Exactly. There are a ton of women who had to leave tech when they had kids. How do we support women who are trying to come back into the industry when their kids are a little older and they’re ready to make that transition? What resources can we provide?
It’s frustrating to have to face this problem, because it’s very specific to women. In general, women are still expected to fill certain roles in the home and be a parent in a way that men aren’t.I’d imagine these types of gendered exclusions happen early in the hiring process. Like if someone has gaps in their résumé because they were raising a kid, it’s counted against them.
Yes. Not just from the perspective of whether they’ll get the job, but also how much they should be paid. Because people assume that if you’re out of the industry for a few months, you’re behind on things. There’s a belief that the technology is moving so fast that if you fail to keep up with it even for a moment, you’ll no longer have the relevant qualifications. Women already face a huge pay gap in tech, and this sort of thing just exacerbates the problem.
My first boss at my first job, the one I was telling you about, once made a comment along these lines that I will never forget. He said that women should be paid less when they take time off to have a baby. Because if they’re out of the workforce for a month or two, they’ll be less valuable when they come back. Therefore their pay should be docked.
That’s a surprisingly pervasive attitude among men in tech. They think women who are taking maternity leave are doing it for fun or something. They think we’re hav- ing a vacation. So why should we make as much money as men?
The Conversations Are LouderIn addition to having more remote-friendly policies, what are the other kinds of things you think tech companies could do to reduce gender inequality?
Put in place better programs to train their managers. Managers have an enormous amount of power. As I’ve moved into a leadership role myself, I see how little training there is. I hire people, I promote people, I give them raises, I sponsor them, I coach them—and I do all of this with no real training. There’s nothing preventing me from imparting my own biases. And that’s a terrifying thing to see from the inside.It seems like one common career path in tech is that if you do well as an individual contributor, you move into management. But just because someone is a good software engineer doesn’t mean they’ll be a good manager.
Yeah, it’s a totally different set of skills. But there isn’t much agreement on what those skills even are. For most people, it’s a complete black box.
When I moved into a leadership role, I joined Slack communities where managers give one another advice. Some of the things they say are pretty wild. The women and nonbinary folks had to create another private channel just for us, where we talk about how we can influence the men to not be shitty.
So, yes, we need better criteria for who we promote into management and better training to remove people’s biases, or at least be aware of them. We need to be more intentional about the kind of environment we’re trying to create, and understand the roles that individual managers play in creating that environment.Are managers in tech especially powerful? Is there something about the greater informality of tech workplaces and their “flatter” organizational hierarchies that tends to leave more decisions to managerial discretion?
Let’s say you have salary ranges for the different levels of a particular role. That’s a way to help standardize pay and reduce gender disparities. But those ranges can be as big as a hundred thousand dollars. And it’s up to the manager to place a new hire within that range.
So, all the time, I see men who are hired in at higher rates than women with the same amount of experience. Again, it all comes down to the individual manager. Maybe that manager saw something that makes them see the woman as a little less technical. Maybe that woman wasn’t at a well-known company. So they bring her in lower because they have these biases against things that women have no control over, and which does not actually speak to the value they will bring to the organization.In recent years, we’ve seen a bigger public conversation about gender inequality in tech. There have also been actions by tech workers against gender inequality that have received media attention, such as the Google walkout in November 2018.1 What’s it like to have these conversations grow?
These conversations have been happening in back channels for a long time. Not just around women, but around any minority group in tech. If they’re not happening in back channels, they’re happening within people’s heads. We know what’s going on. We know the situation.
Now there’s this heightened scrutiny. People are calling out things for being unjust, and that’s great. But the heightened scrutiny is not necessarily productive. The media, for example, can be exhausting. There were articles written about my company a couple of years ago that I found really frustrating.Why?
Because we were having these conversations among trusted back-channel groups internally. Then all of a sudden it became a public issue and the narrative was taken away from us. The media makes you out to be victims. You become part of a bigger story about women being mistreated in tech. It’s really tiring after a while.It sounds like what you find tiring about the media attention is being made into the object, not the subject, of the story. That you’re being presented as the victim, and not as someone with autonomy and agency.
Yes, that’s exactly it.
I mean, just look at the entire situation with James Damore.2
