Women in Tech Supporting Women in Tech

Michelle:
Hi Allie.

Allie:
Hi Michelle. It feels wonderful.

Michelle:
It’s feels like it’s been way too long.

Allie:
It has.

Michelle:
Between Mike having Covid, and travel, and you having a guest on the show.

Allie:
It’s been over a month, I think.

Michelle:
We took a week of a break. We did.

Allie:
Yup. Our last two episodes, we took a one-week break last week, I think. The last two episodes, the three episodes before that, two of them was me with a guest, and one of them was you with a guest. So the last time we, it’s been, yeah.

Michelle:
About a month.

Allie:
Literally a month since the last time we, “Hi Allie”, “Hi Michelle’d”.

Michelle:
I learned a couple of things with that. Number one, I miss seeing your face. We do text. In case people wonder, we are absolutely best friends, and we do text each other, and share each other’s joys and sorrows, and, “Hey, did you see this meme?”. Obviously, I learned that I miss seeing your face, and talking to you in person, as much as in person Zoom is.

Allie:
Yeah.

Michelle:
Also, I learned not to take a big drink of coffee before you’re about to drop something funny on me, because I literally almost killed my keyboard.

Allie:
Oh, no. I didn’t even mean to be funny.

Michelle:
No, it was just funny. It struck my funny bone. But anyway, beware if you’re drinking coffee around Allie, she may actually make you do a spit take.

Allie:
A new skill I’ll add to my resume.

Michelle:
There you go. Voiceover work and ridiculously funny at times.

Allie:
Absolutely.

Michelle:
I love it.

Allie:
I’m super excited. I’m super jealous, you got to go to work in Europe, and have that amazing experience. You went with your real daughter, not your work daughter, who I love. I love Lydia so much.

Michelle:
I went with my birth daughter, that’s right.

Allie:
Yeah, your birth daughter.

Michelle:
She had fun.

Allie:
Yeah.

Michelle:
She drove in Athens. Which we had no idea, we rented a car for the week, she dropped me off in the morning, picked me up in, she came to some of the board camp stuff during the day, but mostly she went and did beach stuff and hung out on pool top or rooftop pools with other travel companions that were at WordCamp and that kind of thing. But she drove in Athens and I don’t know if you picture the craziest drivers you’ve ever driven amongst, prior to this I would’ve said Puerto Rico, San Juan, Puerto Rico. Like absolute insanity. Athens puts everybody to shame. It is like, there is not a car without a scratch. And my badass daughter literally drove this little beat up Peugeot that we rented all over Athens, a couple of times in tears because we did get sideswiped once and somebody, yeah, people can be mean. But hats off to her. She was like, “Do you want to drive?”. I’m like, “No freaking way. You rented the car. I’m not sure, honey”.

Allie:
I don’t even like driving in Miami, okay? So I can’t imagine having to drive in a place like that where also, because I assume it’s the left, it’s the, “wrong side”, right?

Michelle:
No, in Athens it’s the same as we have here.

Allie:
Oh, okay. Cool.

Michelle:
So we’re driving on the right side, the right-hand side of the road. Yeah.

Allie:
See, I’ve never had to drive on the left-hand side.

Michelle:
Same.

Allie:
And that alone is unbearably scary to me. I am certain I’m going to crash into everything.

Michelle:
But major shout out honestly to Codeable, I’m trying to… Codeable, Yoast, and I think there was another company that did the put on the Pride party. It was the party to attend at WordCamp, Europe. And my daughter was loving it. We Ubered there so that she could have a couple beverages there. They didn’t hand out drink tickets, you just drank whatever and however much you wanted. There were drag queens who did drag shows. It was like, it was open fun, people could be themselves. And it was just such an amazing event. And my daughter’s a DJ now, she’s like, “I want to DJ these parties for people in the future”. So I’ve put her in touch with the proper people. So we’ll see what happens.

Allie:
Nice. Yeah, definitely want to give a shout-out to Mike Demo for those Pride parties. There was one in [inaudible 00:04:01] Asia earlier in the year, and I think there’s been maybe two others at various other events.

Michelle:
Yes, they are amazing.

Allie:
And they had a great time with Mike demo and I don’t think he gets enough credit.

Michelle:
Yeah, he’s pretty awesome. As a matter of fact, I had Covid last week, he was texting me or messaging me, I’m going to keep sneezing, sorry. He was messaging me like, “Hey, this is where you can go online to get an online TeleMed appointment. They’ll actually send you your medication. They’ll have it delivered to you. This is the extra hydration you need. Order this thing”. He literally got me through Covid this last week. So major shout out to Mike.

