Most boys seem to learn something before they are adults which prepares them to navigate a career. A career involves a relationship to the public and navigating that effectively amounts to understanding PR -- Public Relations -- and that's a memo my sister and I and most women seem to not get.
This has made me absolutely NUTS for YEARS because I was a social butterfly in my youth compared to my PAINFULLY shy, socially awkward ex husband. How in the HELL does HE know this -- whatever THIS is -- and I don't and exactly WHAT in the HELL is he doing right and I'm doing wrong????
We both had career military fathers and we both are culturally more "American military" than American civilian. We both know the lingo. He joined and I didn't.
Yes, yes, there's my problem. Or one of them.
Those stand for Advanced NCO Course and Basic NCO Course. You take BNCOC when you first make NCO -- non commissioned officer (it's an internal ranking) -- and ANCOC when you get to a higher rank in charge of stuff and start running with the big dogs.
My ex was good at his job. Like super amazing, so much so that when all his buddies were terrified of being RIFed, we both slept easy.
RIF is a reduction in forces that occurred early in his career when the federal government decided "We are spending too much money and need to cut the budget." So good soldiers can be told "Thanks for your service, but you are not invited back to the party. For budgetary purposes, you're mediocre ass can just go job hunting after this current tour of duty ends."
This is a NIGHTMARE for people who were intending to make a career of the military, so people were losing their minds about this situation.
If you are awesome sauce and amazing, no worries. You will get to stay.
So with being awesome sauce and amazing and sleeping soundly during the RIF, he unsurprisingly made E-7 at a young age. So he goes to ANCOC, the course for new E-7s, and people are making casual conversation and people start talking about Master Gunner school.
They start swapping anecdotes "When I went six months ago..." and probably someone said "Sergeant T, how about you?" because he's kind of quiet and shy. I don't know how quiet and shy he was at work around his people, but folks who knew him first would meet me, do a double take and ask him privately "How did you get with HER?" because I'm much more talkative and sociable than he is.
Anyway, in a completely unintentional mic drop moment, he replies to their query "Well, let me think. It's been a few years since I went..."
Master Gunner school has a fifty percent washout rate and you can take it as many times as you want. This is not true of most military schools.
He went at a very low rank and young age and passed it his first time through. So he was younger than most of his ANCOC classmates and went to Master Gunner school longer ago, leaving everyone standing there with their mouths open, doubly so because he wasn't actually trying to brag.
Now to my real point:
Master Gunner school is a significant distinction. It's brag-worthy, impressive and reputation enhancing. And it was one of TWO such distinctions the ex had and I forget what the other one was but they were each a big deal individually and it was super rare for someone to have both.
So one day he calls some department and says "You have my file miscoded. It should show BOTH of those." And the guy says "Pick one. You can't have BOTH in your code." And he says "Yes, I can. They go in different places in the code." and schooled the guy whose job it was to code his files -- probably because having both is extremely rare -- and the guy ultimately agreed with him and updated it.
That probably explains a lot of things that happened later in his career where he was being requested by people and MY friends were going "Wait? What do you mean he tried to get out of that assignment? I thought you needed to know someone to get that at all!!"
He knew the system and what he needed to do to communicate stuff that mattered. Other than convincing ONE guy he was wrong and please update my file, there was no need to be chatty and sociable and good with people.
I told their webmaster Rick Moyer that I was the highest ranked woman on Hacker News, figuring he would know who I was because of my online activities. He had never heard of Hacker News.That's like being introduced to a local actor and saying "I'm big in Hollywood." and being asked "What's Hollywood? I've never heard of that."
I wasn't really trying to tell Rick Moyer "I'm hot stuff and you should be impressed." I probably shouldn't have mentioned Hacker News because being the highest ranked woman on Hacker News isn't anything akin to highlighting Master Gunner school on your military file where that makes it easier for people to FIND qualified candidates when they go looking for them.
That's a bit more like saying "Oh, I think you know me because I think we go to the same church. I sit in the back row and I wear a big pink hat, unlike today."
It's sort of incidental that me saying that outed Rick Moyer as not really technical because most people on Hacker News wouldn't see me as really technical. I know a little HTML and CSS and I have a Certificate in GIS, but I'm not really a programmer and I've never had a serious tech job.
I'm a blogger and freelance writer and I know for a fact there are people in tech land who think I don't belong there and wish I would shut up and go away and I have in recent months.
I was nervous about meeting Rick Moyer because he was being paid big bucks and I figured he was a real programmer, not someone who actually knew less than I did about being a webmaster. And then he didn't know the login credentials and had never heard of Hacker News.
So that's how I learned he wasn't actually more qualified than I was to do website work, though for whatever reason he knew how to get these fools in this small town to PAY him big bucks.
And I didn't know how to convince them he's full of baloney, I'm more qualified and "But my product (instead of his)."
I was newly off the street, a woman, new to town, dirt poor with no car and dressed in t-shirts and sweat pants. He had all the advantages in terms of social cues and the non-technical audience was judging both of us on those social cues.
No one knew enough to judge either of us on the quality of our website work. No one in town had any idea what made for a good website.
And I didn't know how to convince them, how to appropriately price my work and a long list of other stuff.
In the good news column, he didn't know me AT ALL, so I got to try stuff without dealing with people having stupidly high expectations of me or someone from tech land who actually knew what they were doing dragging me in an authoritative fashion.
Tossing out the tidbit about being on Hacker News was one of several things I did to try to figure out how to get my online and offline life to meet without going BOOM. I never did figure that out.
I was trying to avoid drama and didn't really do that. I did avoid scenarios I imagined might happen and had seen happen in town.
The architect promoting his boat idea got it published in the local paper and some folks at local meetings were angry and fussed at him in person -- in front of me, the outsider no one liked or respected -- telling him they felt blindsided and people had asked them about it and they had never heard of it.
So that example is included to demonstrate that women typically fail to effectively communicate something important. I wasn't really trying to communicate my qualifications to Rick Moyer even though I was trying to manage MY PR problem rooted in being a twice exceptional woman trying to establish a career after being a homemaker for years.
I have big strengths, like good grades and a substantial academic record, and big weaknesses, including being a woman in a man's world and having a substantial online presence and trying to figure out how to navigate dealing with the public in the face of all that. My mind was going to "If he's a programmer, he's probably on Hacker News and so he's heard of me and I should try to admit that upfront and try to deal with that, whether he's a fan or a critic."
And that somehow lacks important parts of what men do when they deal with the public and putting out information about themselves.
It's not a big failing on my part. As someone dirt poor, newly off the street, etc. I probably did surprisingly well and I was trying to do something NEW. That always involves TRYING stuff and seeing what works.
In Dutch, the word for business man translates literally as "undertaker." Business involves undertaking a project and there's always some figuring it out involved.
Given that I was trying to do small scale community development AND the existing Main Street model doesn't actually work, I was biting off a lot more than I knew.
But if you are a woman and frustrated with your career, hopefully this piece helps you figure out something about the difference that makes a difference about a detail you can change and doesn't leave you going "It's just straight up sexism! And I am what I am. I can't stop being a girl because other people are assholes!"
I became the highest ranked woman on Hacker News by wondering what I was getting wrong rather than just chalking it up to "Men are all sexist pigs!" I'm not sure that does much of anything for me going forward and never did for me professionally what it did for a lot of the men there, but most women aren't even getting their toe in the door enough to so much as open their mouths there.