Thread by @mykola

Last week I noticed that we have way fewer women engineers than we used to, and I started a company conversation about it. Or tried to. It's hard to know how to participate in that conversation.

Here are my thoughts:

1. This is on leadership to an extent, but not fully. Company culture matters, and we've clearly stumbled into a culture that made our women engineers feel less welcome.

2. This is more of a conversation for the men at work to have.

3. We can and should do better, and we want to, but it's not clear how.

4. What thoughts or observations do folks have?

The result was that a few people weighed in -- a bunch of leadership weighed in thanking me for starting the conversation and explicitly hanging back to hear what other colleagues had to say.

One or two folks chimed in, other than that crickets.

My question to you, Twitter, is how I can make this conversation easier to have? It's still an open Slack thread, I can stir it up again, but I'm not sure how.

Are there direct questions I should ask? Are there resources I could employ?

I will say that the phrase "pipeline problem" has already appeared, which I know is a red flag, right?

My understanding is that there is no pipeline problem, it's a question of creating a culture that feels safe and then explicitly seeking out underrepresented folks.

And Mode did that work, and had a culture that felt safe, and I think during the Pandemic with layoffs and priorities that safety crumbled a bit and we lost a lot of the employees that made Mode special.

But all is not lost, we can turn this around if we make the effort now.