all these people earn $70+ per hour and they are quibbling over using company credit card to buy a $50 card table so the expensive consultant isn't on a wobbly plastic crate.
Because they were a client, my friend just sucked it up for the week, but the whole experience left her feeling shitty and undervalued, which probably would have shocked the client, who was paying a pretty penny for her expertise!
The client didn't want to be sexist but oops, here we are. The question is,
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@Xibanya Hmm, I see.
*taps operational health and safety clipboard thoughtfully with pen*
So when's the execution scheduled?
So if men are just so endearingly dumb that they can't conceive of something like "our cool standing desk setup is hostile to women because women are on average shorter than men" how can we design systems so these poor guys don't have to worry about making that mistake?
well it's simple, if your cool office setup is OSHA complient and ADA complient, probably an average woman will be able to do work there 🤔
You don't even have to make a single man fix the SIN IN THEIR HEART to combat sexism!
@Xibanya How is that even legal? It means no short or disabled person would ever been able to work there… If you break one foot (or have any other temporary or longer term injury preventing you from standing all day) you similarly have to work from home. This is not just sexism, it is some bro culture hostile architecture.
What cheesed my friend off was that their refusal to run out and get a card table was based on the premise "you are capable of using your laptop by standing on a crate" without regard for anything but the literal problem "consultant too short for our standing desks" and no thought of the symbolic nature of the crate. She felt like not only was she being treated like a literal child, but that she was forced to look like a child. Why introduce these bad vibes when u could just get a fkn card table
help i am a man what can i do proactively to keep sexism from making it harder for us to make software aside from purging the sin from my heart??
a few things
- make u workplace ADA and OSHA complient
- do not use "culture fit" (aka "do they have my same hobbies") as hiring criteria
- have an office administrator on payroll whose job it is to do stuff like make sure there is enough coffee n pens n shit; if u cant afford one dont make this a female senior engineer's job for some unholy reason
How to build a team, and not those foo-foo Team Building Exercises:
Don't hire just-one-woman, hire two.
@tuban_muzuru it is depressing how often in my career I have been the only female engineer. when I was a kid in the 90s they told me sexism was over!!!!
- make u project managers pay attention to who is talking and if someone cuts a woman off during a meeting have them moderate (big props to the PMs I have known who were great at this)
- make taking notes a rotating task or use voice to text or something
- get one of them fancy pro tier coffee machines with buttons n stuff
- if u meetings are longer than an hour, bathroom breaks pls
- WORK FROM HOME, LET EVERYONE WORK FROM HOME
@Xibanya As someone who is both 1) often read as femme (genderqueer but... let's face it, going to be read as femme) and 2) short af, yeah. There's so much.
And that's BEFORE getting into my area of specialization - which is accessibility.
Because I found out a lot of devs nowadays don't... think about things like keyboard navigation. They just assume it's there, even when it isn't.
@Xibanya table which also increases options for future
@MachineLordZero Yeah liek the what if, and I know this is out there... another woman entered the office?!?!
@Xibanya it’s extra insane because consultant was probably on a T&M contract, and they ran up the cost on T to save trivial expense on M.