Article originally published January 2018
If some specialist websites are to be believed, you’d have to be a “cool” woman to thrive in the tech industry. IT Business proposed six steps to being a “cool” woman in tech while Refinery29 highlighted eight “cool” tech women, to name but a few. On the one hand, you don’t have to look cool to work in this industry and, on the other, donning this false persona is detrimental to women’s advancement.
We’re young, we’re growing up, we look at those around us and draw inspiration from them to forge our own identity. Those of you who have sisters and brothers know exactly what I’m talking about. I have an older sister and she hated it when I did her hair. In a professional context, when you work with a majority of men, you often end up taking them as models and wanting to become “like them”. No choice, they’re often the only people you can identify with!
In an article for Code Like A Girl, author Sarah Stockdale, recounted her experience. “In my early 20s, I tried the ‘cool girl who works in tech’ thing,” she wrote. When you’re early in your career and one of the only women in a startup, it’s easy to fall into this trap.”
Stockdale mentioned not needing feminism because she worked hard, laughed at inappropriate jokes on the Slack app and thought she’d never experienced discrimination at work.
This was obviously untrue.
The only solution the author found, and many other women too, is to use a coping strategy: if you don’t feel like you can be yourself, then you find a new identity. You become “one of the boys”. You adopt the attitude of the “cool girl who works in tech”, as Sarah Stockdale put it.
By wanting to belong to the “cool girl”, we distance ourselves from the “other” girls. “We’re not like them, we’re better.” That’s where judgment of other women comes in. It’s built-in misogyny. “It’s true that Julie is emotional, as are women in general!” This attitude distances the person exercising it from other women and therefore from the advantages she might have. And yet, there’s so much positive in women helping each other!
In a New York Times article, author Elissa Shevinsky recounts that “for years, all [she] wanted to do was work, code and create software. “That’s why I didn’t care about feminism,” she writes. I just wanted to build things.” She wanted to be “one of the bros,” throwing whiskey and rubbing shoulders with M.I.T. grads, and if that sometimes meant laughing yellow while her colleagues made jokes about porn.
You enter an industry, you’re passionate about it, you want to learn, grow, build things and be taken seriously by your peers. Your peers are what we often call “brogrammers”. How do you get taken seriously? You fit the mold. But how do you know when it’s okay to laugh at a dirty joke and when it’s time to put your fist on the table?
In startup culture, we work very long hours. You often spend more time with your colleagues than with your partner. Colleagues become a kind of tribe. And let’s not forget that we’re talking about a small group of people. If you raise your hand to disagree with others, you become “that girl”. You’re ostracized, pushed aside and you’re bound to end up leaving, because who wants to put themselves through that? As a reminder, this is what emerged from a study carried out on the reasons why women leave the industry. The two main reasons for their departure were the discovery of a better opportunity (33%) and the existence of an unfair working environment (32%).
Wondering how to change things? If you see a woman with that “cool girl” attitude, mentor her, formally or informally. Help her with her career and her decision-making. Empower her to achieve what she wants. If you’re a business owner, build diverse work teams and try as much as possible to have parity. As Caitlin Moran, a British journalist, says, “I can’t be what I don’t see”. We all need role models.
Why is this important? “I cannot be what I cannot see.” Girls need to see more girls. INCREASE THE LEXICON.
— Caitlin Moran (@caitlinmoran) December 3, 2014
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