Let's Talk About the Elephant
I'm just minding my own business, focusing on fixing a bug before tomorrow's release. Suddenly some guy appears beside me. An engineer from another team.
"Since Matt is not here, I need your help with an urgent problem," he begins.
It's obvious that he'd rather talk to Matt. But Matt is on vacation, so he has no choice but to talk to me.
I listen to his problems and tell him what to do. He is not convinced and begins arguing. Another colleague overhears us and tells him the same thing. This time, he thanks the guy and walks off without a word to me.
It's not the first time I get the brush off from casual colleagues outside my team, and it won't be the last. If you're a woman in a predominantly male workforce, you are used to being contradicted, snubbed, and ignored. It is the unspoken modus operandi of most large tech firms.
In recent years, due to various HR policies, outright prejudices have mostly been made taboo. They are seldom verbalized, but are expressed just the same. You know without a shadow of a doubt when a slight has just occurred, whether it's a sneer, a smug remark, a cold handshake, or the way a person stands angled away from you. It's passive aggressiveness acted out in today's politically correct, HR-sanitized, work environment. People are more careful about what they say in public, but nobody is changing his mind, attitude, or behavior. It will continue to sting each time somebody cuts you off without so much as a nod to your comment or a glance in your direction. Complain to someone, and it will only reenforce the belief that you are too weak to thrive in their world.
This begs the question: what with all the efforts and money thrown at promoting gender equality and inclusiveness in the workplace, and with these being touted as core company values so that it's sloganized and exploited in giant posters and made into training courses, why is it that we continue to hire brash and mannerless people who behave badly towards women? Why do we never screen potential employees based on their match with company values and cultural fit? Why do we hire people only for their talent and then hope that somehow they will fall in line?
Conventional wisdom tells us we can't get into a relationship with the hope of changing the other person into someone we want him or her to be. It just doesn't work. When you marry someone, you marry his background, education, values, and biases. Whether you like it or not, it's all part of the package. It would be extremely naive to think that you can re-educate your husband or wife into a better human being because you are more "enlightened" and can somehow influence him or her through osmosis or superior rhetoric.
Sadly, that is what companies do. They eagerly scoop up the talents in the industry, ignoring their attitudes, biases and values, then afterwards hope to train these headstrong and self-satisfied individuals into nicer people.
It seems pretty obvious that what we need is to screen people who are psychologically or culturally ill-suited for a company. The fact is, a person's biases can be easily assessed. The guys I encounter wear their distain for female coworkers on their sleeves. For many, these attitudes spring from deeply rooted cultural backgrounds. For some others, these men just never outgrew their parochial, dysfunctional world views. Whatever the cause, the prejudices and the associated behavior cannot be squashed or eradicated with a couple of insipid slogans and training videos. They will continue to rear their ugly heads in the everyday interactions with peers and customers, direct reports and superiors, hurting people, impeding collaboration, and wrecking morale.
If companies are serious about ensuring gender equality and inclusivity, they need to stop hiring people who can't respect women or treat them as equals. They need to stop putting up posters and start putting their money where their mouth is. Maybe then, we may see women truly accepted, respected, and treated as equals in the workplace. Maybe then, feminism will be a thing of the past because it is no longer needed, and inclusivity as a company value will be abandoned and forgotten like transparency projectors and xerox machines. As a society, we've come a long way in terms of technological advances in recent history, but when it comes to social and anthropological progress, more often than not, we take one step forward only to take many steps back or sideways.
But I haven't given up hope. Engineers are by nature optimists. Maybe we can finally engineer ourselves out of this quandary, if we ever set our minds to it.
"Since Matt is not here, I need your help with an urgent problem," he begins.
It's obvious that he'd rather talk to Matt. But Matt is on vacation, so he has no choice but to talk to me.
I listen to his problems and tell him what to do. He is not convinced and begins arguing. Another colleague overhears us and tells him the same thing. This time, he thanks the guy and walks off without a word to me.
It's not the first time I get the brush off from casual colleagues outside my team, and it won't be the last. If you're a woman in a predominantly male workforce, you are used to being contradicted, snubbed, and ignored. It is the unspoken modus operandi of most large tech firms.
In recent years, due to various HR policies, outright prejudices have mostly been made taboo. They are seldom verbalized, but are expressed just the same. You know without a shadow of a doubt when a slight has just occurred, whether it's a sneer, a smug remark, a cold handshake, or the way a person stands angled away from you. It's passive aggressiveness acted out in today's politically correct, HR-sanitized, work environment. People are more careful about what they say in public, but nobody is changing his mind, attitude, or behavior. It will continue to sting each time somebody cuts you off without so much as a nod to your comment or a glance in your direction. Complain to someone, and it will only reenforce the belief that you are too weak to thrive in their world.
This begs the question: what with all the efforts and money thrown at promoting gender equality and inclusiveness in the workplace, and with these being touted as core company values so that it's sloganized and exploited in giant posters and made into training courses, why is it that we continue to hire brash and mannerless people who behave badly towards women? Why do we never screen potential employees based on their match with company values and cultural fit? Why do we hire people only for their talent and then hope that somehow they will fall in line?
Conventional wisdom tells us we can't get into a relationship with the hope of changing the other person into someone we want him or her to be. It just doesn't work. When you marry someone, you marry his background, education, values, and biases. Whether you like it or not, it's all part of the package. It would be extremely naive to think that you can re-educate your husband or wife into a better human being because you are more "enlightened" and can somehow influence him or her through osmosis or superior rhetoric.
Sadly, that is what companies do. They eagerly scoop up the talents in the industry, ignoring their attitudes, biases and values, then afterwards hope to train these headstrong and self-satisfied individuals into nicer people.
It seems pretty obvious that what we need is to screen people who are psychologically or culturally ill-suited for a company. The fact is, a person's biases can be easily assessed. The guys I encounter wear their distain for female coworkers on their sleeves. For many, these attitudes spring from deeply rooted cultural backgrounds. For some others, these men just never outgrew their parochial, dysfunctional world views. Whatever the cause, the prejudices and the associated behavior cannot be squashed or eradicated with a couple of insipid slogans and training videos. They will continue to rear their ugly heads in the everyday interactions with peers and customers, direct reports and superiors, hurting people, impeding collaboration, and wrecking morale.
If companies are serious about ensuring gender equality and inclusivity, they need to stop hiring people who can't respect women or treat them as equals. They need to stop putting up posters and start putting their money where their mouth is. Maybe then, we may see women truly accepted, respected, and treated as equals in the workplace. Maybe then, feminism will be a thing of the past because it is no longer needed, and inclusivity as a company value will be abandoned and forgotten like transparency projectors and xerox machines. As a society, we've come a long way in terms of technological advances in recent history, but when it comes to social and anthropological progress, more often than not, we take one step forward only to take many steps back or sideways.
But I haven't given up hope. Engineers are by nature optimists. Maybe we can finally engineer ourselves out of this quandary, if we ever set our minds to it.
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