So much discussion around the gendergap in technology focuses on women and what they can do to solve theproblem: negotiate harder, be more assertive, talk a bigger game. But beingcockier isn’t enough to grow women’s 11 percent share of the engineeringpopulation to 50 percent. The drivers of inequality are systematic,institutionalized, and far bigger than just women’s attitudes. Why, then, dowomen shoulder the burden of making change?
The burden should be on the people who have the power to level the playingfield: leaders in business and technology. I realize demanding change ofleaders sounds more than a little anti-establishment, so rather than talkabout it, I want to highlight some examples that show how top-down changedoesn’t have to be radical to be meaningful. The following cases illustratewhat it looks like when leadership recognizes that they, not theirstaff, are responsible for correcting gender- and pay-imbalances in theircompanies.
Buffer
The people behind Buffer, asocial media platform, noticed that women made up less than two percent of their candidate pool.Unsure where the problem was, they reached out to Hackbright Academy, anengineering fellowship for women. Hackbright saw something Buffer missed: thegendered connotations of the word “hacker.”
Buffer used the word “hacker” intheir job titles to refer to engineering positions, e.g., front-endhacker, iOS hacker, etc. They opted for the word because “hackers are justpeople who work well and fast,” but the people at Hackbright pointed out theword can be difficult to identify with, especially for women. When Bufferdropped the “hacker” title in favor of a more inclusive “developer” they saw animprovement in the gender balance of their applicant pool.
Etsy
When Marc Hedlund, head ofengineering at Etsy, found himself with only three women engineers out of a staff of 97,he connected with the Recurse Center, the host of a three-month longprogramming retreat for both new and seasoned coders. Etsy made a dealwith Recurse: If they could achieve gender balance in their participant groups,Etsy would provide them with more space to increase the program size, and theywould pledge 10 grants to support women students.
Despite having graduated only twowomen students in its three years of operation, Recurse agreed. Theirpartnership with Etsy helped build their first gender-balanced class, with23 women and 28 men. Etsy then, having created a pool of engineers,hired five of its women graduates. Thanks in large part to their work withRecurse, Etsy grew its population of women from three percent to 14 percent ofthe staff in just one year.
Study after study shows that salarynegotiation doesn’t reward women the same way it rewards men: Women areless likely to negotiate in the first place. When they do, they’re morelikely than their male counterparts to be perceived as pushy and aggressive.
In response to this inequity, EllenPao, interim CEO of Reddit, recently eliminated salary negotiations for thecompany. “Men negotiate harder than women do, and sometimes women get penalizedwhen they do negotiate,” Pao explained. “We come up with an offer that wethink is fair: We aren’t going to reward people who are better negotiators withmore compensation.”
Shiftingthe blame
Buffer, Etsy, and Reddit made smallchanges to their organizations: a name change, an inexpensive partnership, apolicy tweak. But these small efforts create real, measurable change.
My alma mater, anengineering-focused university with a student population of only 30 percentwomen, offers workshops for women on how to negotiate theirsalaries more effectively. The rationale is that if women want to be paidthe same as their male colleagues, they needed additional training.
The sameuniversity also recently celebrated National Women’s Day by handingout sewing kits to its women students.
We wouldn’t have to go out of our way to developself-confidence if universities would stop giving us sewing kits, if companieswould stop describing our jobs with words we don’t identify with, if ouremployers would eliminate policies and practices that blatantly favor men. Weshouldn’t have to adapt to a broken system. The system needs to change, andleaders are the ones to make it happen.
