The Loneliness of Trying to #EmbraceEquity in FAANG

This year's theme for International Women's Day at my employer was #EmbraceEquity, with a slate of women-led talks and panels and some truly inspiring stories of women rising in the ranks of Amazon and AWS.

And I love that we're calling out the problem and (in theory) actively working on it, though we still have such a long way to go.

In practice, though, my day-to-day interactions look like this:

with the occasional

(if you know, you know :sevh:)

And then, inspired by a tweet from a colleague, I did the math on my actual team, the people I interact with 90% of the time at work:

and all the hope and optimism IWD is supposed to inspire was brought crashing down by reality.

Don't get me wrong: I am incredibly lucky to work on a respectful, collaborative team of allies, and I have never felt discriminated by my immediate coworkers - they're awesome dudes! But there is something incredibly lonely about never (or hardly ever, if you count Slack) interacting with another member of your gender in your role. I'm jealous of my colleagues that don't have to feel that loneliness, and in my experience, no amount of women in tech meetups can fill that day-to-day gap.

So what can we do about it?

I realize that the bigger the company, the more that equity is a marathon, not a sprint. A startup can hire two new engineers and suddenly the numbers are much closer to 50/50. At a FAANG, this process takes years and requires not just desire from the bottom, but buy-in from the top. And the top... well, let's just say it's even lonelier than I am:

Source

This is compared to all corporate employees, which unfortunately are not broken down by job roles, as based on my experience over the past 1.5 years, the numbers for AWS specifically and all engineering roles are much worse:

The good news is that the numbers are getting better! But for someone working day to day in a very male-dominated environment, that change still feels far too slow. AWS has shown numerous times that when something matters, leadership can act much faster in a concentrated effort. I can only hope that this pledge to #EmbraceEquity results in more action than words.