Category Archives: D&I in business

Why performative inclusion thrives? Because it’s a win-win billionaire industry

Torso of a woman in a blue suit covering her face with a big white square piece of cardboard that has drawn on it a happy face and a flower with the colours of the rainbow.
Collage by Patricia Gestoson from Images by Gerd Altmann on Pixabay and Sharon Pittaway on Unsplash.

I’m back after a hectic and unpredictable summer break. More about it soon.

In the meantime, I want to share with you an article that I published in the economics journal The Mint Magazine about the industrial complex behind diversity, inclusion, and equity initiatives and who really gets the benefits. In it, I uncover the economic and strategic interests behind the “fixing women” programs, unconscious bias training, and allyship overload.

The great pretenders

In 2013, the then-chief operating officer of Facebook, Sheryl Sandberg, published her book: Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. It was a cultural phenomenon that prompted discussions about women and their professional ambitions as well as the additional barriers they had to surmount to get to the top compared to men

The book also reassured organisations that it was not their responsibility if they didn’t have enough women in leadership. It was the women’s fault. They were not leaning in, not putting themselves out for a promotion, they were not confident enough. As a consequence, the “fixing professional women” industry boomed. 

An indicator of this boom is the exponential growth in Google searches for imposter syndrome since 2015. Increasingly, workshops, programmes, and newsletters have been relentlessly targeting women in male-dominated sectors like tech and finance with the promise of giving them confidence as a means to reach leadership positions. A peek into the publishing industry proves that imposter syndrome has also colonised our bookstores in the last few years.  

However, unconfident women alone couldn’t explain the whiteness of executive and board teams. So training in unconscious bias came to the rescue. It was appealing to organisations because again it focused on individuals rather than on the organisation’s processes and culture. Moreover, it exculpated leaders too, who could blame their “primitive” brains for the inequities in the workplace.

Workshops, programmes, and newsletters have been relentlessly targeting women in male-dominated sectors like tech and finance with the promise of giving them confidence.

It was a marketing success. In 2017, McKinsey estimated the annual spending in the US on unconscious bias training at $8 billion. This despite researchers reporting in 2001 that training initiatives focused on changing employees’ attitudes and behaviours that reflected more subtle forms of discrimination and exclusion rarely led to the desired long-term changes.

Ironically, as most organisations made those trainings optional, the typical attendees were employees bearing the brunt of unconscious biases – women and people from underrepresented groups – which reinforced the obvious conclusion: unconscious bias training was a lovely ticking box for organisations because it was quantifiable in terms of money spent and number of events but let key stakeholders get out of jail free.

Unfortunately, it didn’t result in the effective diversity and inclusion game-changer that we were led to believe it would deliver. This was not a surprise since it rested on the premise that learning about unconscious bias and its impact on decision making was enough to solve it, while ignoring that by design, most of our mental processes are unconscious. Even Dr Daniel Kahneman, who was awarded a Nobel Prize for his work on heuristics and biases, has been vocal about his inability to keep his unconscious bias in check

Diversity training needed a revamp and the murder of George Floyd in May 2020 brought a revival of the word “allyship”. In 2021, Dictionary.com named it the word of the year.

This “allyship continuum” is very attractive to organisations and leaders. First, it reinforces the lack of accountability at the senior level by equally distributing the responsibility of building inclusive organisations among all employees .

In the Global North, “allyship” and “allies’ are words that bring memories of the World Wars, being on the right side, and sacrifice. In the workplace, it has become an all-encompassing term for framing the interactions between a person in a position of privilege and a targeted person or group. From simply becoming aware of oppressive actions on less privileged groups, to deploying institutional change to tackle the discrimination of protected categories, all can be considered an act of allyship.

This “allyship continuum” is very attractive to organisations and leaders. First, it reinforces the lack of accountability at the senior level by equally distributing the responsibility of building inclusive organisations among all employees . Second, it’s self-congratulatory. Under a premise that we could summarise as “every little helps”, it enables us to embody the identity of an ally with minimal effort. Finally, it reiterates the belief that diversity, inclusion, and equity (DEI) are under-represented group problems that allies can help to mitigate from the margins.

And allyship training excels at marketing. Some of its promises are building empathy, addressing biases when they arise, and even helping those suffering the burden of discrimination to stop complaining about microaggressions and instead listen without getting defensive – a big relief to human resource departments.

But overpromising is not the only problem. Our obsession with rebranding all DEI strategies as allyship also waters down powerful initiatives by drowning them in a sea of sameness. For example, recently, the Mayor of London office announced that it is investing £1 million in an allyship training package available to every secondary school in London to educate and empower young Londoners to take a stand and help prevent violence against women and girls. The package – a teacher’s toolkit titled, Ending gender-based violence and abuse in young people’s relationships – doesn’t contain the words ally, allies, or allyship. Still, the mayor’s press office felt the need to rebrand it as allyship training. 

Regarding effectiveness, the key problem is that reported measures of success are typically based on people’s perceptions of themselves – or others. Research shows that men are worse allies than they think. For example, 77% of executive and c-suite males think that most men within their organisation are “active allies” or “public advocates” for gender equity but only 45% of women at that level agree. This gap in perception increases at lower management levels.

Is tackling imposter syndrome, reducing unconscious bias, or promoting allyship useless?

Would replacing allyship with a different word boost the commitment of employees and organisations to make workplaces more equitable? Suggestions abound: advocate, champion, co-conspirator, co-liberator – the list goes on. Moreover, is tackling imposter syndrome, reducing unconscious bias, or promoting allyship useless? I posit that they are mostly a distraction from tackling systemic inequalities at work and the responsibility of leaders to drive those changes. 

For example, whilst we throw money into addressing underrepresentation or making privileged employees feel good, the UK gender pay gap has increased by 3.8% from 2021 – black African, Bangladeshi, and Pakistani women earn, respectively, 26%, 28%, and 31% less than men and disabled employees earn a sixth less than non-disabled workers. And organisations dodge responsibility for the fact that 50% of women who take a tech role drop it by the age of 35 or that 20% of British businesses get away with lacking policies to support LGBT staff.

How do we move away from sympathy for the hardships of under-represented groups to embedding equity in organisations? How can we escape the trap of DEI-washing?

Organisations need to shift from the comfort of snapshot statistics such as annual diversity audits, to measure the progression of women and underrepresented groups through the ranks.

For example, asking themselves how they can attract brilliant women in their 20s and keep them until they retire, and realising that’s much more than thinking about maternity leave. It involves mapping the journey of employees such as a neurodiverse, female software engineer until she becomes chief technical officer, or a black, nonbinary person joining as a junior sales manager and reaching vice president level. This will uncover blockers to accessing opportunities and career progression within the organisation and provide insights into the initiatives needed to overcome them. 

Individuals are not off the hook either. It’s paramount we teach people how to transgress boundaries such as gender, ethnicity, class, age, or disability to achieve the collective gift of freedom. Building inclusive and equitable workplaces is a practice, not a certificate.

As Aboriginal elder, activist and educator, Lilla Watson, said, “If you have come here to help me you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” 

QUIZ: Patriarchy and You

How much is patriarchy ruling your life and career?

We believe that we make choices based on logic and objective criteria.The reality is that the patriarchal rules embedded in our socialisation often decide for us.

This 3-minute quiz will tell you how much patriarchy impacts your life and career choices.

Mid-year review 2023: Savouring my DEI wins in a world not made for me

As an inclusion strategist, I always have the impression that I’m behind. The inspiring Audre Lorde – who defined herself as “black, lesbian, feminist, socialist, mother, warrior, poet”- captured my feelings very well in the following quote:

“Life is very short and what we have to do must be done in the now.”

Audre Lorde

So much to do and so little time!

I also find it difficult to reflect on and savour my accomplishments. Although DEI and women in tech are topics where many people doing an amazing job, the progress is slow or sometimes akin to a Whac-A-Mole game, the moment you think an area is improving, then something else pops up.

For example, I was very glad to see that the Black Lives Matter movement had put DEI are the forefront and that many organisations were prioritising it. But the relief has lasted only for a while. With the redundancies in the tech sector and the inflation, the roles related to DEI are the first bearing the brunt of the layoffs.

Unlike in my corporate job, my “identity” as an inclusion strategist has much more fluid KPIs. Part is paid work and part is probono. It’s also a match-up of several areas: coaching, public speaking, and writing, to mention a few.

So, what’s enough? Is savouring successes a path to conformity? 

Comparison

We are told that comparison and feedback make us better. That without criticism, we’ll all be slackers and underperformers.

And that’s reinforced every year when we commit to annual goals, KPIs, and scorecards. 

We’re told that we need to do more and better and that the path is to continuously measure ourselves against others — and surpass them. Only then, we can be sure we’re doing our best.

The problem that is not often discussed is how this drives dissatisfaction, frustration, and disappointment with ourselves.

“Comparison” comes often in my coaching sessions. Amazing individuals that create and deliver impactful work feel that they’re not enough when they measure themselves up against others — colleagues, family, friends, influences, and even random people on social media.

I tell them that I see comparison at three levels:

  1. Upward social comparison  — When we compare ourselves to those who we believe are better than us.
  2. Downward social comparison — When we compare ourselves to people who we believe are worse off than us.
  3. Comparison to ourselves — When we compare ourselves against a version of our persona.

Upward and downward comparisons typically provide either transitory self-esteem boost— e.g. I’m better than individual X — or in the long run, generate emotions like jealousy and envy — my career hasn’t progressed as fast as that of colleague Y.

But comparing to ourselves is not the panacea always. And that became clear to me last week.

Savouring our wins

I joined a journaling virtual session focused on mid-year reflection. It sounded harmless but I was dreading it — a little bit like when you know the medicine you’ll take is going to be bitter. 

My brain catastrophised about all the things on my “2023 to-do list” that I hadn’t accomplished yet. Still, I saw the value of joining the session because I thought it helped me focus and prioritise activities and tasks during the last part of the year.

In hindsight, I see that I went to the session thinking about comparing myself with an aspirational version of myself that I imagined on January 1st, 2023.

