Women vs the Workplace: why gender discrimination is not necessarily what you think it is

There has been a lot of buzz online recently regarding parity in the job market, and the way successful women leverage their difference with their male equivalents. Marissa Mayer's recent announcement about her intent to return to work two short weeks after her maternity leave, or posts related to Google's Ruth Porat awe-inspiring work ethic are just mere examples of the underlying social activity related to the sensitive subject of women in the workplace. It is a fact: while the number of executive positions currently occupied by women at top companies isn't exactly breathtaking, women have been working their way up the corporate ladder to a place where companies have simply no choice but to deal with the new norm. Yet we all know this topic is still very taboo in companies of all sizes.

The question doesn't revolve around whether a woman can do a good job as an engineer or a researcher anymore. In fact, many recent studies released over the course of the last few years show a rapid gain in educational achievement among female students. While the proportion of female employees in the Tech field is still low, there is a clear female presence in most successful companies. I hear comments regarding the way female employees bring a fresher vision regarding the direction of their company on a daily basis - and I am convinced this is all very true. The whole industry seems well aware that not only do women represent a workforce that cannot be ignored anymore - especially in functions where talent is rare and hard to find -, they also bring a different perspective. The industry in general has grown to acknowledge that women are here to stay; the general attitude, however, has failed to evolve homogeneously across the industry. 

As a young graduate, I used to believe that the reason why women in Tech were sparser was intimately related to a lack of opportunities for female students to access high level education, and/or to the fact they were less attracted to technology in general. For me, if you were a woman, and you had chosen to make it as an engineer, then you would eventually get the same opportunities than your male peers. It was just a matter of putting the right amount of effort and work into it. Of course, I did realize that companies were more cautious when hiring female workforce, because women were a priori more likely to take a leave for family reasons, or skip a meeting to pick up the kids in school. Still, I thought that because of the evolution of society, which was recently demonstrated by the popularization of paternity leaves, the differences in consideration between male and female employees would eventually fade away and disappear.

Then one day my whole perspective started to change. I was having a perfectly innocent and casual conversation with my HR manager, a successful career woman herself, when she suddenly dropped a bombshell on me: "Jennifer, you know, I think that the guys in your department would like it if you showed your legs a little bit more". She tried to make it sound like she was joking, but I could tell she was all too serious. The doubt was there in my mind to stay. Did my colleagues really expect me to dress differently? Worse, did one of my collaborator explicitly say something in that sense? At first, that made me angry, and I thought it was none of the HR manager's business, or as a matter of facts, none of my colleagues'. I did, by my own admission, enjoy a more casual dressing code, but after all, wasn't that my right?

Then I slowly started questioning what originally hadn't entered my mind. Was I expected by my management to bring a feminine touch on the team? Had I been hired for that, as well as for my skills? And if so, should I settle for that? I knew of course that I was doing my job at least as well as any male member of the team, but a daunting question was now occupying my mind: were my job responsibilities the same as the ones of a male employee at the same level, with the same experience and the same title?

Months went by, and I eventually moved on to another company (for independent reasons), and I became quickly a top performing employee. So much so, in fact, that people from all departments would constantly ask for my input. My (male) manager was full of praise for me. I was asked to present my ideas to management on a regular basis, and they would all take my opinion very seriously. And then it happened: as I was chatting with a colleague from another department, he said the words that would make me realize that no matter how much emphasis companies would put on parity and woman advancement, men and women might never be considered in the same way.

You're definitely performing very well... for a woman.

Now, that person was not precisely known for being a feminist. But I couldn't help but question what I could have done more so that this person would consider that I was performing well in the absolute. That eventually brought me to ask myself the very important question: are women being evaluated with the same criteria? Feedback from my peers and management has always been very important to me. What if I couldn't take that feedback to face value because people would tolerate more mistakes from me? What could I do to validate my value as a professional, without the gender discrimination? I wanted to move up the hierarchical ladder in my company, but not for the wrong reasons. So I started paying more attention to what people told me, how they were talking to me, and tried to analyze all input with enhanced attention.

