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 […]
Women just don’t ask for raises and promotions
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 […]
I’m still speaking
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 […]
What about the boys though?
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 […]
That’s just how it worked out
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 […]
You can’t see what you can’t be
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 […]
A bit more experience
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 […]
Why I am sharing these anecdotes
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 […]
I thought you didn’t like emergency projects
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 […]