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From time to time I still think about a conversation I had years ago with a man who “debated” me on basic differences in how women and men experience workplaces, then insisted he was an “ally” and how dare I question his good intentions. So, a brief thread on allyship...
Allyship isn’t a cookie you give to yourself. It’s advocacy: a sustained set of actions that involves taking risks, in service of a longer term goal. @KimCrayton1 tweeted a while back that you have to earn your status as an ally from folks who are marginalized. 💯
“Ok, what do these actions look like? I’d like to grow in this area,” you might wonder.
Lots of little things. Call out people who interrupt URM folks in meetings. Make eye contact and assume technical expertise when asking questions to URMs. Assume we do technical work.
Lots of little things. Call out people who interrupt URM folks in meetings. Make eye contact and assume technical expertise when asking questions to URMs. Assume we do technical work.
But the most impactful thing you can do, by a long stretch:
Write down specific feedback about the impact of someone’s work. Email it to them and copy their manager. Help them create an undeniable paper trail of high impact, so they can be promoted and get paid more.
Write down specific feedback about the impact of someone’s work. Email it to them and copy their manager. Help them create an undeniable paper trail of high impact, so they can be promoted and get paid more.
Also, make sure your feedback is technical. Literally none of my women and NB tech friends have ever gotten written technical feedback. The cultural/process feedback is nice, but unless you can relate it strongly to career progression criteria in your org, don’t write it down
Here’s the thing: People get assessed not on the work they actually *do*, but on the work that their managers can *see*. Since we’re all human, that view is tinted with subconscious biases about what kind of work a URM should be good at, not what the individual actually does.
You can do your part to add data points and help undo some of this tinting! Heck, you can even write feedback when you’re a URM yourself - I do it all the time - but recognize that you inherently have a Loud Voice That People Listen To if you’re a white, straight guy.
So tl;dr if you wanna be a good ally, start documenting, with unimpeachable details, the good technical work that your URM peers are already doing and help them get promoted and paid 💰
[URM = under-represented minority’s]
[URM = under-represented minority’s]
