On International Women’s Day

tl;dr. Women thank you. Men, spend a day thinking.

So, today is International Women’s Day. I was hoping to be at a lunch celebrating this at White October, but sadly have other commitments, so I thought I’d write something to show solidarity that way.

First off, thank you to the women we celebrate today. Thank you for your persistence, your determination, your resilience. It’s shameful there is a glass ceiling, it’s shameful that there’s even the term “glass ceiling”. Thank you for making workplaces better by your presence. Thank you for making your voices heard despite male voices that try to talk over you. Thank you for fighting for your rights in the face of misogynists or those who just don’t understand, I’m sorry on behalf of my gender that you have had to.

Secondly, to the men who have this in their calendar as “International be a whiny male troll day”, please spend the day on the naughty step. You deserve to be there for your infantile behaviour. Grow up, grow a pair. Sit and think about what’s really going on. You’re more privileged than you know, you don’t deserve more. Women are more likely to be sexually assaulted by men than men are by men, or men are by women. Women are paid less, yes still, than men, when they do the same job.

Finally, I work in the tech industry. Sexism is rampant. It’s so common there’s the term “brogrammer” for misogynistic software developers. We have to have “codes of conduct” to protect women at conferences when it should just be common sense. Men, please spend today or parts of it and think hard about this and how wrong it is. As an industry we pretend to look at how we shape the world, I hope we don’t shape equality in the likeness of so many who disregard women and equality of every sort so readily.