On interrupting interrupt culture
I've been pondering this post for a while now, and then yesterday morning an article titled Speaking While Female was published, so now seems like an appropriate time to finally get around to writing my thoughts on the issue. If you haven't read that piece in its entirety, I'd highly recommend doing so, but in the meantime I'll pull out this paragraph:
We’ve both seen it happen again and again. When a woman speaks in a professional setting, she walks a tightrope. Either she’s barely heard or she’s judged as too aggressive. When a man says virtually the same thing, heads nod in appreciation for his fine idea. As a result, women often decide that saying less is more.
As someone who gets read as female, I have seen this happen more times than the number of yaks I’ve shaved. At nearly every job I've had, I've walked this fine line. I've had performance reviews where I've been called pushy, aggressive, assertive, abrasive, or bitchy simply for speaking up in a similar manner to that of my male colleagues, and on the other side of things, I've been interrupted and spoken over more times than I can count. I've worked at places where I was the only one being interrupted (backstory: I've been the only not-dude in a lot of engineering departments), which has bothered me. But I've also worked at places where everyone interrupts each other all the time. For a while, I thought that was better. "At least I'm not being spoken over because of my gender; the guys get interrupted too," I thought to myself. But everyone interrupting everyone else actually isn't that much better.
The last time I brought this up in a 1:1 with one of my managers at the time, I was told that I should just interrupt people more myself. Now, I'll admit that there is some benefit to being able to speak up if necessary, but to me, adding more interruptions to an already interrupt-filled environment isn't a good solution. It leads to what I've taken to calling an interrupt culture, where your value in a meeting is directly correlated with your willingness to interrupt and talk over other people. When people are talking over each other, none of them are really getting heard, let alone understood. People get so used to having to interrupt each other that they stop even trying to wait for a break in conversation because they know there won't be any, because somebody else will interrupt before it even gets there. In an interrupt culture, the ideas that win aren't necessarily the best ideas, they're just the ideas that were voiced the most loudly over somebody else's. And the kinds of people that stay in an organization with an interrupt culture are those who are willing and able to constantly interrupt others.
That kind of culture tends to drive away people who don't thrive on that confrontational style of discussion. Women especially are socialized to not interrupt, because we are so quickly judged to be unlikeable or too aggressive when we do. Those of us who do interrupt and argue, uncommon as they are, know this - we can’t win either way. I myself am from a conflict-avoidant midwestern family where we don't have arguments, we just disagree in silence until everyone agrees by mutual awkwardness to pretend the whole disagreement never happened. I'm also an introverted person, so interacting with groups of people is draining to me, and this is so much more true when I have to fight to even take part in the discussion.
Interrupt culture has driven me away from jobs, and I've spoken with many other women and nonbinary people who have said similar things. If you're at all concerned with retaining women in tech, take a good hard look at the kind of culture you have. How do meetings and group discussions tend to go? How do individual disagreements get resolved? Take a read through this, and maybe start taking notes at your own meetings to see how the numbers compare.
One time I had a disagreement with a coworker on how we should implement Technical Thing X that we had both spent time working on. I was certain that my idea was better in this context, but after a good 10-15 minutes of having the same argument over and over, I gave up. I was out of spoons and had no more energy to spend being talked over. My manager later said to me, "I thought you were right, and I was disappointed that you didn't keep arguing your point." I wanted to say, “dude, why didn’t you have my back and, you know, SAY SOMETHING.” I wanted to flip a table. I wanted to say a lot of things but didn’t feel comfortable actually speaking up about any of them. I can think of several meetings I've been in where a break in conversation where I could have said something without interrupting someone else never appeared. These were not one-off events in an otherwise interrupt-free culture. These were the norm. There are myriad reasons why women leave the tech industry, but just maybe one of them is that we're tired of having to literally shout over other people just to get a word in edgewise.
One of the many things I love about working at Etsy is how infrequently people interrupt each other, at least in the meetings that I've been in so far. I think part of it has to do with having such a remote-friendly culture. Maybe because we have so many remote employees in meetings via video chat, people know that they can't rely so much on the non-verbal queues that people often use to indicate they want to start talking (someone leaning forward or raising their hand a bit is much easier to miss on a screen than in person) so they pay more attention before they start speaking. Maybe the vicious cycle of "A talks over B, so C talks even louder to be heard over A, then D talks EVEN LOUDER to be heard over all three of them" never got started, or maybe those bad habits were broken before I arrived. On the infrequent occasions that multiple people start talking at the same time, they all back off rather quickly instead of everyone continuing to talk with the expectation that someone else will give up first. It's an incredibly refreshing level of courtesy and consideration for group dynamics, and I feel so much more energized after a meeting where I haven't had to shout over anyone else or been interrupted constantly. When I have something to say, I am given the opportunity to easily start and finish voicing my thoughts, which, not surprisingly, really makes me feel that my input is valued.
Men, you can help with this! You have great powers of a) interrupting and b) having other dudes listen to you, and if you combine those powers and use them for good (or for awesome) you can help improve this kind of interrupt culture. Next time you're in a meeting and a woman gets interrupted, you can interrupt the interrupter and say something like, "Hey Bob, I'd love to hear your thoughts on kitten.io's shiny new containerized package manager, but I want to hear the rest of what Alice had to say first. Alice?" Yeah, it will probably feel awkward in the beginning, but if these powers are applied diligently, you can start to break people of the habit of interrupting each other all the time. If you're worried about how the women on your team would feel about that kind of thing, by all means ask them first. Or, you could address interrupt culture as a whole and ask everyone on the team to be more mindful of whether or not they're talking over someone else in meetings.
How about let's have 2015 be the year that we stop looking for "rockstars" and stop tolerating "rockstar" behavior like people who constantly interrupt and speak over others because their "rockstar" opinion is just that damn important. If we all mindfully work to interrupt this interrupt culture, all voices can be heard, and everyone wins.