Wie man sich für Mikroaggressionen entschuldiget

„Ich bin eine weibliche Unternehmerin im technischen Bereich und ich habe den Diversity-Ansatz satt“

Eine weibliche Unternehmerin berichtet:

I left Google to build UrbanAMA. As a woman entrepreneur, I wanted to build a company that had a diverse team. I’m ashamed to admit that I’ve failed miserably so far.

We try hard, but again find ourselves with a 98% male candidate pool. You should know that we are an early stage startup that cannot afford market salaries. Despite that, we paid premium salaries to bring a few women who did well in our interviews. But, they lacked the energy to put us into overdrive. Worse, they were starting to drain the energy from the rest of the team. Eventually, we had to do the right thing for the company and let them go. I’m now back to being the only woman on the (tech) team.

That said, I’m proud to say that our freelance journalists on UrbanAMA are predominantly women and are kicking butt on the AMAs they are hosting. You should really check it out if you haven’t — they’ll blow your mind too!

But on the point of diversity in tech within the company, it’s a miserable state of failure so far. And that’s not because we didn’t try.

Sie hat auch eine Erklärung dafür, dass es nicht klappt und warum der Diversityansatz nichts bringt:

After diversity attempts at large companies and my own startup and the attempts to start tech early with my own children, I can tell you that our obsession with diversity and attempts to solve it are only fucking it up for the actual women in tech out there!

What do I mean by this?

• We get upset about the state of gender diversity in tech
• We make a pact to hire more women
• The pool has (a lot) more men than women
• After some rounds of low to no success, we start to compromise and hire women just because we have to
• These women show up at work and perform not as great as we want them to
• It reinforces to the male population that was already peeved by the diversity push that women aren’t that good at tech after all
• They generalize that observation on the entire women in tech community
• Sooner or later, some such opinions get out there
• The feminists amongst us go crazy
• The diversity advocates are caught in a frenzy and make a pact to hire more women (again)
• This loops. Infinitely.

Wenn der Pool der Frauen sehr klein ist und viele Frauen auch eine andere Life-Work-Balance anstreben, man sie dann aber dennoch in Jobs lockt, die das nicht zulassen, dann kann das in der Tat nur schiefgehen.