Third Wave Feminism and XP

New school thinkers in XP are taking lessons from Third Wave Feminism and Intersectionality.

San Francisco has been schooling me on Feminism.

When I joined Double Union, my hometown feminist maker space, you could say my feminism was young. In tech feminist circles we talk about where someone is with their Feminism. Someone who is learning the very basics is considered to be at a 101 level. At this point in the journey, you understand that there is discrimination against women, but you might not know about your own privilege, how to check your privilege or how that plays into the way you face discrimination or are part of it.

The history of feminism itself is loosely grouped into 3 waves. I say mostly, because feminism is a large, rambling space of thinkers going in all directions, much like software. The first wave was the suffragettes getting us the vote. The second wave came through in the 60’s when women were ready to kill the misconception that they should stay in the home. This included the flowering of fighting for the right to an abortion and the right to equal pay.

Third wave feminism de-centers the fight for equality from being all about white, middle class women. Because the third wave is about rights for all people of all colors and for all people identifying as women at all income levels, there is a level of nuance introduced into feminism that is more of a match with the high-wire, balancing act that is daily life for most women. This has the positive effect of broadening what it means to be a woman in a way that gives us the freedom to wear what we want, sleep with whoever we want, when we want and live the way we want to live without shame as we buzzsaw our way through the existing patriarchal system.

There is no shame for women who:

• Stay home with kids
• Don’t want kids at all
• Have kids and stellar careers
• Transition to or away from the gender they were assigned at birth
• Enjoy wearing makeup and/or heels
• Feel more comfy in a short, sharp haircut
• Sleep with multiple partners
• Wear that panstsuit every day

This is the world I inhabit and this is where I build software. I am a woman and there is no separating these out for me. It’s a convergence.

Given the pragmatic, sophisticated nature of the 3d wave, I look around all of the agile I’ve done and the XP I’ve practiced and see room for improvement. I guess it’s not a surprise given who’s missing from this classic photo:

Hint: everyone is white and it is all men.

That tracks with my experience of agile workplaces and seeing that women tend to suffer and leave, there are barely any People of Color at all and management looks just like the photo above. It’s all white men.

If you want to know the effect, here is a discussion started by Nicole Sullivan on twitter that is speaking a truth (storify by Eileen Clancy).

But this post isn’t about condemning XP or agile. In fact, from what I’ve seen, XP comes the closest to respecting human patterns and humanity. It’s day has come. There is now much more of it and it’s still not enough for me. I want there to be tests everywhere. I find the white noise of pair programming to be comforting. It brings in a metaphor for software that is more about artistic creation than about an assembly-line manufacture of cars.

In order to make this vision a reality, I suspect the men in the photo probably realized early on that for this XP thing to fly, they needed to find people who would work well together. They needed to put together teams of people who could be chill with each other. Some probably also added a requirement that the people be pretty good programmers already.

When all of these requirements are boiled down, you get the perfect new hire:

A nice kid from Stanford, Berkeley or some East Coast, Ivy league school who drifts upward through levels of management without too much effort. He’s chill.

This leaves us with where we are and the complaints you’ll see being voiced about XP. I’ve started listening to these complaints and usually they come from someone whose pair walked all over them, someone who wants to go home and play with their kids before dark in the winter or someone whose manager had no people skills and seemed to have been promoted because he was chill. At least we’ve established that meritocracy is a joke.

While this is a grim picture, it doesn’t have to be this way and, in fact, it’s already started changing, even in the XP Houses of the Holy, but there isn’t enough of it yet. Also, we are getting more woman’s voices, like mine or Nicole Sullivan’s or Sarah Mei’s coming through, but we are all white. That’s not enough.

It’s time to dismantle the clean room most XP shops think is so necessary. Maybe they are “clean” but they are quite uncomfortable for many who pass through, leaving the impression that XP is an elitist practice for perfectionists.

There are lessons here from the third wave of feminism. The third wave is all about inclusivity and shame removal. This is something we work at on my team. We’re a diverse team that works in pairs and if we hit an XP limitation, we are apt to chuck it and keep going, learning from our compromises as we go.

Inspired by the third wave of feminism, I am imagining a software version of the previous bulleted list:

There is no shame in making software by:

• working from home
• having a non-coding tester and a developer pair together on production code
• letting go of a test when it’s stopped serving you
• including slack time that isn’t backlog focused
• drawing out your big hairy problem along with where you think you want to go on a whiteboard
• Giving the women who work for you a pay raise so their salaries match the men’s
• working fewer than 40 hours a week (@frameshiftllc)
• getting your mom to watch the kids (Alex Harms)
• dressing up so you look fucking fabulous because that’s one place you get courage(Alex Harms)
• crying with frustration from time to time (@SalFreudenberg)
• using skills you’ve been taught by someone else, rather than having taught yourself. (@ThatAndromeda)
• copying it from a book or blog (@wilkieii)
• Doing something together that you could get done alone. (@maaretp)

This list is not great. It is short, incomplete and lacking perspective. I can’t fill it in alone, nor should I.

While I have much respect for those who got us here, I’m not really looking to them to fill in the list because their list is already posted for all to see. Thanks for your vision.

I am leaving an invitation here to step back and listen with me. If we keep listening together, we will start hearing more of the voices that already surround us.