Last March, Chloe Condon, a cloud developer, tweeted, “Hey ladies, come work in tech. We have no bathroom lines” – with a picture as proof. Posted during Women’s History Month, it was a tongue-in-cheek comment on the gender disparity in tech very much in keeping with the at-times irreverent tone of Condon’s social media presence. She’s a truly prolific tweeter and an influencer in her field.
This was far from the first time Condon had publicly spoken on the subject; something that comes with certain risks. Asked if she ever finds social media to be an ugly place, particularly as a woman working in tech, she quickly answers yes – 100 percent.
“This is actually the number one question that I get when I speak at women’s groups or the female portion of a boot camp or something,” she said. “Anytime that I post anything opinionated, specifically about being a woman in tech or feminism, I put it up with my metaphorical armor on.”
Condon needed all of that armor when she published, “What It’s Like to Be a Woman at a Tech Conference.” Writing for the blog NewCo Shift in summer 2017, Condon riffed on what her “inner monologue” sounded as she attended such a conference for the first time: “So…many…dudes… oh! Is that a woman? Hmmm, no… she’s on the catering team. Oh wait! Is that another one? NOPE just a dude with a man bun.”
The article went viral, featuring on the front page of the online content aggregator Medium and getting significantly upvoted on Reddit. But there was a dark side to this.
“For every 25 thumbs-up I got about that, I got the worst [comments] like, ‘You’re not a real engineer’ and ‘Get back in the kitchen,’ which I couldn’t believe was actually something that someone typed out on the Internet,” she said. Specifically, someone told her, “You’re just angry because your a women” – grammatical errors left intact here. “When I Googled ‘Reddit Chloe Condon,’ I unfortunately came upon a five-paragraph essay about how unqualified I was to work in this industry, and I couldn’t believe that someone took the time to do that.”
Sung Dialogue as a Soft Skill?
Nevertheless, Condon’s career in technology has been proceeding apace – she’s currently a cloud developer advocate at Microsoft. She came to tech from a unique place; acting. Condon started in musical theater at age four and even has an IMDB page. But as she pursued work on the stage she learned how little it paid.
“That’s actually how I ended up getting into tech,” she said. “I realized I needed a nine to five, Monday to Friday to support me while I [had] this theater habit.”
She took on jobs in office management and sales at companies like EA, Yelp and Zirtual – all of which was nudging her toward the tech world.
“I was working in tech in all these administrative roles, but didn’t really know what engineers did,” she said. “Everyone in my life was a creative person. I had never met an engineer. When I pictured what an engineer was it was someone in a lab coat physically hammering a computer together.”
A talk on Google on getting women into technology led Condon to reflect on what she saw in the entertainment world – a lack of depictions of women in tech – and how this might have misled her. Condon studied up and took an all-female software engineering bootcamp in San Francisco, and from there leapt into the world of developer evangelism.
She quickly realized that her background in music theater had equipped her with a potent soft skill. “I use my theater degree every single day in my role as an evangelist [in] everything from communication to content to writing to being on camera to public speaking,” she said.
Condon noted that acting prepared her for tech in another way – in encountering gender imbalance.
“You go to an audition in New York or even in San Francisco and the room is 90 to 95 percent women,” she said. “Ten to 20 women get called back for one role and maybe one or two men [get] called back for five roles.”
Starting to attend tech conferences presented her with a similar dynamic; albeit from a flipped perspective. “A visual that comes to mind a lot is I was at a conference, it was lunchtime and I was carrying my tray of food,” she said. “I was walking by all the tables and it felt like everyone was staring at me, and they were because I was literally maybe one of two women in a room of about 1,000 people.”
Getting to the Audition
According to Condon, there are certain pitfalls to avoid in advocating for diversity in technology. She says it’s “super important” for anyone who speaks on diversity at a tech conference to also give a talk on a technical subject itself.
“I’m a technical person and I want to make sure that [in] the work I’m doing that I’m seen as a technical person in this community and not someone who talks about diversity and puts on a show about it,” she said.
Condon added that it’s important to her that her diversity talks are packaged in a way that’s exciting and directly translatable into people’s businesses.
“I really want it to be a positive experience because the last thing I want is for someone to walk away from my talk thinking, ‘Oh wow, this is really [bad] and I can’t do enough as an individual contributor to change things at my company,’” she said. So, Condon always gives an action item, and a big one is talking to your company’s recruiter about how tools like resume screeners might screen out underrepresented people with potential.
“The example that I love to give is that we use a recruiting software where my degree is not even recognized,” she said. “Theater, performing arts, drama; it’s not even something I can type and be accepted into recruiting software.” Condon flagged this with her own employer.
Understandably, Condon is a big advocate for people – particularly women – coming into tech from non-traditional backgrounds. “Not everybody is lucky enough to have computer science programs or engineers for parents or relatives,” she said. “I just didn’t have any of that and I think getting creative people who have whole lives before getting into an engineering role [is] really key to innovating in this industry.”
CompTIA is active in increasing the number of women in technology via its Advancing Women in Technology Community. Click here to learn more and get involved today.