And that became clear during the first 10 min of the session. The facilitator asked us to focus on the past 6 months and think about what we were most proud of, what we had to celebrate. We were urged to look for all kinds of accomplishments and experiences — big and small.

Even the smallest victory is never to be taken for granted. Each victory must be applauded…

Audre Lorde

So, instead of comparing myself to that idealised version that I had set at the beginning of the year, I was asked to go back in time to January 1st, 2023 and compare myself to that version of Patricia.

And that did the trick. By comparing my current self with that of 6 months ago, I was able to see progress without judging myself. We were given less than 5 minutes but I couldn’t stop writing. 

Writing

Podcasts

I did my first podcast of the year! I was a guest on the podcast “Ophelia On Fire!”. In the episode, I talked about 

  • Self-worth vs Confidence
  • Confidence vs Competence
  • Strategies to avoid our feeling of confidence holding us back in our careers

Talks

Coaching

  • After a 6-month training and passing two exams, I’ve got certified as a life coach by The Life Coach School.
  • Following my impossible goal for 2023 of coaching 50 women and underrepresented people to get the promotion they deserve, I’m happy to report that I’ve already coached 42 of them towards getting the professional recognition they merit.

Book

I’m writing a book about “how women succeed in tech worldwide” for which we run a survey worldwide. Last June, we reached the milestone of 400 responses from women in tech living in 50+ countries.

If you’re a woman in tech, you can still share your experience by answering the 7-min survey here

Testimonials
Patriarchy instructs women to downplay our achievements, experiences, and skills. That’s why I find testimonials from clients a way to fight against that indoctrination. 

  • I created a page on my website to collect clients’ testimonials.
  • I was especially touched by four of the testimonials I received this year

Over 6 coaching sessions, Patricia’s empathetic approach enabled me to work through my difficulties and find new ways of approaching my work projects.

The dedication and commitment she brought to our sessions gave me the confidence and encouragement to identify what was holding me back and to find possible solutions. Her insights always kept me focussed on putting into action steps that would achieve results.

I gained enormously from my sessions with Patricia. Her experienced questioning guided me through a difficult period of transition from a career in the television industry to a new phase in my working life.

Bren Simson. TV director, author, local historian and guide

I participated in the Ada’s List coaching programme, a 6-month development programme for women and non-binary people in tech at Citizens Advice. We focused on leadership, diversity, equity and inclusion within technology and ways to develop your career. We shared insights and challenges, discussed different approaches and identified opportunities to learn and develop.

Sarah Gallacher, Product Manager, Citizens Advice

Patricia was able to look at my experience, and then where I was right now. It literally felt like she was weaving together different strands to then hone in exactly on career blocks and give me some ideas to move past them.


Her style was to ask questions rather than give me a simple a to-do list, I also liked the way I felt I could trust her professional experience. She knew what I was talking about from inside my chosen sector.

Ruth Westnidge, Software Engineer

Patricia joined our Feminist AI and Digital Policy Roundtable discussion in April and presented her view on “how do decolonize AI with feminism”. I am impressed with her deep insights from the various, socio-technological perspectives of AI that she backed up with professional and personal experiences. Highly recommended speaker!

Alexandra Wudel, Co-Founder & Geschäftsführerin FemAI GmbH | Political Advisor | Speaker | MBA

Back to the journaling session, the effect of writing this laundry list of accomplishments was cathartic

As for the rest of the session? The usual. We were told to come up with our list of priorities for the year, identify the barriers, and look for enablers.

My takeaway? Whilst comparing ourselves to our future selves can help us think big, it can also lead us to burnout and permanent dissatisfaction.

Back to you

Put a 5 min alarm on your phone and give yourself permission to pause and journal about all the things you’re proud of in the last 6 months.

And then, savour them.

“You are the one that you are looking for.”

Audre Lorde

Let me know in the comments what 2023 accomplishments and experiences you celebrating.

QUIZ: Patriarchy and You

How much is patriarchy ruling your life and career?

We believe that we make choices based on logic and objective criteria.The reality is that the patriarchal rules embedded in our socialisation often decide for us.

This 3-minute quiz will tell you how much patriarchy impacts your life and career choices.

Welcome, not just tolerate: Redefining relationships in the workplace

Grey wall with the text "Everyone is welcome" stamped on it.
Photo by Katie Moum on Unsplash.

I’ve been part of committees as well as advisory boards for several years on very varied topics: emerging tech, DEI, customer support, operations…

After some reflection, I recently decided that I wanted to broaden my impact and I started to apply for non-executive board positions.

It’s not been easy or quick because I’ve been very picky about the organisations I’m submitting my applications to. First and foremost, I want to be part of the board of an organisation connected with my values and the legacy I want to leave behind: Working towards building inclusive products, workplaces, and societies.

The feedback I’ve got so far on my applications it’s that my background is difficult to “put in a box”.

  • I’ve been working on software companies for 18+ years BUT not in the IT or software development departments. 
  • I’ve been part of the acquisition integration team operationalising the transfer of thousands of support tickets, accounts, and contacts, as well as creating standard operation procedures for support, onboarding thousands of customers and internal employees, and running support operations BUT technically I’m not in the operations department. 
  • I have countless proof of DEI advocacy — including spearheading diversity initiatives, writing, speaking, inclusive leadership programs, mentoring, and coaching — BUT I’m not in HR.

In summary, I’m not enough or — even trickier — I’m too original, as I was told in France when I applied for a job for which I fulfilled all the requirements but — guess what? — the fact that I had done my engineering and M.Sc. degree in Venezuela, my Computational Chemistry Ph.D. in Canada, and my post-doc in Greece meant for them that they couldn’t relate to me or my experience. Frightened by the difference I was bringing with me, they decided to go with a candidate from the same university that everybody else in the department.

But this week something different happened.

I met with the CEO of an organisation with several open board positions to learn more about them and check if my profile was of interest before submitting my application. The position description specifically asked for DEI expertise. 

At the meeting, the CEO described the organisation and I was in awe at their purpose and impact. Then, it was my turn to talk about my background. I told him about my different roles as Director of Support and Customer Operations, award-winning inclusion strategist, as well as a DEI board advisor for an NGO focusing on making AI work for everybody. 

We talked about the need to diversify their board members and that they wanted to operationalise DEI in their organisation. My brain began to talk me out of the position. I mentioned something along the lines of “I fully support the need to diversity your board and obviously I’m white” and “I’m an inclusion strategist but I don’t have an HR background”…

And then, the magic happened.

The CEO told me that they were recruiting for 3 positions — not one, as I thought — and that my experiences as an immigrant in different countries, my work in tech, and my DEI journey would bring a very unique perspective to the board. 

Suddenly, I experienced a shift.

From feeling that I needed to fit into boxes created by others — to be tolerated- I moved to feel welcome.

Welcoming users

This is not only about hiring people. It’s about customers too.

Some months ago, I was talking with an organisation that works towards ensuring that data and AI work for all people and society. They wanted my feedback about their website in the context of my hat of inclusion strategist.

I pointed out that the site didn’t comply with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) international standard. But that was only the beginning. 

For example, I told them about how there were no images showcasing people with disabilities, old people, or children on their website. I also mentioned the lack of pronouns and the signals that sends to users from the LBTQAI+ community. 

Once I finished with my high-level evaluation of their website, I waited for my interlocutor’s feedback:

“You mentioned visitors of the website feeling welcome. I never thought about a website in this way”.

And his face lighted up. I hadn’t realised until that moment that I used the word “welcome”. I’m glad I did.  

To welcome people, start with your own feelings

When we talk about DEI, we often talk about “managing” the feelings of the people that society puts in a low-status category: Women, LBTQAI+, disabled, old…

  • We should make them feel included
  • We should make them feel that they belong
  • We should make them feel…

But the reality is that we can only control our feelings. The idea of “making somebody else feel like they belong” is a nice construct but doesn’t reflect how our brain works.

We’re a “circumstance” in others’ lives. We’re their “environment”. Their thoughts about that environment are what make them feel included or excluded — that they belong or they are only tolerated.

What if instead of thinking about others’ feelings, we started by thinking about our thoughts and feelings?

In other words, when you have a new colleague, manager, direct report, neighbour, or family member, my challenge to you is to interrogate your thoughts about that person

For example, are you thinking?

  • “I need to make X, Y, and Y so the person doesn’t think I’m racist”
  • “I must watch what I say to avoid hurting the person’s feelings”
  • “I should say X, Y, and Z so the person knows I’m their ally”

and as a consequence, are you feeling?

  • Stressed
  • Judged
  • Inadequate

Instead, I offer you to “try” thoughts like

  • “I’m interested in what I can learn from this person”
  • “This person will be an asset to the organisation”
  • “As a manager, I can help this person to fulfill their potential”

And what feelings do those thoughts elicit? I can share how I feel when I “try” those thoughts with a person.

  • Curious
  • Interested
  • Energised

In summary, we should care about our own thoughts and feelings because they drive our actions.

If you feel “judged” because you think “I must watch what I say to avoid hurting the person’s feelings”, probably you will “send vibes” to the person about being hypervigilant, sound scripted, and you’ll minimise your contact with them.

On the other hand, if you feel energised because you think that you can help this person to fulfill their potential, chances are you’ll share your knowledge with them, introduce them to your networks, and assign them stretching projects that will lead them to promotions.

The bottom line

We put a lot of effort into discussing actions to affect others’ feelings of inclusion and belonging.

Instead, if we truly want to produce meaningful DEI progress, we should start with our own thoughts and feelings. Only then, we will move from tolerating to welcoming.

QUIZ: Patriarchy and You

How much is patriarchy ruling your life and career?

We believe that we make choices based on logic and objective criteria.

The reality is that the patriarchal rules embedded in our socialisation often decide for us.

This 3-minute quiz will tell you how much patriarchy impacts your life and career choices.

TAKE ME TO THE QUIZ

10 Promotion secrets revealed: The poison of well-meaning advice

Suprised woman.
Image by Robin Higgins from Pixabay.

I’ve been a mentor for many years and I’ve had the privilege of receiving advice from fantastic mentors. 

But I’ve had also tons of bad career advice. Advice that has derailed my professional progression, robbed me of opportunities to stretch myself, and fostered patriarchal thinking.

