Let’s Talk About the Men in Tech Problem

Take the 2–question gender bias survey: http://bit.ly/1RSQdIO

I think it was just one too many articles about how women need to stop apologizing so much, or lay off the exclamation points, or stop saying just, or do a bit more leaning in. Or maybe it was another women in tech conference or…I don’t know exactly, but I do know that I am officially done listening to this school of advice. Real talk here, the problem isn’t women, it’s men.

Back in 2008, Chris Rock was asked about Obama’s presidency and what it meant for black progress, his response is golden:

Here’s the thing. When we talk about race relations in America or racial progress, it’s all nonsense. There are no race relations. White people were crazy. Now they’re not as crazy. To say that black people have made progress would be to say they deserve what happened to them before.

How perfectly Rock calls out the one weird language trick that places the onus to solve a problem on the oppressed rather than the oppressor!

The whole nebulous issue of “women in tech” suffers from this same weird language trick. The problem of “women in tech” is an umbrella issue that includes the lack of women in STEM fields, the embarrassingly low number of female executives, and the still blatant sexism that plagues Silicon Valley. Regardless of the specific dimensions of the problem, they are all framed as “women’s issues.” And if it’s a women’s problem, then it becomes our problem to fix.

If we stick with our current methods, trying to get women to change to fit into the existing paradigm, it’s estimated to take another 100 years before we reach gender parity. This answer is not good enough.

If companies genuinely care about diversity (and I recognize I am using that term very narrowly here to describe only one factor of diversity — gender). If leaders really want more women in leadership roles then we need men to change their behaviors as well. Change will not happen because women are more empowered, or women learn to speak up, or women stop saying just, or women lean in. Change will not happen because women change, it will happen because men change. This is a men in tech problem.

Because here is the very hard truth that is overlooked in all this helpful advice to women about how to dress and talk and “get ahead” in the workplace, the system is stacked against you. While the tech industry prides itself on being a meritocracy, it fails to recognize just how terrible the human brain is at actually evaluating merit. Here’s an example.

Wordstream is a SaaS company that helps businesses get more revenue from their ad spend. Like many companies, they ask their customers for feedback on how they’re doing. Wordstream wanted to use these responses to identify their best customer service reps, but when they looked at the data, male reps consistently received higher scores than women:

The mean satisfaction score across all reps, for this time slice and segment of clients, was 3.11. Almost all the men had scores above this group average, and all the women had scores below the group average. Further, the male client service rep with the lowest score still did better on the survey than the female client service rep with the highest score.

Case closed! Objective feedback is in and men are better online marketers than women. Well..not so fast. Thankfully, Wordstream had the good sense to realize something was up. They also realized that they actually possessed truly objective performance evaluations — data. Digital marketing is rich with data, and they had it all — click-through-rates, conversion rates, Quality Scores, etc.

So they looked at that data and…women consistently outperformed their male counterparts. WTF?! So, clients were getting better results, but were less happy with their female account managers. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say this had nothing to do with how many just’s or exclamation points those female account managers were using.

It’s worth mentioning here that this biased client feedback was likely coming from both men and women. Because yes, both men and women suffer from gender bias. But I’m placing the onus to solve this problem on men for reasons other than wanting a click-bait title and harboring some hopes of inciting one of those bizarre men’s rights activists. Here’s why:

1. This has traditionally, and wrongfully, been framed as a women’s problem, so I’m using strong language in an attempt to reframe it.
2. Men are disproportionately represented at the executive level. This means the bias of a man has the power to do more damage than the bias of a woman.
3. When women do speak up about bias, they’re more likely to experience negative repercussions.

The solution

That’s really cute if you actually thought I had a solution to any of this. Sure, I’ve heard of instances where men were involved in counteracting bias, stories about policies that are put in place to adjust for bias, even trainings to make people aware of their own bias (which is awesome). There are certainly pockets of progress, but there are no good models for what it looks like when men are actively involved in helping to fix the men in tech problem.

This means we need to come up with something entirely new. We need to throw out the bad questions like “how can we empower women at work?” And we need to insist on better answers than “women need to stop saying just so much.” We need to imagine a new way of working together.

Which brings me to my modest attempt at moving toward a solution. I’d like to fuel our imagination about what it looks like when men and women are working together to solve this problem. To do this, I’m collecting stories about times people experienced someone counteracting gender bias. Responses to this project so far have already been incredibly insightful. They include:

• Men paying attention to, and pointing out, a lack of diversity in the company’s promotional materials
• A sales team that removed aggressive language (i.e., “crushing goals”, “killing it”) in an attempt to recruit more women (it worked)
• The man that found out his female colleague was suspicious about salary differences between the genders, and teamed up with her to expose the discrepancy and work with management to create a more transparent system

I’ve also got a lot of responses from women that prove the not-so-subtle forms of sexism are still very much at work, for example:

• The male boss that answered every positive client comment on his female employee’s work with, “I know! Isn’t she pretty?”
• Women being called “girls” or “kid” by their male colleagues
• Backlash for speaking up about these issues, from dealing with co-workers furious for being called out, to losing a job all together.

My hope is that these stories can be turned into something of a guide that will help all of us to be a little better at recognizing our own gender-bias, and provide men with some practical guidance of things they can do to solve the men in tech problem.

If you’d like to participate, I’d love to get your responses to this 2-question survey (men and women are welcome): http://bit.ly/1RSQdIO