Picture the scene: a typical lunch room in an office. There’s people from all teams gathered around tables, people are joining in and out of conversations as they finish their lunch or as the topic changes.

A coworker mentions that he fasts all the time. I joke to someone else at the table that I could never do that because I get “hangry” (angry because I am hungry).

My male coworker immediately says “lots of things make you angry, don’t they?”

This coworker has a history of pushing boundaries that I set, including my one hard and fast meeting rule – unless I have asked you to do so, or you are presenting at this meeting, do not bring your laptop to my meeting (or at the very least do not have it open). I have instituted this rule because in my experience, when running certain types of meeting, if people have their laptops open they will browse, work, or otherwise not pay attention, and require me to have to repeat things multiple times. It’s inefficient and disrespectful to whoever is presenting. I make this rule clear and I enforce it equally. This coworker repeatedly brought his laptop anyway, refusing to close it, only closing it halfway then peeping in through the partly open gap, etc.

Back to the lunch room, I am surprised that the coworker has decided to make such a statement in the lunch room, in front of all my colleagues, when it is actually untrue. I, knowing that I had just reminded him the other day about my laptop policy, try to brush it off with another joke like “ha, yes, I do get grumpy when people bring laptops to my meetings”.

“Lots of things make you angry, don’t they?”

And then he starts to list times he feels like I have been angry in the office.

I interrupt him to ask “are you keeping a list?!” and he says “yes”. I say “that’s actually pretty creepy” and then attempt to just start a conversation with another person.

I don’t need a rundown of times I’ve been “angry” from a man who threw a tantrum one day because I asked that developers set their Jira stories to “in progress” when they were “in progress”.

Notable is that, actually, my coworkers haven’t seen me angry at all. The one time I have been genuinely angry at a work situation, I left the office for a few minutes for a brief walk to manage the feeling. My coworkers have seen me express disappointment that a commitment wasn’t met. They have seen me gently and then more firmly enforce a policy that they agreed to and that I have made clear. They’ve even seen me make clear at the start of a meeting that any less-than-cheerful tone they may sense from me is a holdover from a previous difficult meeting and that it is not a reflection of them, and that I’ll be working to ensure it doesn’t impact their meeting. But angry? No. This man has not seen me angry.

That day he didn’t even see me angry. But I was. And I was disappointed that everyone else just sat there and let a coworker announce to the room that he kept a list of times he felt I was angry.

I am 100% certain that he would not describe these behaviours as angry if they had been exhibited by a male coworker. When women assert themselves in the professional space we are bossy, we are talking too much, we are shrill, we are angry. We are never assertive or firm or powerful. But we aren’t doing anything different. Too many people think that anything other than sitting quietly, smiling prettily, and being agreeable are the only acceptable behaviours for women in the workplace and are affronted when you do anything else.

In one of my jobs, I found myself pretty unhappy with my situation. Some of the other stories I’ve already shared had happened, I was feeling underappreciated, and passed over for things in favour for some of my male colleagues.

Things came to a head when I was told that I was expected to take on yet another product and team, and that the rest of the team would travel to onboard with the new product, but that there simply wasn’t budget to send me too. I would have to arrange my own calls with the product owner that I was taking over for, and figure it out myself.

So I took the weekend to gather my thoughts. I sat down and made a list of the things that I was unhappy with, instances where I felt like the wrong decision had been made, where I had been left out, etc. And I scheduled a meeting with my manager to discuss.

When people are this unhappy, often their managers only hear about it when they submit their resignation, but I wanted to give my manager a chance to fix things, so I sat down and told him what was going wrong, and what needed to change. The meeting elicited a number of promises that things would change, and that certain opportunities would be offered to me.

At this point, my manager could not have been more clear that I was unhappy, that I had a list of grievances, and that many of them were within his power to change. I had done the hard thing, I had laid out the problems.

It’s important that you know that this discussion happened shortly before our annual performance review cycle, where people would be offered raises and promotions based on performance. It’s also important that you know that while in this role, I never received less than an outstanding performance review. That’s not a brag, that’s literally the title of the rating I received, year after year. At the time of this conversation with my manager, despite my performance reviews and having grown my area of responsibility from one team to three, I was still on the same grade level.

It is a commonly repeated (disputed) fact that women simply don’t ask for raises and promotions, and that’s why we don’t get them. Well, performance review time came around, and I got a standard increase, and no promotion. So I asked. I asked my manager what about promotion, and pointed out that I was still on the same level and had been for 3 years.

His response: “Oh, I didn’t realise”.

After I had specifically sat down with him and outlined my feelings about my role. After I had made it clear that I wasn’t happy with the lack of support for my role and the way I was not being appreciated. He didn’t realise that I hadn’t been promoted at all in 3 years.

He didn’t realise because when he sat down to decide which employees to promote that year, I hadn’t even been on his radar.

He followed up with some indications that maybe next year he could look at it, for the next cycle, and that it would maybe possible to promote me two minor steps up the ladder (which would have been necessary for a more major promotion). I left the meeting dejected. I had asked. But been told “not possible til next year”.

A short time later, I found out that a male colleague also had not been promoted in that cycle, and had also expressed his displeasure at this.

So my manager went to HR to talk about whether or not budget and scope could be found for promotions…. for my male colleague.

My male colleague was promoted. And my manager received my resignation letter.

Women do ask. We just don’t get.

A theme of International Women’s Day 2021 is “choose to challenge”. They want to encourage people to challenge biases where they see them, to call it out. In my career, I haven’t experienced very many instances where someone called out sexism or bias. Usually I was doing the calling out, and others sat silently and let it happen.