The problem is that because it comes from well-meaning people around us, we’re conditioned by patriarchy to think others know better than us, and we’re trained to want to be liked — to “do as we’re told” — damaging our career in the process.

Here are my top 10 pieces of bad career advice and what to do instead so you save yourself time, energy, and frustration.

[Bad career advice #1] Women don’t help other women

This is patriarchal advice at its best. Are you really saying that 4 billion human beings won’t help their own group?

Yes, there have been some women that have hindered my progression or didn’t help me when it could have made a massive difference for me….

BUT

I’ve found many other women that have supported my career progression, made warm introductions, amplified my work, and highlighted my achievements and skills in rooms where I was not present. They have been my mentors, coaches, and sponsors.

What to do instead? If you’re a woman, connect two other women in your network that would benefit from knowing each other.

[Bad career advice #2] If you do a great job, you’ll be promoted

I have bad news for you: doing an impactful job that deserves a promotion is not enough to get promoted. That’s a sad truth that I’ve confirmed over and over throughout my career and from people that I’ve mentored, coached, and sponsored. It’s also well-documented in leadership books and articles.

There are multiple reasons for that. Some of them are:

  • Others may not be aware of your work.
  • They may be aware but don’t understand what it takes to deliver those results.
  • They may know about your work but don’t remember it at the promotion time.
  • Maybe only your manager knows about your achievements.
  • You deliver great value on key initiatives that are perceived as “one-offs”. That is, the value doesn’t fit the “typical” checkboxes for promotion.
  • Your work has reset the baseline of what people expect from you: You consistently deliver fantastic work so, by doing so in each project, you’re perceived as not doing anything “extraordinary” worth of a promotion.
  • You are perceived as a “commodity” worker: The business believes you won’t leave.

And there are many more.

What to do instead? Two actions you can start implementing right now to visibilise your great work:

1.- Record your wins — For example, create a “win folder” in your inbox to record your achievements, including those that appear “small”. That especially includes positive feedback from customers and colleagues. This information will be invaluable at the annual assessment time.

2.- Socialize your wins — Make your manager aware of your achievements… and everybody else that can support your promotion or may raise an objection about it. That includes your peers and especially other senior leaders in the organisation.

[Bad career advice #3] If you minimize your work, you’ll be more likeable and get promoted

Since I was little, I was taught by society to minimize and diminish myself and my contributions at each opportunity.

If they’d say “You’re intelligent”, the answer was “I work hard”.

To a professor telling me “Great work, Patricia”, I’d reply, “It was easy”.

Even to somebody praising how well a dress looked on me, I’d learned to reply “Really? It was not that expensive”.

And this pattern of diminishing my contributions and work continued through my early career. I felt the “right” answer to somebody acknowledging I had done great work was something like “It’s nothing”, “Anyone could have done it…”, or “Thanks but…”.

I also learn to caveat my comments with “I’m not an expert”, even if I was, because I internalised that otherwise I won’t be liked.

What’s the problem with that? I’ll answer with another question: How are you going to build a case for your promotion if you keep minimizing your contribution during the year? You cannot spend 365 days deflecting every praise on your work and then pitch during the annual and mid-year reviews that you’ve done outstanding work.

What to do instead? When somebody compliments your work, simply reply “Thank you” or, even better, stress what was the most difficult part. E.g. “Thanks. It entailed non-negligible strategic thinking/collaboration among teams/risk-taking. I’m glad to hear the project/initiative/presentation met your high standards “.

[Bad career advice #4] Everybody knows you want to be promoted

Nope. The world doesn’t turn around you!

During my academic years, the path was very clear. I was studying Chemical Engineering to get a diploma in Engineering. The same with my Master, and Ph.D. in Computational Chemistry. I didn’t need to spell out my goals. They were clear to everybody and that made it easy for people to support me, mentor me, and coach me.

Then, during my post-doc, the goal was much more fluid. It was like being in limbo. People assumed I wanted to be a professor at university — that’s what everybody wanted in the lab but I was not sure anymore… And then I knew that I wanted to work for a commercial company. Still, because I didn’t tell anybody, none knew, and obviously they didn’t think to recommend me if a commercial opportunity came along.

I did get a position to work for a company in France after my post-doc but it was all on my own. I had to look for open positions and apply to them. No warm introductions or help to prepare the interviews. Still, my post-doc advisor was very supportive once I asked for a recommendation to finalise my hiring at that company… I wish I’d communicated to him my intentions earlier.

I learned my lesson. Since then, I’ve been transparent with my managers about my career goals and where I see the next step for me. This kind of conversation helped me to understand the gaps between my perception and theirs about my career ambitions.

What to do instead? Spell out exactly what you want. Do you want to be promoted? Do you believe you deserve it? Say it. Explicitly. Don’t simply say “I want to be promoted” but “I have now the skills, achievements, and experience to be promoted to Sr. Support Engineer”, “Operations Sr Manager” or “Principal Software Engineer”.

And if you haven’t started to discuss it with your manager, don’t leave it to the annual review. Bring it to your next 1:1 meeting!

[Bad career advice #5] If you go after a promotion, you may let other people down

At one point when I was looking for a job early in my career, I reached out to quite a lot of organisations with my CV. One of them replied that they wanted to hire me. The position was not starting until several months later but I was over the moon.
 
About a month later I got the previous message, I was contacted by another of the organisations to which I’d applied. They were also interested in my CV. What’s more, they were even a better opportunity than the one I had accepted.
 
I was torn. I didn’t want to let the first organisation down but it was such a good opportunity…
 
 I reached out to my only mentor at the time and she told me I should be cautious. I didn’t want to be known as somebody that was untrustworthy… Long story short, I declined the second offer.
 
 In the very long run, all went well with my first option but I regret that my decision was based on “not letting others down” and not on “this is the best choice for me”.
 
What to do instead? Every time your brain goes into the “I may be letting others down” rabbit hole, question if you’re letting yourself down instead. Also, I invite you to examine the long-term effect of your decision. In my story, the decision was life-changing for me — it affected my career path — whereas for my employers it would have been an inconvenience but definitely, it wouldn’t have changed the organisation.
 

Get the other 5 pieces of bad advice — and what to do instead — when you join my newsletter where I share fresh thinking about inclusion, tech, professional success & systemic change through a feminist lens. Sign here to receive the guide “10 Pieces of Bad Career Advice and What to Do Instead”.

PS. If you’re already subscribed to this blog and want the guide “10 Pieces of Bad Career Advice and What to Do Instead”, get in touch and I’ll send it to you!

Unmasking patriarchal productive procrastination: Empower your professional path

Woman in a library carrying a stack of books.
Photo by cottonbro studio.

This week, I had amazing coaching conversations with my clients about their professional careers. 

A recurrent theme came up: The “evermore education” career trap — using courses, certifications, and programs as barriers to their own career progression.

This is part of what I call productive procrastination.

Productive procrastination

The Cambridge Dictionary defines procrastination as

the act of delaying something that must be done, often because it is unpleasant or boring

We associate procrastination with either doing what we call “nothing” — resting — or embarking on pleasurable tasks — watching TV, gaming, gardening— instead of doing the work we have decided we should be doing.

However, for my clients, a recurrent blocker in their career progress has not been bingeing on Netflix instead of searching for a job. It’s been doing something that on the surface appears to be aligned with their professional goal but that it’s procrastination in disguise.  

“Not All Speed Is Movement”

Toni Cade Bambara

I’m talking about the neverending cycle of “taking another course”, “reading another book”, and“mastering another tool” before applying for a new job, asking for a promotion, or launching a business.

In summary, you convince yourself that before any meaningful step towards progressing in your career, you must learn something that it’s going to take you a considerable amount of time AND that until you complete that step you cannot pursue your career goals.

Why you love productive procrastination

The reason productive procrastination is so efficient is that — unlike bingeing on Netflix — it makes us feel good. How?

  1. It gives us permission not to risk rejection; that is, not to engage with the person that actually can help us in our career progression: manager, recruiter, or sponsor.
  2. It allows us to delay our career progression “rationally” — instead of exploring the reasons why we’re resistant to have conversations about our career with key stakeholders, that 3-month course or 6-month program gives us the perfect alibi to “delay” those uncomfortable discussions for another 3 or 6 months.
  3. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy — as we learn more, we discover other areas/topics/skills in which we’re not an expert. That enables our brain to come up with yet another“learning milestone” that we “absolutely need to master” before going back to our job search.
  4. We’re sure to please most of our friends, mentors, and loved ones. When we share with our network of supporters thoughts like “I learned today that it’s good I do course X before I launch my business” or “I’m going to pursue program Y towards my career change”, we — consciously or unconsciously — already know they are going to tell us things like “Great idea”, “I’m pleased you’re taking action”, “Sounds like the right next step”. You feel good, they feel good, and nothing changes.

Why do I say that productive procrastination is a patriarchal strategy?

Because whilst you are “happily busy” learning and perfecting, those with more privilege than you are 

  • Sending half-cooked CVs to recruiters.
  • Asking for warm introductions to hiring managers.
  • Launching a website with some typos.
  • Negotiating a pay rise.
  • Discussing their promotion with their managers.
  • Running a survey among their targeted customer group to get feedback on a business idea.

Moreover, productive procrastination reinforces the feeling of “not enoughness” that patriarchal structures feed to women and people from underrepresented groups since we’re born.

How else do you explain that in spite that there are more women than men with university degrees in Oceania, the Americas, and Europe, most leadership positions in those regions are in the hands of men?

How do you detect you’re a victim of productive procrastination?

Some clues that you’ve become a productive procrastinator

  • Overcomplicating — You keep adding courses/workshops/certificates to your to-do list of things you have decided you absolutely need to finish before starting to take action.
  • Endless polishing — When you look at your CV, website, or business idea, you tell yourself that you’ll need a ton of work to create/develop/improve them and you keep refining the draft versions for weeks, months, or years
  • Neverending sense of “not being enough” — Do you note a pattern of embarking on back-to-back certifications, even if you continue to promise yourself that this will be the last one?

