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.