Does Remote Work Promise to Destroy Misogyny in Tech?
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So I’ve been mulling this article over in my mind for about a week now, and thinking deeply about this topic forced me into an extremely uncomfortable realization. I tried to count in my head how many female programmers that I’m acquainted with. As in work at a startup or other tech company in the area of Akron Ohio.
The answer was Zero.
Now, this sample isn’t great. For one, startups are not at all liquid with respect to talent and staffing. Startups are usually 2–5 founders, frequently friends who had an idea together. That means that you very rarely have any churn of talent, so these startups aren’t exposed to the diversity of the talent pool at large. Considering that the tech ecosystem as a whole has poor diversity, and the tech talent pool is pretty tight in Akron, this number doesn’t really surprise me. But I don’t like it.
Being a chronic pragmatist, I immediately ask, “how can we address this problem?” I frequently see people discussing gender inequality when it comes to tech, but I rarely read about things that I can act on. What can I do to make this better?
Being a remote work fanatic, of course I can’t help but think, “Perhaps #RemoteWork™ will come to the rescue!”
As a knee-jerk reaction when I see a big project or concept I start to break things down into smaller bits. Let’s take a stab at breaking down the different aspects of equality in workplaces.
Entry
Entry is the easiest one to talk about. ‘Entry’ is simply the steps that turn non-programmers into programmers.
Software Development is pretty good at doing this. Compare programming to another STEM field like mechanical engineering. A cursory google search for “How to become a programmer” yields articles with high-level descriptions, and links to things like W3 schools, or any other of the thousands of programming tutorial sites. Another search for “How to become a mechanical engineer” really only includes the high-level description. When we get to the hard part, all the author really can do is recommend the reader get an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering.
In addition to a wealth of online resources, there is a lot of activity in getting more women into programming. Initiatives like the Women@Google Summit, Girls Who Code, and Women Techmakers all exist and are (usually) regarded in a positive light. Entry into tech is an area that people understand and are continually working to improve.
The concept of anyone participating from anywhere with a computer and internet is very prevalent in this sector, so I ’ll consider this an area that remote work does a good job at helping out.
Access
If leveraging the Internet and remote work to gain skills is relatively easy, what are the prospects like for putting those skills to use? This is where remote work has an opportunity to shine.
Take the earlier case of startups in my area. Hypothetically, if companies in this position were all to shift to a more remote-work-friendly paradigm, they would be able to expose themselves to a much larger talent pool. Assuming their hiring practices are equitable, this could help bring in more female talent into this area.
Drawing from my own experience, when I posted a job online advertising remote programming work, about a third of applicants were female (going by names alone). Comparing this (small) sample to our earlier (even smaller) sample, this is some kind of improvement!
Acceptance
Now we’ve discussed the different challenges and promises of improving diversity via remote learning and hiring, but that still leaves arguably the most important point: the culture and behavior of those already on the ‘inside’. Having access to a larger talent pool that includes more women isn’t going to magically make sexist companies less sexist.
Should we just wait for these ‘bad’ companies to die off? Should we outcompete them, because companies with better hiring practices will find better talent?
We can start to think about companies from a social network/authority perspective, companies are a lot like families. We begin to realize that you can’t really go and ‘fix’ a broken company if you aren’t in it already, and even then it’s a tremendous amount of effort.
But now we need to acknowledge some facts.
Even on top of these challenges there is still so much left. Misogyny everywhere, tech included, is an extremely complicated, multi-faceted issue that can’t really be broken down into a series of culture ‘bugs’ to be patched. Many of the issues women face are so systemic it’s hard to even see them as issues.
So ‘Does Remote Work Promise to Destroy Misogyny in Tech?’
No.
A single band-aid of pseudo-anonymity, better communications, and easy access to information is not going to ‘destroy’ societal mechanisms that have emerged over centuries. It may help, band-aids are better than nothing. But we can’t take the easy way out. We have to acknowledge the problem for what it is.
No one was asking me to solve sexism. No one is asking anyone that. Thinking that one can ‘solve sexism’ is naive, and a little condescending.
What is being asked of us all is to try. Try to understand the issue, try to envision a good path forward, and try to move forward along that path.
Everyone has a sphere of influence, big or small. I plan on trying to make my little patch of the world (on and offline) as fair as I can make it.
