One All-Female Engineering Team: Observations From the Inside
I was recently a member of a really great engineering team which also happened to be made up of all women. For a stretch of around six months, there were between four and five engineers on the team, all of us women. Our program manager was also a woman and for part of the time our manager was a woman. Anyone in tech will easily understand how unusual this is. I will be the first to agree that our team was not diverse (at least in terms of gender) but that’s not the piece I want to dig into. A number of people have asked me what it was like working on an all female team, so I want to dig into our experiences as a team and how gender was and wasn’t an issue.
All of our team members were women from the time we became an official team and from the very beginning gender continually came up. It didn’t come up because of any actual issues, but because everyone, both inside and outside our team, recognized how unusual it was. Perhaps the most remarkable thing was how unremarkable working on the team actually was (other than having to constantly have this conversation). As our agile coach mentioned when he started working with our team, he was super attuned to the fact we were all women and then realized that it really shouldn’t be any more unique than the teams he’s worked with that were all men. He never thought twice about those.
Sure, there were differences in the team, but there are differences in every team that I’ve worked with. There was nothing hugely revolutionary in the whole situation. That said, there were differences and I want to talk about a few of those. None of us are sure if these differences are a direct result of gender or even related, so I’ll let you draw your own conclusions.
How we worked
As individuals and as a team we were much more polite than any other team I’ve interacted with — for better and for worse. This came through positively in that we ran meetings a little differently. Everyone had a chance to voice opinions and we would make sure to give people space to talk if they were unusually quiet. No one ever felt like they had to fight to be heard. At the same time, this politeness meant that even if we disagreed with someone, we would find a ‘nice’ way to say it. This sometimes lead to more confusion and beating around the bush. We would also sometimes put off conflict rather than just working through it immediately. No one had their feelings hurt, but it also sometimes took us longer than was necessary to get things done.
This may also be related to our team’s project (breaking our monolith into microservices), but we also focused more on doing things correctly than on getting lots done. While we were motivated and hard working, there wasn’t the push I’ve seen in some teams to just try to get as many things over the line as possible. If we were close and could finish something out this sprint but it might be a little sloppy, we would usually opt to let it go on to the next sprint. The options we picked were almost always the ‘best’ or ‘correct’ ways of doing things — often sacrificing speed in the process. We were hesitant to pick a solution or commit to something until we felt confident that it was the right option. There’s obviously a time and place for each style and the optimal is probably some balance somewhere in the middle, but this is how we typically operated.
How The Team Changed Us
Everyone is partially a product of their past experiences, but also a product of their current environment. One of my teammates noticed that all of the women on our team were more assertive than many of the women she had worked with previously on mixed or predominantly male teams. Now it may be that we are all more assertive people than those women she had previously worked with, but it’s also possible that our environment gave us the space for that side of us to come out. When there’s trust with my teammates, I feel I have the space to push for what I think is right.
An engineer on a different team (that is also more than half women) mentioned that she felt more able to speak up on her team. She felt that the women on her team made her feel safer and less scared about saying something stupid, which helped to empower her. Similarly, while I’ve never been the type to be scared about speaking up, I have noticed that there are certain groups with which it feels like no one ever listens to anything I say. They make space for me to talk, but they seem to completely ignore my points and I find myself making the same point over and over. When I find that happening, I find myself less willing to talk. Every thought I have isn’t worth the emotional battle to ensure that I’m actually heard, so sometimes I find myself checking out because it isn’t worth the effort. With our all female team, I never felt that way so I always shared my thoughts.
How we were perceived
Even while we were working well together, we had a bit of a PR problem more broadly. People outside our team and even our manager didn’t always seem to have a clear picture of how we were working or what we were doing. More specifically, this manifested itself in a few ways. From one side people had this perception that we weren’t working together well as a team. They had this image that some of us were unhappy or that people’s opinions weren’t being voiced. It’s possible there was something happening that I don’t know about, but from everything I experienced and from what my teammates shared with me, I never got the impression anyone felt this way. In some cases, they actively volunteered that they felt the opposite.
The other big piece of feedback we got was that we weren’t good team players. We may have been working well together and within our team, but they felt we only prioritized our immediate team and we didn’t do enough to help the larger project. It’s probably true we could have done more, but that’s always true. From what I saw, the problem wasn’t that we didn’t do things that were more broadly applicable, it was that we didn’t make a big deal about the things we did. We didn’t do a good job of tooting our own horn or emphasizing all of the things we did, so it became easy to overlook our contributions. We didn’t push to point out that it was us who did the work or even push to have the work noticed at all if it didn’t need to be. It’s still a problem we should have worked on, but a slightly different problem than the one shared with us.
Team Cohesion
There are a variety of opinions about the importance of team cohesion. Without getting into any of that, I will say that this was one of the most tight knit teams that I’ve ever been on and I think all of my teammates would agree with me. We had a greater focus on bonding than most of the teams I’ve been a member of. While we didn’t do any specific team building activities and we actually did fewer large social outings than other teams, we did a lot more small things. As a team, we ate lunch together almost every day and we had a weekly team fun time. The fun time usually just meant walking to grab coffee or tea or a pastry from a nearby shop, but it was a good chance to get out of the office, talk and get to know each other. Sometimes we talked about work, but often we just got to know each other better.
As a team member pointed out, we also had fewer ‘boring’ conversations. I’ve noticed that even just by adding a few men to this same group, our conversations much more often turn to work. In other groups I’ve noticed that the conversations always turned to basketball or in the case of one particular team, hockey. I know those sound like stereotypes, but I’ve actually been on teams where each one of those was the case. Not that there’s anything wrong with discussing work or sports, and I even enjoy the occasional conversation about each, but I sometimes need a mental break or want to discuss something I’m excited about or can relate to. The four core women in our team aren’t even all that similar — two have children, three are married, one is super into running, one is super into hiking and camping, two are Indian, two were new to the company while two have been here over five years and the list goes on. In fact, the primary commonality I can find is that we’re all women in tech and yet we managed to have extensive conversations about our lives, thoughts and dreams — all of which I found interesting.
I’m sure there were a number of other things that made our team unique, but these were the things that struck me. I don’t know that I would directly attribute any of them to gender, although I’m sure it played a role in more than a few. That said, the most striking thing to me throughout it all was that everyone else seemed to be making a much bigger deal about our gender make up than I felt. In general, while I loved my team, we were just a team. We were certainly different, but every team I’ve been on has been a little different. Like many other great teams, we got a lot done, worked well together and had fun throughout it all.
