Men in tech #YesAllMen

**TL;DR:** A woman who has worked as an engineer in tech for twenty years tells her own story of how men pushed her out of the industry bit by bit — from refusing to merge her pull requests, to "diversity slot" conference speaking invites, to the risk calculation at a hotel room door — and calls on the men in the audience to think: what can you do to stop this? ## Content Warning & Opening Thank you all for coming. The talk is titled "Men in Tech," and the hashtag is #YesAllMen. Two things before we begin: this talk carries a content warning, which you can see in the talk description on the EMF website. Please take care of your mental health, because it gets right to the point from the very start. Also, the speaker will be reading off slides — she has ADHD. She'd love to have memorised the entire talk, but she can't, so she'll occasionally look down at her slides. ## It Started With a Text Message 0:40 AM, text: You, you [ __ ] [ __ ] [ __ ] you. Twenty minutes later: [ __ ] you. 2:00 AM: [ __ ] you, you [ __ ] [ __ ] The messages kept coming all night. She woke up to them on her phone, sent by a colleague — right after what had seemed like a perfectly normal night at the pub. Everyone was crowded around one table, as people do when a bar is busy. Apparently, her leg touching his leg was enough for him to conclude she wanted to be with him. And when she said "no," that was her answer. And he believed that was an appropriate response to him saying "no." ## Code Held Hostage The next morning, she showed these messages to her manager, who showed them to the CEO. What truly hurt her wasn't the texts themselves — it was what came next. They didn't punish the man. In their own words, he was **too valuable to lose** — he was cheap, efficient, and replacing him would be a hassle. So the result was that nothing happened. But here's what did happen to her: he decided to make her disappear. He stopped merging her pull requests — every single one. No review, no rejection, just left there to rot. **Because the woman who turned down his date request didn't deserve to have her work exist.** Her code — her actual professional output — was held hostage, all because she wouldn't sleep with him. No one stopped her. She had to learn to work around him, like navigating around a fallen tree on the road. You don't ask a fallen tree why it's there; you just change your route. Except a fallen tree doesn't affect your performance review. A blocked pull request does. Work that can't ship doesn't exist. In the promotion committee's eyes, the productivity data for that year told a version of her that looked like she was less capable than before. All because one man decided to let her code die quietly. ## "At Least Nothing Physical Happened" The part people overlook is right here. When they say, "Well, at least nothing physical happened" — something did happen. It happened to her career, in a column of a spreadsheet that was invisible to everyone except her. And in her entire career, no one ever taught her how to deal with this. No confidence workshop solves a man who won't merge your code. No negotiation technique can unsend a [ __ ] you text. No resilience training makes a CEO value a woman's safety more than a cheap developer. She has seen brilliant women leave technical roles: worn down by silent bullying, confidence eroded a little at a time, unsupported, until they simply couldn't stay any longer. ## Where the Anger Came From: Those "Well-Meaning" Women's Forums A recent panel on "Women in Tech" sent her over the edge. They were full of good intentions, claiming to teach women how to survive in tech: you need more confidence, you need to advocate for yourselves more, you need resilience. One woman even said it out loud: **"If you work hard, you will be rewarded."** Every time, the implicit message was: the problem is you. You're not working hard enough. There is no bias against you. No prejudice. *"And I've been working hard, I've been working harder, and I'm tired. We're all tired."* So tonight she's not going to tell women how to survive in tech. She's going to tell the story of her own survival in tech — at the hands of tech's **men**. Just one career, but she hopes these stories are shocking enough to make some of you in this room start thinking: **What can men do to stop women being pushed out of tech?** Before we begin, let's be clear: nothing tonight is extreme. Nothing is a cherry-picked worst case. Every woman in this room has her own version. This isn't unusual — **this is a normal Tuesday.** ## The First Job: "You Only Got the Job Because You're a Woman" Age 18, first tech job: an internship at a well-known UK research lab. No programming experience whatsoever. She felt like an impostor before she'd done anything in the interview. Part of the process was a non-verbal reasoning test — a booklet, work your way through it. She only learned later that you weren't actually meant to finish it; it was designed to see how far you could get. She finished the entire booklet. Then she got the job. But what happened next laid the foundation for her sense of belonging in this industry: men in her life told her she got that job **only because she was a woman** — that she was clearly the diversity hire, and that there was no other reason to hire someone with zero programming experience. The job offer wasn't because of the test, wasn't because she performed well in the interview. It was because of her gender. **Notice the mechanism underneath that:** A woman achieved a clear, measurable, verifiable accomplishment — she completed the test. And the men around her preferred a story where her achievement didn't count and the real explanation was her reproductive organs, not her intelligence. That was week one, before she'd written a single line of code. ## Flowers and Chocolate on the Desk At that internship (she was 18), a colleague roughly 20 years her senior took an interest in her. He would leave flowers and chocolates on her desk before work. And every time, her coworkers — all men, of course — would sit there and watch, snickering: "Funny, huh? He left her flowers again." No one told him to stop. No one said it was inappropriate. **The joke wasn't him. The joke was her reaction.** Do the math for a moment: it's not one person doing something creepy in isolation. It's one person doing something creepy, and an entire room of men actively choosing to treat it as an amusing anecdote. Every one of these men had the chance to say the sentence — "Dude, she's 18, she's at work. That's not romantic. That's f[ __ ]ing creepy." — and not one of them took that opportunity. **In moments like these, silence isn't neutral, and laughter isn't neutral. It's a vote cast every morning for his comfort, not hers.