A must read blogpost

I was linked to this great blogpost "To my daughter's high school programming teacher, where a tech writer writes an open letter to her daughter's teacher, explaining how that teacher failed his duty to help foster an environment that welcomes young talented people, regardless of their gender.

The comments under the blogpost are unfortunately predictable - men denying the problem etc., so don't read them, unless you want to get annoyed.

Sexism in IT, again

I'm currently at the GOTO conference in Aarhus, where I am spending a lovely time going to some great talks and meeting some great people, and I had planned on spending the evening blogging a bit about my impressions from the first couple of days at the conference.

Had.

That was until I had lunch with a couple of other people, and I heard about this incident (opens in a new window). Please go there and read the post.

As people who have been around me since I heard about this will attest, I've been pretty damn furious ever since first hearing about it, and then reading Cerian's blogpost (which was posted shortly after I heard about the episode).

I don't think I really have to explain why this incident makes me furious, but for good measure I will try to do so.

First of all, it is an incredible rude way to behave, and even if there were no other considerations, I think that unwarranted rudeness against complete strangers at a conference shouldn't happen.

But of course, it is not just the rudeness - it is the sexism that really gets me angry.

Can anyone even for a second imagine that a guy would have been addressed in that way? Yes, I am sure that there a few men who have been accused of being hired because of their looks, but it is not something people would say about a complete stranger that they had never met before, much less to that complete stranger. I mean, WTF? How can anyone think that it is OK?

Unfortunately, for women, this is a common remark, though not usually said directly to their face (though it happens all too frequently as well).

And it is not just men who makes this sort of remarks.

When we had a meetup of the bloggers/web media people before going to GOTO Aarhus, there was a woman among us who expressed her opinion that among the women studying Computer Science, there were two types:
1) The pretty ones, who got their (male) group members to do the work, and thus, couldn't code.
2) The non-pretty ones, who had to do their own work, and thus, could code.

In her mind, it was obviously not possible to be conventionally pretty, and be able to code.

I could now make some kind of argument about knowing pretty female programmers, but that would just be feeding the sexism. Rather, I'll just say that I cannot fathom why anyone would think it is acceptable to make that sort of comments, yet here there was a woman publicly stating these things. Among people she didn't know.

We seriously have a long way to go. A very long way.

Now, back to the incident. The thing that made me furious about the incident was not the fact that it happened (though that should be enough), but the fact that nobody spoke up when it happened. This is not mentioned in the blogpost about the incident, but I asked Cerian about it, and there wasn't. Or rather, one person said to her that she should ignore it, but nobody said anything to the guy about it.

The GOTO conference has an incredible good track record when it comes to not only getting female speakers, but also getting female attendees (once having to go to court for the right to give a discount to women in order to make the gender less underrepresented - a court battle they won). Yet, even at such a conference, not only does a guy feel entitled to make this sort of remarks, but nobody spoke out against him.

That shows me that the whole culture is still sexist at its core. Not that I think that the people who was there with Cerian are particularly sexist, or even that they agree with the guy, but I do think that they can't see how this sort of remarks are not only incredible hurtful towards Cerian, but also helps create an atmosphere where women, or a sub-group of women, don't feel welcome.

We, the IT sector as a whole, need to change that. Not only because it robs the sector of so much potential talent, but also because it is the decent thing to do.

So, if you see this sort of thing happening, speak up, and make clear that you don't find that sort of stuff acceptable. This is the only way to change the environment, and get rid of the sexism. We need to stop implicitly accepting this behavior by keeping quite, and instead explicitly express our disdain of it.

And it is important to note that it is extra important that we men are very active in doing this, showing our support in changing the environment.

On those words, I think I only have left to thank Cerian for speaking up, and that I hope that there will be some kind of official reaction from the GOTO conference. I know for sure that I will be following up on this issue, so expect more blogposts dealing with sexism, GOTO, and IT in general.

