Essential Practices for Women in Technology

Let’s talk about retention and what we do to stay happy, healthy and engaged in technology.

I’ve been thinking a lot about retention in the tech industry — not just getting more women into tech, but keeping them here. I understand, deeply, why women leave. After all, I’ve been stalked, hacked, harassed, trolled, threatened, underpaid, upward de-mobilized, hostile-workplaced, micro-aggressed, objectified, gaslighted, dominated, isolated and generally maltreated past what one’s preservation instinct should permit.

Why am I still here?

I wanted to share three practices which have provided me with the critical space, resources, support, self-esteem and dignity to keep working in tech. I want to preface this post with the disclaimer that it is not always possible to implement these strategies in your life. Sometimes, the very economic, emotional and sexist oppression faced by women in our industry means that we CAN’T do these things. But if you can, they might just help enough to keep you here fighting.

Build Community With Women

In tech, it’s easy to spend the majority of your time in male-dominated spaces. Your team at work, your company, the conferences and meetups you go to, your online community — easily mostly male.

About two years into my career I began to realize how completely, how totally male presence was dominating my life. I was surrounded on all sides, every angle, by straight white men. It was boring. It was exhausting. It was stressful. It was scary. I noticed that when I walked into a room or conference where I was the only woman, fear and anxiety gripped my entire body. I had no real community, no real support system except that was defined by my own oppression and position as Other.

I have actively worked to change this trend in my life. I hire women, organize women-led events, opt out of male-only spaces, actively nurture friendships with women in tech, build close relationships with women at the companies I work with. I no longer attend conferences unless I know that women will have a strong presence. I will leave social events, happy hours, dinners, conferences, meetups, meetings that are all-male, or I will bring women to them. The community I have built with other women has kept me in the industry, because:

• Women can empathize with your experiences in the industry in a way no man can. Having the true listening, true shared experiences, and true empathy I get from women is essential for my emotional health. And being able to provide that for others is essential to my well-being.
• We help each other. We get each other jobs. We get each other speaking opportunities. We get each other consulting gigs, projects, introductions. We share salary information. We share information about what companies are good places for women to work with, which should be avoided. We introduce each other. We promote each other. We can help protect each other when we are targeted by men in the community.
• Perspective. Privileged white men as a group have afforded me very little perspective except a narrow one of entitlement and exploitation. Women I work with, drink with, talk with, and love give me so much more.

Set Boundaries Around “Women’s Work”

One of the ways that our industry oppresses women is by expecting them to carry out traditionally gendered work that is undervalued compared to men’s work. In fact, it’s instructive to study such jobs through a gendered lens — when performed by women, they are considered low-level and administration; where performed by men, they are often considered strategic and high-level. (Look no further than how men vs. women who organize tech conferences are valued).

Women in the workplace are disproportionately expected to take notes, record meetings, perform administrative duties, organize social events and look after the emotional and physical needs of men in the group — even in so-called “flat” organizations. Resisting these roles was impossible early in my career when I didn’t have the seniority, knowledge, and economic security to resist these gendered expectations. Make no mistake that being able to set boundaries around this work is a form of privilege that many women in our industry don’t have access to. At the same time, it is important to be aware of how these roles function and resist them if you are able. Resisting being the caretaker of the group, the one always organizing meetings and social events, the shoulder to cry on, the secretary and scribe, can help you establish necessary space for yourself. Some strategies for resistance:

• Don’t volunteer. Oftentimes, women volunteer themselves for this type of work because they have internalized gender-based roles or feel they are expected to — sometimes without even realizing it.
• Suggest a rotation strategy for a team’s administrative / social tasks so everyone has to take their turn.
• Be explicit when you are asked to do this type of work — saying something like “I ordered lunch last time” or “I took notes at the last meeting” or even “OK, but you get to do this next time” can help remind people, who are often exercising unconscious bias, of how this work is being allocated.
• Invite a guest speaker to your company to talk about subtle forms of sexism and discrimination in the workplace — awareness is critical for change.

Re-Define Your Work in Technology

Most of us have a reason, a passion, a curiosity that draws us to the tech industry. When I was a bored, rebellious and isolated kid growing up in Minnesota, building websites, publishing poetry online, and finding new ways to connect with people around the world over the internet gave me an outlet for my creativity and curiosity. Today, I’m very interested in distributed systems and the dynamics of how people work together to build technology.

But nothing will suck the joy of technology out of you quite like being a woman working in it. Finding ways to stay excited about tech outside of the workplace has been critical for me — I have taken up blogging, Ruby, public speaking, online publishing, and technocultural analysis at various points, gaining ways to indulge, sustain and grow my interests and investment in the industry. These activities have helped me to build my self-esteem, find new communities, and stay passionate even when I’ve been generally despairing of my career.

Our jobs, especially as they are defined and restricted by misogyny and institutionalized sexism, cannot be relied upon to fulfill our ambitions, our intellectual and emotional needs. As I grow older, I am learning to define my practice in technology outside of the barriers of a job description or institution — to “work” in a more expansive sense, in technology, on my own terms. I see this pattern in a number of the women I am close with as they start their own projects, initiatives, practices outside of the confines of their jobs. Indeed, I think that some of the most important work women are doing in technology happens, perhaps from necessity, outside of the workplace.

In conclusion…

In the fading light of my twenties, it seems an absolute truth that life, viewed from the inside, is but a series of defeats; and furthermore it will not grant your career any exception.

When my career began, I was fleeing haphazardly from the midwest and an ill-spent youth, hoping to become a tech executive or a waitress, as one does. Had I been informed enough for expectations, I imagine I would have expected a utopian garden of diversity, meritocracy, intellectual fulfillment. But in this, the very exposition of our heroine’s journey do we find instead a sea of mediocre and self-impressed white men vying endlessly for ego trophies in a high-tech version of Camus’ Sisyphus, except Sisyphus having a laptop or being in One Hundred Thousand Completely Irrelevant Startups makes the story no more exciting, and the overwhelming boorishness of the whole fucking affair certainly has a way of sucking any philosophical drama from the scene.

I’ve been going through somewhat of a quarter-life crisis with the slow realization that no amount of analyzing the glass ceiling will save it from crushing your fading ambitions, and no level of psychological insight is sufficient to keep the never-ending gaslighting and care-trolling from eroding your (hotly contested) levelheadedness. And this type of crisis is not unique to me — it is shared, in many ways, by all women in tech at some point or another.

But we persevere, for many reasons. Including that we have our own state of privilege and economic security in this industry, even as we are second-class citizens in it. Including that at this point it seems too late to start a different career, that we love it still in spite of, that we want to play our part in making it better for the women who will come after us. I know I will be dead and buried cold in the ground and this blog long bit-rotting in a distant server ether before this industry looks anything like a place I would enthusiastically call my sisters to join me in. But I still want to help build that place.

As a community of women in technology, let’s talk more about retention. After all, if none of us are left here, who is going to fix it?