How do you begin to open a discussion on these topics with people who not only lack the necessary education to talk about them accurately, but already have a disdain for words like "feminism" and "privilege"?
You don't. You leave that discussion and have it elsewhere. I don't know about you, but the most feminist response to the alleged Github debacle would be for a woman to go out and start her own company with the culture she wants to see in the world.
There are a lack of women engineers out there, but if the issues we're discussing here are so widespread and destructive, why do we not see more female engineers leaving these misogynistic cultures in droves to start companies together?
Early on in my career I worked at one of the largest banks in the world and sought to promote changes for the better within the bank. After 6 months, I succeeded in getting that behemoth of an organization to move maybe a hundredth of a degree. For all intents and purposes, it was a pyrrhic victory at best. The amount of effort for so little payoff led me to the conclusion that if you want to see the changes you want, then you need to leave that system and head elsewhere, where you can actually have an impact.
Once you've built an organization where you are at the top, you then have the experience to determine how much of what you experienced in prior organizations was actually discrimination and how much was the result of a manager/subordinate relationships. I would genuinely love to hear the opinions of women who have already gone down this route since their voice is conspicuously absent in this discussion.
Comments
How do you begin to open a discussion on these topics with people who not only lack the necessary education to talk about them accurately, but already have a disdain for words like "feminism" and "privilege"?
You don't. You leave that discussion and have it elsewhere. I don't know about you, but the most feminist response to the alleged Github debacle would be for a woman to go out and start her own company with the culture she wants to see in the world.
There are a lack of women engineers out there, but if the issues we're discussing here are so widespread and destructive, why do we not see more female engineers leaving these misogynistic cultures in droves to start companies together?
Early on in my career I worked at one of the largest banks in the world and sought to promote changes for the better within the bank. After 6 months, I succeeded in getting that behemoth of an organization to move maybe a hundredth of a degree. For all intents and purposes, it was a pyrrhic victory at best. The amount of effort for so little payoff led me to the conclusion that if you want to see the changes you want, then you need to leave that system and head elsewhere, where you can actually have an impact.
Once you've built an organization where you are at the top, you then have the experience to determine how much of what you experienced in prior organizations was actually discrimination and how much was the result of a manager/subordinate relationships. I would genuinely love to hear the opinions of women who have already gone down this route since their voice is conspicuously absent in this discussion.
except that women starting companies also have an uphill struggle when it comes to interacting with the larger ecosystem.