From that point on, it started to be very clear to me that the gender bias doesn't necessarily mean that a successful female employee would be denied promotions, salary raises and advancement based on her gender - she might actually be promoted because management had an agenda and sought to make themselves look like they cared about the female cause. And weirdly enough, that discovery made me feel that even more ground work would have to be done until the community could claim that they had reached the Holy Grail of parity at work.

Gender discrimination doesn't stop at your teammates or your management. As I gained more experience, I realized that customers didn't treat me as they would treat my male colleagues. Advisors considered my input or my opinion differently - either way. Conference and MeetUp organizers contacted me because "they really wanted to get a woman among the speakers". Obviously, the same went for fellow entrepreneurs, as well as investors.

One area of my professional life seemed particularly prone to unsettling gender-biased remarks, and that is recruiting. As a data scientist, I get emails and impromptu phones calls constantly, and I consider it good practice to respond even if it is only for declining politely - after all, burning bridges without a good reason wouldn't be reasonable. Therefore, I often chat with head-hunters, and it seems that I have received both the most feminist and anti-feminist comments from recruiters themselves.

I am sure that someone like you will appreciate our women-only team.

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My client is open to female candidates, but I don't think they will go that high compensation-wise for a woman.

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The co-founders only want to hire women.

Yet, few comments have left me as flabbergasted as the one below:

Men are so combatant and only have their advancement in mind. For that reason, the hiring manager's mind is set on hiring a woman. He knows that he'll have more control. That definitely makes us women more marketable.

Like the HR manager I had encountered earlier in my career, the person recruiting for that position was a very successful businesswoman. And apparently she somewhat had come to believe herself that it is unlikely that a professional woman would ever "make it" only through excellence and hard-work.

So where do we take it from here? Career women seem to have come up with different coping systems. One strategy, often adopted by women early on in their careers, consists of mimicking the behavior of their male peers in order to "compensate". Another is just to ignore any gender-specific comment, and just stay themselves. I personally don't believe that behaving "as if nothing ever happened" will help change the mindset of both the people who clearly ask less from women, and those who believe they can't be expected to take on the same responsibilities and show the same creativity. So speaking up matters. Most people don't even realize that positive discrimination is just as hurtful and unhelpful as its traditional, negative counterpart. As far as I am concerned, I am proud of what I have accomplished so far in my career, not because I am a woman, not in spite of the fact I am a woman: I am simply proud of making it past most of the challenges some of my male colleagues and managers have thrown my way because I was a woman.

My personal experience hasn't given me any ground to believe that these trends were shifting. The job market realized a while ago that women had a key role to play: it is what that role is that still seems very unclear to this day. Many successful women have established their fundamental positions within their companies and within their entire field; yet, these examples are still too sparse. The path for the everyday career woman towards crisp success seems complicated, to say the least.

Will the cultural melting-pot that made Silicon Valley so unique and favorable to hard-working, intelligent individuals, also help female employees and entrepreneurs reach the parity that they have now been yearning for for decades? While I do believe that it eventually will, the path down that road looks bumpy, for an easily understandable reason: mixing cultures is hard and at times unnatural. As if the cultural shock of bringing the working woman in front of the scene was not enough, we still have to add to the mixture the fact that for some cultures it is still highly unusual for women to belong in the workforce, let alone pioneer their industry.

So what to expect, and what to hope for? I, for one, want to be evaluated, judged and promoted for my technical abilities and my work ethic, and I make it a personal priority to disentangle genuine appreciation for my accomplishments from meaningless biased comments. I certainly don't want to work in a woman-only department just for the sake of it. The good news is I do personally believe that, in the same fashion that the Tech Industry brought together people from different countries and cultures, and successfully spurred new products and successful startups, it will eventually create an environment where women can bring their expertise, ideas and unique identities without suffering from any gender bias.