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May 23, 2013

Filed under: tech»education

Equal Opportunity

Last Friday, I gave a short presentation for a workshop run by the SCCC Byte Club called "Technical Interview Mastery for Women." Despite the name, it was attended by both men and women. Most of my advice was non-gender specific, anyway: I wanted to encourage people to interview productively by taking into account the perspective from the other side of the table, and seeing the process more as a dialog instead of a confrontation.

Still, during the question and answer period, several people asked about being women in the interview process. Given that my co-presenter has many years more experience being a woman, I deferred to her whenever possible, but I did chime in when the conversation turned to interaction styles. One participant said she was ignored if she wasn't assertive enough, but was then considered unpleasant if she stuck up for herself--what could she do about this?

It's one thing, I said, to suggest ways that women should adapt their communications for a male-dominated workplace--that kind of pragmatic code-switching may well do the trick. But I think it's unfair to put all the burden on women to adapt to men. There needs to be a way to remind men that it's their responsibility to act reasonably.

The problem is that it's often difficult to have that conversation without falling afoul of the same double-standard that says women in the workplace shouldn't be too loud. Complaining about sexism tends to raise hackles--meaning that the offending statement not only goes uncorrected, but dialog gets shut down. I don't know that I have any good solutions to that, but I suggested finding ways to phrase the issue akin to Jay Smooth's presentations on How To Tell People They Sound Racist. I like to think that most people aren't trying to be sexist, they're just not very self-aware. This may be a faulty assumption.

There are still people who argue that the tech industry isn't sexist--that women just aren't as inherently good at coding (this is often hidden behind comments that it's a "meritocracy"--in which, conveniently, women somehow just haven't had merit). From my point of view, I don't see any way that could be correct. My best JavaScript students are split 50/50 between men and women (so are the worst students). I trained equal numbers of men and women on the multimedia team at CQ (and probably would have given the effectiveness prize to the women in a pinch). Moreover, I've never seen any evidence that the skills I use in day-to-day work--spatial reasoning, some basic math, navigating abstraction--are gender-exclusive (or, indeed, required for all programming: the job of a web programmer is markedly different from a systems coder or security investigator, and yet those also suffer from serious inequality issues).

My talk at the workshop was specifically about interviewing, but obviously this is an issue that goes beyond hiring. Something is happening between the classroom and the workplace that causes this disparity. We have a word for this--sexism--regardless of the specific mechanics. And I would love to have more discussions of those specifics, but it's like climate change: every time there's a decent conversation in a public forum about solutions, it gets derailed by people who insist loudly that they don't think there's a problem in the first place.

That said, assuming that people just don't realize when they've done something wrong, there are doubtless ways to address the topic without defensiveness. If the description "sexist" derails, I'm personally happy to use other terms, like "unprofessional" or "rude"--I'm just embarrassed that I (and others) need to resort to euphemism. We need to change the culture around this discussion--to make it clear that we (both men and women) take this seriously, including respectful responses to criticism. We can do better, and I'd like to be able to tell future workshops that we're trying.

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