** ## Conferences: "You Should Talk About Being a Woman in Tech" Fast-forward a few years, now in London. She was deeply involved in the frontend developer community, attending meetups and conferences, and started thinking about giving a talk. Again and again, the response she got was: **"You should talk about what it's like being a woman in tech."** Not "What are you working on?" Not "What have you been learning recently?" Well-meaning men kept telling her this. She thinks they believed they were being helpful. It was an area where her gender wasn't a disadvantage — it was just a topic. The message she received was that men weren't interested in her technical content; she should only talk about soft topics — impostor syndrome, confidence, and resilience. She can feel the irony completely — here she is, twenty years later, doing exactly this. And at those same events, walking around with the same lanyard as everyone else, she was more than once asked: **"Are you a designer?" "Are you here with your husband?"** Not "What are you building?" Not "What technology are you excited about?" The assumption was always the same: a woman at a tech conference must be decoration, or here to accompany someone, or simply lost. ### "We Just Need More Women" Finally, for the first time ever, a conference invited her to speak. She remembers every word of that email — the excitement of finally feeling like she might belong here, tangled with bitter disappointment. They said they needed more women. Not "We need you." Not "We need your expertise." They needed someone who looked like her to stand on their stage so no one could accuse their speaker lineup of being all men. **To them, she wasn't a speaker. She was a compliance checkbox, a shield against criticism.** The organisers looked at their lineup, felt a flicker of concern about public perception, and their solution wasn't "Let's find the most interesting women in this field and invite them" — it was "We need more women." Present tense, generic, interchangeable. Any woman would do. She accepted anyway, because she wanted to be on that stage. But she remembers standing backstage very clearly, knowing that part of the audience had been primed to expect a "diversity slot" rather than a real talk. She was just a "charity listen." ## The Language Wars: "Female," "Guys," and a Big Red Button Around the same time, she had to pull aside a company VP and explain to him that **"female" is not a polite synonym for "woman."** He'd used the word in an email complaining that the women on his team hadn't been sent to Silicon Milk Roundabout. "Female" is clinical language — the kind of thing you'd hear in a nature documentary. She had to teach this basic point to an adult in a leadership position, on top of doing her actual job as a frontend developer. And when she asked at another job to stop using **"guys"** to refer to groups that included her — a man gave her a big plastic button, the kind that records sound, with the instruction: press it every time someone in the room says "guys." Everyone laughed. The only woman in the room, assigned the job of nagging them to treat her like a person. And her repeated call for equality was reduced to a gag. ## On the Road: The Risk Calculation in a Hotel Room Once she had enough confidence to speak regularly on the tech conference circuit, at every event there were men buying her drinks, someone standing a bit too close, people feeling entitled to tell her about their sex lives, sexist jokes handed to her like little gifts, and attempts to flirt. **She was there to work, not to be someone's holiday romance.** One evening, a man she'd been talking to offered to walk her back to her hotel. She didn't really want him to, but didn't want to make a scene either. It was a city she'd never been to, it was late, and a small voice in her head said: "Well, probably better than a man she'd spent the evening talking to versus an empty street." So she didn't say "no" as firmly as she wanted to. He walked her back to the hotel, then followed her upstairs to her room door. He wanted to come in — in his words, to see if her room had the same layout as his. She was alone in a hotel room in a strange city with a man she didn't want near her personal space. She hinted every time — "Oh, I'm feeling really tired" — and he ignored every one. **This wasn't shyness. This wasn't playing hard to get. This was a woman running a fast, silent risk calculation in her head:** Of the two options in front of her, asking a strange man to leave her room or letting him stay — which one was less likely to make things worse? This calculation is exhausting. And she assumes that, statistically speaking, the minority of men in this tent have never had to do this — especially not at a work event. There was nothing dramatic about that night: no drugging, no threats, no violence. Just a man who seemed perfectly friendly, walking a colleague home after a perfectly normal industry event. Every decision she made that night was reasonable — a smart attempt to stay polite while protecting her own safety. And yet it still ended with her trapped in her hotel room. **This isn't a story about monsters. This is a story about how low the bar has to be before women end up somewhere they never wanted to go.** ## Age 40: From Being Flirted With to Becoming Invisible She recently turned 40, and with it came a strange sense of relief — she'd never be flirted with at a conference again. From target to fully invisible. But she traded one problem for another: **her body betrayed her in return.** Perimenopause hit her like a [ __ ] freight train. And the people around her had never been taught anything about it — honestly, including herself. She didn't know the basics, didn't know what symptoms to expect. Schools don't really teach it. It's not in workplace onboarding. It's not in the health newsletter from HR. Women's health is generally assumed to be something you figure out for yourself when it happens to you. She was in severe pain, had debilitating brain fog, lost her words mid-sentence, and felt her mind and body were no longer under her control. *(The talk was interrupted at this point; the original recording does not include the continuation.)* ## Afterword The purpose of this talk was not to tell women how to survive in tech, but to tell what actually happens in one ordinary career — nothing extreme, nothing rare, just "a normal Tuesday." The speaker turned the question back to the men in the audience: what can men do to stop women from being pushed out of tech? Source: Men in tech #YesAllMen — youtube.com via gmem (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXL6K1lhvt0)