The One Thing Silicon Valley Got Wrong about Empowering Women in Tech(And This Woman Is Trying to Fix It)
I am not a feminist but I do support women and their rights to get what they want and what they deserve.
For a long time, I thought being a feminist is good. I mean there is nothing better than helping women to get equal opportunities and treatment, right?
We have mothers, sisters, friends, colleagues, partners and daughters.
I have always felt something was wrong with feminism and the whole women in tech movement since I read Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg.
I attended once a Women In Tech like event. I was the third man in a room full of women. I certainly felt intimidated. I could totally relate then to the position of every woman in a male dominated industry.
In the Q&A session, I had one question in mind: How could men support women effectively? Women behaving like men as Sandberg suggested is certainly off the table.
Telling women what they should do doesn’t work too(sorry feminism).
Feminism appeals to women who seek authority, power and money. There is nothing wrong with that. But not all women want that!
Little did I know that Lean out by Marissa Orr is the answer to all my questions.
The book is based on Marissa’s experience while working at Google and then at Facebook.
She doesn’t only offer a fresh perspective on women’s empowerment strategies and behaviours in the workplace but also reveals certain cues most men are not aware of due to social norms, “feminism”, the way we raise women and encourage toxic masculinity.
Chapter 5: School vs Work in particular struck a chord with me. It made me take a step back. While we are celebrating the fact that women are dominating men in college, the author points out that women are failing in the corporate world because of that.
By the time I reached chapter 10 Well being vs Winning, I felt I was in a long dream and I just woke up! The book burned all the pre-filled scripts about feminism, money, power and success that we have been reading since birth. Yet we have never had the guts to question any of it!
I have always thought of myself as a feminist. After reading the book… Yikes! I am not a feminist but I do support women and their rights to get what they want and what they deserve.
I barely scratched the surface of the topic. We gotta start somewhere you know…
If you have already read the book, what’s your take on this?
Submitted July 01, 2019 at 01:51AM by azzenovic https://ift.tt/2KQKHts
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