How you get unstuck from productive procrastination

And here are some strategies to unhook you from productive procrastination:

  • Overcomplicating — what’s the minimum education or piece of work you need to start interacting with stakeholders in your career?
  • Endless polishing — When you look at your CV, what overwhelming evidence do you have that more polishing is needed before you send it?
  • Neverending sense of “not being enough” — Decide in advance what’s the minimum you need to “learn” and what’s the deadline. And then stick to it. 

BACK TO YOU: What’s one way you’ll stop productively procrastinating to block your career progression this week?

PS. I can help you to unblock your career 

Book a strategy session with me to explore how coaching can help you to become your own version of success.

How patriarchy teaches you to talk yourself out of what you want

Patricia Gestoso delivering a talk in front of a screen that reads: Career vs Patriarchal version. Under career, there is a workflow that starts with goal, plan, people, implement, and ends with achieve. Under the patriarchal version, the workflow starts with play small, magnify obstables, do one test, judge ourselves, and ends with conform.

In May, I delivered a talk to the University of Manchester at the EDIA Colloquium “Women in Science, Industry and Academia”.

The title of the talk was How Patriarchy fosters your Perfectionism, Self-criticism and Self-doubt and what you can do about it”. To my surprise – and maybe yours – the title was not suggested by me but by the organisers of the event after reading my posts.

During the keynote, I shared with the audience how I talked myself out of launching my website focused on the intersection between technology and DEI for three years.

Reasons I gave myself:

Lack of role models: I hadn’t met yet anybody that worked in tech – I was senior manager of support at the time – and had a personal blog about diversity, inclusion, and equity.

Perfectionism: As a non-native English speaker, I catastrophised about the possibility to have a typo on the website or that my grammar may not be flawless.

Validation: The patriarchal structures had educated me that my worth was dependent on validation from others. I was concerned that people in my network and at work would see me as “less” for having a blog.

Credibility: I have a Ph.D. in Computational Chemistry but not in HR or DEI. At the time, I felt my lived experiences as well as my work advocating and spearheading diversity and inclusion initiatives weren’t “enough” to grant me permission to write a blog about DEI.

How did I overcome all those obstacles? I’d love to tell you that I “cured” myself by repeating in my head “Fake it until you make it” or “Be confident”. But it was not the case.

I had to do the work against two powerful enemies.

The first was my brain, that’s wired for survival and hates anything new. My brain knows me well so it would always throw me “thoughts” to discourage me to pursue a stretching goal.

The second was patriarchy, which is an even mightier adversary. Through the years, it has built for me a big encyclopaedia called “Good girl rules for Patricia”.  In it, it’s carefully detailed the very few things I’m allowed to think, feel, and do and all the other things I can’t even dream about because “good girls don’t do that”.

Among the patriarchal rules that are extremely successful at minimising women and people from underrepresented groups is the idea of the “role model”. It’s the perfect self-fulfilling prophecy.

Take women in tech.

Society says “Women need more role models in STEM”. That causes women to think that they need a role model to have a career in tech. And if they don’t find it, they abandon the idea because “you can’t be what you cannot see”. Not only that, if you’re indeed a woman in tech that has succeeded, society imposes on you the “obligation” to act as a role model on top of your full-time job. This can go all the way from agreeing to be the company’s speaker at STEM events to sponsoring the female employee network. All that whilst the men around you prioritise their careers.

How convenient, isn’t it?

That’s the reason that I told the audience that instead they should cherish the opportunities when they don’t have a role model. That means they are creating original work. That means they are trailblazers!

Moreover, I invited them to think about being role models themselves and have impossible goals. In my case, I want to be a role model of what’s possible for an immigrant woman in tech.

In the end, I shared with the audience a tip and a quote

The tip is that you need to learn how to move whilst feeling fear. There is no “imposter syndrome” vaccine. Fear will always be there when you attempt greatness, when you disrupt the status quo. The trick is to acknowledge it and explore the techniques that will suit you to still go ahead in spite of the discomfort.

The quote is

“If someone is unhappy with your life, it shouldn’t be you”

Brooke Castillo, Life Coach School

BACK TO YOU: How are you talking yourself out of doing what you want?

PS.

Do you want to get rid of chapters in the “good girl” encyclopaedia that patriarchy has written for you? Book a strategy session with me to explore how coaching can help you to become your own version of success.

How to integrate quitting your job into your career success strategy

Text that reads both as "Don't quit it" and "Do it".
Photo by Leeloo Thefirst.

Work is currently designed for an idealised version of a White young single man with no care responsibilities.

And it goes beyond the scheduling constraints of a “full-time job” – 40 hours/week, 9 to 5 straight hours, and the Monday to Friday working week. From what we consider “looking professional” all the way to the expectations of having to be always on just in case the business needs us or even setting the office temperature, which was developed back in the 1960s through an analysis of the resting weight of a 154lb (69kg) 40-year-old man.

It’s not a surprise that women and people from underrepresented groups feel they don’t “fit in”.

And it goes beyond dress codes and schedules. We’re expected to put up with microaggressions, weaponised incompetence, office work, and harassment, to mention a few.

However, rather than questioning the current state of affairs, patriarchy has trained us to think that we’re the problem and it’s upon us to either fix it – for example, through championing DEI initiatives – or simply toughen up.

In addition to the mental load to either fit in or fix the system, the problem with that kind of indoctrination is that assumes that quitting a job is not a valid option. It’s seen as a failure rather than a choice. And that hurts our career and diminishes our leverage.

How do I know? Because I’ve done so.

My quitting story

After finishing my master in chemical engineering in Venezuela, I decided to pursue a Ph.D. abroad. At the time, I wanted to become a professor at the university and I felt that was the best next step.

The problem? I didn’t have the money to pay for 5 years of living abroad and expensive tuition fees. One of my master’s advisors came up with a solution: There was a professor in Canada that was looking for a Ph.D. student and he could pay me a minimum wage – enough to live.

Our email interactions hinted some worrying signals about him not being an easy person to work for but I was so keen on the opportunity – I kept telling myself that was “the only” chance available to me – that I decided to take it and go to Canada.

I should have listened to my gut feeling. He was a bully. I was the only woman in the lab but we all suffered harassment and discrimination at different levels. One of the people even died from suicide.

How was he able to pull it off? We were all on a student visa. Pushing back, denouncing him, or leaving the lab meant to have to go home empty-handed. In one word, fail.

I kept telling myself that if I was able to cope, it’d be worth it. I got really good at diminishing in my mind all the things that were wrong with my boss’s behaviour and minimising myself such as not bringing out the worst of his character.

Moreover, most people around me that knew about his behaviour empathised with me but also reminded me that quitting would mean “losing” the time I’d already spent on my Ph.D.

To cut a long story short, after 1 year and 4 months, I quit. When I announced it to him, he told me that he’d publish my work without my name, which he did it. He tried to make me change my mind with threats and nice words.

It didn’t work. I left and I moved to another lab where I thrived. The difference was that now I had a great advisor that supported me rather than put me down. I wrote 5 papers and completed my Ph.D. in 4.5 years.

What about the others in my first lab? They stayed. And they all told me that they regretted it.

From my side, I didn’t regret going to another lab and start again my Ph.D. That previous experience was not a waste of time. It helped me to know that I have non-negotiables at work like respect, mental wellbeing, and appreciation.

I learned from that experience that it was paramount that I integrated quitting into my career strategy.

But how to do it?

Coaching tool: decisions ahead of time

One of the reasons that makes it so hard to quit is that we only consider it when we have the feeling that we’ve run out of “other” options. That means we’re not in a very generative state. We feel exhausted, defeated, or angry, to mention a few typical emotions.

What’s more, we feel disappointed with ourselves for allowing the situation to reach such a low point. Typically the reason it’s that we’ve experienced the boiling frog syndrome.

The premise is that if a frog is put suddenly into boiling water, it will jump out, but if the frog is put in tepid water which is then brought to a boil slowly, it will not perceive the danger and will be cooked to death. The story is often used as a metaphor for the inability or unwillingness of people to react to or be aware of sinister threats that arise gradually rather than suddenly.

Wikipedia

How to avoid finishing like the frog? Or wait until you’re burnt out to jump out of the boiling water?

I recommend a coaching technique called “decision ahead of time”. In brief, plan how you’ll think, feel, and act in advance of certain triggers appearing.

How does that work in practice?

List your non-negotiables at work. That can be about the culture, the perks, your promotion aspirations, your schedule, your participation in projects, your salary expectations, and so on.

Then, decide in advance what changes in those areas will give you hints that you may want to leave, how leaving would look like, and how that would integrate into your career strategy.

In those terms, quitting doesn’t look like a failure but as part of a plan. It’s framed as a healthy way to avoid burnout and practice setting boundaries.

If not quitting, what are you doing about your career?

The boiling frog syndrome is so seductive that can make us forget our career by focusing on our current job.

How do we know if we’re trapped in our own version of the boiling frog syndrome?

Ask yourself the following questions:

  • Do you know where you’re and what you want out of your career?
  • Have you delegated to your manager, CEO, or organisation your professional ambitions?
  • Are you hoping to finally get promoted but you don’t have a clear commitment from your manager about what you need to get it or when it’ll happen?
  • Do you keep talking yourself out of your promotion aspirations, telling yourself that it could be worse?

If after reading the questions above you feel you’re ready to jump out of the boiling water, join me for the Joyful Career Promotion Week later this month.

Let me tell you more about it.

WHAT YOU GETHOW THAT WILL HELP YOU TO GET A PROMOTION
20+ page workbook1.- Step-by-step guide to writing your 2023 mid-year career review.
2.- Examples of framing the promotion conversation with your manager.
3.- Insights into how to tackle the common pushback from your manager about discussing your next promotion
Three one-hour group virtual coaching calls via Zoom1.- Get coached on your mid-year self-assessment review and specific career progression goals.
2.- Learn from others getting coached about their promotion challenges.
 Live pop-up private online community groupGet asynchronous feedback about your written mid-year assessment, the promotion conversation with your manager, and career progression.

When? Mon-Wed-Fri May 22-26, 2023 – 12.00 BST | 13.00 CEST

If you’ve been thinking about working with me, this is the perfect opportunity to get introduced to the power of career coaching with a very small investment.

