The tech mechitza

Photo by Gareth Harper.

By Melissa Nightingale

It’s fall. It’s officially sweater weather here in Toronto. Outside the sky is bright and blue and brilliant but I’m not fooled. Winter is coming. But before it does, we get this amazing season where everything changes colors and the city tries to take in the last bit of good weather.

Fall has always been one of my favorite seasons. I don’t really enjoy hot weather (a byproduct of a decade in San Francisco). I love when the temperature breaks and the air turns crisp. For someone who spent a long time without distinct seasons, it’s a bit like living in a world of pumpkin spice, flannel, and those oversized Roots scarves.

Fall also brings the Jewish high holidays which these days are really the only time I find myself in synagogue. Maybe it’s because so much of the past couple months have been go go go but given the opportunity to slow down and reflect, my brain does funny things.

Lately, I’ve found myself thinking about the mechitza.

A mechitza is the divider that separates the men’s and women’s sections in Orthodox synagogues. Men sit with men. Women sit with women. In my least favorite versions, the women sit upstairs, the men downstairs. I also dislike the ones that split across the room with men at the front and women at the back behind a wall.

At my dad’s synagogue (shul) the men and women sat parallel with a half-height wall between them. When I was 6, my mom found and joined a Conservative shul and Dad continued to go to the Orthodox one. We kids got to pick where we wanted to go on weekends.

Going to shul with dad meant sitting with the men. This was likely good, though unintentional preparation for my future career in tech. I have frequently been the only female interview candidate, the only woman on the team, and sometimes the only woman in the company.

I find myself unable to shake this idea of the mechitza. This physical representation of gender divide. Men on one side. Women on the other.

I think about my life and career in technology. I think about a childhood of sitting with the men, on their side of the gender barrier followed by a career spent doing basically the same thing.

These days, more and more, I find myself sitting with the women.

I am in women-only tech startup groups on Facebook. I’m in several tech feminist slack instances. I’m at women in tech conferences. I’m in broad, far reaching slack groups about management, only to find myself most actively contributing to the private, women-only channel, tucked away in plain sight.

There is strangeness in this professional division, voluntary yet profound in its impact.

Before the common era

I used to have zero time for women-only, gender split tech groups, events, or conferences.

I’m loathe to admit it now, but in my early career I wanted to be awesome, not an awesome woman, not awesome with boobs, just plain awesome.

Back in 2007, I attended the first She’s Geeky conference. It was the first time I’d been to a women in tech event and I found I couldn’t relate to the women at the event. Their situations seemed so dire, their coworkers so disrespectful, and their work environments so profoundly awful that I left feeling completely adrift.

I couldn’t relate to what they were describing. I wasn’t afraid to speak up in meetings. I didn’t have a problem disagreeing vocally and sometimes loudly when the situation called for it.

I am naturally outspoken. I am on solid footing in tense or uncomfortable conversations. I enjoy the art of negotiation. And I have a knack for converting nervous energy into confidence. These attributes (and a bunch of privilege) helped me excel on a lopsided playing field.

At the time, nobody was talking about pipelines. We should have been paying more attention. I wish I’d been paying more attention. But I wasn’t.

I worked with sexist asshats for years and thought the fact that I succeeded made me tough. I thought it was a commentary on my awesomeness. I ignored gender politics and got ahead.

Shanley has a name for this. It’s “Fuck you, I got mine” feminism. And it’s problematic for a bunch of reasons she articulated back in 2013.

The common era

Last night, I went to a dinner that was hosted blessedly close to my house. The kids wake up early and despite not being a morning person, I’m up with them, before the sun. As a result, I’m exceptionally picky about my after hours networking these days.

I’m at a table full of vibrant, funny, sharp ladies from a variety of fields. Some of them are also in tech (and yes, of course I already know them). But some are not.

The woman next to me leans over and says, “OK, I’m not in tech but I keep hearing a lot about bro culture. Is that a real thing? Have you ever had a man interrupt you or take your idea as his own or shout you down in a meeting? Does that actually happen?” The emphasis on actually indicates that it’s something she’s heard about but can’t quite fathom. Sometimes it’s the outside perspective that brings into focus how much work we still have to do.

The woman across from me is someone I adore. Like me, she’s been in tech for her entire career. We make eye contact and laugh long and loud. It’s the laugh of people who realize that what we find normal and commonplace is horrifying to those who don’t live it everyday.

We explain that what she’s describing is so deeply prevalent in tech culture that it doesn’t even rank as bad behavior. The worst, we explain, are things we still hesitate to say out loud because it’s difficult to reconcile that these things happened in professional workplaces. Even at a dinner full of successful, accomplished women.

. . .

It’s such a junior move to decide you don’t know how to engage with something, therefore you won’t engage with it at all. I didn’t know how to engage with women in tech. I didn’t know where my direct, naturally outspoken, comfortable with discomfort, lopsided playing field self fit in.

I didn’t know how to talk about my day to day struggles alongside people who were experiencing much more horrific versions of it.

The first time I got promoted to senior management in tech, I realized just how dreadful the gender split was at senior levels. I was confronted with first-hand evidence that meritocracy is a myth that results in both a consolidated and homogeneous face of power.

Over many years in tech, the ghosts from the original She’s Geeky event would come back to haunt me again and again.

These were the women who should have been next to me in the board room. These were the women who should have been promoted alongside me. These were the women who were supposed to ride out an abusive work culture so I wouldn’t have to sit with the men. Alone.

I wish I’d been paying more attention.

I’m trying to pay more attention.

I hope you are too.