I worked with a guy who was infamous for his long, rambling questions, and his explanations which were complex, went on too long, and somehow left you more confused than when you started. He was also infamous, at least among the few female employees, for constantly interrupting and speaking over people.

Once I was in a meeting, while acting as the product owner, and someone asked me a question. The question specifically related to product, there was no reason for anyone else to answer.

As usual, I got about two words into my sentence, and Mr. Interrupter decided it was his time to shine. This time, however, I had had enough. I interrupted him back, stopping my explanation to tell him that I was speaking, and that it was a product question directed to me, and that if he wanted to add something he should at least have the decency to let me finish speaking first.

No one in the meeting said a word.

I finished my answer to my other colleague. Part way through, Mr. Interrupter just got up and left the room without a word.

I wasn’t rude, I wasn’t angry, I just stood up for myself. I chose to challenge his constant interruptions of me, and I did so without any backup from any of the other men in the room. And what still stings to this day is that afterwards, I felt not empowered, but sorry.

Because no one backed me up, I worried for hours that I had done something wrong, and every bit of social conditioning in me told me I should apologise to this interrupting guy. I challenged, and in the end I felt bad and alone.

I didn’t apologise. I wasn’t wrong. He shouldn’t have kept interrupting me.

Something I was quite proud of at one time in my career is an initiative I was involved in to encourage young girls to stay in science and technology. It was based on a program that had been run in a US branch, but I spearheaded it in Ireland. I developed a whole curriculum for it, including different printable resources for teams to use, learning goals for the day, different demonstrations that could be run, etc. I was proud of the “behind the scenes” parts too – I ran training courses so that other locations could run the events, and when I scheduled volunteers to run the events, I made sure that it was predominantly women who taught the girls, and shared their work experiences. I also made sure that there were a variety of experiences shared, not just coders, to try and emphasise that technology was broad, and a lot of jobs fall under the tech umbrella.

It was hard work and it was brilliant, and we got amazing feedback from the girls every year.

One day, someone asked what about the boys? Couldn’t we run it for them? I pointed out that the point of the day wasn’t just “fun day out of school” it was “girls tech is also for you”.

So when they went ahead and decided it wasn’t fair to run it only for girls, they tried to do so without me. They scheduled a meeting, pulled in volunteers, and starting setting up a version of my day for boys. Using my curriculum. Expecting to use my personal equipment that I volunteered for the days. But without including me in the meeting or the event.

Because it’s only fair, right?

But hey, at least the boys got to see that technology is for them too…

There are often reshuffling of teams when you work in tech. Projects come and go, budget changes, and you may find yourself with a new scrum master, team mate, or manager without very much say in the matter.

I had moved departments internally but ran into an old scrum master at a coffee machine. He told me about a team reshuffle that had just happened (which I was already aware of) and how it “just happened” that all the female engineers were on one team together, and all the male engineers made up the remaining teams.

He told me about how he was pretty interested to see how it worked out, if the all-female team did better than the guys, etc. I think he told me this because he thought it sounded progressive. It did not.

I already knew about this team reshuffle because, separately, two of the women had sent me messages, wondering if they were alone in thinking it felt wrong or weird or sexist. How does it “just happen” when teams are reshuffled by all the managers talking?

I graduated in 2007, and went straight into work. Since then I have worked as a coder at several companies, been promoted a few times, worked at different levels, and even transitioned into product management.

My current manager is the first female manager I have ever had.

In previous roles, there were no female managers in the engineering groups.

At one stage, a company I worked for had a major transition of version control versions, and internal tooling. A number of teams had to be trained in Git (a version control tool), and also an internal UI development framework.

At the time, I was something of a Git guru. I had been working in tech for several years and already had a few development jobs under my belt. When people on the floor had problems with their commits, it was my desk they came to, and I could almost always help them resolve their issue. I was pretty fluid in Git command line commands and I could usually get the commit back into shape without people having to abandon the commit and start again.

I volunteered my time to help with the training effort. I’d never travelled for work before and I thought it might be fun and interesting, good for the CV.

My scrum master pulled me aside to let me know that I probably wouldn’t be going, they were looking for someone with a bit more experience. They sent a guy who had just been hired as full time after completing his internship with us.

I wanted to start sharing some of my experiences of sexism in technology for IWD because I think there is a fundamental misunderstanding about what we need to do to try and address the gender balance issue in technology.

In these anecdotes, people didn’t set out to be mean or sexist. And sure, they didn’t necessarily say anything sexist to me. But that doesn’t mean that some internalised or unconscious bias didn’t creep into their actions. And the end result is the same – I was left out in the cold, and questioning why.

If we ever want to address the imbalance in tech, it has to be about more than just not actively shouting sexist remarks at your female colleagues. You need to look at all of your behaviours and really, genuinely examine them for unconscious bias. Did you leave that person out of the meeting because they are not as skilled as you? Or because they don’t look like you?

Did you perceive her complaining as somehow worse than his?

And what are you doing to fix it?

I worked in a department that frequently got pulled into short lived projects, and we did a lot of “fire-fighting” (i.e. getting pulled onto a project that was in trouble, working on it for two weeks to turn it around, then leaving). We had been through a particularly tough run of this, working nights and weekends, and all of us had vocalised our displeasure at this to managers and in team meetings.

Then another project came in. And the first I heard of it was when I arrived into work in the morning to find everyone in the big meeting room, in a kickoff meeting about it. Well, almost everyone. They had pulled in every engineer on the floor except for me, one other female engineer, and the interns.

When I asked our lead about this, I was told it was because we had complained in the past about the firefighting work, and he assumed we wouldn’t have wanted to be included.