I'm a backend software engineer with 9 years of experience.

I am also very active in the events / meetups scene of my city (a European capital), to give some context. Anyway, I have been approached 3 times this year to talk at the office of very prominent companies 💅🏼

The first time, it was for a Big 4 company. Women in tech event panel. I was very flattered they asked my insight as an engineer and that they would want to share my story. Good experience overall.

The second time, it was a couple of months later, from a recruiter on LinkedIn, and the company is a big tech scale up but less prominent than the first one. The recruiter, also a woman, asked me if I wanted to talk at a Women in Tech event. I was very excited, and based on the vague info she provided me, I was happy to confirm I had a technical topic I was already preparing for other occasions.

She said ok thanks I will let you know. A month later, I asked her if there was an update and she told me that the event was postponed because of some issues. 🤔

Another month passed, and with surprise I see that she posted on LinkedIn a promotion of a Women in Tech event about to happen at her company and, surprise surprise! It's another panel, once again featuring few of the female employees. Not engineers. The thing that bothered me the most is that in her communication with me she didn't have the courtesy to tell me that the event was about soft skills and happening soon. I forgot about it and simply thought she was unprofessional.

Then another month passed. Another recruiter contacted me about a job position for a top 10 tech company. 💅🏼

It was very flattering but I was still quite happy with my current job so I declined. The she asked me if I was interested in joining a Women in Tech event that her company was organizing. I was still naive at that time and yes, once again I didn't see it coming. I proposed the same tech topic I proposed in the past.

I confirmed my interest before the event was actually set in stone, to figure out on a later stage that, alas, it was another soft skills panel. They knew that I proposed a technical topic and they dodged the point until I was actually too involved in the conversation to pull back. But I know I started seeing a pattern.

So the event happened. 5 panelists including me. 1 engineer (me), 1 entrepreneur with a background of programming, 1 data scientist, 1 designer and 1 product owner. The last 2 really just worked for a tech company, they didn't have any background in tech. 2 out of 5 worked for the event hosting company, and when asked about insights and tips, were most times talking about the diversity initiatives existing in the company. It was very embarrassing.

Last but not least. There is a very big Women in Tech conference coming soon in my city that will last 2 days. 99% of the talks are about soft skills. Almost zero tech talks. Even the workshops!!

I feel insulted, infuriated and sad. 😑 For me, but also for all the brilliant engineers and women in tech that get approached for women in tech events only to be confined to soft skills topics 🙄 and they don't get to talk about their actual job and tech knowledge! 😡 I have experience in public talks related to very technical topics, btw.

It seems like that right now it's very hard to make a simple step further and I feel very upset by this trend. Let me clarify: refining soft skills and talking about diversity and inclusion is extremely important. And we should absolutely keep talking about it. But that shouldn't be the main mean to give support to women in tech. I'm not a tool you can use to recruit women.

End of the rant.

Sauce 🥫