Reversed roles

Note: I should probably point out that in the following piece, I will follow the Danish tendency to not use peoples’ titles. For people not living in Denmark, this might seem disrespectful, and if it is perceived as such, I apologize, but the habit of not doing so is too ingrained in me, for me to start doing so now.

I was considering calling this piece “through the looking glass”, but that would have connotations of weirdness which I found inappropriate, since what I wanted to was to indicate that I had experienced the “other side” of the divide for once.

What divide you ask?

The gender divide. The gender divide in technology to be more specific.

People who have followed my other blog and twitter stream are probably aware that I am an out-and-open feminist, and that I regularly criticize my field (programming and IT consulting) for how women are marginalized, e.g. by the male dominance when speakers are picked for conferences.

This year I participated in such a conference; the GOTO conference in Aarhus, Denmark (the conference was formerly known as JAOO). Here the lineup of speakers was also heavily tilting towards men, but it is one of the conferences which actively tries to get female speakers, and they had managed to get some really great ones, including Linda Rising, Rebecca Parsons, and Telle Whitney.

Telle Whitney held a talk on women in IT, and all three of them participated in a meeting with the Ada Aarhus group, which was held after the talks on the second day of the conference.

I went to the talk, and participated in the Ada Aarhus meeting, and both of these things introduced me to the concept of being the outsider. Something which I understood, or at least thought I did, yet which I hadn’t really experienced before. I cant say I enjoyed the experience, but it was certainly enlightening, and it forced me to re-evaluate what I thought I understood on this subject.

Before going into how this happened, I want to back away a bit, and give a brief introduction to myself and that part of my background which is relevant.

First of all, as the sidebar says, I am a Danish IT consultant in my thirties. For those interested in the details, I am a .NET consultant, working mostly with large financial or public systems.

What the sidebar doesn’t mention, but which many people know, is that while I am Danish, I am also Australian. My mother was Australian, and while I grew up in Denmark, my childhood was a mixture of cultures - not only Danish and Australian, but also several others, since my childhood friends were also mostly of mixed backgrounds as well (though all with Western backgrounds).

This upbringing has left me unable to entirely relate to a typical Danish upbringing.

It is the small things that usually trips me up - the children's’ stories and songs that I haven’t heard, and the ones that I grew up with instead (would you believe that most Danish children don’t grow up with neither The Wizard of Oz nor Snugglepot and Cuddlepie?) - but it is also the inability of many to look beyond the borders, and think globally. The distrust of foreign things and multi-culturalism that people hold, thinking that anything foreign must be dangerous or less good.

This means that I am the outsider in some cases. But given that fact that I’ve grown up in Denmark not entirely so, and since I look Danish, I can always act in ways which allows me to fit in.

Going back to the woman in IT talk, Whitney talked about what companies and individuals could do to ensure women could advance in IT. A subject I feel strongly about. Yet when listening to the talk, I kept feeling that I was left out - that Whitney wasn’t talking neither to nor about me. The reason was that I am not in a position to make company decisions, and that the individuals that Whitney was talking to, about what they could do, was the women. Not the men. All the recommendations didn’t relate to me and daily life.

You know why? Because it wasn’t about me!

I knew this at an intellectual level. Yet I hadn’t realized the full impact until I experienced being left out. It bothered me more than I thought it would. My privilege kicked in, and I felt a bit of resentment at the gut level, while knowing fully well that this was how it ought to be, at the intellectual level.

If this was how I felt during a 50 minute talk, how must it not be for people who experience it day in and day out? E.g. women whose wishes and needs are ignored or LGBT people who live in a heteronormative society.

I cannot in any way pretend that I can relate to how they feel. But I can say that I understand it a little better now.

The Asa Aarhus group meeting, where both Linda Rising and Rebecca Parsons gave brilliant talks, just strengthening my understanding of this, and my realization of how little I can relate to how it would feel to experience this every day.