Allie:
Yay. Wonderful. Cool. Well, we were talking about your badass daughter and I was going to say, “Speaking of badass women”, and then we went into talking about Demo.

Michelle:
Yeah, sorry about that.

Allie:
Circling back, speaking to badass women, our topic today, which I’m really excited about, is just chatting about the importance of, the importance and the methods in which women can support other women in tech, and in this industry, and in general, because that’s important too.

Michelle:
Absolutely.

Allie:
Yeah. So this is your idea, so I’ll let you launch us off.

Michelle:
Oh, that’s all I got. No, I’m kidding.

Allie:
Episode over. Bye.

Michelle:
That’s it. I love shouting out other women. I use Twitter a lot. I know other people are love-hate relationships with Twitter, whatever. But I still use Twitter a lot and I love shouting out other women and boosting other women and talking about what other women in tech are doing and how they are just killing it. And right around the time we have International Women’s Day and things like that, we oftentimes have, people will start a chain like, “Hey, tag all the badass women in tech that you know”, blah, blah, blah. And those are great. I love them and I’m done them before, I’ve started them, I’ve participated in them, and no shade to any of that because any opportunity you have to shout out other women, I’m all about it. But last month, I think it was last month, time is irrelevant now. It could have been a month and a half, who knows, whatever.
I was like, you know what? I want to shout out about some women who are doing some pretty awesome work, but I’m only going to shout out, I think I did four. And honestly, I don’t, I’m going to paraphrase what I said because I don’t even remember what I ascribed to who. But instead of saying, “Hey, shouting out these four women”, and just tagging them, I did that thing that you see on tote bags, advocate like Susan B. Anthony and help others like Harriet Tubman, that kind of thing. And so I did that, but I tagged women with specifically some of the things that they do. I tagged you, I tagged Naisha, I [inaudible 00:06:45].

Allie:
If you hear clicking, that’s me trying to find the tweet so that we can actually-

Michelle:
Thank you. I would love if, I would love that if you could find the tweet. I may have actually bookmarked it because oftentimes I try to go back and find those things, but of course I did not. So whatever. Anyway, I basically said along the lines of, “Use your voice like Allie Nimmons, advocate like Naisha Green”, and some of those women that… Oh good, will you read it so that I can remember exactly what it says?

Allie:
May 20th, so it’s actually almost exactly a month ago. “Speak out Allie Nimmons, stand up like Naisha Green, educate like Jill Binder, be resilient like Carole Olinger”.

Michelle:
Olinger.

Allie:
“-Olinger. Help me add to the list. #WomenatWordPress”.

Michelle:
And boy did people ever start adding to the list. And some people just tagged people, which is what we’ve done in the past and that’s great. But others actually followed suit in the same way and document [inaudible 00:07:55] and those kinds of things. People are adding that, specifically pointing out some of the specific strengths and contributions that women in WordPress specifically I think, in this case, are giving back to the community and the strengths and contributions that they have made. And I love that. I didn’t even realize when I did it that people were, people are retweeting it, people are still referring back to it. Last week somebody was like, “Hey, Michelle had a tweet like this. Let me find the thread”, and tagged me as they retweeted the thread to somebody else. And other people commented, I’ve seen tweet threads that tag women, but this one went above and beyond and ascribed to those women the things that they do.
And I thought, wow, that is so freaking cool. I love that I started it. I mean the idea of how to do that, certainly not mine, not taking credit for that, but started this tweet thread in a way that really allowed people to sing the praises of other women. And men participated, absolutely. But more women shouted out women in this case. And as you and I were talking about this beforehand, we wanted to talk about not just how anybody can raise women up, which obviously men can raise women up in technology too, we love it when they do, we love the participation, it’s all about equity, but it’s really something else when women can support and raise up other women as well because it doesn’t always happen. And you had something to say about that. So I’m going to let you pop in here with that idea.

