This post is about why I’m no longer volunteering my EDI expertise for tech organisations.
Back in 2019 I offered to volunteer on the outreach team for a hacker event here in the UK. I’d been to this event a couple of times before, and like most tech events they struggled to attract a lot of women and people of colour. While I personally had pretty good experiences at the event and didn’t feel like it was particularly hostile, I also witnessed some incidents that highlighted how there’s still a lot of normalised sexism and racism in technology communities that people turn a blind eye to. At one point I passed a guy walking around wearing a t-shirt referencing the “make me a sandwich” meme – this guy had been walking around a busy event with literally no one calling him out on it. Another time I was sitting around with a group of men when one of them made a joke out of the blue about big black dicks, and not a single one of the other five or six guys there said anything until I told them the joke had made me super uncomfortable (and one of those other guys was a person of colour – can’t imagine what the experience was like for him).
Unlike with some other hacker events I’d been to, it wasn’t clear what unnamed-UK-event’s stance was on behaviour like this or what to do if someone was acting inappropriately. I’d recently been to the Chaos Communication Congress in Germany, and I liked that they’d made it really clear on their website what their expectations were around people’s behaviour and how you could contact their Awareness team to get help if you needed support. I thought that the UK hacker event probably had good intentions around helping people to feel more comfortable there, but maybe lacked resources as a volunteer-run organisation to put more work into putting those processes in place.
So when the next event was coming around, I reached out and asked if they needed any volunteers to help out with inclusion and diversity stuff. I was put in touch with the teams that dealt with their code of conduct (I didn’t even know that they had a CoC) and with doing outreach to under-represented communities. At this point I’d been doing PhD research for the past 3 years on how to make technology communities more gender diverse, I’d spoken to various technology organisations who had a lot of women members about how they’d managed to do that, and I’d been involved with tech communities and going to events for the past 6 years and had my own positive and negative experiences that I could draw on. I was excited about being able to apply my experience and expertise to improving this event, and I had lots of ideas about how they could become a more welcoming and comfortable space for women.
Too bad the men organising the event didn’t agree with me. Any suggestion I made for improvements was shot down, both by higher-up event organisers and by men in the code of conduct and outreach teams. Even basic changes that are the bread and butter of EDI initiatives – like making the code of conduct more visible on the event’s website, or collecting demographic data about event attendees to track whether engagement initiatives had any impact or not – were pushed back on. To add insult to injury, one of the other people they were consulting with about improving women’s engagement was a guy with a past reputation for being skeevy and hitting on women in the tech community, and whom I’d had my own negative experiences with when I was just starting out in the community and he was a much older and well-known member.
I got the impression that the two men running the event didn’t truly trust the people on their outreach or code of conduct teams to know how to make the event more inclusive, and weren’t willing to relinquish any power to them. Despite bringing together a good group of people from different under-represented communities, the organisers micromanaged these teams and always seemed to think that they knew best. They sat in the teams’ IRC channels, so there was no space available for us to talk freely amongst ourselves about our experiences at the event or in the tech world generally. It was an extremely frustrating experience, and I felt unappreciated and like I was wasting my time with an organisation that had no will to change. My involvement was cut short because COVID-19 happened and the upcoming event was cancelled – I didn’t volunteer again when they started running events after the pandemic, and the experience left such a bad taste in my mouth that I haven’t been back to the event since either.
As a postscript to this story, when they were organising their first post-COVID event two men reached out to me on Twitter less than two weeks before the event because they needed volunteers for the code of conduct team – because they were asking me if I was planning to be there, I assume they didn’t have enough people on their enforcement team to deal with any conduct issues that might come up. Kind of a scary thought so close to the event. When I replied explaining that I hadn’t really felt listened to when I’d been involved before, one of them did seem to understand my complaints and appreciated that they needed to do better. The other one commiserated with me, said he felt the same way, and that he would speak to the other male organisers about what they needed to do better – which is ironic since this was one of the men on the outreach team who’d been pushing back on my own contributions for improving women’s engagement.
The title of this post comes from a woman I spoke to as part of my PhD research. We were talking about how her hackerspace had been able to get around 40% women members – an extraordinarily high number when most hackerspaces are around 5-10% women. She was explaining that when they first started out 11 years ago there were a lot of disagreements about how to recruit more women and how to make their space a welcoming environment for them. During one of these arguments a woman had ended up breaking down in tears and saying, “If you want there to be women in the space you have to respect that women know how to do that.” The lesson, according to the woman I was talking to all of those years later: “Regardless of what anybody else says, when the women tell you that this is a thing we should do to get women in the space then you have to just believe them.” Unfortunately too many technology organisations that are run by men don’t do this, and I’d be very wary of volunteering my valuable time again for any tech org that can’t demonstrate a genuine willingness to listen to women’s experiences and actually act on our advice.
(Header image designed by Freepik.)