Women in the Room

This morning a company acted shitty (so yeah, just another morning, really):

I saw a few responses to the ad on Twitter from conference-goers saying something to the effect of: if there were ANY women in the room when this ad was decided upon, it would have NEVER run. Which is probably true, and I don’t want to throw the people under the bus who are saying this, since the general sentiment is well-meaning.

But it’s not really what we should be saying, of course. Assuming that merely tossing women in a room to fix everything men come up with is kind of insulting to men, who should know better already, and more importantly, it adds to the laundry list of extra unnamed roles women in tech are already burdened with.

We want more women in the tech industry, but we can do that without making them some sort of gatekeeper to insulate the world from a company’s shitty men.

Women aren’t our mothers, women aren’t the ethics police, women aren’t some magic group men need to leverage in order to do their own damn jobs.

Anyway, I’m sure we’ll all learn a lesson from this and future companies won’t do anything stupid like this again for at least another few hours.