It’s been a while since I wrote about women in tech, but I attended the Data + Women DC Inaugural Event last night, hosted by CHIEF (check out their blog for their monthly events) and was really inspired by what I saw and heard. In some ways the format was like all other meetups, networking followed by a program, but this group did something a little bit different by splitting into smaller groups for more intimate discussions. It was definitely easier to get to know people, and as one person in my group said “maybe all meetups need to treat each event like it’s an inaugural one, and give everyone a smaller forum to be heard.” I tend to agree.

Unfortunately, or given the aforementioned feedback, fortunately, I was coming from another appointment so missed the networking. I caught part of the panel discussion and then all of the small group discussion. We hit on quite a few pieces of advice or considerations that I wanted to share.

Brag!

One of the most critical points made in response to the question about what you and/or your company can do to help advance women was about bragging. Often we are uncomfortable with other people bragging about our work, especially if it’s unexpected. It’s important to promote the work you do, and if you’re not comfortable doing that, then maybe having your friends and colleagues do it for you, will help make it more comfortable. One participant said she was going to take that recommendation back to her corporate lean in circle.

Emotion & Passion

We definitely touched on not allowing your emotions get in the way of your passion (or lack their of). Several participants shared their experience creating a goal to accomplish X to prove you could, then realizing part of the way that you didn’t want/like this. In the same vane, if something isn’t working for you in your current role or with your current company, it’s within your right to fix it. And if your company isn’t willing it work with you, then it’s time to fulfill that somewhere else.

Confidence & Competence

We had a fairly extensive conversation about women’s confidence & perceived competence. There have been many studies that show men interview for potential (what they believe they can do) and women interview for performance (what they know they can do). While the overall consensus was that we wanted to be true to who were are, and what are capabilities are, but still acknowledge what you can do. Some discussion occurred around how frustrating it is to work with people who say “they can do everything”, but in reality can only do some portion of it. This conversation brought to mind the differences I see in male and female developers. Many male developers I know will say they have experience in language a, b, c and therefore have learned the programming methodologies and frameworks and feel they can do languages d, e and f. Female developers that I know tend to put more weight on what they have done (i.e. language a, b, c). I hope female developers will become comfortable enough to take the same stance as men, extrapolating from their experiences to speculate what they can do.

Inherent Bias in Open Source and Software Language Naming

Our group shared some interesting experiences with the open source apps and software language naming conventions. One participant was recently using an app and came across very male gendered language in the examples and documentation. In pushing the issue on social media, she was able to get some changes made, but no clear alternatives to the problem. Another participant introduced the topic of software languages named for females tend to use very comfortable, personal first names (Ada, Ruby, Julia). That’s rather interesting when you apply the aggressive “wrangling”, “manipulating” verbs towards it.  I can’t say that I had observed either of these first hand. I wonder if I just don’t notice.

I had a great time connecting with my small group. I hope I represented our conversation well. And I hope to see everyone again.