I look forward to working with you on making your career aspirations a reality!

Are You Falling for Weaponised Incompetence at Work? Here’s How to Stop

Senior Caucasian man holding a blank empty banner covering his mouth with a hand, looking shocked and afraid because of a mistake.
Photo by krakenimages on Unsplash.

I’ve written in the past about how women – especially non-White women – are expected to do the office housework: Those administrative tasks that are important for the business to keep moving but that are undervalued and not likely to result in a promotion.

And last week I learned that office housework has an ally: Weaponised incompetence.

Definition:

Weaponised incompetence or “strategic incompetence” as it’s sometimes called ― is the act of faking incompetence at any one task (though usually an unpleasant one) to get out of doing it.”

Examples:

  • Your partner claims they are “not good” at household chores so you do them.
  • Your family says that they are rubbish at planning, so you get stuck with organising family gatherings.
  • Your roommate consistently does a poor job at cleaning the toilet so you step in and do it yourself.

But it’s also alive and well in the workplace.

How do you identify weaponised incompetence at the workplace?

By the task

They are typically mundane tasks or activities perceived as low-value – taking the minutes, planning office events, handling conflict among colleagues, or soothing unhappy customers.

By what they tell you

  • You’re praised by how well you do the task, e.g. “You’re naturally good at taking notes during the meetings”.
  • They make you responsible for their faked incompetence and delegate the task to you, e.g. ” Remember last time how bad it was when I did it? You’re so much better than me at this”.
  • They say they don’t know how to do it, e.g. “It’s so difficult to update the Excel spreadsheet with the new leads”.

By what they do

Some strategies to deal with weaponised incompetence

  • Recognise you’ve been manipulated.
  • Communicate the patterns you’ve noticed.
  • Set boundaries AND STICK TO THEM.
  • Leave them on their own to figure things out
  • Coach them through doing the task themselves.
  • Take the opportunity to start a discussion about how valuable is the task, who should be doing it, and how it should be rewarded.

Are you a “perpetrator” of weaponised incompetence?

It’s also important that women – and people belonging to other protected categories – check if we are using weaponised incompetence against other people. For example, as I mentioned above, non-White women are expected to do more office housework than White women.

We, White women, need to step up and help break the cycle rather than reinforce it.

The first step is awareness.

  1. Look at the low-value tasks you convince yourself “you’re not to be good at” or that you don’t want to learn.
  2. Reflect on the reasons why you don’t want to learn to do them or why you think you’re not good at them.

Next, think about to whom you deflect that task.

  1. Is it always the same person?
  2. Is there a reason why the task shouldn’t be rotated among other people?

If it’s always the same person and the task is not core to the person’s role, step up and break the cycle of weaponised incompetence.

Final reflections

During an insightful discussion, Rose Cartolari challenged the use of weaponised incompetence as an expression that may further the divide between the giver and the receiver of the action. Instead, she offered the less violent and loaded term learned helplessness for reflection.

The American Psychological Association defines learned helplessness as “a phenomenon in which repeated exposure to uncontrollable stressors results in individuals failing to use any control options that may later become available. Essentially, individuals are said to learn that they lack behavioral control over environmental events, which, in turn, undermines the motivation to make changes or attempt to alter situations”.

I wonder if a term like strategic helplessness could be used instead of weaponised incompetence. I love to get your feedback on the comments on this expression.

BACK TO YOU: What do you do when co-workers use weaponised incompetence to get you to do low-value/unpromotable tasks?

A gift from me to you

Are you interested in discussing how setting boundaries can help you achieve your professional and personal goals?

Then book a free strategy session with me.

“Am I Making Sense?” – Language and Power Dynamics in Meetings

A photo of a woman surrounded by overlayed question marks looking doubtful.
Image by Sophie Janotta from Pixabay.

As I non-native English speaker, I was puzzled by women finishing their sentences with “Am I making sense?”. I finally understood the reason.

Although I’d been fluent in English for many years before, it was not until I moved to the UK that I lived in a place where English was the native language by default. (Yes, I’d lived in Canada for 5 years but it was in Quebec City, where most people have French as their mother tongue).

Back to my life in the UK, I remember being intrigued by how women – and only women – would finish their interventions in meetings with “Am I making sense?”.

Why? Because, it didn’t make sense to me that very confident women – at least they looked that way to me – would ask that question after sharing their opinion in a concise and assertive manner.

And I began to find explanations for it.

1.- For women confident in their ideasConfident women are a hard pill to swallow in leadership. We expect women to be “collaborative” – e.g. take the notes, be the admin for the team, do the glue work – not be assertive or confident.

How do women tackle the bias against confident women?

“Playing” dumb. By downplaying what they are saying, they’re hoping to not look threatening and get others’ buy-in (or mansplaining).

2.- For women concerned that their ideas may be too much – These women have picked up that their organisations and peers like to congratulate themselves on doing exactly the same things over and over and they won’t support rocking the status quo. In the past, those women have proposed a visionary project, an innovative idea, or a transformational initiative and it has been rejected for being too much.

How do women tackle the bias against their ideas?

They downplay their ideas by presenting them as a “thought” with the hope they’ll stick this time around.

3.- For women concerned that their ideas may be too little – Society has indoctrinated women that perfection is expected from them, with no margin for error. Those women don’t believe they have permission to express their opinions because they judge their ideas as not strategic” enough, “visionary” enough, or “fully formed”.

How do women tackle their bias against their own ideas not being “good enough”?

They share their opinions with the caveat “Am I making sense?” in the hope that the feedback they receive it’s not too harsh.

My take

In the past, hearing a woman saying “Am I making sense?” used to upset me.

Now, I salute all those women that use “Am I making sense?” as a way to overcome the patriarchal constraints imposed on us.

I’d still prefer those women experiment with other ways to connect with their audience and instead use alternatives such as

  • “comments?”
  • “any questions?”
  • “I’m curious about what’s your feedback.”

BACK TO YOU: What’s your take?

P.S.

Are you tired of patriarchy, stereotypes, and cultural norms creating obstacles to achieving our goals?

Then book a free strategy session with me.

Beyond Cosmetic Changes: The Truth About DEI Efforts

Hiker walking on a flimsy line bridge between two boulders. There is a cartoon thought callout coming from the hiker with the text "Every little helps..." .
Photo by filllvlad adapted by Patricia Gestoso.

I’m so tired of messages downplaying the effort that takes to build a diverse, equitable, and inclusive (DEI) workplace!

If all that it takes is minuscule steps, why aren’t we there yet?

Some examples

  • A couple of months ago, I received an email from an organisation specialised in recruiting for tech and sales jobs entitled “10 small (but mighty) tactics to reach your DEI goals”.
  • Last week, on LinkedIn a Global Head of DEI posted “It is often in the seemingly small moments and tiny gestures that inclusive leadership shows up.”
  • Even Entrepreneur let us off the hook for being DEI slackers and tells us that “starting with a bite-sized approach is the key to authentically weaving diversity, equity and inclusion into the culture of your business”.

Personally, it feels like they’ve borrowed Tesco’s motto “Every little helps”.

Can you imagine companies using the same approach for revenue, marketing, or customer support?

  • To investors: “10 small (but mighty) tactics to reach your revenue goals“.
  • To the board: “It is often the seemingly small marketing events and tiny social media campaigns that bring big business.”
  • To dissatisfied customers: “Starting with a bite-sized approach is the key to delivering outstanding customer support”.

Is really so easy?

No, it’s not. But I understand why that language is used.

Those messages suggesting that tiny DEI steps can have a massive impact on the quality of the workplace culture or that “simple” steps can increase the diversity of your workforce are targeted to an audience of

  • DEI sceptics.
  • Those that benefit from the current status quo.
  • Those that feel DEI is a zero-sum game.
  • Leaders that want to believe that some cosmetic actions will make their Great Place to Work ratings soar.
  • Organisations that feel the pressure to “show” DEI commitment without seeing the business case.

That is, the goal is to appease those that resist change telling them that they won’t need to do a lot, it won’t cost too much money, and business processes won’t have to be modified in the hope that those naysayers don’t block DEI initiatives.

What’s wrong with “tiny” DEI steps?

“When you make success look easy, you attract people who want easy success.”

Kris Plachy

When we say that small changes are enough to create valuable DEI change

  • We diminish the value of the work DEI professionals deliver.
  • We demoralise DEI champions and employee resource groups that see their efforts minimised.
  • We belittle the experience of those excluded.
  • We justify the lack of investment.
  • We assume no radical changes are needed in the organisation.
  • We outsource the responsibility for the organisation DEI to individuals.  

Finally, by downplaying the effort required to deliver change, we implicitly remove the systemic angle that is at the core of DEI practices.

What to do instead

DEI initiatives are not different than any other strategic programmes: What you get is proportional to the effort you put in.

Treat DEI as the serious matter that it is.

Rather than softening the effort required

  • Lead with the benefits to have a diverse, inclusive, and equitable workplace.
  • Caution against the risks of working in a homogenous, exclusionary, and unfair organisation.
  • Highlight that DEI issues are systemic and there is no room for bystanders. If you abstain to work towards bringing the system to health, you are reinforcing the current status. 

Patriarchy & Your goals

Are you tired of patriarchy, stereotypes, and cultural norms creating obstacles to achieving our goals?

Then book a free strategy session with me.

How to advance equity in the workplace? Embrace legacy

Photo of the Giza pyramid complex with the word "legacy" overlayed.
Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay adapted by Patricia Gestoso.

At the end of March, I attended the women in tech conference #ReframeWIT2023 in Manchester. During one of the sessions, they asked us to reflect on purpose-driven work. More specifically, what was our purpose.

The woman next to me shared that she’d always found it difficult to think in terms of purpose: Too fluffy, too aspirational, too “marketing-ish”.

So I let her into my secret. Ditch purpose and instead focus on legacy.

The face of my conversation partner illuminated. She just had the same revelation that I had when, years ago, this amazing gem of wisdom was shared with me by one of my mentors.

As my interlocutor at the conference, at the time I was disenchanted by the overuse of the word purpose. During the last decade, Simon Sinek’s TED talk How great leaders inspire action triggered an epidemic of organisations rewriting their websites to state their purpose, their “why”.

