Monday, August 14, 2017

Thoughts about Awesomeness

To be frank, I hesitated to write this post. I still wrote it because I think it is an important topic. I feel the need to document my current thoughts for my future self and to share them as a basis for discussion. The following reflects my non-expert, non-scientific impression of things. My personal thoughts of today will evolve as I learn more. This post got quite long, but please bear with me and read to the end.

At Agile Testing Days 2016 a Women in Agile Summit was hosted. To be honest, when I read about it, I was taken aback at first. Why would a women event be needed? Why excluding men and everyone who's not comfortable with this binary classification? I felt that making something gender-specific was not the right approach. I am not considering people for their gender first. We're all humans, right? We're having many different identities. In the end, we're all individuals. So I'd rather strive for equal chances than supporting women over others just because they're women; strive for diversity in all means, not only gender. It simply didn't feel right. It still doesn't feel right. But I might be thinking a bit too naive about the topic. Back then I finally decided: Well, I am a woman, I'm working in an agile environment, so I should attend this event and check out what it's all about.

At the summit, I joined a lean coffee session with several women coming from South Eastern Europe and Germany. We exchanged our experiences regarding gender issues at our work places. The German women saw things just about like me: well, there's no real problem anymore. If a few more women would join our teams, that would be great. To attract them, maybe we could advertise more that we're having an open and safe work environment. Right, and there's probably still a salary gap, but it appears to be closing more and more. Besides that, we didn't encounter discrimination due to our gender yet - well, at times some positive discrimination. But so far so good, we're getting there.

And then we heard the women coming from South Eastern Europe, telling us way different stories. Stories of women having to justify constantly why they are having a "man's job". Tales of women who learned that they had to show bossy behavior to get accepted by their male colleagues, and of others having to use their charms to survive in tech. Those women reported about struggles which never occurred to me. Naive me, to be sure. So, slowly but steady I realized that this topic is not at all out of date yet. For another view point I recommend reading Maaret's wonderful blog post about the summit. Personally, this event triggered me to be more aware of the topic.

The next thing that surprised me came early this year. I had submitted papers for Agile Testing Days 2017, so I followed their news about the submissions. When the call for papers statistics were published, I was really surprised.
29% of papers had been submitted by women speakers. One of my colleagues was positively surprised how high the percentage was. I, however, was rather disappointed; I would have expected that figure to be way higher. I mean, it was not about getting accepted at the conference, it was only about submitting. Why would less women submit? Does this only reflect that there really are way less women in tech overall? Or is there another reason?

Nowadays, again lots of discussions are going on regarding women in tech, minorities in tech, anyone in tech. Probably the most prominent example right now is the manifesto of a male engineer internally published at Google. I won't address the topic here, it has been discussed at length already.

Instead, I'd like to share another story with you. End of July, Ashley Hunsberger raised awareness of the following post.
It was quite commonly agreed that this kind of list rather served as marketing campaign than represented reality. On the one hand there were more women experts in test automation to be named and on the other hand same listed men seem to not match the profile at all. When people started to list further women, I found myself named as automation expert as well. Not my biggest strength, but people even started to follow me due to the mere fact I was added to the pool!
Shortly before that tweet, I had the honor to be invited to the Women in Testing Skype/Slack group, a group from and for women in the testing community (if you want to join, I can invite you, just send me a direct message via Twitter). As a reaction to above post, Anne-Marie Charrett came up with the idea to create our own list of awesomeness. The intention? Show the world that there are way more women in testing that could have been on a list. Way more that could get invited to speak at a tech conference. Way more to follow and get to know. And even way more who are not so publicly visible but worth being public.

Within very short time, we had a document with over 100 names on it. I could only contribute marginally myself; however, I was feeling so honored when realizing someone added me to the list as well. Even while creating this compilation of awesome testers, we felt how great it is to see who else is out there and which topics they're into so everybody could reach out to them more easily. We wanted to get this list out to the public. Agile Testing Days agreed to support and published the list on their blog.

The blog post leaked a few days before official publication date, and the reception was already overly positive and welcoming. I was even asked whether we also had a related Twitter list. Great idea! So we created it: https://twitter.com/lisihocke/lists/awesometesters Unfortunately not all women named have a Twitter account, but most of them do. The list is still growing as the Women in Testing working party is still adding to it. So look out for an updated version!
Side note: I would love to have gender, ethnic groups, educational backgrounds, or anything to be ignored and have a real diverse list of awesome testers compiled. The mere need of an all women list sticks in my craw. However, I found that sometimes support is needed to increase transparency and to point out issues. Also regarding my own biases. Just compiling this new Twitter list made me realize its difference to a personal Twitter list of awesome testers I created a while ago. Judging from the 70 testers I listed, I was aware of way more men (47) than women (23) in testing myself. I'll definitely have to add more women there as well. Well, every list is wrong in some way. Still, we can use them as a starting point and as a basis to trigger discussions.

In the end - there is no end to the topic yet. In my company, we have many awesome women. We also have many awesome men. We have colleagues from many different countries and cultures. I think (and hope) they had not been hired because of their gender or identity, but simply because they are awesome. Maybe we're still too similar when it comes to our education or work background in order to gain from actual diversity - worth finding out. Also, I'd like to further encourage hiring less for skills but rather for learning mindset and team spirit. Everyone deserves a chance to show that they are awesome in many different ways, and they deserve your support to grow their awesomeness.