#glassbreakers

I am one of these women (minus the startup experience) and although working in the industry while female is difficult it's important to recognize that I'm sitting on the easy side of the privilege spectrum. The women on the Glassbreakers panel on mobile development were also all white women working at startups or large tech companies with less than ten years industry experience. If we want to be taken seriously when we talk about the necessity of diversity in technology we need to practice what we preach. We need to represent software engineers of color, women over the age of thirty, trans* women, and women that don’t fall in any of these boxes as necessary and indispensable to our endeavors. How are we supposed to learn from their struggles and their triumphs when we don't ask them to be on panels, speak at conferences or join companies? When we push wealthy white women to the top of the industry and call it success we make gender discrimination in tech worse. The issue can be safely ignored by those who can now say: "Look, she made it, so you can too!"

2. We Celebrate Fear Instead Of Our Accomplishments

Fear dominates a lot of conversations about women in technology. We confess how afraid we were to start programming, how hard we still find it, how much you will struggle, how much you will need other people's help, and how hostile the industry is. It's fine, important even, to be afraid and to acknowledge that fear. But fear without action, and fear in an echo chamber is dangerous. It leads us to focusing on what scares us rather than what we can do to overcome it or despite it. It's fine to be afraid. I'm afraid so much of the time it’s unbelievable. But it's the things we do despite being afraid that make us awesome engineers.

We should also think carefully about the message we send to girls considering careers in CS when we stand up in a room full of engineers and talk about how technology and working in this industry is difficult. You don't get brownie points for having faced the most sexism on the job so let's stop trading horror stories like badges of honor. Without context these stories can easily turn women off coding entirely. And among each other it’s too easy to minimize one another's experiences by playing the one-up game.

It's important to acknowledge that what we do is hard, and that it's ok to be afraid. But we spend so much time talking about how afraid we are and so little time on our actual accomplishments. Past a certain point I feel exhausted discussing how hard the IT industry is - instead, tell me about that robot you built, or that web-app you wrote, or that company you launched. Goodness knows I could use the inspiration to keep me going through the crappy bits of the everyday.

3. We Confuse Friendship And Respect

There is a stereotype of the female geek that many women in tech conform to at some point or another in their lives - cute but not trying too hard, she loves video games and indie bands and most importantly she's one of the boys. She is unfailingly likable, effortlessly cool, and smart (but only in a vague, nonthreatening sort of way). The pressure to conform to this image of female nerdom seems to be particularly prevalent in startup culture where youth and hence immaturity rules. During the question and answer portion of the panel a woman stood up and said she didn't think her all-male team liked her very much - she was having a hard time connecting with them, and it was leading to things that affected her ability to do her job like being left out of impromptu hallway meetings. One panelist's recommendation was to address it head on with the team, asking to be invited to the meetings over and over until they relented. Another was to ask the men on the team for help with her work so they would like her more (rooted in psychology research but disempowering nonetheless). 

At no point did any panel member tell this woman that she didn't have to be friends with her teammates. To be successful at work you need team members who respect you and your work not necessarily people who will invite you to their LAN parties. Outside of startups this becomes more obvious - when your colleagues are middle aged men with kids you care less about trying to get everyone out to the bar on Friday night. The notion that you have to be friends with, or even well liked by your teammates to be a useful, respected engineer is an insidious one. Energy spent wondering why boys on the team don't invite you to play foosball is energy not spent becoming a better programmer or meeting people who are more mature than to write women off as coworkers.

4. We Think It’s Our Job To Fix It

Gender inequality in the tech industry isn't going to go away once we lean in hard enough, suck up to our male colleagues and dress the part. There are structural injustices embedded in tech culture that are not our obligation to fix. It's not our fault that people see a female name on a resume and perceive her as less competent. It's not our fault that women are systematically paid less than their male counterparts. It's not our fault that men are hired for technical positions more than women on the cultural assumption that men are more suited to the part. And it's certainly not our fault that women are harassed and assaulted and subtly made to feel less than human on a day to day basis.