The danger of a single story
MY story about why I love being a “women in tech”
I do a considerable amount of public talks about what it’s like to be an engineer. If you can’t tell at this point, I’m pretty direct; I also happen to be a lady. This means almost without fail someone will ask me the following question:
“what is it like to be a woman in tech?”
I hate this question. I hate this question because what everyone is really asking is “what are your horror stories about being a woman in tech.” Despite my annoyance, I can’t truly blame those that ask this question. Sometimes it’s asked by young women who are considering entering this industry, and they ask it with such heartbreaking sincerity I know they have asked this many times before and gotten answers they weren’t happy to hear. However, much more annoyingly, this question is most often asked by someone who isn’t technical but works in tech. When they ask it, they are practically salivating at the opportunity to talk about how sexist this industry is. This tension between the non-tech and tech workers might even warrant it’s own post at some point, but for now imagine a civilian asking someone how fucking awful military service is- you don’t know, some people are proud of this work, stop putting your shit on me.
Listen, there’s no question tech has a rocky history with gender relations. If you take Microsoft as a pretty typical example less than 26% of the company is female, less than 18% if you scope that to technical employees (source). With an imbalance like that, it’s clear there are some pretty bad institutional issues.
Even though there are relatively few of us whenever I read about women in tech the story is AMAZINGLY similar:
- there are absolutely NO ladies in tech
- someone “mansplained” and ignored me during a meeting
- someone assumed I only got where I was because of affirmative action
- overall, being a lady in tech isn’t great
This response is SO PERVASIVE that we have gotten to the point where when I tell people I am a software engineer, they put on their “Oh isn’t that so tough for you face”.
Now here is one of the more controversial things I will ever say: It’s fucking AWESOME being a lady in tech.
Why is this controversial? Because it threatens those that have put all their energy behind that single story.
It makes them feel as if I am saying “your story is wrong,” but in fact I am just trying to say “your story isn’t the only one.”
A few years ago I was at a smaller women’s event at Microsoft. There were about 100 women in the room asking a panel of executives questions, pretty casual. I was switching teams a week later so I thought to myself “why not ask that one question I’ve always been terrified to bring up in groups of women in tech.” I asked “in your experience, are women in tech treated worse than say women in finance, marketing or other professions?”. Before the panel could even answer a woman stood up, took the mic, and proceeded to ANGRY CRY at me for even suggesting that women in tech have it equivalent to other professional women. I mean tears running down her face angry cry. I was so taken aback I half tried to defend it pointing at the fact that two of the panel members had non-tech backgrounds and I wanted to hear from them. The panel gave non existent answers and the room moved on as quickly as possible.
Afterwards, a couple of women came up to me, I assumed to talk about how fucking crazy that had been, but instead they chastised me. They told me I was ignorant and unsympathetic. Seriously, all I did was question whether we had it as bad as other professions. I didn’t say “we have it perfect” or “if you say you had a bad experience you’re a dirty liar and I hope you die a painful death,” or other things I assume would provoke complete strangers to cross a room to tell me what a shitty person I was. The worst part is I knew it wouldn’t be well received, so I softened the question. I can be blunt, but I PROMISE you I made this as soft as possible. I had never verbalized it before, but I instinctively knew there was one story the world was interested in when it came to women in tech- and that story wasn’t mine.
Chimamanda Adichie does an incredible job explaining this phenomenon in her most popular TED talk (a high honor considering Beyonce sampled her other TED talk in ***flawless). I strongly suggest you take the 19 minutes to watch it.
I link this TED talk because it does a much better job of saying what I wish I could have to those women that were so angry with me, that my story being true doesn’t make yours any less so. I hope that those who will inevitably write me letters will better understand where I am coming from. Those that will write me messages about how “you don’t understand how bad it can be”, “you are just an outlier”, “you work at a big company this is a start up problem”, “you work in Seattle this is a bay area problem”, “you’re early in your career, it just hasn’t happened to you yet”. Outrageous! Can’t we just all take a fucking moment and celebrate that I can even say “I have never been discriminated against because of my gender in the workplace.” It bears repeating:
I have never been discriminated against because of my gender in any part of my engineering career.
Why is this? Well frankly because I chose a career where the measure of success is in what I produce, not who I know, how I interact, what I look like etc… This industry is the American dream! Did you read my first post? I was planning to go into the theater business! I had actual conversations about my weight as a barrier to success. In the entertainment business, we have real conversations about the “casting couch” and whether or not people will trade sex for opportunities. CAN YOU IMAGINE?! Tech is a fucking paradise! Let’s keep some things in perspective.
Sure, this is a male dominated community, which can lead to some uncomfortable situations, but the men I work with have never treated me as lesser, never tried to exclude me, never tried to discourage me from speaking up or getting more involved.
However, since no one seems to believe me when I say I haven’t been discriminated against here is a short list of “uncomfortable situations” I have encountered, which by no means do I consider oppression:
- In college, there were so few girls in my EE project class that the dudes put a sign over the word “women’s” on the restroom that just said “kasey’s”. I thought this was hilarious.
- On my first day at Microsoft, my manager spent 10 minutes telling me about all the lady groups I could join and how he would happily set me up with a “female mentor”. What is a female mentor? Is it a mentor that helps you be a better female? Can you just recommend someone who would be a good fit? k thanks bai
- When managing my interns, one of them told me she felt uncomfortable because a male co-worker would talk to her a lot. Upon investigation, it turned out because she made the gross mistake of telling him she also played Starcraft and the rest of our team had long since decided we couldn’t stand listening to him prattle on and on about it any more. I told him to go back to the message boards (or wherever Starcraft is discussed, clearly I am not in the know). Threat neutralized.
- Once at a job fair in college, a mid-level baby-boomer manager in a gray polo and khakis spent 15 minutes telling me about their “team pink” and how they were working really hard to hire exclusively female engineers. He then handed me a pink laptop sticker that said something obnoxious like “I’m a FEMengineer”. Barf.
- During gamer gate my facebook wall was fucking flooded with my male engineer friends sharing articles about how disgusting it was. I was also bombarded with a number of fb messages asking me if I was “doing ok” with the whole thing. For reference: not a gamer, had nothing to do with gamer gate. Thanks for being overly concerned though friends, I appreciate you.
- In a team all-hands meeting a LADY asked what we could be doing to hire more LADIES and my manager (a man) decided to handle the question by saying “We hired Kasey! Kasey anything to say?”. All I could stammer out was “I’m an engineer first, a lady second”. Afterwards, a bunch of people left me little notes on my desk in solidarity. Again, thanks for being overly concerned everyone- I’m cool, I said my piece.
- Every single person ever has asked me how much I love the Grace Hopper conference to which I had to respond “I’ve never been”. (I did go this year for the first time, I’ll blog about it later)
- There are always plenty of lady sized t-shirts left over, so I pretty much never have to do laundry ever :)
That was MY story about being a “women in tech,” what about you? Do you have any experiences you’d like to share to help us tell a more balanced story? Are you someone who has reached out to a woman in tech in any of the above ways? Share your experiences in the comments below!
Keep an eye out for more stories from Kasey every other Tuesday as she tells stories from both the classroom and the tech industry. Next post coming 1/3/17