Allie:
Yeah, I mean, so here in the West, or in America, or I’m not exactly sure the breadth of that, but there’s kind of this idea, I feel like women tend to be very competitive with other women. There are structures in our society that make it kind of feel like we have to compete with each other or there’s this cattiness, this competitiveness. Not all the time, but a lot of the time. And so I feel like sometimes it’s important to be very intentional about supporting and uplifting and helping other women. It’s kind of like we all want space at the table and there’s kind of this feeling that there’s not enough space for all of us, which is totally not true. So what I loved about your tweet thread the most is there are so many ways that you can be performative about supporting people, and we had a couple of examples of that in the WordPress community a while back when people would post these lists about the top 20 rock stars to follow in WordPress and blah blah, blah that are just, they’re just clickbait, they’re just traffic bait because they don’t provide context.
If you just list a bunch of people, that doesn’t mean anything to me. If I don’t know those people’s names, if I don’t know what they do, if I don’t know what they believe in or what they stand for, it’s just names. Why should I care about that? And so the way that you did that thread and the way that threads like that are done not only gives other people context for that person, but it allows the person you’re talking about to really feel seen and appreciated and not just another person on a list. So the ones that you used about me, and Nye, and Jill, and Carol are so specific to us. And when people say things like that about me, it makes me feel so much more proud of the impact that I’ve made rather than someone just tweeting like, “Oh yeah, Allie’s awesome, you should follow her”.
It’s just so much more validating. And then going down and seeing what other people say. One of the first replies that I see is from Matt Cromwell and he said, “Know your stuff and stand up and deliver all the damn time like Taylor Walden”, and anyone who knows Taylor, that’s Taylor.

Michelle:
Yep, absolutely.

Allie:
It’s just so much more impactful that way. And it’s so much more helpful, and efficient, and positive to actually take the time to think about, okay, well what’s a couple of words that really succinctly sums up this person? And it just makes me feel a lot better if I”m mentioned on one of those lists, if it’s in that way rather than some other way. And I mean, that tweet, your tweet has over a hundred likes on it. It has 27 retweets. People really got into that because almost, it’s like you made it kind of like a game, as well. You kind of gamified it where it’s like, okay, well now I got to think of who I want to mention and how I want to mention them. Oh my God. My favorite one though… My favorite one is the tweet that says, “Innovate like Elon Musk, motivate like Tony Robbins”.

Michelle:
I know.

Allie:
From some AI writing content plug-in thing. And you just go…

Michelle:
Did I respond?

Allie:
“Well, those aren’t women in WordPress lol”. Okay, great. You fully missed the point. Thanks a lot.

Michelle:
Big ol’ fail AI.

Allie:
Oh my gosh. But yeah, all of these replies and yeah, some people just tried to cram in as many people as possible, which is lovely. But some people really took the game to heart and tried to think of things. And some people literally, so when Stina tweeted, “Presence and creativity like Peacha”, and then she tagged you and me and asked if we’ve met Peacha. And I’m like, “Of course I’ve met Peacha”. But I appreciate the intentionality of making the connection and not just naming a name but being like, “You two people should know this person”. There’s just so much more interactivity available in a post like this.
And I mean, a lot of the sexism and also ageism, which ageism is not just discrimination against older people. I’ve experienced a lot of discrimination in this community as being younger than the average person, most of that has come from other women. And it’s really frustrating because it’s like you should know better. We should be able to support and uplift each other a lot more easily. It should be more second nature to us to be able to do that. And so seeing a way that we can do that intentionally is really helpful and really refreshing.