And the trend is still going strong. By now, everyone has got the memo that organisations’ why – aka purpose – should sound groundbreaking, grandiose, awe-inspiring…

Let’s check some

“Our purpose is to move the world forward through the power of sport.

Nike

“To inspire and nurture the human spirit – one person, one cup and one neighborhood at a time.”

Starbucks

“We reimagine the way the world moves for the better.”

Uber

Because there is a tacit understanding that purpose is aspirational – a far away North Star – there was no metric or timeline attached to it. Moreover, often the greater the purpose, the more disappointing the actual results in terms of contribution to planet and people.

It was discussing this gap with my mentor that she shared her focus on her legacy as a North Star.

And that was my AHA moment. Why?

Whereas purpose relies on wishful thinking, legacy prompts you to action.

Your mind transports you into the future, where you can look backwards and ask yourself

“How can you prove that you’ve been a good ancestor?”

Legacy helps us close the gap between intent and impact.

Unfortunately, because we focus on asking organisations what’s their purpose rather than their legacy, they get away with bland commitments to sustainability, employees’ rights, and – of course – diversity, inclusion, and equity.

Shell’s purpose is to power progress together by providing more and cleaner energy solutions. 

Shell

Legacy and I

I’ve often talked about my awaking to digital accessibility. In the article Unlocking change with ethical and inclusive design, I described how I learned the hard way the gap between my purpose to be a diversity and inclusion advocate and my legacy.

 […] in December 2018, six months after launching my website on diversity and inclusion in tech, an expert in disability asked me if it was accessible and pointed me to the post 10 ways to make your blog accessible for people with a visual impairment on the site Life of A Blind Girl . Reading the article was transformative. It made clear to me that, irrespective of my intention — promoting diversity and inclusion — my impact was the opposite: I’d been potentially frustrating and excluding from my website the millions of people with visual impairments that use screen-readers. All by not using simple and low effort practices such as adding alternative text to the imagines.

So what’s the legacy I’m working towards? What am I aiming for?

First, I want to be an example of what’s possible for an immigrant non-native English speaker woman in tech.

Second, I want to help embed diversity, inclusion, and equity in organisations so that those values cascade to workplaces and products. To make this more actionable, I’ve split it in two.

At the individual level, help release women and underrepresented groups’ capacity so they get into positions of leadership and unleash inclusive workplaces and products.

At the organisational level, help leaders leverage diversity into their business strategy so they can boost innovation, attract and retain talent, be prepared to manage a diverse workforce, and be an example of inclusive leadership.

BACK TO YOU: What are you and your organisation doing right now that will make you mighty ancestors for future generations?

Personal invitation

I’m running again the free online session How to move from self-criticism into inner wisdom on Wednesday April 26, 2023 at 10.30 PDT | 13.30 EDT | 18.30 BST | 19.30 CEST.

Last time, we had an insightful conversation about how workplaces reinforce self-criticism and what we can do when they block our career aspirations.

This is what you’ll learn:

  • How I moved from being stuck in my career in tech to thriving as a technologist, award-winning inclusion strategist, life and career coach, writer, and international public speaker.
  • Three real examples of how tapping into inner wisdom has helped women and non-binary people in tech to reframe confidence to achieve their goals.
  • Understanding how the patriarchy, stereotypes, and cultural norms put obstacles to achieving our goals and promote self-criticism, self-doubt, and analysis paralysis.
  • ​​A framework to move from self-criticism to inner wisdom.

Sign up today to make sure you don’t miss it.

What women leaders want: A fresh perspective on retention strategies

Bar chart with the title "if you considered leaving the workforce in 2022, which of the following would make you more likely to stay?". Feeling more valued is at the top with 74%, increased pay second with 60%, and promotion to a higher level of responsibility is the third with 41%.
Results from Chief’s Make Work Work survey.

I’m so tired of bland business advice about how to retain women in leadership positions

  • Talk about the purpose.
  • Given them flexibility.
  • Build an inclusive workplace.

Why bland? Because it’s not a strategy, it’s the minimum.

That’s why it was so refreshing to read Chief‘s article “What women leaders really want at work

Chief’s “Make Work Work” survey of 847 Chief Members, all of whom are women at the VP level or above and who collectively manage $220 billion of the U.S. economy found that – surprise, surprise – there’s a massive disconnect between what companies think women want at work versus what they actually want. To be honest, that’s not a big surprise for me. Already in 2019, I wrote about the disconnect between HR and millennial women on the top reasons why those women leave companies.

So, what’s at the top of the wishlist for those 847 female leaders? In other words, if they considered leaving the workforce in 2022, which would make them more likely to stay?

Feeling more valued – Recently, I read in a community of women in tech a post from a female VP that is routinely expected to play the “secretary” for the exec team: Writing minutes, sending reminders… How valued do you think she feels?

Increased pay – Who would have guessed that women want to be paid as much as White men?

Promotion to a higher level of responsibility – Another shocker! I was sure women don’t care about promotions…

What retain women executives? In order of priority

1.     Power

2.     Money

Is that so different that what male leaders want?

Quiet quitting and rusting-out

So what happens to those that remain in their jobs and don’t get what they want?

In the last six months, there’s been a lot of chatter about quiet quitting. As per Forbes, “burned-out or unsatisfied employees put forth the least amount of effort possible to keep their paychecks”. Whilst for some this is a euphemism for lazy workers, others have made the case that quiet quitting can also be understood as refusing to be a workaholic and instead strictly delivering the work that matches your role and remuneration. But it’s not the only option.

Last week, I learned a new word rust-out: the condition of being chronically under-stimulated, uninspired, and unsatisfied at work

In an article in Stylist, Sharon Peake mentions that “rust-out is also more likely to affect women than men due to the unique workplace barriers that women experience, such as the double burden of paid and unpaid (domestic) work. This often leads highly capable and experienced women to return to work part-time, working at a lower level of responsibility after maternity leave, or even opting out of the workforce.” Moreover, “it can cause employees to ‘doom loop’. that is, repeat unhelpful stories about ourselves.”

In my post Join the conversation: How has mansplaining impacted your life? I mentioned the importance of having words to explain and validate our experiences.

I can finally name the experience of all those fantastic women that started with me in tech years ago and that were given unappealing part-time jobs when they came back from maternity leave, without access to the plumb assignments that lead to career progression.

Their organisations had condemned them to rust out in their jobs.

Join the conversation: How has mansplaining impacted your life?

Cartoon of a woman absorbed looking at a man that is telling her "Let me explain..."
Image by Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay  adapted by Patricia Gestoso.

By now, the term mansplaining – to explain something to a woman in a condescending manner that assumes she has no knowledge about the topic – has become mainstream. It was even incorporated into the Oxford English Dictionary in 2018.

It’s also a kind of “inside joke” among women. Our bosses, peers, and even direct reports “mansplain us”. Our family and friends too…

Sometimes we just sigh.

Sometimes we try to “kindly” point out to the mansplainer that we know better than them.

Sometimes we fight back, like the time that during an evaluation of scholarships for funding,  I had a disagreement with another juror regarding a research proposal to develop new tools for materials molecular simulation.

I found the proposal weak, partly because not enough details were given about the methodology that was to be implemented. One of the other evaluators countered that he had found the proposal outstanding. When I pointed to him the list of “holes” in the proposal, he retorted that although he was no expert in modelling he insisted the proposal was excellent. I replied that – unlike him – I was an expert on that kind of materials modelling so that my feedback should prevail.

And even last week, I was mansplained when I shared among colleagues that I was writing a book about how women succeed in tech. I mentioned that I was collecting answers to my short survey asking those women what has made them stay and what they need to thrive in the next 5 years. One of them – whom I’d never met before – volunteered that this was not the right focus for the book. He shared that instead I should write about how STEM is taught in the schools…

Even The Economist has found use for the word in their article The battle for internet search: “ChatGPT often gets things wrong. It has been likened to a mansplainer: supremely confident in its answers, regardless of their accuracy”.

But mansplaining can be life-threatening too, as Rebecca Solnit – who inspired the word with her essay Men explain things to me – wrote in The Guardian last week.

Mansplaining occurs too when

  • The police explain to us that the partner violence we experience is not rape.
  • When doctors explain to us that our pain is imaginary rather than uncovering that it’s caused by endometriosis.
  • When we denounce sexist, ageist, racist, or ableist practices in the workplace and we’re told that it’s only banter.

Mansplaining and epistemic injustice

At the root of mansplaining there is a bigger issue: Who we believe is credible.

In the end, what we believe is conditioned by who’s the messenger. Is it a White male in a coat or a Black trans woman? A Venezuelan immigrant single mother or a wealthy Indian man that studied at Oxford?

Dr. Miranda Fricker – a Professor of Philosophy at New York University – coined the term epistemic injustice, the concept of an injustice done against someone “specifically in their capacity as a knower”.

There are two kinds of epistemic injustice.

Testimonial injustice is when somebody is not believed because of their identity. Like when women are mansplained about their pain being imaginary because they are women.

Hermeneutical injustice is when somebody’s experiences are not understood so they are minimised or diminished. For example, before the term was introduced, the experience of being mansplained had already existed for centuries. However, as there wasn’t a word for it, it was difficult to recognise it as a particular form of patronising women and even for women to discuss the experience among themselves.

How to counter epistemic justice?

We need to get bolder at sharing our experiences of injustice, even we don’t have a name.

As I mentioned in my post What words do we need to invent to embed systemic change?, we must give ourselves permission to create and discard words to be able to build new futures.

And that also includes creating words to describe our experiences. For example,

  • The constant state of alert that we immigrants experience because the laws of the countries we live in can unexpectedly change affecting our right to work and live in the country.
  • The sense of dread people from older generations experience when they go to a job interview and they feel they need to reassure the prospective hiring manager that they won’t steal their job.
  • When your boss boasts about being a female ally because he has a daughter but doesn’t do anything to advance gender equity in the workplace.

BACK TO YOU: How has mansplaining impacted your life? Let me know in the comments.

