Ada Slivinski, the Vice President of Talk Shop, a full-service communications agency, wants you to envision the following: there is a tech panel, featuring four men of great accomplishment, ready to answer questions about their experience in the industry. A woman approaches the microphone, and she asks the panelists how they balance work and their skincare routine.
The men are at a loss for words. They ask, “Is that a serious question?” It sure is.
For women entrepreneurs, questions like these are a dime a dozen. When accomplished women make it to a stage, more times than not, they get asked questions about their work-life balance before they’re ever asked about what they’ve achieved.
At Toast Summit, where 94 percent of the audience were women, Slivinski hosted a “Men in Tech” panel, hitting them with age-old questions like:
- Do you plan on having kids, if so, how will that impact your career?
- How does it feel to be a man in tech?
- You’re quite the boss boy – what’s it like raising money, from the perspective of a man?
“Even naming the panel ‘Men in Tech’ was jarring for some,” said Slivinski. “What do you mean ‘Men in Tech?’ It’s just tech!”
Such was the point. Slivinski flipped the script: she directed these traditional, gendered questions to a group of men, and showed off how ridiculous they really sound. By the end of the panel, many of the men were feeling like outsiders.
There is a reason for all of this—and it’s not spite.
Rather, the panel was all about perspective. “Having men be in that perspective that women in technology are often in shifted [their] perspective,” said Slivinski. The panel enlightened her own perspective, too. Because she was tasked with asking gendered questions, she wasn’t able to get the answers to the more important, relevant questions that she wanted to ask.
“It made me realize how many women have gotten to that stage and should be asked these really interesting questions that can add so much value to discourses and the community, but instead are asked about their hair-care routine,” said Slivinski.
Centering the conversation around work-life balance wastes the panelist’s time and the audience’s opportunities. It turns a brilliant chance into a lose-lose.
So how do we combat this double standard?
Slivinski’s sums up her advice for any female panelist in a helpful phrase, stating, “It’s okay to say, ‘That’s not why I was asked to be here today.'” There is a time for shutting down questions that don’t spawn productive conversation, and that time is now.
But conversation is a two-way street. Batting off ridiculous questions isn’t good enough—we need to replace them. Slivinski notes that “not everything needs to get so personal.” Questions about a panelist’s predictions for a given industry, about innovations they’ve seen, or even about general markers of success can all drive better, more relevant conversation.
“Women in X”
A tempting solution to avoid gendered questions might be to host panels centered around women of a particular industry, but Slivinski isn’t completely sure. “I don’t know if I would say no to being on a panel that was women in whatever industry, but I would certainly steer the conversation in a bit of a different direction,” she said. It is good to have an outlet for women’s voices, but the focus should be on an industry’s infrastructure and operations.
“CEOs are often men for larger companies, so those are the representatives who are often called upon for these panels. So if we want to really change the makeup of the panels, maybe we need to look back and change the makeup of who is running some of these bigger companies.”
This frame of mind provides the best groundwork for getting rid of these double standards. In the conversation about getting rid of gendered questions on-stage, the best course of action might just be a more persistent off-stage presence.
It’s clear that this issue goes beyond gendered questions. In some cases, the speakers themselves aren’t even real. See how fake female speakers stirred up controversy at a major tech event.
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