Women, stop me if you’ve heard this one before:
You’re at a tech conference, one that you are attending as a tech professional with interest and expertise in the subject matter. You’re standing talking to a man – perhaps he’s a speaker whose talk you just heard, or someone with influence in your field, or you have any other professional reason to speak with him. There you are, deep in conversation, when another man suddenly swoops in and starts talking to the man you are talking to, about a completely different topic, as if he didn’t even notice you were there.
Usually, he is allowed to completely disrupt the conversation you were having. Your original interlocutor may not even notice that you were interrupted. If he does, he may throw a sheepish look at you, while going on listening and responding to the interrupter. You wait patiently until the interrupter finishes and goes away (possibly without ever acknowledging your presence), then finally resume your own conversation. No one thinks anything unusual has happened.
But, as the interuptee, don’t you feel… small? As if whatever you had to say – or even basic good manners – will always be less important than what a man wants to say, the second he wants to say it?
This may have been happening to me all my life, but I’ve become more aware of it over time. One egregious incident occurred at a tech meetup run by a small company. I had business reasons to speak afterwards with the CEO, and he was definitely interested in speaking with me. As we stood talking, another man butted in with a technical observation completely unrelated to our conversation (which he hadn’t heard). He monopolized the CEO’s attention for ten minutes, and there seemed no way to stop him and return to the conversation that was of actual business interest to the CEO and me. The second man barely even noticed I was there. But, that time, I definitely noticed that I had been interrupted – very rudely, too.
Some years back, Brendan spoke at BSides, and I attended as well. After his talk, as usual, people wanted to talk to him. I sat on the periphery of these conversations (we were at a table), listening in. Most of the people wanting to talk to him (and most of those at the conference) were men. A young woman waited her turn to talk ask Brendan a technical question. She had barely got started when a man lunged across the table, saying: “Hey, man, I just wanted to say how much I admire your work!” Right in the middle of the woman’s question. He didn’t even notice that she had been speaking – but somehow it was the woman he interrupted, not the men who had been speaking before her. Brendan responded politely, and the interrupter, after a few more sentences, withdrew to his seat.
Brendan and the woman were about to resume their conversation, but I couldn’t just let it go like that. “You just got interrupted for being a woman,” I pointed out to her. “And you need to not let that happen,” I said to Brendan.
Later, after they had finished their technical discussion, the woman said: “I didn’t even notice I had been interrupted. I’ll notice from now on.”
And that’s fine. But it’s also men who need to notice, and need to react. Don’t let other men do this. If you were speaking with a man and some third man came and interrupted, you’d most likely say, “Hey, let me finish my conversation with this guy first.” You need to do that for women, too. But first you need to notice that it happened.
