I’ve got one of the top 100 reputation scores on StackOverflow. It’s not something I usually brag about (except on my resume, perhaps) but it’s an important piece of context for this story. Every year or so, Stack Exchange sends out some schwag to the top users on its sites. Typically this works out to some stickers, a random item like a mug or desk toy, …and a t-shirt.

As I was going through the survey they sent out to their users with 100k+ rep collecting mailing addresses and so on, I got to this part:

Ah, the dreaded “unisex” shirt sizing rears its ugly head yet again.

Most of the time when this happens I wind up either asking my husband if he wants a free shirt or just picking a random size and figuring I’ll donate it to Goodwill.

I’m not entirely sure why, but this time I decided to not just leave it as water under the bridge. I responded to the email containing the link to the survey with a somewhat snarky response — fully expecting I’d be told that bulk t-shirt orders just wouldn't work out in my favor:

I realize that there’s only like, maybe one or two women in the 100k league on SO, but I still wish I could get a fitted t-shirt instead

Then I went to bed, not expecting much. The next day when I checked my email, however, I was pleasantly surprised. Jay Hanlon, StackExchange’s VP of Community Growth, had written back. The response started out like this:

I’m the VP of Community Growth here at SE, and I just wanted to touch base to let you know that we realize our current tee shirt options are exactly the kind of soft signal that we really, really don’t want to send to the women in our community.

That, in and of itself, was nice to see. These kinds of complaints are often brushed off as inconsequential or unavoidable, but the impact can really add up. I was glad this was actually getting taken seriously. Just taking it seriously doesn’t actually solve the problem, but that’s okay, because the email continued, detailing ongoing efforts:

New samples just got sent to me yesterday, but it’ll probably be at least a month or two before we have the women’s stocked in our inventory. Email me directly with your mailing address and preferred women’s size. In a month or two, as soon as I get em, I’ll get you the freshest, just-out-of-the-oven style.

Definitely an improvement. But still missing one critical aspect: blank sizes are incredibly varied, and this tends to be especially relevant for “women’s” blanks. So I wrote back again mentioning that, and we wound up having a rather extensive discussion about the collected knowledge of diverse t-shirt sizing, which included this frank and self-aware admission from Jay:

I can’t help but share that one of the hiccups that took so long was, despite my best efforts, a great example of how diversity on a team helps you see problems you otherwise don’t even know exist. I was smart enough to have a bunch of female employees try on the blanks and rate them for our selection, and they all loved them, except for the fact that they seemed to need to order 1–2 full sizes up from their normal size, which made me crazy — the last thing we wanted was to finally have female-targeted cut shirts that don’t fit or feed into body image issues if we can’t provide enough guidance on weird sizing. I was not smart enough to involve anyone female in reviewing the options. Had I done so, someone probably would have pointed out that “Juniors” is not a stylistic term, but a size-based one — a fact that I lacked.

Thankfully, in this case it got caught while the blanks were still in a trial run, and they wound up swapping to a different, non-Juniors blank.

This story has a happy ending — it took a fair amount of back and forth, but today I got a package in the mail containing not one, but two shirts. Just to make 100% sure that I got a shirt that fit, Jay had sent me both the size I asked for and the next one down.

This is one “nerd shirt” (as one of my friends refers to tech company logo shirts) that I will definitely wear. I’m proud of the Stack Exchange folks for doing the right thing in this case, and I hope other companies will follow in their footsteps.