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This is sadly often true.
Random story: I'm a little unusual, skills-wise and back when my then-manager started bugging me to be promoted we had to figure out on what job ladder. I chose to be promoted to Principal Engineer instead of Director.
Why, you might ask?
https://twitter.com/decryptlyfe/status/1327684038803394566
Random story: I'm a little unusual, skills-wise and back when my then-manager started bugging me to be promoted we had to figure out on what job ladder. I chose to be promoted to Principal Engineer instead of Director.
Why, you might ask?
https://twitter.com/decryptlyfe/status/1327684038803394566
... because it would cause fewer people to make bad assumptions about my level of technical skill.
Mind you, this was in a company which was pretty good about this and where I had done Useful Engineering Things (including inventing quite a lot of my field) for about a decade.
Mind you, this was in a company which was pretty good about this and where I had done Useful Engineering Things (including inventing quite a lot of my field) for about a decade.
I'll also note that a surprising number of coworkers (not the ones I really worked with) were *surprised* that I could get promoted on the technical ladder. I have no idea why. But the job title did help, as much as it shouldn't have.
Job titles are esp. important in settings where people don't have the ability to evaluate you for whatever reason. I ended up with the "Global Lead of Privacy Technology" title at Google specifically because I met a lot of people outside of the company and they needed a cue.
And in the interests of transparency, I'll note that I erased that note about inventing a bunch of my field multiple times. I think it's true, almost as much as I believe this is a collective endeavour, but it's incredibly hard to say. And that is part of why the titles matter.
Saying that I have accomplished something comes across differently when I'm perceived as a woman, because that's how we've set up the patterns of social interaction. It can come across as stuck-up, regardless of truth. Title does some of that work for a person from a URM group.
So let's do the work for equity and pulling the bad heuristics out of our heads. But also recognize that they exist and that workarounds may be imperfect but exist.
