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If you are a man reading this, I invite you to: a. Resist the urge to pick apart the OP's life and criticize how/what she said. b. Honestly reflect, without shame or blame, about what you know of sexism. What do you understand of it? What do you understand it's roots are, and how it works? What do you think your responsibility is, as a man, and as a member of this community? I invite you to do this, because it's a charged topic, but an important one. See if you can look past the hurt feelings and accusations, and sincerely reflect on what you can do to understand how sexism works a little better, and address it. EDIT: I am by no means an expert on the topic, but I've spent the past few years earnestly looking at how oppression works and keeping an open mind. I was truly astounded by the magnitude and difficulty of the problem. |
You know what? I don't think I've ever personally witnessed a woman in tech being subjected to sexist behavior. And I know exactly why that is. It's because I so rarely encounter a woman in tech. They're like unicorns. And so we treat them like unicorns, because we, men, are having a new experience. Lo, a woman has entered into our mancave, let us attempt to impress her with our alpha geek abilities. But for them, that must be the experience they have continuously -- they are perpetually in the presence of a woman because they are one, so the novelty of that wore off a long time ago and now they're just constantly surrounded by men who act as though they've spotted a fantastical creature and are suddenly anxious to capitalize on this rare opportunity to try to mate with it.
I don't know how to fix that. A woman who knows what data locality optimization means is rare. And it's dangerous to be rare. It's difficult. You don't have safety in numbers. You don't have the benefit of the experience of many others like you. You don't have a strong voice because you don't have a strong population of similarly situated individuals.
So if I had a prescription for fixing it, it would be to make it not rare. We need a thousand million new women in tech. Easier said than done, right? But that's what we need. Chicken and egg. We drive all the women out by making them feel awkward and vulnerable, and then there are not enough women to move the needle on the treatment of women.
So women in tech… to use a popular phrase, a market segment in serious need of disruption.
We need to make it cool to be a unicorn. When we encounter such rare creatures we must make "respect" rather than "capture" to be the default response.
Which I know is hard. It goes against our nature. "New toy" and "human being" are not equivalent but are far too easily confused, and the fact is, most of the time we don't even realize we're doing it. And a lot of us are going to fail a lot of the time, but we still need to try.
And we're still going to fail even when we're trying. Which is why I say to those women who have bothered to read this far into my nonsense: Don't give up! Please don't give up. Because we -- men -- need strong female role models. We need to encounter women we can respect on a regular basis, so that respecting women is something we have experience doing. We need you to put up with our shit when we're embodying human imperfection and throw it back at us when we deserve it, because if you don't, no one does and then it happens again. We need you to call us out. We need you to not quit in the face of adversity, because our daughters should not have to go through what you already have.
Being a rare specimen is hard, but we need you. The future needs this to be fixed. And if enough of you hang in there when the going gets tough, eventually it can stop being rare, and stop being hard.