Do you want to achieve diversity, inclusion, and equity in 2023? Embrace impossible goals

Message pinned with three pushpins to a whiteboard that reads "Nothing is impossible only improbable".
Image by Davie Bicker from Pixabay

(5 min read)

Happy New Year 2023! I wish this year brings you professional and personal success.

This post is inspired by a great conversation I had with my lovely mother-in-law this morning. She’s a fantastic woman that — as myself — is ambitious. Unlike myself, she didn’t have the support of her parents to attend university or to do any other kind of studies after secondary school. But her brother did have that opportunity. The reason? He’s a man, she’s a woman.

The same happened to my grandmother, an extremely brilliant woman. Her only brother was sent to pursue further studies after he finished school. Neither my grandmother nor any of her 3 sisters were given that opportunity.

Until this point, hopefully, none of this surprises you no matter where you live in the world.

So what made that conversation relevant? My mother-in-law told me that believes that things will continue to improve steadily for women in the next years and that they cannot be speeded up.

When I reiterated that I don’t want things to improve “steadily” for women and people of underrepresented groups but that I want them to improve “dramatically”, she reminded me of all the progress achieved for women’s rights since she was young. As proof, she compared what happened to her professional ambitions with her great expectations for the professional future of her 10-year-old granddaughter — who happens to be my goddaughter.

She also conveyed to me that she believed that I was being unreasonable. After all, it has taken centuries to get where we are now regarding women rights.

I used two arguments to support that (a) we need to upend the status quo now, (b) that it’s possible to deliver that change in an extremely short time.

Why we need to upend the status quo now

My mother-in-law told that whilst none of the two of us would see equality in our lifetime, my goddaughter would because

  • She’s intelligent.
  • She’s ambitious.

My reply? As Dame Stephanie Shirley, my head is flat from so many people stopping me from my ambitions and creating artificial ceilings for my career.

I told her that her granddaughter may be very talented and determined and still have bosses that won’t promote her because

If that wasn’t enough, I told her that the UN estimates that it will take more than 150 years to reach gender equality.

To be more precise, only four months ago — on September 7th, 2022- the UN Women and the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs released the report Progress on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG): The Gender Snapshot 2022 that forecast that at the current rate of progress, it will take up to

  • 286 years to close gender gaps in legal protection and remove discriminatory laws.
  • 140 years for women to be represented equally in positions of power and leadership in the workplace.
  • At least 40 years to achieve equal representation in national parliaments.

That is, we’ll have to wait three centuries to achieve full gender equality!

After that, my mother-in-law was more willing to see the urgency for change but she was adamant that systems cannot be toppled on a whim.

Why systems of oppression can be knocked down swiftly

If there is a useful learning we can get from the covid-19 pandemic is that extremely fast change is possible.

Within a year

  • Three vaccines were developed.
  • In many countries, people were house-bounded and were required to use masks when stepping outside their homes.
  • Many employees worked from their homes even when previously they had been told it was impossible.
  • Millions of people without previous medical training learned about pandemics, how to perform covid-19 tests, or what a coronavirus looks like.

All that with the support of many democratic countries and billions of dollars.

What does that tell us about change? That dramatic change at a worldwide level is possible when that change becomes our priority.

Moving from SMART goals to impossible goals

I’m currently finalising my certification as a life coach. One of the topics covered is how to set goals and develop a plan to achieve them.

After 20+ years working for corporations, I’m very well acquainted with SMART goals. This is how you set annual objectives, 5-year plans, and roll out new initiatives.

This is how it works: You pick the objective/deliverable/goal and you ensure that is Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound; hence the acronym SMART.

And that’s how you get things done in organisations.

So I was very surprised that in the coaching certification they taught us how to set and achieve impossible goals.

That is, a goal that is so extremely bold that you don’t know how to achieve it. Yet.

What’s the value of impossible goals:

  • They remove limiting beliefs you didn’t know you had about what you can achieve.
  • It enables you to embrace uncertainty.
  • You allow yourself to entertain the idea that you can learn on-the-fly what will take you to achieve that impossible goal.

Case studies: Impossible goals to advance DEI

Imagine that Mahatma Gandhi, Emmeline Pankhurst, Nelson Mandela, or Florence Nightingale had used SMART goals instead of impossible goals to achieve the kind of changes they led.

And I’m sure a lot of people tried to “knock some sense” into their heads — told them that the transformations they were pursuing were foolish, unreasonable, unattainable.

What if they had complied?

What if they had said “Yes, you’re right. This is not a SMART goal”? Or “Indeed. I don’t know exactly how to achieve independence, get the vote for women, end apartheid, or found modern nursing, so I better stop until I figure it all out.

Maybe we’d still be grappling with those issues…

My 2023 impossible goal

In 2022, I coached five women and nonbinary people that got promoted.
 
In 2023, my impossible goal is to coach another 50 women and underrepresented people to get the promotion they deserve!

Is it a SMART goal? No.

Do I know exactly how to achieve it? No.

Will not knowing how to achieve it stop me from trying? No.

Is it worth it? Absolutely yes!

What am I doing towards achieving my impossible goal? I’m running again the Joyful Annual Career Assessment Week in February, after the sucess of the first edition in January. This is a one-week event from February 13th to February 17th where I help women and people from underrepresented groups get a clear picture of their professional accomplishments in 2022, tell their career story in a compelling manner, and be ready to discuss their career aspirations for 2023 and beyond.

“Patricia talks about how to frame our accomplishments without seeming arrogant, declare our desires in the professional sphere, and get managerial support for them, and learn about how to advance, despite upbring that may teach us to downplay our skills and contributions. It is amazing!

I wish I had learned this in my 20s- my career path would have been different, and I would have known the invisible rules, so that I could advance in the way I wanted to!”

VHA, Director, Business Development

BACK TO YOU: What’s your impossible goal in 2023?

Let me know in the comments!


Inclusion is a practice, not a certificate.

How to move diversity, inclusion and equity forwards three articles at the time

I feel I’ve been neglicting the readers of my blog, that is, YOU, this year.

On the bright side, I have continued to embed diversity, equity, and inclusion in organisations, technology, and workplaces through opinion articles and fiction.

I’m delighted to share with you that my writing has been featured in three magazines in the last three months.

Artificial Intelligence and the Global South

Scattered white plastic figures resembling humans sitting at tables in front of laptops. The white background makes their environment look bleak.
Max Gruber / Better Images of AI / Clickworker Abyss / Licenced by CC-BY 4.0

In September, the economics e-magazine The Mint published my article How artificial intelligence is recolonising the Global South.

In the 5-min piece, I discuss how the Global North exploits poverty and weak laws in the South to accelerate its digital transformation.

Have you ever asked yourself:

  • Who moderates our social media?
  • Who annotates the images for our self-driving cars?
  • Who extracts the metals needed for our smartphones?
  • In which populations AI algorithms are tested?

Being accountable for the books we read

A computer-generated photographic style image showing piles of distorted books with some surreal landscape features in the immediate foreground, such as a kind of beach and games board. The books merge into each other in an impressionistic, digitally blurred way, and rising out of them and taking up the main part of the image is a huge undefined concrete structure topped with more books and folders that get bigger as they go up.
jbustterr / Better Images of AI / A monument surrounded by piles of books / Licenced by CC-BY 4.0

In October, Certain Age Magazine published The DEI Booklist: Five books to think and act differently, where I reflect on the fact that whom we read matters as much as what we read.

In the article, I review 5 books:

  • Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger by Soraya Chemaly
  • Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
  • Data Feminism by Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein
  • Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity by Julia Serano
  • Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence by Kate Crawford

I also share how I overcame the inertia of only reading books written by White, able, American, heterosexual cis-men.

Scoop: It took two years!

Using short fiction to get people talking about emerging technology

Black and white photographs  of the faces of White people scattered across a white background and grouped by similarity.
Philipp Schmitt & AT&T Laboratories Cambridge / Better Images of AI / Data flock (faces) / Licenced by CC-BY 4.0

Last week, the Medium magazine The Lark published my second short fictional story, The Life of Data Podcast. As in the previous one – The GraduationI’ve used future fiction to question the interplay between humans and technology, specifically AI.

Have you ever thought what happens to your photos circulating on social media? That’s what I did in this 10-min short fictional story.

In a nutshell, I imagined what the data from the digital portrait of a Black schoolgirl woud share about how it moves inside our phones, computers, and networks if it was invited to speak on a podcast.

How does the story resonate with you?

And the cherry on the cake

In August 2022, I was featured in the Computer Weekly 2022 longlist of the most influential women in UK tech.

Each year, Computer Weekly publishes the longlist of all of the women put forward to be considered for its list of the top 50 Most Influential Women in UK Tech.

And I was nominated!

Looking at the names of the other 600 women in the UK that were nominated as well was such a boost of energy! Among them, I’ve found great role models, IT leaders, community builders, and amazing raising stars.

One thing that I love in the list is that not only women in software development were nominated, dispelling the myth that tech is only about coding. Tech is so much more! Women investors, CEOs, COOs, non-tech founders…

If you’re unsure if there is a place for you in tech, please have a look at the list and get inspired. We’re waiting for you!


As I mentioned on a previous post, I’m writing a book and I need your help!

I’d be immensely grateful if you could complete and/or share with your network of women in tech this short survey about your/their experiences at work.

What do I mean by “Women in Tech”? Women working in any function (R&D, HR, services, finance, CXO) in the tech sector (software, hardware…) or in tech-related functions in other sectors (e.g. IT, cybersecurity…).

Whilst the survey is anonymous, you’ll have the option to get involved in the project before submitting the form. Thanks for your support!


Inclusion is a practice, not a certificate!

The luxury of overconfidence when you have privilege

Chart showing the comparison between UK men's and women's confidence about beating several animals in a fight unarmed. The highest confidence is for beating a rat with 77% men vs 57% women, and the lowest is for a Gorilla, 2% men vs 1% women.
Chart from YouGov UK.  

(5 min read)

As a woman in tech, every day I’m reminded that my problem is a lack of confidence. I’m constantly showered with newsletters, offers of webinars and coaching, as well as articles telling me that confidence is a fix-all from the gender pay gap to solving the shortage of women in CXO roles.

