Some of you who follow me might not see firsthand the kind of harassment that marginalized folk in tech can experience. Ian is an expert in Kubernetes security and they have to battle this kind of harassment while also doing their job, living their life, and keynoting KubeCon. https://twitter.com/iancoldwater/status/1320138340218396672

If you’re in tech and for whatever reason I happen to be one of the few people in tech you follow here who is not a white man, I implore you to expand your follow list. If you’re not a big twitter user then expand your network in other ways so you are hearing stories like these.

I don’t have a huge number of followers on here so I haven’t had to deal with this kind of twitter-based harassment (yet) but over my decades-long tech career I have had to deal with all kinds of other crap (big and small) as a woman in software engineering.

I have plenty of stories of my own and some days the accumulated weight of them feels overwhelming and unbelievably exhausting. Along with each memory also often a sense of shame for having tolerated it, or not having done my best to protect others from it.

And for everything I have experienced I know that others who are less privileged than me have had it worse. I’m white and cis and assumed straight and I have a Harvard degree. I love my current job and I feel safe and respected there.

Look at the fact that I had to write “safe”. I feel safe. Have you ever felt unsafe in a workplace, at a professional conference, at a meetup? I don’t mean “has someone challenged your beliefs or made you uncomfortable?” I mean safe.

I used to be afraid to talk about any of this. I didn’t want to be “that woman”. I didn’t say the word “patriarchy” in a professional context until 2018, and I MINORED in women’s studies. And I didn’t fully engage with my own complicity in white supremacy until even more recently

I did not feel that I was in a position of strength. I started speaking publicly about my struggles with mental illness many years ago now and I didn’t want to add on other ‘issues’ on top because I was afraid that I was already making myself unemployable.

But now I feel confident that my record as an engineering leader speaks for itself and that this moment calls for me to take on more risk and speak out more because I can and because so many others cannot take the risk.

Thanks for coming to my Sunday morning sermon on listening to the voices of marginalized people in tech.