My Grace Hopper Experience - 2015

It was an awesome experience to attend the opening Key Note on Wednesday.  Amazing to see 12,000 women (and a smattering of men) gather in the huge auditorium at the the George R. Brown Convention Center.  As Telle Whitney said in her opening speech : “Welcome men, now you know how we feel”.  And this rang true as one big take away from the event. I felt awkward.  Not because I wasn’t welcomed or felt ill will from anyone, but because I was a minority.  I felt out of place. 

For example after the keynote I wandered upstairs and stood in a long line to enter a large room, not really sure where I was going.  I entered the student opportunity lab, which was a large hall with a 100 round tables arranged in rows. At each table were 15 seats and there was a topic under discussion, such as “How to prepare your resume” or “How to find the best Internship” or “Doing well on the technical interview”.  Since I had arrived late all the tables were full, there was no where to sit and I wandered around awkwardly.  I felt a bit like an outsider, first due to my age and secondly because I was one of 3 men in the room out of 4-500 women and there was no place at the table.  I felt like this was an important perspective to gain that is perhaps how many women in technology feel when they are the only woman on the team.  When your in the majority I think its far too easy to take for granted your situation and to not remember how the minority feels.

Similarly I had a bit of awkward experience attempting to use the bathroom in the convention center.  As you might expect in there was a very long line for the women's restroom.  It went on for more than 30 feet down the hallway, in fact I couldn’t even see the entrance to the men’s restroom due to the long line, so I went into the exit of the men's room.  To my surprise it was full of women, so I turned around and walked back out.  Another male co-worker was actually in the men’s restroom at the convention, he was in a stall.  Gradually it got louder in the restroom and when he exited the stall that it had been changed to a women’s bathroom while he was inside.  He had a panic attack that he had wandered into the wrong room, until he saw the urinals. Outside the restroom he found the male symbol had been covered with a post-it note with a female symbol.  A powerful way to drive home the fact that we were in the minority, which was understandable given where we were.  I also think this an interesting example of how the majority has the tendency to forget the needs of the minority. The irony that the roles were reversed was not lost on me.

I was also interested to observe the presentations given by other men at Grace Hopper.  The opening Key Note by the president of ACM was staid lifeless and took the energy out of the room (though Hilary Mason’s follow up Key Note talk made up for it, she was awesome and gave a great talk).  I was super surprised to see GoDaddy’s CEO Blake Irving make a key note presentation on Wednesday.  If you have any association with GoDaddy its the sexist exploitive commercials they used to sell domain hosting.  Blake was very upfront in addressing in his first slide that everyone was probably asking “What are you doing here?”.  But Blake went on to talk about very opening about the tech team at GoDaddy, was super transparent on their ratio and how he had changed the culture so that the women of GoDaddy were the women employees and the focus of their marketing was how they helped customers. Pretty impressive.

In addition to a couple of tech talks I attended, I think the most enlightening where the discussions that focused on diversity and organizational issues.  I attended a talk by researcher Brian Nosek on implicit cognitive associations that exist in the brain, they are used as short cuts to process/interpret/act/react to the complex environment around us.  For example he showed the power of perception on “reality” with the McGurk Effect based on the input of sound only, visual only, or sound and visual together.   Or how once a brain has made a visual association (which animal do you see?) that it becomes a short cut path, that you have a hard time unseeing the first perceived animal and it requires real effort to unsee the first association and see the other association.  Brian then went on to demonstrate the unconscious associations that much of society has regarding different genders.  The simplest set of associations male = ugly, strong, mean versus women = pretty, kind, nice.  Brian demonstrated this by showing the millisecond response from the audience to identify which gender was associated with adjective, the quicker the response the more evidence for a hardwired fast wired association.   These associations carry over into how we hire and reward individuals in the computing industry, and he convincingly and persuasively argued that these favor men, and create an environment that is more accepting, comfortable and rewarding to men.  

These associations and unconscious bias don’t make you sexist per se but they do make you susceptible to unconscious bias.  Combine the implicit cognitive associations with a majority position and there are some fairly large reasons for the gender gap.  Being aware of these unconscious biases is part of what I feel makes it so important to put extra and additional effort in actively increasing diversity.  Some additional quotes I jotted down in presentations : 

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