Part 1: Insecurities

I remember a few years ago when I had a heated argument about a sub-par piece of work from a service provider. The man I paid was in his forties, and he spoke to me in the most patronizing tone, as if I were some silly little girl who did not have the right to question his work, despite the fact that I was paying for it. It’s incredibly hard to make me angry, but on that occasion I was furious.

I was also shaken. And confused. I’d started my company straight after graduating from an all-girls school — one of the best in Australia — where women were celebrated. We were told we’d be the leaders of tomorrow, and I believed this whole-heartedly. When I looked around at all the smart, talented, and downright gorgeous (yes, Hollywood — brains, beauty and amazing personalities do go together) young women in my grade, there was no reason not to believe that the future was bright.

Which is why I was so taken aback by this patronizing episode. I’d never perceived myself as being any less capable than a man, so I couldn’t understand why someone would treat me like that.

Later on, I had a brogrammer on my team in his mid thirties who suddenly left. At first he refused to talk about why he was leaving, and when I did pry it out of him I was astounded. Among the cocktail of reasons (some of which I was at fault for, and could easily have been fixed with better communication on both ends) was a feeling of emasculation. Having a 20 year old chick calling the shots didn’t sit well with this guy’s ego.

As he was explaining this, he thought he’d let me know that he didn’t think I was passionate enough about 99dresses, and he wasn’t sure if I was cut out for entrepreneurship. He kept comparing me to other women CEOs (not men, just the women).

After all the shit I’d been through for my startup, this really hurt. Especially coming from someone who I’d previously considered to be a friend.

The hardest part about being an entrepreneur is managing your own headspace. Believing in yourself is tough enough, especially during the hard times, without other people giving you reasons to feel inferior. There is a big difference between constructive criticism, and what was said that day.

These comments reminded me of when I was a 14 year old in boarding school and was being bullied terribly by another girl. I’d ring my mother up in tears and tell her of the next mean thing she’d done, like invite everyone in our boarding year to her birthday party except me and two other girls. I had never done anything to provoke her — I just didn’t understand why I was being singled out.

This girl was rather short. Very short, actually. And I was incredibly tall for a 14 year old at 5'11. My mum said “Nikki, she is just targeting you because you are tall”. I thought this was ridiculous, and I didn’t believe my mother. What a stupid reason to be so horrible to another person.

In my final year of high school, with the days of bullying long behind us, I was chatting to this girl and reminiscing. “Why were you so mean to me?” I asked.

“Because you were so tall” she said. It had nothing to do with me and everything to do with insecurity.

Part 2: Culture, stereotypes and assumptions

There’s no denying that Silicon Valley — a place drenched in startup culture— is a sausagefest. I lived there for 5 months during my time in Y Combinator, and I was one of 7 female founders in our batch of 63 startups.

I totally understand why this is the case — its just a fact that statistically speaking more men are hackers, and hackers meet other hackers at their hacker events and in their hacker courses, and make sweet co-founder love to produce startup babies. And because the startup ecosystem revolves around hackers, it essentially revolves around men. How to get more women to become hackers, and thus balance out the ecosystem, is a whole other topic.

However, this does lead to a whole lot of assumptions being made when it comes to women.

Some of them are quite subtle, and most people probably don’t realize that they’re making them. For example, I had a female on my team doing community management & social media, and she wanted some help from a male developer. She needed to run some queries, and wanted the developer to help teach her SQL so she could do them herself. They were queries that she’d need to run over and over again with different nuances and waiting for him to do them every day as the need arose was a massive bottleneck for her workflow and a huge time suck for him. The developer kept saying “oh, just tell me what you need and I’ll get it for you” but she was quite adamant about being able to do them herself.

He did eventually help teach her (I say help, because she also used internet resources to teach herself). He seemed surprised at how fast and easily she picked it up, and once he was confident enough in her abilities she could access the database without his supervision. Before long she was doing fairly complex queries by herself. Teaching her to fish, so to speak, was way more efficient than giving her a fish.

Now I know for a fact that this developer is not sexist. He’s actually awesome, and a great friend of mine. Assumptions are a product of the culture & stereotypes we’re exposed to, and they can cloud our judgement if we don’t stop to think. Heck, I’m guilty of this just as much as the next person, but at least now I try to bring those subconscious judgements to the conscious surface and question them.

The worst part is that this is a self-fulfilling prophecy: if men make an assumption that women aren’t great at tech, then those men won’t help mentor women. Women will then start believing they aren’t great at tech, or feel alienated from the community. As a result, there will be no women in tech, which just perpetuates the stereotype and the cycle.