felt confident it was a good environment. And like, my information on $Dude1 is ~1 year out of date but includes 1) massively inappropriate behaviour (not sexual, but horrifying) to a woman I know, 2) multiple accounts of harassment in his org, and 3) a known broken stair.
Now it’s possible that in the time that passed $Dude1 has addressed his own behaviour, fired the missing stair, and developed better strategies for harassment and now runs a healthier organization. But I don’t think that people who suffered in the process are obliged to forgive him, or give him the benefit of the doubt.
The second one. Someone asked me for backchannel on $Dude2. I generally like $Dude2, and am reasonably positive about him, however I feel like he learned some lessons at the expense of me and another woman, and that always tempers my comments on him.
I’m at peace with it and that allows me to be friendly with him, but the fact that we’ve not had an open conversation about it makes it hard for me to be confident he’d do better today than he did then.
When and How
To be clear, I’m not advocating that men apologise to people who clearly want nothing to do with them. That’s self indulgent.
I’m not suggesting general “I realise I am part of the problem” apologies unless you can answer “how, specifically?”
But if there’s someone who you still have a relationship with, an apology about a concrete thing that you would do differently now… that seems like something that has the potential to be a good thing.
Macro Problems
One thing (of many) I find very jarring about the discourse on “diversity”, is how it’s framed as “things used to be AWESOME, but now they are AWESOMER”. As someone who was harassed, who has many friends who were mistreated in a variety of ways (including N > 1 stories of sexual assault), who has heard horrifying stories about basically every major tech company…
… the only way I have to describe it is that it’s like being socially gas lit.
If there are <20% women and ~2-3% PoC there’s a reason for that. And if companies have finally learned, if things are finally better – I’m skeptical of this, but setting that aside – people were financially, emotionally, even physically harmed in the process of learning those lessons and addressing that environment.
IANAL but I understand companies can’t admit this because legal liability. Which perhaps makes it all the more important that individuals do.
Thanks Rachael for reviewing a draft and providing helpful comments.
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