Are we ‘Women in Business’ or Business-People sitting at the kids’ table?

by Tessa Hawthorn

I recently watched the acclaimed Phoebe Waller-Bridge series, Fleabag, in which Kristin Scott-Thomas makes an unforgettable cameo. She plays a high-powered CEO, Belinda, who after receiving an award for ‘Women in Business’ says to Waller-Bridge’s character at a cocktail bar “it’s infantilising bollocks… It’s ghettoising. It’s a subsection of success. It’s the fucking children’s table of awards.”

I don’t disagree.

Before I go on, let me state clearly that I am not about to reel off the well known stats about the abysmal underrepresentation of women in STEM and specifically tech. There’s plenty of content out there (here, here and here) — or you can just attend a tech summit, meetup, accelerator program, look around the room and the audience composition will speak for itself.

Here, I am simply musing on my own journey from traditional legal practice to the world of tech and startups, how my gender has played in both, and what I take away from my experience in each of these boys’ clubs. Because one thing I know resolutely is that whilst both are very different experiences, the average courtroom and startup are, sadly, dripping in testosterone.

My first experience after leaving traditional legal practice and moving in-house to a property tech startup, was really positive. I was actually incredibly lucky to work in an unusually gender-balanced company. The C-suite was predominantly male (save for one badass CMO, who remains a mentor to me) but the company didn’t feel like “bro-culture”. As the only lawyer I sat sandwiched between Marketing, Dev and Product and would regularly regale my new colleagues with sexists yarns from my former life. I would tell them about the male barristers who would shake every man’s hand in the room and leave mine hanging (despite being the lawyer running the file). They would listen, aghast: “nooooo way! As if that still happens!” Genuinely shocked.

Their shock at that alone gave me pause to reflect on when I sat outside a courtroom with a partner from my firm and a senior barrister. It was one of my very first trips to court, age 24 and very green. They were laughing at something on the barrister’s phone. I asked (I was a pretty presumptuous junior lawyer) what was so funny? The partner explained that the video was of a cross-dressing man in a nun’s outfit that reminded them of the very senior and highly competent female barrister on the opposing side. The female barrister just looked like a regular middle aged woman to me. Regardless, even if there was a likeness — the shamelessness of their objectification and ridicule was galling to me. To this day, I wish I’d had the chutzpah to say something to both of their crusty mugs. Little did I know, that was just the tip of the iceberg for the next four years.

Fast forward seven years and I’m now a partner myself. At LUNA, gender is a lens through which we filter and view absolutely everything we do. In large part that’s due to my business partner and CEO of the company, Ronen Heine, being possibly an even more staunch feminist than I am. I feel blessed to work alongside him. How telling — that I should feel blessed to work with a man who champions women. But I do, because that’s the state of the world and certainly the state of tech.

What’s interesting to me is how important it remains for women to gather to the exclusion of men. It’s what women have always done in innumerable documented cultures across the world, in order to survive, organise and support. It made sense to me when I entered Victorian Women Lawyers committee meetings and felt the communal exhalation of female breath. Because top tier law firms and court rooms are not just male dominated. Many of the men still project a particular brand of maleness which reflects the speed at which legal institutions have evolved. Hint: very slowly. Not all of them though. I had wonderful male mentors and friends in that world.

Tech though? I was hopeful that, whilst male dominated, the men would be more enlightened. Perhaps we wouldn’t need all of these private spaces to exhale together. We wouldn’t need to be “ghettoised.” However, what I’ve found is that women in tech gather to an ever greater extent. Organisations with suffixs and prefixes of ‘she’ or ‘her’ or ‘femme’. SheStarts, SheWorks, Girls in Tech, Women in STEM — it’s everywhere I turn or click.

At first, this made me despair. Why do we still need this to survive?

The conclusion I’ve come to, is two-fold. Sadly, in 2020 we do still need these groups, for reprieve and survival. I’m a member of one myself, SheMentors. It’s a sanctuary from those male dominated tech events that I attend, mentor or speak at (often the only woman at the table). However, it gives me pause. Are we creating a self perpetuating loop when we cordon ourselves off from men by creating female groups? Do we silo ourselves from the adult’s table? Do we belittle ourselves when we submit to our own special groups where we award one another, and meanwhile the boys’ club laugh at us, or worse, are entirely ambivalent. My issue is that our successes risk being belittled if we only measure ourselves against each other.

However, I’ve realised that women don’t just gather because they must, they gather because they enjoy one another. As such, SheMentors is a gift. I believe men should gather, too. Not to beat their chests but to share in the experience of what it means to be male. Companies like The Man Cave, an organisation that delivers workshops to facilitate healthy masculinity in young boys and men, paves the way for this kind of action and should be applauded.

Sheree Rubinstein has built the One Roof community — a co-working space for female-led businesses. It doesn’t exclude men however there must be a female founder within any company that works from the One Roof space. The men who work there routinely report how the predominantly female space not only broadens their perspective but enhances their professional lives. One could say One Roof is a birthplace for male champions of women, which is a beautiful thing.

How do we support women in tech without carving out entire, separate narratives for them to exist within? How do we turn infantilising bollocks into genuine support for women? I think the answer is that it begins by simply understanding the predicament we risk perpetuating with well-intentioned actions. So when we create or engage in an initiative solely for women, we should ask: why is this just for women? What does it do for women? Or, what agency might it take away from us?