All that in spite that there is no correlation between confidence and effective leadership! When I mention this fact, most people look puzzled. I don’t know why. It’s not like we have a “confid-ometer” that enables us to correlate our leaders’ confidence to the success of their initiatives.

What’s more, I’m adamant that our economic, political, and social problems are often rooted in overconfident leaders. If in doubt, only look at how the overconfidence of some political leaders has resulted in disastrous outcomes on the flight against the COVID-19 pandemic. I wish they could have been much less confident and more humble to follow the advice of others that actually know better.

Still, people are resistant. It’s so easy to attribute to self-doubt the lack of CEOs that are disabled, non-White, or self-identify as women…

Early this year, Caroline Perez Criado’s newsletter came to help me! She shared the results of a survey by YouGov on Which animals could Britons beat in a fight?

Guess what? The results show that 28% men vs 9% women think they could beat “unarmed” an eagle in a fight. Gets better, 12% of men vs 2% of women think they could beat a King Cobra, again, unarmed! By the way, in the same article there is also a reference to the US study and how compares with the UK. Priceless!

We can continue to assume that because some people think they can beat a cobra, they can actually beat it. Or, we can confront the myth that confidence is a predictor of effective leadership.

What should we care?

I’ve been coaching and mentoring for years university students, direct reports, peers, clients… And confidence is a topic that comes often. “If I were more confident… ” People talk about it as it was an unreachable superpower such as being invisible or capable to fly.

Confidence is simply about how we feel about a decision. If we feel good, we tell ourselves that we’re confident. When we feel bad or unsure, we lack confidence. So far, so good.

The problem is that we assume that this particular feeling is a good predictor of success. And it’s not. This delusion has even a name!

The Dunning-Kruger effect is “a cognitive bias whereby people with low ability, expertise, or experience regarding a certain type of a task or area of knowledge tend to overestimate their ability or knowledge. Some researchers also include in their definition the opposite effect for high performers: their tendency to underestimate their skills”.

A chart of confidence vs competence with the title “Dunning-Kruger effect”. The curve starts a zero confidence and competence. Then, it increases rapidly in confidence and very little in competence to drop very quickly in confidence as competence increases. Then, the curve continues to increase slowly in confidence and compentence until it reaches a plateau. The plateau is lower in confidence than the peak reached previously.
Confidence vs competence: The Dunning-Krugger effect (Patricia Gestoso).

Moreover, we reverence so much confidence that we have made it a key prerequisite to be considered for any meaningful progression in our careers. I cannot recall how many times I’ve heard hiring manager justify their choice of candidate because the person “looked” confident, even if the other candidate had a superior CV.

What if Instead of pushing people to do power poses to boost their confidence, we demanded our overconfident leaders to demonstrate with data and facts the bases of their confidence in their strategy?

What if hiring managers asked candidates to share the evidence supporting their level of confidence rather than assumed it correlates with their competence?

Let’s stop fixing women and underrepresented groups’ confidence. Our problem is not confidence but overconfidence.

Before I go

For reflection

In this 4-min article, Mary Fashik – a queer disabled woman of color – and Corie Walsh – a White disabled woman with wealth privilege – share the regular erasure, oppression, and disrespect they experience as disabled women. They also discuss how the pandemic was a missed opportunity for the world to learn some of the lessons the disabled community has long known like “collective care is the way forward”.

A boost of energy

On International Women’s Day, the First Minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon, issued a posthumous apology for the “historical injustice” of witch hunts. From 1563 to 1736, an estimated 4,000 people in Scotland were accused of witchcraft, of which about 80% were women. “These women were targeted because they were vulnerable, some of them owned land that others – usually men – wanted access to, or they were unmarried or widowed, or they looked or spoke or acted differently.”[reference] Two-thirds of those accused were executed.

For comparison, during the worldwide famous trials of Salem, 200 people were accused and 14 women and 5 men were hanged.

News from me

I’m writing a book and I need your help!

As some of you know, my DEI work was prompted by my dismay at realizing in 2015 that fantastic women that had started with me had either quit tech tired of fighting over and over the same battles or given unappealing jobs when they came back from maternity leave – I don’t have children myself.

Unfortunately, little has changed. Seven years later, still, more than 40% of women that start in tech leave the sector.

So, this year I decided to write a book about how women succeed in tech worldwide. There are great books written about this topic focused on US corporations. I also believe we can learn a lot by casting a wider net. My first step? Asking those women what has made them stay and what they need to thrive in the next 5 years.

[ASK] I’d be immensely grateful if you could complete and/or share with your network of women in tech this short survey about your/their experiences at work.

What do I mean by “Women in Tech”? Women working in any function (R&D, HR, services, finance, CXO) in the tech sector (software, hardware…) or in tech-related functions in other sectors (e.g. IT, cybersecurity…).

Whilst the survey is anonymous, you’ll have the option to get involved in the project before submitting the form.

Thanks for your support!


Inclusion is a practice, not a certificate!

13 Books to think differently about technology, business, and inclusion

People in a bookstore reading books sat in either comfortable seats or a bean bag chair.
Image from Pixabay by LubosHouska.

In 2021 I read 38 books. Following from my CuriousMindsDiversePeople Challenge, I kept track of the diversity of authors and topics. For example, 25 of the authors self-identified as women, 14 were non-US authors, 4 discussed disability and 11 LBTQ+ topics.

Below are my personal highlights from 13 of them that made me think differently about data, artificial intelligence, design, sustainability, feminism, pleasure, and God. I’m listing them in the order I read them.

Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions by Gloria Steinem. If you are a feminist and somehow feel guilty that all the books on the topic depress you, I thoroughly recommend this book as audio, since Steinem herself narrates most of it. It’s a collage of articles written at different points in her life about walking the talk on feminism and women’s rights and the importance of challenging both the small and the big oppressions. All that is delivered with wit. A huge bonus!

The Responsible Business: Reimagining Sustainability and Success by Carol Sanford. In 2020, I learned about the concept of regenerative as an “upgrade” to sustainability. This book provides food for thought and examples about how to make businesses adopt practices that benefit their employees, users, communities, and the planet. However, I missed a more critical view of some of the study cases, especially for big tech companies, which is the area I’m more familiar with. For example, Facebook and Google are portrayed as the paradigm of regenerative businesses, without any mention of their questionable practices as employers and business models. Still, the book provided valuable insights for my talk Regenerative Business: Embedding ethics and inclusion in workplaces, products, and services at the Cambridge Agile Exchange last February (recording here).

Continue reading

When tokenistic diversity damages reputation: The revenge of the lehenga

Paws of different colours - blue, green, red, yellow – on a wood background. Among them, there is a black pawn.
Image from Pixabay by MetsikGarden.

(4 min read)

When business leaders learn that I’m an inclusion strategist, most of them tell me about their diversity and inclusion (D&I) initiatives in the workplace: gender pay gap report, employee resource groups, diversity audits…

Then, I ask them what are they doing about the diversity of their customers. Yes, you can come up with 4-6 versions of the “ideal” customer and hope for the best but the reality is that humans are much more complex and their situation and environment are dynamic, not static. How are they authentically including that diversity of experiences in their products, services, marketing, and sales?

The HBO TV series “And Just Like That…,” a reboot of “Sex and the City,” is a good reminder of what happens when you play the “diversity” card in your products whilst patronizing your customers.

Continue reading

Four ways we ignore children when discussing digital inclusion

Two teenage girls portrayed against a wall with multiple surveillance cameras pointing at them. The girls look at the cameras back. Image by StockSnap from Pixabay

(5 min read)

Children are an afterthought in our digital inclusion plans.

We talk about the importance of embedding diversity, inclusion, and ethics in technology as a prerequisite for a digital future that works for everybody. The conversation is framed in the context of identities – gender, ethnicity, sexual preferences, culture. However, we have forgotten children. I’m talking about children’s data privacy and their vulnerability to tech tools, especially those powered by artificial intelligence (AI).

In this article, I share four areas where we’re letting children down and how the power of framing data as money can help us to proactively include them.

Continue reading

How are you losing business today by skipping diversity and inclusion in business operations and how to fix it

Photo of a wooden staircase in a bamboo forest by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay.

(10 min read)

I’ve been beating the drum of the business value of diversity and inclusion (D&I) in tech since 2015. Many moons later, still every time I engage in this discussion with business leaders, they invariably default to either the diversity of their workforce or the McKinsey reports correlating the gender and ethnic makeup of their leadership teams to increased financial returns such as higher earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT).

In my experience, it’s hard to use correlation to convince the skeptics or to support D&I champions. On the flip side, through my professional and personal path, I’ve witnessed innumerable instances where D&I has played a crucial role in the success and failure of initiatives and organizations.

How did I come to witness all that evidence? I’ve been a unicorn all my life. I became an emigrant before I was a year old and I’ve had the opportunity to live in 6 countries and 3 continents. As a woman, my professional path is “atypical” by Anglo-Western standards. I studied engineering and computational chemistry, which are considered typically male occupations. Beyond academia, I’ve worked for chemical and tech companies. I don’t have children. I still remember talking to colleagues in December 2015 about the need to put in place a strategy to retain women in tech as half of the young women who go into tech drop out by the age of 35 [source]. To my surprise, often my puzzled interlocutors would ask me if “diversity and inclusion was an American thing”.

Fortunately, nowadays there is much more awareness about diversity and inclusion in business, including the tech sector. Also, there are some companies that are getting tangible value out of understanding the value of developing solutions for underserved populations. As I’ve written in the past, people with disabilities and their families constitute a market the size of China ($8 trillion/year). Closer to home, the UK’s 12 million people with disabilities have a spending power of £120 billion as per AbilityNet, a British charity focused on the digital inclusion of people with disabilities.  

But how to go beyond preaching to the converted? Moreover, how to engage with organizations that don’t have the budget for a Head of D&I?

What business leaders want to know about the value of D&I

Early June this year, I launched a survey asking business owners, managing directors, CXOs, and board members their top question about the business value of diversity and inclusion. In return for answering the survey, I offered respondents to email them my answer to their question.

I categorized the 50 answers I received into four buckets. Even in such a small sample, still we can trace a roadmap for how organizations approach D&I at workplaces

Continue reading