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A version of this essay was originally published at Tech.pinions, a website dedicated to informed opinions, insight and perspective on the tech industry.
I’ve been thinking about writing something about women in tech and what we have been witnessing over the past few months, but I had resisted thus far. Last week, however, when I was a guest on the Download podcast on Relay FM, I was asked my opinion about the many stories we have read in the press concerning childish CEO behavior and continued allegations of sexual harassment, from Uber to 500 Startups, and I could no longer shy away. After all, I am in tech, I am a woman and I have an opinion on the topic.
We expect more from men in tech
Women face discrimination, chauvinism and harassment in pretty much any business they’re in. For some reason, however, I think the disbelief around some of the stories that have emerged in tech comes from assuming that men in tech would be different, evolved, better. Better than the men who run Wall Street, and better than the men on Capitol Hill. That hope is buoyed by the fact that men in tech are by and large well-educated and well-traveled — they are entrusted with building our future. Men in tech are also by and large white and entitled, and often have poor social skills when it comes to women. Of course, there are exceptions, but they are, alas, exceptions.
You start to believe it is you, not them
I’ve been a tech analyst for 17 years, and while I have seen more women working in tech since the beginning, I still get excited when there is a line for the ladies’ bathroom at a tech conference. I still pay attention to how long it takes for a company to put a woman onstage at those tech conferences. And while it seems that all the big corporations have increased the number of women onstage, if you pay attention, you notice that most of those women onstage are performing demos and they are not upper management.
When I got pregnant with my daughter, female and male colleagues alike told me that my priorities would change and I would not work as hard. I was expecting this from my male colleagues, but it was disappointing to hear from my fellow female colleagues that it was expected that I would want to do less. The implication, of course, if I did not feel that way, was that I was a bad mother.
On many occasions, I was told I was “emotional”; I was asked if it was “that time of the month”; I was told to “grow a pair.” In meetings, I have been interrupted and talked over by endless male colleagues, mistaken for my colleague’s secretary, and outright ignored after making the mistake of serving coffee to guests at a meeting. At the outset of the smartphone market, I was handed pink phones with a lipstick mirror. I’d love to ask Walt Mossberg if he ever reviewed one of those! After complimenting an actor’s launch of a tech product on Twitter, I was told I was “throwing my knickers” at him. I have been the token woman on tech panels, and I was invited as a guest on a radio show because “the audience responds better to women talking tech.” And the list goes on.
Things like this happen all the time to many women. They happen so often that you start to think it is the norm, or that you are reading it wrong and taking it personally. Whether you think it is wrong or not becomes irrelevant, though, when you consider how hard you worked to get to where you are, and how much further you want to go. So you ignore it, you smile, you move on. You do what Irish reporter Caitriona Perry did in the Oval Office a few weeks ago.
Avoiding Discrimination 3.0
If things have not changed up to now, why is it important that they do? Why does it matter so much that men in tech must understand when enough is enough? Because what is going to happen when everybody in the room looks alike and behaves the same way? Of course, this applies to gender as well as race, religion and politics.
We are at a time when we are training machines to think like us. What a scary thought when it comes to how we think about women in business. What will happen when machines consider physical and psychological traits based on the beliefs that dominate society today? What if men who claim they didn’t know that it’s not normal to make advances in work situations train computers to think it is normal too?
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Will women be negated from roles a priori based on the belief that “it’s much more likely to be more talking” if too many women are part of the board? Are we really building a better society if we move from paying a woman by the hour for sexual favors to buying an AI-enabled doll that will respond to its master just the way a male engineer has designed it? What will happen if self-driving cars are taught that a woman is more dispensable than a man when it comes to life-and-death situations?
We can rejoice at having female emojis representing more professions, and we should. We should continue to foster STEM among female students, but we should also know that just because they can do the job it does not mean they will be given the opportunity to do it. Let’s lean on the strong female role models we have. Let’s be supportive. Let’s have each other’s back.
A smart woman said recently that we should not just be happy to be in the room where it happens. We should be sitting at the table and make it happen. So let’s do that, let’s stop thinking that it must be us, not them; let’s stop thinking that it’s normal; and let’s get a seat at the table.
Carolina Milanesi is a principal analyst at Creative Strategies Inc. She focuses on consumer tech across the board; from hardware to services she analyzes today to help predict and shape tomorrow. In her prior role as chief of research at Kantar Worldpanel ComTech, Milanesi drove thought leadership research; before that, she spent 14 years at Gartner, most recently as VP of consumer devices research and agenda manager. Reach her at @caro_milanesi.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
