I took this photograph in April of 2018 at a major K-12 Educational Technology Conference during a birds-of-a-feather session for Technology Directors: the people in charge of the vast array of things that often fall under the purview a school’s technology department. Imagine how shocked I was to learn that not only did the convener think that issues of sex (and gender as helpfully pointed out in the example) did not fall under the responsibilities of technology departments but, in fact, considering such issues was such anathema to the work of a K-12 Technology Director that the act must be banned entirely.

Represented in this birds-of-a-feather were some of the most prestigious private schools in the United States. I was one of maybe six women in a room that contained dozens of men. The session was co-convened by a man who I consider to be a good friend and ally. He didn’t think twice about allowing his co-convener to include this slide in their slide deck. Initially, I pulled my friend aside as he was moderating the room, pointed out the slide, and asked him to say something. I honestly believe he didn’t even understand what I was asking or what I was trying to say.

So, I said something.

I asked the co-convener what he meant by this slide. He explained that religion and politics are choices, and that in the “real world” gender only causes complications among businessfolks, so the rule stands that one does not discuss these three things in order to have civil conversations.

I think that it is safe to say that if talking about gender vastly complicates your business, you are probably ignoring an important part of your business and you are content with preserving gender inequalities. Furthermore, if you can’t have a conversation about sex and gender without becoming uncivil, you probably should not be working in an educational environment where children need to learn how to have these conversations.

I pushed him that gender, pronouns, and the presence of sexual discrimination in technology very much affect my ability to do my job and that ignoring that fact, or barring its discussion, is discriminatory. Three other men, all senior administrators at elite private schools in the United States in 2018, joined in on the conversation, echoing that it was not discriminatory, that I was getting emotional, that there was a session for women, and that was the only correct place to discuss gender inequalities.

I mentioned that technology is rife with permissiveness surrounding false assumptions about women based on who they are and how they look. That this was called sexism. Two other men joined in at some point, echoing the idea that gender was not a thing to be discussed when talking about being a Technology Director. Voices were raised, discussion became heated and I was alone against many more voices than my own. At least four or five other men, who I consider close friends, and one who I consider a mentor, were in the room watching, but did not join in.

When my session-convener friend asked later, in the company of some of his audience, what he could have done, or what he should do in the future, the only answer I could muster is “Say something.” But how can he say something if he didn’t see anything worth mentioning? More directly: Why do school administrators allow esoteric knowledge to exempt operational IT departments from accountability as visible role models and authority figures in our schools?

We are hiring poorly and doing even less to train our current workforce.

On my first day in K-12, I was told that every adult in a school is responsible for every child. It can be difficult to own that when you see your role as just fixing computers. The emotional labor of talking a teacher through data loss or absorbing the weekly ire of the admissions assistant who wields their label-maker as a weapon, seems a high enough demand on one’s energy to not have to think about what you represent to the children at your school. I didn’t come to technology as an educator. I came as a terrifically efficient technician who loathed the perceived weakness of being a woman — and perhaps, because of that cultural stereotype, loathed being a woman in a fundamental way. I was embarrassed by this flaw in my makeup. I tried to hide it with behaviour, speech, and dress. And thus, I’m absolutely guilty. Guilty of internalizing every instance of discrimination as being my fault for not ‘toughening up’ or ‘leaning in’. But I was also coerced into feeling that way by a thousand tiny cuts.

This has very little to do with intentions. Even when men feel they are being supportive, mentoring, or even complimentary, discriminatory culture makes itself evident. On a number of occasions I received the alleged compliment that I was “just one of the guys”. Unpacking all of the sexist assumptions in that common phrase alone could be the subject of a whole post, but anything that makes high performance an explicitly masculine trait should be seen for what it is.

When looking for a job for myself in the few last years, I realized, sitting in interviews, that I was the diversity candidate. I was an offering to the school administration to say “See? We don’t just look at male candidates.” Once, I was even criticized by a hiring manager for not dressing “more femininely” for my interview — as if my pants and blazer didn’t do enough to underline the progressive nature of their hiring pool. Does it really count as interviewing a women if she is ‘just one of the guys?’. Ultimately, I also believe my interviews were designed, often by the IT department itself, to be an example of why a male candidate should eventually be selected.

