Photo by Tom Fisk.
I’m over it
“Are you ok? You look like you’re over it.”
I looked up. My outside face was wearing my inside exhaustion. I find IWD incredibly triggering, I answer. So no, I guess I’m not really ok. And yes, I am for sure over it. I find everything about this week hard and stressful and not at all celebratory.
My Twitter mentions are full of wonderful, well-meaning women spamming other wonderful and well-meaning women in a giant and never-ending thread. And then also crowding my mentions are the men’s rights activists who are concerned that me being on a Canadian Women in Tech list somehow takes something away from them and their ability to also be in tech. Though I’m not quite sure how because I long ago muted the threads.
I wrote one (very gentle) line about my lived experience at an organization where I used to work and had the company’s D&I team descend from the Twitter ceiling to tell me that my experience either wasn’t valid or wasn’t relevant because things are so much better now. If your D&I team exists to silence the voices of women who used to work at your company and protect the abusers who still work there, well, I’m pretty sure you’re doing it wrong.
A good friend said “I have an IWD hangover.” She is one of the most tireless champions of women I know. But the pressure and the weight and the attention of having every conference, every press piece, every social media shout-out, and every corporate “everything is ok, nothing to see here” parade all on the same day…well, it’s a lot, y’all.
Looking to do something meaningful for the women in your life around IWD? Spread out your energy, advocacy, and activism to the other 364 days of the year. <3
— Melissa & Johnathan
What Melissa’s reading
Too Offensive for Burning Man?
We’ve talked before about my open tab problem. And nothing exacerbates too many tabs across multiple browsers like a multi-part series about inclusion, values, and community. It’s like Melissa catnip.
Caveat Magister has three posts up and a fourth one pending on controversial (acidic) art at Burning Man. The piece covers not only the 10 Principles, but the difficulty of championing all of them equally at the same time. The posts focus on Radical Inclusion (a place where all are welcome) and Radical Self-Expression (all are free to express themselves).
The author writes:
“We need all 10, even when they conflict, especially when they conflict, if Burning Man is going to happen.”
We talk about this shit all the time in our day jobs. That there are no universally good values. How if you actually intend to abide by them, all values are double-edged. If you have a value around winning, you take fewer risks. If you have a around value moving fast and breaking things, well, you’re gonna crack some muthafukking democracy. Or something.
As leaders, we hold outsized influence within our organizations. And it means that when we have people act in ways that are out of step with those values, it often falls to us to find a path forward. The Burning Man series is an unvarnished look at a community trying to find their path forward.
It made me think of a really great piece Ellen K. Pao wrote last year about getting ahead of issues before it’s a crisis, and the importance of living your values, especially when it’s hard. ICYMI.
Whose corporate email Johnathan’s reading
I assume you’ve heard the good news. As of March 5, 2019, Goldman Sachs is officially business casual.
Sooooort of.
This is a heck of an email, David, John, and Stephen. It’s a window into an organization that, even relative to other wall street firms, tends to hoard data and internal information. Goldman was an investor at my last startup and I still didn’t get much out of them. Anyhow, it’s an interesting case study. If you haven’t read it you should. It’s short, I can wait.
There are two warring forces here. Do you see them?
On one side is the pressure to modernize, to give more autonomy to their employees, and to allow them to exercise any independent judgement at all. It’s hard to treat “you are allowed to dress yourself” as a great stride in employee autonomy in 2019, but then again this is Goldman Sachs, of the Walter Sachs pajama zinger.
On the other side is the subtle refusal to actually do any of that. “…we trust you will consistently exercise good judgment in this regard. All of us know what is and is not appropriate for the workplace.” Does it sound like trust, to you? Did it sound like trust when you wrote it?
Modernizing workplace expectations is a fine thing. But this doesn’t modernize the expectation, it obscures it. At least a formal dress code is clear. Now we have to guess. Is this a case where I’m using my judgement, or is this a case where “All of us know”? If I dress casually to suit my client, but Jeremy on my floor doesn’t like me, does he get to complain about it? Do I get in trouble? I hate Jeremy.
Who’s taking bets on whether the flexibility of this dress code reads differently for men in the firm than for women? Or for people of colour?
Here’s the thing: implicit systems invite bias. Sometimes that’s deliberate – CTOs are often asked to make a technical call without a robust decision framework, for instance. Daniel Kahneman wrote a whole book about it. Sometimes it’s the right call.
But when you mix an implicit system with a power imbalance, you build nightmares. “Culture fit” interviews, flat org structures, ad hoc salary adjustments, secret-decoder-ring dress codes — this shit is a damned mess every single time. And it won’t be David, John, or Stephen that gets stung by it.
