Last night I read Lighten Up, a blog post by a woman in tech, talking about how all the tiny insults build up, and how being told to “lighten up” is the inevitable result of her daring to complain.
This morning I woke to a twitterstorm of controversy around another woman in tech who spoke up, publicly and vociferously, about a company’s sexism, only to have her complaint deflected and her livelihood threatened.
What stands out to me about these incidents isn’t that Katie and Shanley experienced sexism in a predominantly male environment. Frankly, at 37 years old, I’m no longer surprised by incidents like these. What I found remarkably consistent in both these narratives is that once the straw broke the camel’s back, a woman snapped back, and was slapped down for it.
As Katie points out, a man only sees his one flip comment in a vacuum. What he doesn’t see is the constant daily barrage of messages that we are worth less than men. That we don’t matter except as sex objects. That we don’t deserve respect.
Even more than women who work in gender-balanced fields - or even women-dominated fields - I believe women in tech are subjected to much more of this environmental sexism simply because of the fact that we are minorities. The men commenting on Katie’s blog and the Hacker News post acknowledge that they’re simply not accustomed to dealing with women and aren’t sure how to behave respectfully.
Reading these accounts, I reflected on how I often bottle up my feelings in an attempt to make interactions with others easier, but then let frustrations build up to a point where I end up expressing them out of proportion to the particular stimulus.
What if women in tech had a safe space, virtually or physically, to vent their frustrations and share experiences with other women in tech, without the risk of alienating our male colleagues? Would we feel more confident that our experiences were valid? Would we be able to develop better tools to combat this subtle sexism that don’t jeopardize our careers? Would we feel empowered to object to the daily insults in a more calm and timely fashion?
Single-sex education results in better student outcomes. Maybe having a single-sex networking space would result in better outcomes for women who are tired of working in a sausage fest.