An occasion meant to build careers for women and non-binary tech staff has become a symbol of the gender imbalance in the industry after self-identifying men popped up en masse.
Grace Hopper’s birthday party receives an invitation from a pioneering computer scientist and bills itself as the world’s largest annual gathering of women and non-binary tech workers.
Tickets for the four-day event, which took place in Orlando, Florida, last week, ranged from $649 to $1,298, and included a coveted one-on-one meeting with sponsors including Apple, Amazon, Salesforce and Google.
With about 30,000 annual attendees, this career fair is already a competitive space, according to Beyond attendees. But this year, access is even more limited because of what organizers described as “an increase in participation through self-identifying men. “
Videos posted on social media showed scenes of men gathering around recruiters, rushing to event venues and standing in front of women to get a spot for the interview. The images showed a sea of people, lots of people, queuing for a chance to participate in the career fair.
As one sign put it: “The Kens had taken over Barbielandia. “
Several convention attendees told NPR that there is a 40/60 ratio between men and women at the career fair.
“From what I’d heard, I expected between 0. 5 and 1 of the participants to be male,” said Morgan Young, a computer science student at the University of Nevada, Reno, who also creates content for early-career tech workers. social media.
“I’ve heard it’s like the Coachella of women’s tech. Their goal is to be fun and collaborative,” he told NPR in an interview this week. “But the atmosphere is very different. You can feel the violence in the air. “”.
Some attendees had lied about their gender identity when registering for the conference, said Cullen White, an impact lead at AnitaB. org, the nonprofit that organizes the conference.
“Judging by the lots and lots of resumes that you’re handing out, you did it because you thought you could come here and take up a space to review and get a job,” White said in the conference’s plenary address. Let me be perfectly clear: stop. Immediately. Stop. “
Bo Young Lee, president of AnitaB. org, said in a video post that the demographic replacement had stripped the convention of the cheerful and supportive atmosphere that in the past had helped women grow.
“We’re trying to create a space. And this week we have noticed the global invasion from abroad,” he said. “I can’t assure you that we will have answers tomorrow. But I can promise you that we will work on answers, and we probably wouldn’t do it in a bubble. “
Earlier in the week, the organization responded to calls to exclude men from the convention by saying that “the men’s alliance is necessary” to move toward global inclusion and that federal law prohibits discrimination on the basis of gender.
NPR reached out to AnitaB. org for further comment, but had garnered a reaction at press time.
Some participants said they felt organizers had prioritized profit over people, registering more participants than they could accommodate and then subjecting women and non-binary staff to the familiar feeling of having to compete with men.
“Basically, you’re paying stacks of dollars to do the same thing you live in the industry, desperately looking to get your resume out there,” said Agnes Lu, a master’s student in computer science at Northeastern University. “It’s like you’ve been deceived. “
Tech jobs were once a gamble for workers looking for solid, lucrative careers, but a wave of industry-wide layoffs earlier this year suddenly put hundreds of thousands of workers out of work.
Women have been disproportionately affected by those cuts, accounting for 69. 2% of all layoffs in the tech sector, according to the Women Tech Network. And this adds to the persistent gender imbalance in the industry. Women hold only 26% of jobs in all STEM occupations. and even fewer (24 percent) in IT fields, according to the latest available data from the U. S. Department of Labor. U. S.
The tension is even greater for foreign workers in the sector, who threaten to waste their visas if they don’t find a job soon.
“We’re set in about 90 days,” said Anusha Das, a foreign graduate student who reads data systems at Northeastern. “There’s competition. The job market is bad. There is no grace for us. “
Das said he missed most of the convention’s workshops and panels only to wait in line for an hour to get a two-minute interview with recruiters.
In one of the lines, he said he heard a men’s organization casually misogynistic insults in their local language, Hindi. In another, he saw an organization of men split up to form a new line, cutting off the others who waited patiently. .
But he said he doesn’t expect long waits either; In fact, they were one of the most productive reports of the conference.
“I was talking to other women while waiting in line and they were turning me on, telling me not to get nervous,” she said. “The most productive facets of the convention are the ones that actually advertise. “