Grace Hopper sucked lol
I was really excited to go to Grace Hopper in Phoenix. I left feeling weirdly disappointed by the whole thing.
Microsoft sponsored me to go to Grace Hopper in Phoenix this week and I was really excited about it. I work in WDG under storage and filesystems, so I am very used to being one of relatively few women around. Some of my Waterloo friends who moved to California were going too, and since I am in Seattle now I was excited to see them. The first day was honestly kind of surreal. There were women everywhere. This sounds dumb, but I am used to looking around a technical room and seeing mostly guys with short hair and hoodies. At Grace Hopper I felt like a drop in an ocean of long hair and ponytails. I don't think I had ever been in a technical space that looked like that before. It was really cool.
Then we started going to sessions and I got confused about who some of them were for. I am still pretty early in my career, but Waterloo co-op means I already have several internships under my belt. I have worked on operating systems and drivers, and I interned at Facebook on the core website. Git is also already taught at universities. So when a few of us saw a GitHub session, I assumed it would get into Git internals or something interesting about how it actually works. Nope. It was basically the basics of using Git and GitHub. We walked out. The Chrome session was way more what I expected because it was actually about building Chromium.
That mismatch kept coming up. There were technical talks, but a lot of the conference was about careers, confidence, identity, workplace dynamics, and being a woman in tech. At one point there was a privilege walk. I actually think the point of it was good, and it makes differences in people's starting points very obvious, but I also kept thinking: I came to a computing conference. Maybe that is unfair because Grace Hopper is obviously about women in tech, not just technical content, but I expected a lot more depth than I got.
The male allies panel was probably the strangest part. The panelists were Alan Eustace from Google, Mike Schroepfer from Facebook, Blake Irving from GoDaddy, and Tayloe Stansbury from Intuit. So at this enormous conference for women in tech, we had a big session where four men talked to us about women in the field. I get why men need to be involved. Most tech leadership is male, so obviously nothing changes if men do not care. But why did nobody invite women onto the panel? People were already annoyed enough that someone had handed out male ally bingo cards with predictable things the panelists might say. At one point a woman literally stood up and yelled "BINGO!" in the middle of the session.
A lot of the advice was some version of women needing to excel, speak up, be confident, and make themselves heard. Blake Irving from GoDaddy said it was up to women to be excellent. I remember being really puzzled by that. We are already at a conference full of women who went into computing. We know we have to be good at our jobs. That is not exactly news. But I also did not totally identify with the protest response. There were boos and the bingo cards and a lot of hostility, and at the time I remember thinking that just protesting men probably was not going to fix anything either. I had no idea what the right approach was, though. I was basically sitting there thinking both the panel and the reaction to the panel felt bad.
Then Satya Nadella spoke, which obviously mattered a little more to me because I work at Microsoft. Maria Klawe asked him what advice he would give women who were uncomfortable asking for a raise, and he said women should have faith that the system would give them the right raises over time. He called it "good karma." The room really did not like that. Maria disagreed with him on stage, there were boos, and he apologized afterward.
The weird thing is that I actually understood what he meant. Microsoft has a pretty structured promotion process. There are calibration conversations, your work gets discussed by people other than your manager, and promos are not literally decided by whoever is best at barging into an office and demanding one. So part of me was like, okay, I get where "trust the system" comes from here. But then there was a listening circle where women talked about their experiences across the industry, and a lot of them were basically saying the system does not work for them. People get overlooked, underpaid, or ignored unless they advocate really aggressively for themselves. That was hard to dismiss. I could understand Satya's point in the context of Microsoft and still understand why the room was furious.
I left feeling weirdly betrayed by the whole thing, which might be dramatic but is honestly how it felt. Microsoft paid for me to go, I got to see old friends, and I got to be surrounded by thousands of women who had chosen the same field I had. I expected that to feel incredibly affirming. Instead I kept wondering why a conference for women in tech seemed to expect so little technical depth from us, why a male allies panel had only men on it, and why so much of the advice still seemed to boil down to women needing to be better, louder, or more confident. At the same time, I was not convinced the angry protest response was the answer either.
I don't really have a clean conclusion. I went in expecting to feel like I had found this huge community of women like me, and instead I mostly came away feeling like I did not quite fit there either. Which is a pretty weird feeling to get from a conference that was supposed to make me feel less alone.