Ask for it.

I’m 29 years old, a young woman working in Berlin Germany as user experience designer. I’d like to share my experience from just being a woman in tech and stepping up as woman in tech.

When i started out, as 14 year old girl and i figured out how to use #irc i knew immediately i should hide my gender. I was as very young girl exposed to more or less respect less conversation about girls (i was playing Ultima Online it was pretty much teenager talk). Later, i learned men can be intelligent, tolerant, respectful and brave. Just the same as woman. I surrounded myself with those because they have been sharing my interests. When i started my career as designer i also started to collaborate with hackers, developers and other makers and i did something good. I went deep into a culture which is clearly dominated by men.

When i met Karen, a technical writer and Danish / American, my business was deep in trouble. I had a contract as creative director which was the right thing to do with my skill set and soon it was pretty clear the contract was never ment to happen as described. Karens words helped me to understand why. I started to understand how many woman work in positions and do not ask for the privileges or proceed as described in the position. I understood my behavior was different because i did asked for it and i was furious and angry when i figured out i quit my clients to join a fake contract. When i think about it, i still don’t like it but the anger comes from somewhere else. The company got a mark.

Every woman i was talking to, experienced underselling or tremendous trouble to get what the paper says. It was a turning point in my career. I started to look deeper into patterns and i learned more about my own faults and society mistakes. Just like other woman i thought it is all my fault. And it wasn’t. After you have figured that out you feel better. Because it makes you more human, a better person, less flawed. It also helps you to discover your faults and work on them.

I’m deeply grateful to all woman around the world, sharing their experience as woman in tech. I still need you to navigate better and learn more about myself.

My changed mindset and my interest in psychology, user experience and other human related fields, helped me to observe my environment. And this is the moment where the negative emotions come back. Because what you observe makes you angry, helpless and sad. I’d like to share a few of them:

• A CTO felt intimidated because i refused to sign a weird contract with wrong wording, project description and paragraphs.
• A friend said i’m emotional in terms of working together. He never worked with me. None of my clients said that.
• A Client hid information and data from me because he couldn’t admit to a woman the dataset and api has huge quality issues.

None of these people liked to harm me or had thoughts against woman. The number of situations, made by society and common behavior is endless. And i’m not mad with the people acting against me. I feel helpless. Sometimes. When i went to the gamescom congress Köln, i already had a discussion about a proper flight, hotel and other details. When i joined the breakfast room in the morning i sat down at a table for 6 with a window. The room was empty except two groups and had about 6 huge tables and 8 small tables.

A servant came by and asked me to move because the house is fully booked and bigger groups might need this table. I took his request as valid and moved to a table he asked me to sit down. wifi in this place was terrible and my mood began to decrease. 2 minutes later a single men, mid thirty sat down at the very same table. I waited and it made me incredible angry when i learned the servant said nothing to him. 10 minutes later i decided to ignore the not coming big groups and crawled back to my window place with good wifi.

I like this story because woman are asked to move far more often. The border to ask us is much lower and refusing, or saying no is a guarantee for being seen as inconvenient, emotional maybe other strange negative character flaws i cannot imagine right now. There is no good way out of it.

Option 1 is to accept the situation and be angry which costs you energy. Option 2 is to say no and invest energy in the discussion about it.
Option 3. Saying no and refusing to discuss it which is a guarantee for being seen as a emotional disturbed person.

Woman in the whole world helped me to see through this mess and i’m still learning every day to deal with it. When i look back at my time with the Google technology user group i wish i had never joined and on the other hand i know exactly what i need to avoid now. I know exactly which characters i have to avoid. And you can find them in any user group. I learned to communicate about how the system works because in my opinion thats the only chance we have to fix it. I learned i need to ask for credit. I have been skipped many times and it will not change if i don’t speak up.

All this because woman decided to share. I’m asked very often “how can i help”. You could reduce the cost for speaking up. We are not emotionally disturbed and we need to change this society pattern as soon as possible.