Are we all different or all the same?

When people try to make a difference, what do they need to look like?

I got an interesting email the other day about a Women 2.0 newsletter. It was not uplifting (as many are). It was harsh, and, even though I’ve heard it before, it still made me pause and reassess.

Here it was:

As an actual women in tech, someone who has a computer science degree and looks at code daily, I find newsletters like this counter productive. Nothing is more irksome than a bunch of people with soft degrees in business telling engineers how awful we are, and prescribing change despite never having worked in that environment. It also is insulting to group people with actual engineering positions with sales and marketing folks and say that they ‘work in tech’. Being a janitor in a hospital doesn’t mean I work in healthcare.

I could have ignored it, but I chose to respond after a few days of thinking.

My response (put into a more organized format):

Women 2.0 isn’t for everyone, and that’s perfectly ok.

I’ve done work for women in tech and entrepreneurship for 10 years now. I know enough coding to be dangerous, but not anywhere close to many of the women I “work on behalf of”. I’m a marketer by trade. In that sense, this criticism is correct.

However, if those of us who may not be hardcore technologists weren’t leading some of these initiatives, there would be holes, gaps would be bigger, discussion would be less. That’s not say that things wouldn’t be where there are today, but some of the leading organizations in this space are run by, well, “other” people. Those organizations and those leaders wouldn’t be here (holes!).

So what gets me up in the morning? The number of women who have told me over the course of the last 10 years that the work I’ve been involved in has changed their lives, made a difference in their careers, their positions as women in tech, their local or regional communities, company policies, you name it.

As a fellow woman (even though I’m not same-same), I would encourage everyone to look around their work tables and strongly consider the women there as allies instead of enemies unable to relate. They’ve likely been in very (very) similar positions to yourself whether technologist or not. I have sat literally directly next to a female colleague who was an engineer and been in the exact same position as they have been on the receiving side of some of the “stuff” we’re trying to change at Women 2.0.

I also sincerely hope that, if you’re hearing anyone say what this responder seemed to hear — “how awful we are” — try to reframe this and instead hear “this isn’t right, you deserve more, let’s fix this”.

That last part — “let’s fix this” — will be difficult to accomplish if we continue to put up walls around ourselves.

I would invite further dialogue from anyone!