“.. Dr. Kieran Snyder observed 900 minutes of conversations between men and women working in the tech industry. The study found that men interrupted others twice as often as women did and were nearly three times as likely to interrupt a woman as they were a man.”
— Bustle
“Women have good reason for such caution — what I’ve described as the double bind. If they talk in ways associated with authority, they can be seen as too aggressive, and subject to the damning labels so readily applied to them. But if they don’t — if they hold back in these and other ways — they risk being underestimated.”
— Deborah-Tannen, Linguistics Professor
One of the the biggest difficulties in engineering is not the technology. It is how difficult it is to be heard and taken seriously. Even talking about this anymore feels like beating a dead horse. I have probably said a version of this at least once a month for years.
I am often in the position of teaching that which is counter-intuitive. It’s not easy to teach something that goes against dominant thought, or that inverts the usual flow of logic, even in the best of situations. But doing it while presenting feminine is almost impossible. It takes every last ounce of patience and creativity I have to prepare my audience and explain in a way that ensures I am taken both seriously and understood.
To explain a concept that is counter intuitive, you have to first create a safe environment for those who are learning. You have to make sure they don’t feel their expertise, intelligence or competence is being challenged. You need to make sure they feel secure enough to ask questions that may on the surface feel stupid. You need to do this while also making sure that your own expertise, intelligence and competence is acknowledged, which is nearly impossible if you’re part of a marginalized community. It is not possible to state my own expertise without making the vast majority feel personally challenged or feel that I am overstating my expertise.
Not long ago I dropped in on a weekly engineering meeting I only intermittently attended. There were about 15 people, a third were women. I was talked over repeatedly, to the point that the meeting chair was also ignored when he called on me to speak. Three times. It was at this point that I finally noticed — not one woman in the room had spoken the whole time. I messaged the group of women privately. None of them had spoken in this meeting for at least a month in protest. No one had even noticed.
The men were all senior engineers and I lit right into them the moment the meeting ended. To their credit, they were horrified and appalled and apologized. At least they did to me. It only occurs to me now that I never checked back in how that meeting was going forward. None of them even knew the women in the room were staging a silent protest or for how long it had been going on. I didn’t even notice until it was happening to me.
Discouragingly, while researching bias, I couldn’t find any studies on how this is affected by intersections of race, age, gender or orientation. There hasn’t been enough resources dedicated to studying how other intersections are affected, but we can probably take an educated guess how that plays out. Hint: it’s not great.
Throughout my career it has become so commonplace for me to be talked over and interrupted that I often don’t notice it myself. When I do, I have to fight to be heard. Every. Single. Time.
I’ve tried a lot of strategies:
- If I interrupt a man exactly as often as he interrupts me, it almost always makes him visibly angry.
- If I refuse to yield to interruptions, there tends to be a lot of confusion as the men interrupting me do not actually cease talking.
- If I speak exactly as often as a man in the room I am told that I am “dominating meetings” or “wasting time”.
- If I limit my speaking to only the minimum necessary, I am told I am ineffective or incompetent.
- If I apologize often I’m not “confident enough”.
- When I speak confidently I am often accused of being “arrogant” or ‘icy’.
The most frustrating issue is that even if I have pitched it exactly right, my concerns and thoughts are often dismissed only to become massive issues later and my having brought it up repeatedly is forgotten.
Sometimes it’s like shouting into a gale. My words just disappear, moments later to come out of a man’s mouth.
More than once.
More than twice.
With appalling regularity.
Not just to me. To myself and white women and POCs around me. If you don’t believe this happens, then I challenge you to take notes at your next meeting and compare. Time how long people speak and how often people are interrupted. See if anyone is repeating anyone else’s ideas. Note the different reactions to different speakers. Instead of assuming the problem lays with the speaker, take note of the audience. Write. It. Down.
It’s important to note that having an intersection of age, race, gender or orientation yourself does not make you immune. When I was in that meeting I also did not notice that none of the women were speaking. You are just as likely to fall victim to the same bias.
Falling victim to bias doesn’t make you a bad person. This is not a rolled up newspaper. You have spent a lifetime immersed in this culture.
It is not perfection that is required, it is a modicum of effort. It is the bare minimum to take a step back and look at why you are having a negative reaction when a person from an underrepresented group speaks. Not to bristle or interrupt people that don’t look like you. That’s it. It costs you nothing.
Listening is a major skill deficit in software engineering as it is, considering it is our job to critique each other’s ideas and to accept criticism. Engineering is a field of constant learning and it’s just not possible to learn from someone whilst talking over them or bristling at their every word . Learning requires listening and there is something to be learned from everyone. Every. One.
And if you are in a senior engineering role — the heart of mentoring is listening and questioning, not lecturing. Are you only mentoring people that look like you? Think about why that is.
Meeting Hygiene
It is small, but I offer this as a toolset to help enable a space where you can be actively listening. This is by no means an exhaustive list, and your mileage may vary.
- Give people speaking your full attention
- Raise your hand (virtually or in person)
- Keep a queue for speaking
- Pause at least to a count of 5 before speaking
- Take pauses while you are speaking
- Look around to see if anyone wants to speak first
- Look again — this time at the people who don’t look like you
- Watch for others reactions to see if you’ve been talking too long
- Don’t depend on the meeting chair to police you or for others to interrupt you
- Instead of repeating someone else’s point, ask them to repeat it so they retain the credit
- Allow space for quiet people to speak
Listen to others the way you would want to be listened to, with respect and admiration. Be aware of your own reactions and emotions before responding. Frankly, so many serious issues the tech world has caused could have been mitigated or even entirely avoided if all voices had been heard. These voices have always been there, we just haven’t been listening.