Michelle:
I think a lot of the time it goes back to, like you said, the seat of the table. It’s not even the seat of the table. We’ve been thrown scraps from the table for so long as women in technology. It’s like whatever’s left over the women get to have a chance at or, “Oh, we’ll let Michelle take a stab at it and then we’ll correct whatever we don’t like about the work that she does”, or whatever. And I’m not saying that’s my current situation, please don’t read that into that. But that’s what historically has happened for women in WordPress and women in technology. So there are fewer scraps to go around even than there are seats at the table. And so I think sometimes there’s this dog-eat-dog mentality that when the scraps hit the floor, we’ve got to scramble and take what we can for ourselves, other women be damned.
And it’s not like that anymore. And it shouldn’t be like that anymore. And honestly, if I get half a piece of bread, I’m going to tear it in half and give you the other half, Allie. And we both get a quarter of a piece of bread, right? But not everybody has that mentality still. And like you said, some of the biggest sexist comments, well there are a few other men that I’ve blocked that have made bigger comments, but there are women who have made incredibly misogynistic comments too. And I wonder, it’s like, who hurt you, right? That old trope, well who hurt you to say that about, to speak out against other women? But it might not even be a “who hurt you?”, it might just be that mindset and the area that they live or whatever. A few weeks back when I was in Oklahoma City, it was the week that WordPress turned 20 and CloudWave had reached out to me and asked me to do a talk, and I did a talk on representation and global representation in WordPress.
And then they said, “Hey, would you also run a panel for us on women in WordPress?”, and I said, “Absolutely”. And Laura Nelson from the UK was on that panel, milana Saap from Serbia was on that panel, and [inaudible 00:16:31] from Bangladesh, and then poor Winstina, she had the time wrong, she showed up for the last 10 minutes. So Winstina was actually on that panel too, Winstina Hughes from the US. And I started asking the questions that we often get asked and that people actually want to hear the answers to is like, what’s the hardest thing that’s happened that, what’s the hardest thing that you’ve dealt with as a woman in WordPress? And what are some of the wins that you’ve had as woman in WordPress? And to hear Milana talk was really interesting because she’s like, basically, not that she doesn’t get it because of course she understands that, she’s an incredibly intelligent woman, but she’s like, “I don’t see that here. Where I live in Serbia, I have just as many, just as much opportunity as men in technology here”.
And so for her, it’s like it’s an academic issue. It’s like, “I don’t experience that”. She believes that other women do, of course, but she doesn’t experience that. And then to hear [inaudible 00:17:24] talk from Bangladesh where that is absolutely not the same experience for women in technology and in WordPress in Bangladesh, where it’s very much a patriarchal society and women are still looking for those scraps thrown from the table, so to speak. My words, not hers. And to see, and then to hear Laura talk about the fact that she put on WordPress or WordCamp, I think it was London once, and got 60% women speakers and what a huge accomplishment and how great that felt to be able to have women in those spots, and how, for her, that was such a win.
Nobody says, “Wow, I get 60% male speakers. All right, let’s go”. Right? Because that’s just how it always is. And then when we see equality and equity with women in technology, we have to celebrate it because it isn’t the norm for us to do that. And so to hear those different experiences from women in different parts of the world was really eyeopening because I mean, I’m in North America, we have hubris here. We think that we are the most progressive nation in the world. The truth is, when it comes to under-representation, we are not. We are not the most progressive nation in the world. We are far behind in disability accommodation, we are very far behind in racial equality and equity, we are very far behind in women’s equality and equity, and I’m sure many other areas that I, LGBTQ, for example, all of the underrepresented areas, we are not at the top of our game. And we are not at the top of the list of progression and inclusion.

Allie:
For as progressive as so much of this country is, for as advanced as so much of this country is, we are not where we need to be. And obviously there are so many places in the world where these things are worse. I was just having a conversation with my husband the other day of, there are places in the world where it is literally illegal to be gay. And there are systems here, you can be killed just for being gay, just if the government finds out, you’re done. And there are systems here in which you could be killed for things and the government won’t necessarily do a lot about it. And it’s like well what’s [inaudible 00:19:43].

Michelle:
It’s illegal but…

Allie:
Yeah.

Michelle:
Yeah.

Allie:
It’s not illegal to be black, but still got a lot of people dying for being black. Not to bring the whole message of the podcast down, but you know.

Michelle:
No, but it’s true. So we are not as progressive as we think we are. There’s so much hubris here in the United States. So to hear other women from around the world speak as to how they’ve been more included and less included kind of puts you, it helps you figure out where on the spectrum that you are. And let’s face it, different companies value people differently. Right here in the United States, I could work for one company that values my opinion just like anybody else, or another company that doesn’t because I’m a woman or because I’m an under any underrepresented group. And so there’s no one kind of answer for any particular environment either, I guess is what I’m trying to say.

Allie:
Absolutely.

Michelle:
So if you had the top three things that you think that women can do to support and promote other women within technology, what would some of those things be?

Allie:
That’s a good question. I mean there are so many things. What are three things? I think…

Michelle:
Do you want me to go first?

Allie:
Yeah, you go first [inaudible 00:21:07].

Michelle:
Okay. So I’ll do the first one. For me, if you know of an opening at your company or another and of a woman who would be a good fit for that company, don’t only just encourage her to apply for it, but talk her up to the person who’s in that position, the hiring position. Because if you honestly feel that that woman would be the best person in that space, then advocate for her to have that job if it’s a job that she wants to have. So I think that’s a great way that we can support other women in our space, for sure. So you got one?

