Being an ally means work
I’m Rowan, a tech lead at Dunelm, writing stories about the intersection of Engineering, Automation and Psychology.
I think it’s the easiest thing in the world to be an ally on international women’s day. Like a post. Turn up to the panels. Clap at the right times in the town hall meetings.
Don’t get me wrong, these things all help in their small way, but they don’t make the kind of impact I’m really after and by tomorrow most people will have forgotten the events of the day and gone right back to the status quo. If I want to see change in my industry, in my lifetime, it needs to be a year round effort that feels like it really does something.
I’ve talked a lot about how you should be up front and vocal about issues and diversity where you can, but when women and minorities step forward for themselves, take a step back. Move out of the way and enable them take the lead on hackathons, workshops and other initiatives. Instead put your energy into supporting the admin work that goes into organising these events, help push the people in your department to turn up and take part and highlight their efforts to the people and companies around you.
Strive to be the type of person to actively call for transparency reporting within your organisation and be the one to share news and opportunities to help in your communications channels. When engineers in my department suggest a hackathon to get women interested in transitioning into tech, I offered to take on the manual labour and logistics of cataloging and coordinating signups. Something which I could quietly do to help make sure they could deliver on their vision for an inclusivity effort, without taking away from the people involved.
If there’s no initiatives within your company or department that you want to put your weight behind, consider joining me in getting involved with some independent organisations that meet people where they’re at to make a real difference and help get people into the industry:
Limit Break is an incredible organisation that targets exactly the types of people that are underrepresented in our industry, taking direct action to connect them with people who have been in their shoes and can help them navigate breaking into the industry. Over six months, you commit to mentoring and guiding someone through leveling up their career and I’d like to think the time I spent with my mentee made a real difference to their time at Unity.
While you’re only committed to mentoring one person at a time, it also gives you the opportunity to hear from the people directly effected and how the systemic biases present themselves.
Pixelles is another organisation that helps empower women in games via workshops, mentoring, socials and talks both in person and online. The group being based in Montreal doesn’t mean you can’t contribute — I’ve stayed up late into the evening before to sit on a panel and pay it forward with the knowledge I’ve gained over the years.
They’ve worked with huge tech companies like AWS (which is how I initially got involved), so if you don’t have the time to help out directly consider bringing it forward as a candidate to others in your company to collaborate with.
Keep your ear to the ground in your workplace, try to stay consistently involved year round and look for initiatives to support. Actively call out jokes and attitudes you won’t tolerate and feed back how you feel about representation within your team and department to upper management. No single snowflake thinks that they’ll have much impact, but together we can bring about an avalanche of change within the tech industry.
