The Elephant in the Room is a Man

One of our goals at Sense & Respond Press is to create a vital conversation across communities in business, technology, and innovation. Since these are fields traditionally dominated by white males it’s particularly important that we foster diversity at every level. That means paying special attention to recruiting authors from under-represented communities and reaching all kinds of readers. If publishing is about sharing voices then we need as broad a range as possible.

So at Lean Startup Week recently I attended as many of the diversity-related panels as I could. To their credit, since 2015 Lean Startup Company has committed to the 50/50 pledge to ensure gender equity at their conferences. So the Women’s Breakfast, on the first day of the conference, was a good place to start.

Women-only events are always contentious. (I went to Barnard College, all-female since 1899, and a public high school founded as the Female Normal and High School that went co-ed two years before I attended.) I believe in them — as long as women-only events have flexible definitions of “female.” Barnard’s admissions policy, for example, was recently revised to accept anyone who “consistently lives and identifies as female.” Lean Startup’s breakfast was limited to “female-identified attendees” and specifically welcomed trans, genderqueer, and non-binary people. So when I saw male-looking people there I hoped, optimistically, that they identified as female.

The panel speakers were high-achieving women from Google’s Diversity and Inclusion lab, tech incubators, and directors and vice presidents at large-enterprises. They spoke about the challenges of combatting gender bias in the workplace, the importance of speaking up against all the ways women are marginalized at work, and how to deal with being the only woman (or person of color, queer-identified, or other overlapping identity) in the room. Geeta Wilson at Humana explored how Lean Startup business methods and diversity initiatives both disrupt Business As Usual in similar ways. Monica Marquez from Google emphasized “making the ask”: women should push themselves to ask for what they want (men do!). It was useful and inspiring.

And then a not-so-funny thing happened.

The moderator of the panel invited questions and instantly an older man stood up and said, “May I share my experience working on product teams?” I’m paraphrasing, but I think he began with what was clearly a rhetorical question because he had already claimed that permission. A (female) attendee jumped up and said, in agitation, “please don’t! We have only one space here at the conference to speak just among women and let’s try to protect that.” As the tension in the room rose, the man simply kept going, talking at length about how he has never seen or shown any difference between the men and “the ladies” on his teams and always hired whoever was best for the job and treated them exactly the same…. The woman who interrupted him stormed out of the room and he ignored it. In fact, we all sat there stunned, and speaking for myself, deeply uncomfortable.

Because this was exactly what the panelists had described. A man had hijacked our conversation, and imposed his experience over ours in ways that seemed completely oblivious to what the panelists had just discussed. In both words and actions he implied that his opinions and experience were more important than ours — even at our own event!

And none of us seemed to know what to do about it. Eventually, the moderator found a break in his monologue to say “okay, now we want to hear from the women in the room” and the Q&A moved on without comment. When the event was over the women at my table shared mixed responses as we processed it: several thought that the man had a “right” to speak too; others thought he was in the wrong but so was the woman who “over-reacted” by leaving. I felt shaken and confused by the whole thing. What should we have done? Was there a way to prevent it? After all, this must happen all the time, right? The whole panel was predicated on this kind of problem.

I’d be very interested to hear thoughts from readers and other attendees (as far as I know there was no aftermath of public discussion over social media or Slack but maybe I missed it). In the meantime, here are my takeaways:

• There should be some sort of gating moment at the door to prevent situations like these. The unfortunate implication here is that you can’t rely on an honor system or any other self-regulating force to manage attendance. If the event was for “female-identified” an organizer should ask everyone at the door to claim that. It’s awkward, yes, but apparently necessary. Then if someone really wants to disrupt the event at least they are forced into some sort of awareness of what they are doing. And it gives the other attendees more justification for my next point.
• Men do not have a “right” to participate in female-identified events in some equal opportunity or free speech sense. To exclude them is not reverse-discrimination because that argument assumes some hypothetical level playing field that does not and never has existed. That is, men do not have a right to attend Barnard even though women have a right to attend Columbia (which went co-ed while I was at Barnard) because men and women do not share power equally and this difference in policies helps even that out. Men who wanted to participate in a conversation during Lean Startup week about women in technology had plenty of other mixed-gender opportunities to do so. There were no other female-only opportunities, which brings me to the next point.
• Women should be tolerant and supportive of the diversity of opinions within our own ranks, though that has always been difficult for us. At the panel Geeta Wilson emphasized the importance of supporting female colleagues in the workplace even across generational (or other) differences. So I was disturbed by some of the hostility in the room to the woman who walked out. I admired her courage but am trying to be understanding of the rest of us too, who couldn’t respond as decisively in the moment.
• But the panel was in part about how to improve our responses to situations like that so what else could we have done? I think at least it’s important to have these meta-reflections as soon as possible (That’s hard. It took me nearly two weeks to get myself to draft this. Conflict avoidance is a bitch — so to speak). If we didn’t know what to do at the time we can at least point to the problem and discuss it now. And during the Q&A the room could have been invited to share thoughts right then: panelists and attendees could have conversed together. Maybe the man in question might have learned something.

Sharing views and hearing each others’ voices brings me back to the importance of diversity in our publishing mission, which is where I started. So how to do that? Any advice about what works in terms of outreach for finding women and people of color to work with would be welcome.

[By the way, my title and topic owes obvious debt to the 2015 study The Elephant in the Valley. Many thanks for that important work!]

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