When I posted my dismay at the way men crashed the Grace Hopper career fair, a male coworker reached out and asked, “Why would they do that? Where is their shame?”
I replied, “The job market is weird and they are desperate. It reflects the same reason tech has been such a terrible place for women all these years. Because when men are desperate - to get a job, to make a deadline, to get ahead - they get aggressive. When women are desperate, they build communities.”
Obviously those are generalizations, and every rule has exceptions, but it’s hard to argue given the historical facts. That’s the reason GHC and SWE exist, and why what happened was so damaging to the safety we used to have in those spaces.
This aligns to the Male Allies talk I gave at the Society of Women Engineers #we23 conference. We need more women in leaderhsip and decision-making roles. We need more women in tech and engineering. We need more women in politics.
But more than anything, we need the men - who are still overwhelmingly in positions of power - to CHOOSE to start speaking the language women have known for eternity, and have the same mindset we have no choice BUT to have as underrepresented minortiies in virtually any place in which there is power or influence, so we can build safe communities rather than tear them apart.
#HeForSwE #Community #WomenInTech #swe #MaleAllies
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👉 @hannah_waddingham
Marketing & Communication Consultant I Sports Journalist Appasionate I Entrepreneur
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