I'm gonna share a blip from my day today. This is a story of awareness, not an intent to single anyone out. This kind of thing happens ALL the time and I can attest to personally laughing it off or ignoring it or not even registering it on countless occasions before.
But that isn't where I am today - as a woman, as a human. And I don't think its what we need as a society TODAY. So I'm sharing this story because I have had enough. I'm on a mission to live as authentically as I can and that really means "when I see something, I say something". When we don't speak up, we become part of the problem.
I had a work meeting this afternoon to discuss some training efforts and how we can make them better. I got to the meeting room about 5 minutes after meeting start time because I was coming from another building and there was no travel time accounted for in our never-ending supply of meetings in a day.
When I arrived, there were 6 gentlemen in the room. Demographics - all white males with one over 50 and the rest in their early/mid thirties. They had been chatting, and within a few minutes of me arriving and sitting down, the elder gentleman looks directly to me and asks if I can launch the meeting. It takes me a second to register, but he is asking me to start up the google hangout so the folks that are remote can participate.
I instantly start to log in, while my subconscious is furiously behind the scenes processing. I can't tell you for sure it was an unconscious bias moment on this person's part, but what I can tell you is when it "hit me", I said something to the effect of the following:
Me: "Sure, I can launch the meeting, but aren't there several capable men here that could have launched this?" Aka, before I arrived when the meeting had officially started?
So I'm working to get the meeting launched and of course we are in one of those excellent conference rooms that has like 15 inputs to the projector and someone always invariably fucks around with the cords and doesn't return it to useable state.
Me: "I don't suppose anyone knows the right inputs to select here?"
Room: "Oh? You need one of these 6 competent males to help you get things started?"
Me (restraining the desire to go bat shit crazy): "Nope. Do we even need the projector? If not, I'll just go over to the computer and dial in from there"
2 minutes later, we are dialed in and proceed to have a very effective meeting.
THIS was the thing that niggled in my brain on my ride home from work. I had completely forgotten about it until I had that quiet time to think about my day. And this was the burning thing that rose to the top that needed post-processing. And its why I'm writing this now...
In hind site, maybe my initial comment wasn't the right flavor of joking to point out the biased behavior. But I think reality is there is NO great way to call this stuff out. I don't think this person was intentionally trying to slight me in any way. And the reality is all of the younger guys in that room I consider friends and have built great working relationships with and have an incredible deal of respect for (and still do).
But, I saw something, and now I'm saying something. I'm not here to be the meeting launcher. I will fill that role as necessary, but I will not be the default answer for filling that role.
Spread awareness. Be part of the change to make us all better.
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