Almost a quarter of a century ago, I wrote my undergraduate thesis on the Benefits of Gender Diversity in Software Development Teams (spoiler: gender diversity is a good thing!) I wish I had written down my predictions on how I envisioned the future playing out. I don’t think I would have predicted that very little would change in the next twenty-five years.
What has changed in this scenario is me. I have gotten older (by a quarter of a century!) Being a middle-aged woman in tech is much, much easier than being a young woman in tech. Now I have all those years of experience behind me. This gives some weight to my thoughts and ideas, though not as much as I would have hoped.
Imagine if someone had told you that, in the future, we would have a timestamped record of who said what at meetings (for some, this also means imagining they were working adults before Teams, Slack, etc. existed). Now, when I say something at a meeting that is either ignored or debated and then, when repeated by a man, is immediately accepted as inciteful truth (Huzzah!) you can go back to the transcripts to assure yourself that it really happened. Sometimes in those situations I wonder if perhaps I didn’t explain myself clearly when I first put forth an idea or perhaps I missed adding in key words or phrases that would change the idea from mediocre to executable. Now I can review the play, so to speak, and analyze exactly what happened. Unfortunately, in those cases where I think I spoke clearly and explained the thought to completeness, there is just no non-petty way to show the record to your teammates to prove it first came out of your mouth and that you deserve the credit. But it is helpful and reassuring to know that it is not just your skewed memory gas lighting you; that actually just happened.
If you have read this far and are struggling with the idea that something like this is still happening in 2023, let me assure you that it is. I have never worked outside of software development and I can’t speak to how common this is in the workplace in general. I imagine that this kind of workplace sexism had totally different causes 50 or 60 years ago. I never feel like my ideas are dismissed because someone doubts that I have the skills, knowledge, or education to solve something. It is more that we are all moving very fast and assumptions must be made. If I am on an email about, say, a network issue along with a man from my department, it is always assumed that I am the project manager and the man is the tech person. I have even been dropped on emails for this reason; I imagine it was because the senders thought that the technical details would not be of interest to me or might be over my head.
Obviously, it is not just an email problem. A WomenTech Network survey revealed that 64% of female respondents have been spoken over during meetings, 19% have felt pigeonholed by stereotypes in various situations, and 11% have been asked to “supply the food” during meetings. I was once even preemptively spoken over (next level office sexism!): “I know what you are about to say, Christine, but I will say it better.” True story, and that was only 3–4 years ago. He absolutely got to say it in the meeting as my jaw was still hanging open in shock.
Need more convincing? Try it out for yourself with http://arementalkingtoomuch.com/ It would only be fair if you then average out the “talk time” to the count of meeting participants by gender. You can find more complete instructions here: https://www.genderavenger.com/tally/
Of course, there is a huge difference between “air time” and actually being a thought leader, but it still might be an interesting exercise.
So…what to do?
I have learned a few tricks over the years that might help. One is to always send a meeting agenda along with any meeting invites. Not only is this basic good business practice, it also helps keep the discussion on track. Any large problem must be broken down into smaller problems and listing those out also allows you to suggest possible solutions to those problems in writing. I certainly do not always have the answer and I very much appreciate the input of my teammates; I am definitely not right 100% of the time (or even 75% of the time, sadly). I have found that putting my ideas down in writing on an agenda makes them more likely to be discussed and gives me at least a chance of being heard.
Another is to own your wins. I will admit that this one still makes me feel uncomfortable. Keep a running list of your contributions to the project. That might take the form of verbal statements at stand-up: “I investigated the failures of the logging calls and found it was due to a concurrency issue with the accounting system. I changed the call to be asynchronous and instituted a retry. This solved the issue completely in testing.” Or perhaps you can list them out in the sprint retro or even in your annual review. Does blowing your own horn in this way make you uncomfortable? It still does to me, but you are the only person who will advocate on your own behalf. If you worked with someone else to solve something, obviously, that person also deserves credit; but if you did it, you need to own it.
Put yourself out there. A study by Harvard and MIT, published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, suggests that women are less competitive than men. Participants were separated by gender into two groups, then asked to perform a simple mathematical equation. They were offered compensation in either a non-competitive, piece-rate fashion, or in a competitive tournament incentive scheme. Men were two times as likely as women to select the competitive tournament compensation scheme for their task. Despite changing the level of performance or capability of participants, women remained 38 percent less likely than men to select the competitive option.
“This gender gap in tournament entry is not explained by performance, and factors such as risk and feedback aversion only play a negligible role. Instead, the tournament-entry gap is driven by men being more overconfident and by gender differences in preferences for performing in a competition.” — source
Did you notice the part about men being overconfident? That is not to say that your coworkers might claim to have skills that they don’t posses. This is, however, a comforting thing to remind yourself the next time you volunteer to take on a challenging new project. You have likely read similar studies about how men will apply to jobs where they only have 60% of the required skills but women only apply to jobs where they posses 100% of those skills. Think about how this might also apply to taking on work in your current job. Volunteer to take the dev lead on a new project! Do not assume that you have to already understand 100% of the problem in order to solve it. If that were true, no one would ever learn anything!
Make sure everyone is heard. Are women capable of making those same sexist sub-conscious assumptions as men? Absolutely. We all live in the same stereotype enforcing culture. Every single one of us has a responsibility to make things better. Read over your meeting transcripts and ask yourself:
- Was someone spoken over?
- Were someone’s contributions ignored? If so, why?
- Was work distributed in a way that fairly respected everyone’s skills and position? (i.e. did someone ask the most junior female dev to bring in donuts next time?)
Although there is a good chance that I won’t be in the workplace 25 years from now, my/your/our children will. Those fresh-faced new college grads you work with will still be in the work place. Will we again look back to see little to no growth in gender equity in software development? All we can do is try to level the playing field. HireMoreWomeninTech.com has a slew of ideas for both hiring and retaining women in tech and is a great place to start.
I would love to know your thoughts and ideas on this subject. Please drop me a line in the comments!
