Different and Awesome
When the topic of diversity comes up, I’m ready. I’m a woman in tech, an Asian, a vet, and I’m older than many of my peers.
The funny thing is that I never felt like an outsider, or like I didn’t belong. Each experience of being “different” ended up helping me develop new skills and approaches that make me a better designer, manager, mentor, and friend.
I was born in South Korea, then adopted into an Italian-American family in New York. I grew up identifying more Italian-American than anything else and was in the racial minority in my family. I was also in the minority at school — a school that was populated mostly by white Connecticut kids. So I was used to looking different from a pretty early age. And that prepared me for a lifetime of standing out from the crowd in some ways.
I dropped out of college and joined the US Army. In Air Assault school with a class of 200+ men, I was one of a handful of women to start and one of only two to finish the course. As the shortest person on the qualification obstacle course, it seemed like every challenge we faced was just a tiny bit harder for me, because the challenge was compounded by some difference in me. But because of those challenges, I was able to compound what I got out of it.
When I advanced to Rappel Master school, I was the only woman, and the only housing they could find for me was in a building — soon to be condemned — that was infested with dust mites that made me sick every day. Being the only woman in an extremely challenging course literally made me sick. And I still passed the course.
When I was stationed in Korea, I stood out from other Koreans, as an American, because of how I dressed and how I physically carried myself. My American friends would occasionally lose me in a crowd of other Koreans, but to other Koreans I stood out. I also wasn’t fluent in Korean, despite some expectations from others that I might know the language.
What I learned from this experience and others was to embrace my uniqueness and let it carry me forward. These circumstances led to some pretty funny events, and I learned to roll with it and laugh. I found that you can choose to feel different, or be offended, or you can laugh at some situations that are honestly pretty absurd. My ability to laugh at some tough situations has been the very thing that has helped me find a way out of some pretty tight places in life.
When I went to art school after the army, I had a different lifestyle from most students, and although I was only about 30 years old, I felt ages older than them. I wasn’t interested in spending my free time like they did, and my priorities were different because of where I was in my life.
I felt that my difference was something I could use to my advantage as well. I was able to apply my experience in business and life to framing and researching problems we worked on in school. I had experience presenting my thoughts and defending my plans, defining outcomes and reporting results. I worked at a consulting company full time so had more money than my classmates to spend on supplies, so that wasn’t a barrier like they sometimes had. I felt like I had developed more focus, resolve, and confidence at this point in my life than I’d had at an earlier age. All of this helped me get my degree.
I’m used to being one of the very few women in a group, or the only Asian, but being one of the only old people is new. For one thing, I wasn’t always old. I’m now almost 50. So that’s new. And being older than others at my company isn’t really that bad. In my day-to-day work life, I’m around several people that appear close to my age group, and I’m not feeling out of touch. I had fears that that wouldn’t be the case, going in. Those fears were mostly based on the well-earned reputation of the tech industry in general being fundamentally hostile on the whole toward people over, say, 30 years old.
But HubSpot’s a lot better than most at designing a workplace and culture that’s inclusive of more than just the millennial crew, which has been wonderful to discover and enjoy since I joined in 2018. I enjoy spending time in the Slack channels we have dedicated to communities like People of Color at HubSpot (POCaH), Women in Tech, the LGTBQ Alliance, and ParentSpot. I get involved when we support diversity in the community through events like the Grace Hopper Conference, InspireFest, Treehouse, when we host panels on mental health, unseen diversity, veterans in tech, and the Returners program. And I love that we track and publish an annual diversity report, so we can keep ourselves accountable to making progress every day.
It’s important to keep diversity in mind when designing products. We try to start from a perspective of designing for inclusion, because it makes the product better for all users. The people I work with here understand that our differences are often our biggest strengths, and what makes me different here is a feature, not a bug.
The organization I work for and the people we serve don’t care if I’m 5’1” or 6’10”, if I prefer saltimbocca or chop chae as comfort food, or if I identify as Gen X or Gen Y. I’m not a female product designer, I’m not an Italian UX manager, and I find it’s distracting to emphasize the differences. I choose to focus on being a good designer, people manager, friend, mentor, and peer.
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