Allie:
Yes. I think honestly, just maintaining a non immediately beneficial relationship with other women. There are certain, I would just say people in this community who only message me or only contact me when they need something, when they need a favor, when they need me to share something for them, when they have a question about how something works. And the people that I will advocate for and go to bat for and bring opportunities to are the people who just check in on me, just send me a message to ask me how I’m doing. Or if I tweet something that they like or that connects with them, they let me know or they share things with me based off of a common interest. And I’m not saying that you have to build a best friendship with every single woman in the community. Treat people like people, not like opportunities, not networking opportunities. And that will, because so much of being successful in these sorts of communities are about feeling like you belong and feeling like there are people on your side and feeling like you can be heard. And that confidence can help you get to where you want to get to.
So yeah, uplifting each other, not even just in professional ways, but in just human being ways and you know, saying, “I got you. I appreciate you”. There are a handful of women that last time there was drama on Twitter, DM’d me, and were just like, “Hey, I know you are probably upset right now, and I just want to tell you, I love you. I support you. I’m here for you if you want to talk”, and that means so much when you are feeling isolated for any reason.

Michelle:
Yeah, absolutely.

Allie:
Yeah, that one is really important to me.

Michelle:
I will add that we need to celebrate each other’s victories and celebrate each other’s successes in a way that only elevates and only lifts up the other person. It’s so easy to lump ourselves in and want to cling to and tail ride each other’s successes. I could say, “I’m so excited for Allie, I knew her back when she, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah”, and bring it back around to me. But instead I can be like, “Oh my god, Allie Nimmons is creating content for LinkedIn learning. Let’s give her a hand. And if you know somebody that’s looking to learn WordPress, send them to this course”, instead of at all putting myself in it. So just lifting each other up and celebrating each other’s successes I think is one way that we can, and publicly, not just DMing you and saying, “Congratulations on LinkedIn learning courses”, but to say publicly, whether you’re using Twitter, or Facebook, or LinkedIn, or whatever it is, to tag you and talk about your success and only raise you up in what you’re doing.

Allie:
And I would bounce off of that and say prioritizing what people do. So for example, if you’re at a WordCamp and you are choosing between, and I’m not saying, none of what we ever say about uplifting and supporting women means put down men, right?

Michelle:
Of course not.

Allie:
It sucks that we have to say that, but I feel like I have to say that. None of this means…

Michelle:
Understood.

Allie:
…Men are less important or you…

Michelle:
We’re not misandrists, we’re not misandrists at all. We absolutely support everybody, but yes, continue.

Allie:
I feel like there are a lot of times where if you’re at an event, physical or virtual, maybe prioritize making sure that at least you’re going to a 50/50 split of male and female speakers. I don’t have statistics about how many attendees go to each whatever. I know that there are more circuit WordPress famous speakers who are men, who draw bigger audiences. So being intentional of like, okay, I’ve seen this guy talk a bajillion times, I’m going to go to this woman’s talk and support her, and be there for her, and ask her questions, and be an active audience member for her talk. I think it is really impactful because something that really sucks that I feel like we don’t really talk about is when minorities are able to speak at WordPress events, when they do manage to get accepted, and then nobody goes to their session or there’s a handful of people in their session and how discouraging that feels. So one of the things that I think we can do universally, not even just for women, prioritize underrepresented speakers when you can. Again, not saying avoid the white male speakers sessions, if there’s something you want to go to and hear…

Michelle:
Absolutely, yeah.

Allie:
Do what you have to do. But we always talk about, this work is intentional. It has to be thoughtful. So maybe there’s two SEO talks at the same time, go to the female talk, right?

Michelle:
Yep. Absolutely. Well, we have waxed on for quite a long time, so I think we should probably curtail it here. We get a lot of DMs, we get a lot of people DMing one or the other of us sometimes on our Twitter account for underrepresented tech, but if you have something you’d like to share about any of the things that we talk about, we want to hear from you. You can fill out the form on our website, you can tag us on Twitter or LinkedIn or wherever, and you can always DM us if it’s something that you really feel passionately about but aren’t ready to talk about publicly. We are happy to hear about topics that you want to hear about because you may not be ready to talk about them publicly or may not feel like you have the platform to do that, but we certainly are not afraid to go into any topic.
I think we have proof of that over and again.

Allie:
I think so.

Michelle:
Yeah, we want to hear from you. We want to celebrate you too. So if there’s anything that you want to hear, let us know.

Allie:
Absolutely.

Michelle:
And we will, [inaudible 00:27:42], I’ve just had Covid, so I’m not going to be able to get it again, hopefully, knock wood, we will be here next week. I don’t know what our topic will be because we never really know until it’s going on. We are also just working up towards our hundredth episode.

Allie:
In two weeks.

Michelle:
Yeah, in two weeks we’ll be on our hundredth episode. So let us know what it is that you’ve enjoyed about the show, and if you have a quote for us, we’d love to read it on our hundredth episode too. So until then, Allie, we’ll see you next time.

Allie:
See you next time.