Women in tech have been told to lean in, back off, be bigger blowhards and simultaneously let others shine. But by far the most inspiring – and probably the most effective – piece of advice is the one found on the otherwise rather mysterious new website tableflip.club: “Fuck that, we’re done. It’s not us, it’s you.”
Meaningful change, the anonymous woman behind the site told me over email, requires not just tweaking but reinvention from the top down: “It’s virtually impossible to change a sick system without being the one in charge.”
You can’t destroy the master’s house, it seems, when the master’s a tool.
Her site went up on Monday and hosts a single, 500-word piece of writing giving voice to years (or decades) of exasperation:
“When we try to play by the rules (which we do because we’ve seen what happens to women who don’t) we’re denied opportunities because we aren’t “ready” for them - and we are ALSO denied the things you say we need in order to BE ready. When we do these things without your corporate approval, we do it knowing that we may be the next woman who gets quietly fired for being too forward. When we try to take a seat at the table like Sheryl said we should, we’re called presumptuous.”
The solution: “It’s time we take our potential elsewhere.”
What makes her campaign so novel is that it applies the language and techniques of political activism to something that’s been treated as a business problem. Many self-help books and workshops designed to support women at work actually place the onus of responsibility on them, encouraging women to brag more but promise less, to be more assertive and less aggressive.
But the tableflip.club founder rejects the idea that women should try to adapt to the demands of an already-broken system in order to survive: “Flipping the tables takes the ‘just try harder, just sit at the table’ advice and flips it on its head. We’re already trying so goddamn hard and it’s not working, women are leaving in droves. So we need to change something”.
Opting out is straight out of the universe of boycotts and strikes. It acknowledges that the problems faced by women in tech are inherently political, and can’t be solved by a human resources department. The difficulties women face aren’t the problems of one woman, or one team or one company. They’re not just limited to Adria Richards or Brianna Wu or Ellen Pao; they’re not just Twitter with its no-women board or Wikipedia with its 91% male editors. The problems are systemic – and no amount of attitude adjustment or leaning in on the part of those who get screwed by the system can possible change it.
“So many women are in shitty, abusive, toxic work environments and internalize the badness as being something wrong with them”, the woman behind tableflip.club told me. “Making it clear that it’s systemic is a small but vital step towards making those environments obsolete.”
Even as an outside observer, I found the tableflip.club manifesto energizing. It has the feeling of a furious tweetstorm or impassioned speech – it goes beyond a mission statement and into the realm of oratory. It’s a huge departure from the usual women-in-tech rhetoric, which usually focuses on prying the doors of the tech world open through education, a positive attitude and changing the work environment. Nobody ever advocates just slamming the door back in Silicon Valley’s face.
Tableflip.club’s intention isn’t simply to punish the establishment by depriving it of women’s contributions, although certainly that will happen in the short term. (“A couple of people have already quit their jobs” after reading the manifesto, its author told me, “which is super rad.”) It’s not about revenge, any more than boycotts are about driving companies bankrupt. It’s about allowing for meaningful change by refusing to participate in a corrupt system.
Once we acknowledge that the system is well and truly broken – once we recognize this as a problem for activists, not business analysts – women can start to realize that we don’t have to struggle to fit ourselves into the cracks that are left for us. And once we’re empowered to leave, we can make something new.
- This piece was updated on 15 April 2015 to include the author’s original last paragraph.