When interviewing for operational jobs, I experienced a level of aggressiveness, machismo, and ire from IT department members that I had come to think was part of being an operational technology employee. However, when later talking to my male counterparts, sometimes who had interviewed for the exact same job, I found that they weren’t grilled, weren’t challenged, weren’t hammered by their eventual direct reports in the ways that I was. They had never been trained to enter their departmental interview conversations with gloves up, didn’t have to posture, didn’t have to go in to win a fight. Their future direct reports didn’t come to their sessions to prove how little their potential future boss knew. And they were surprised to hear about my experiences; as surprised as I was to hear of theirs.

My male counterparts weren’t challenged write SQL statements for imaginary database systems out of thin air, expected to recite a detailed recreation of the OSI model with no preparation time or materials, or talk lucidly about Signalling System 7. They just weren’t. Keep in mind, this was for Technology Director jobs at K-12 or 9–12 schools in the United States. These schools never had more than 1700 students, and even the systems administrators themselves often had managed service providers who were actually performing the higher-level technical work for the school.

If this is a reality for someone whose resume more than qualifies them to engineer circles around the men asking the questions — and it was always men — how are we expected to find non-males in a candidate pool? The truth is, we often won’t. Many of the women who came before me in New York private school technology — women who I see as strong, who know more about educational technology than I ever will, women who are thought leaders in the industry — remain in sub-managerial and sub-administrative-level jobs in their schools because they see being an Technology Director as an insurmountable challenge. They will say this outright if you ask — they don’t want to take the beatings. And they know that there will be beatings, because they’ve been around the small world of private school technology directors. It is that world that produced a national organizing body and conference that put a misogynist in charge of their session for senior IT administrators.

This guru-ization of the people who run our school networks, fix our iPads, and purchase our telecom handsets, articulates a permissiveness for bad behaviour from not only our school administrators, but our culture at large. It does not take many viewings of the IT Crowd or the Big Bang Theory to see that even popular culture has learned to excuse misogynist behavior from STEM-oriented men because it is the mark of the antisocial technical “genius”. It produces men who, as representatives of a school, attack female technical job candidates, and are willing to treat female students and colleagues similarly.

So: What about our girls?

Every adult in a school is responsible for every child, and this includes the IT department. K-12 Technology Directors, we assume, grapple with how to place preferred pronouns in our school databases, we hope will create inclusive Computer Science and Robotics learning environments, are on a large percentage of our hiring committees, and serve as role models for socially-aware technology service and education. And a large portion of them still function as if they are not accountable when it comes to grappling with the STEM-and-gender problem. To ensure this divide continues, I was reassured by my session co-participants that there was a single, separate session for ‘women’s issues’. A separate but equal one, and without a trace of irony. If we continue to populate our helpdesks, our systems rooms, our directorships, and our C-level seats with men who believe wholeheartedly that this is a reasonable way to handle difference, our girls and our boys will see this and understand the statement that is being made. We cannot ever truly diversify our technical workforce if this is the modeling that is being given to even our most privileged students in the earliest years of their education.

I want to ask every head of school, every board, every CFO, every member of an organizing body, to look at your IT departments.

Do they own the role they are playing in shaping our future STEM workforce? They should be able to talk coherently about it.

Have you exempted them from thinking of themselves in that role? You should not only end that policy but ensure your IT folks add this kind of training to their Professional Development plans.

Have you exempted yourself from designing a hiring process that is fair to all potential candidates? Your school will be better if you stop seeing IT hiring as a mysterious process and invest yourself in ensuring fair technical screens and training for your IT department members in how to treat your candidates.

Do you feel that your IT team needs a technical genius who has mastered all aspects of IT in order to maintain business continuity? Installing a hostile or non-collaborative point of failure in your essential personnel is not a good way to protect your school; installing collaborative individual who is willing to learn is a better way to achieve that.

Have you allowed, or do you seek, antisocial or discriminatory behavior in your IT department? It is likely you have, so I am asking that you own it, and take responsibility for working past it.

Seeing a problem with the lack of women in STEM fields, we too often look for an external savior as if we are faced with a purely external problem. But no number of Grace Hopper Conferences, Girls Who Code after schools, or boutique women-in-STEM recruitment firms, can save us from a cultural problem that we are encouraging in our own administrations.