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Getting Taken Seriously in Tech
Over at Forbes, Susannah Breslin seems to have stepped in a hornet’s nest by claiming that many nominally pro-women blogs are actively harmful to the interests of women. The backlash is predictable.
No, this post isn’t about whether I agree with Breslin or her critics. (I do find it interesting that after Breslin said many would complain bitterly about the Patriarchy, her critics at Feministe trashed her for selling out to… the Patriarchy. That's neither here nor there, though.) This is about life inside a highly male-dominated field, and where I think women are falling down and going boom.
First, anyone who says women can’t compete with the men at the highest levels of IT is… well… crazy. To list just the people I know offhand who can compete with me (and I compete at a very high level), there’s Terri Oda, there's Raven Alder, there’s K— who is not only the finest Assembly coder I’ve ever known but the finest I’ve ever heard of, there’s C— who is the second-best Assembly coder I’ve ever known and/or heard of, there’s… the list goes on and on.
What makes them so special? Why have they been able to thrive and find professional success and satisfaction in a world that so many believe is hostile to women?
I wish I could answer that. That presupposes a universal answer to these questions, and I don’t believe any such universal answer exists. What I can tell you is what I see from my perspective — what I see as their common traits. This perspective might be useful to you, or it might not: I make no guarantees.
They’re competitive. Competitiveness isn’t optional at this level of the game. You’ve either got the fire in the belly or you don’t, and there isn’t any way around it. Although K— is one of the nicest, sweetest-tempered people I’ve ever met in this industry, she’s always eager for new challenges and goes after them with tremendous gusto. Terri Oda is a Ph.D. candidate and is immersed in the publish-or-perish life of docs and postdocs: that, too, is a hypercompetitive environment.
Equality, not special accommodations. There’s a big difference between saying “I want to be paid the same as everyone else” and “you have to completely change the culture of your engineering pit just because I’m in the room.” Raven has some truly awful stories of sexual harassment in the workplace and on the conference circuit — crap that has no place in a civilized society — but she doesn’t ask for special accommodations. As soon as you ask for special accommodations, you’ve just become part of the problem.
As part of a training curriculum, we have students parse metadata out of MP3 files. This includes album artwork. None of it is sexually explicit: it’s nothing we would be embarrassed to show our mothers. One of the albums is Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew, which is a masterpiece of the jazz fusion movement, a progenitor of hip-hop, and just all around badassitude set to music. However, one female student complained bitterly about the title, claiming it was sexist and contributed to a hostile work environment. This resulted in the entire curricula being redesigned. Think about it: this is perhaps the defining work of the modern jazz fusion movement, and we have to get rid of those MP3s because someone’s offended at the name? Dear God. I hope that for the text corpus nobody notices there are at least three ribald puns in the name of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing.
Equality is good — special privileges and accommodations aren’t. Making me do additional work because you’re offended by one of the seminal works of the jazz fusion movement is definitely in the latter category.
They don’t claim to have a right to be there: they claim to have a right to earn their place there. There is no faster way to piss off a working engineer, I think, than to tell one you’re entitled to something. You’re not entitled to work with me and you’re not entitled to have me take you seriously. I managed just fine in this career before I met you and I’ll manage just fine after you’re gone. Any claim of, “but I deserve this!” will be met with instant derision: professionally speaking, I don’t much care.
Ah, but the instant you demonstrate that you’re useful, that you’re smart and you work hard and you can handle criticism, you can face failure and rebound into success, you’ve got top-notch skills and you’re not afraid to use them… at that point you’ve earned a spot on the team and you can count on your team not giving a damn about your gender.
… And here’s another thing about these principles that I believe have accounted for so much of these women’s success: they are entirely gender-neutral. There’s nothing in them that says “women need to do X to succeed in this field.” Rather, people need to do this to succeed in this field.
And in that respect, I think they are very hopeful principles indeed.
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Preach it, brother. It is also worth noting that this trait is no respecter of gender: I know as many professionally-offended men as women.
However, I think it’s worth considering what would have happened if it had been a man who was complaining about a female instructor who was using Bikini Kill MP3s in class on the grounds that Bikini Kill is a fairly misandristic band. Would the instructor be able to say, “well, maybe, but it’s also one of the foundations of the Riot Grrl music scene and is culturally significant, and really, if you’re objecting over pillars of our culture aren’t you really making a mountain out of a molehill?”
My impression — and that’s all it is — is that the curriculum would not be redesigned as a result of the man’s complaint.
One of the major problems in civil rights reform is, how do we give effective tools to the justifiably offended and truly wronged, while still denying to the professionally-offended the use of those tools? As soon as you have an answer to that question, please let me know: I’ve been looking for an answer for years.
[Edit: corrected a word to ‘misandristic.’ The previous word was … comedically wrong.]
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I think fundamentally, you're right about what you say: a lot of what's necessary to succeed includes determination and an ability to get stuff done without constantly feeling slighted over every little thing. I don't really think requiring people to fit that mould is necessarily a great recipe for the long-term success of the industry, but it's a clear truth about many people who excel in the current environment.
The problem with stuff like your example about complaining about the album, though, is that it's not really that simple. In my experience in the academic environment, any one complaint would never go anywhere. Either there had to be a lot of complaints or, as in this case, some sort of general sense of malaise that meant that one complaint fit nicely into someone's confirmation bias. That general malaise is why a complaint from a male student won't get as much attention as one from a female one.
And I think that confirmation bias starts the real danger of the more frivolous-seeming complaints. It's not just that they're made, it's that in an organization that fundamentally doesn't know how to fix their problems, any small suggestion can quickly turn into a witch hunt or a supposed panacea for all the other problems. Something Must Be Done. Even if it's the wrong thing, it looks like We Take Issues Seriously.
It's very hard to complain responsibly and a skill I think more should learn, but it's perhaps even harder to react responsibly, and perhaps even more important that we learn to do so.