tl;dr Women in Tech Are Problem Solvers

I'm at a tech conference for women today, listening to a woman talk about her experience getting a board seat at a Fortune 500 company. It's inspiring; it's also devastating that this is a thing we hold strategy sessions on.

That's right. This whole conference is a strategy session.

I want to let you in on a little secret. Women in tech want to make the industry a better place. When women in the industry get together and talk, we talk about what sucks but we also talk about how we can make it better. Lady back channels are problem solving working groups. We complain, we share, and we strategize.

Women pay money for conference fees out of their already discounted salaries to hear other women talk about how to solve the same disparate problems.

Subtle discrimination and inability to be recognized for contributions at work is a problem that we are trying, desperately, to solve. We're trying to fix our micro environments and the things in them that are holding us back from the recognition and promotions that we get passed over for or overlooked for or where the goalposts keep moving just out of reach. We're trying to be better at our jobs, to have our voices and concerns heard and recognized and considered, not ignored and shrugged off. We're tired of feeling like Cassandra, like Hestor, like Mata Hari.

Women in tech are trying and have been trying and if you think they aren't what do you think women in tech fucking talk about. We are problem solvers by trade, what makes you think we would approach professional problems any different?

The fact that we haven't solved the problem yet says something, I think, about the enormity of the challenge.

We're working to fix it. We've been brainstorming and talking and working to fix it.

Why aren't you?