Mentoring women and raising two girls in a global pandemic
2020 was a hard year for my family. I’m sure most of the world would agree. We came out of it mostly unscathed, but we did make some difficult choices during the early days of the pandemic.
I was just getting into my second trimester when we were told by my employer that we were going to start working from home. After about a week of working from home, and some serious hemming and hawing, we decided we were no longer comfortable sending our daughter to daycare. My daughter was 18 months old at the time, non-verbal, and still very dependent on adults for entertainment. We didn’t have a plan for how to take care of her during the day other than “We’ll just have to schedule our meetings opposite each other and try to keep her occupied and happy”.
This…did not go particularly well. We didn’t have any other options really. We didn’t have any unemployed family that could watch her. We were watching the infected numbers tick up in our community every day. We stayed home, avoided everything but grocery shopping and appointments with the midwife. After the first news story broke about a pregnant woman having Covid and giving birth while comatose, I felt a little better about our choice. I already knew I was high risk because I have asthma, but the thought of losing my baby or my kids losing their mother was horrifying.
Knowing we made the best decision we could at the time didn’t make managing a toddler while both parents tried to work from home any easier. Since everyone was working remotely, we spent many hours on zoom calls. Thankfully my boss and teammates were extremely patient with our background noise (so much Hey Duggee and Peppa Pig!) and my needing to randomly run off and change diapers or deal with a meltdown. Since I was pregnant, keeping a squirming unhappy toddler in my lap during a meeting got more and more difficult. There were many times when one of us would have to run and take a call outside while the other tried to calm down the screaming toddler. Our toddler underwent a serious sleep regression when she stopped burning all of her energy off at daycare with her friends, so on top of everything we became extremely sleep deprived again. Everyday was a slog, just trying to get through the next meeting, the next meal, the next nap. I was so stressed and burnt out the only way I could get through to the next activity was crushing my feelings down into a tiny ball and ignoring them as much as possible.
I constantly felt like I was slipping at work. How long could they possibly put up with me running off to fix something for my kid? Most of them didn’t have kids or had partners who didn’t work. Almost all of my planned accomplishments for the year were completely tanked by the pandemic. The few things I did manage to accomplish were so much lesser in scale and quality that I am certain they didn’t make the impact they would have had in a normal year. I knew my career would take a hit from having another baby, but I never imagined it would feel so big.
I was drowning. Personally, professionally, emotionally. I missed my friends, I missed my coworkers, and I missed not being mired in existential dread 24/7.
Desperate for any small connection with someone I didn’t live with, I started a small group at work in MS teams to chat with some of the other women in software engineering. I wanted to create a place where we could talk about some of the challenges with working in the very male-dominated engineering role. In my career, I have frequently been the only woman on agile teams or in meetings. I saw plenty of other women at the office at least and connecting with them was much easier in person. I wanted to make sure that others in my department weren’t feeling as isolated as I was.
I knew that at other points in my career having someone to commiserate with or get advice from was critical to my sanity and success. Subtle things like being frequently referred to as “girls”, being asked to set up future meetings, and take notes individually seem completely inconsequential, but collectively over time it’s death by a thousand cuts. Over my career I’ve struggled with men who ignored me when I told them things a certain way, bosses who rolled their eyes when I opened my mouth in a meeting, and being told I was “too emotional” because I was debating the merits of a technical decision. Having someone tell me “that happened to me too!” makes a huge difference in how much energy you can muster to deal with these issues.
I will be the first to admit that I’ve been guilty of apologizing as the start of an email, using too many emoticons or exclamation marks, and even starting questions with “I know this is a stupid question…”. I’m a self taught engineer; many times the imposter syndrome was oppressive. Through the years, I’ve learned a lot about when to draw a line and stick up for myself. I hoped that this simple chat would create a space for us to connect and support each other.
My little group slowly expanded to include architects, designers, product owners, scrum masters and quality testers; essentially any role. It became kind of a refuge to bond over things about work, the pandemic, life in general. We shared “pandemic safe” date ideas and stories about terrible bosses. We celebrated when others got promotions and had babies. It is all very unofficial. We share advice about how to handle difficult coworkers, asking bosses for help, and provide low pressure mentorship to each other in a very unstructured fashion. It’s a safe place to complain about the guy who keeps talking over you or the person who assumes you can’t possibly be the engineer on the project.
Eventually we felt it was safe enough to send our toddler back to daycare. We had welcomed our newborn home about 8 weeks earlier and I was losing my mind around trying to chase her and watch the baby while still recovering myself. Thankfully her daycare was able to welcome her back quickly and we were lucky enough not have any covid exposures through her class.
When my maternity leave was over we kept our newborn baby home with us. Having her around when I went back to work was special because we did get extra bonding time with her that I missed with my first (for whom daycare fulltime started at 11 weeks). My daughter was my “coworker” until she was 5 months old and her naps dwindled down to almost nothing. Having the baby around was much easier than having the toddler home. After my first baby, between sleep deprivation and pumping breaks, having to make major decisions about software releases and refactoring required a lot of caffeine and late nights. Thankfully with my second I was making a lot fewer decisions and doing more analysis (which is easier to review a few times before handing off!)
My boss thankfully loved seeing my baby rocking in the basinet behind me, so stepping away to change a diaper or feed the baby wasn’t a huge issue. I can’t thank my her enough for being constantly supportive. She went out of her way throughout the first year of the pandemic to assure me that I was still doing good work even if it felt inadequate. My work may not have been my best, but it was enough and she reminded me to have a little grace with myself. Her mentorship was crucial to me not throwing up my hands and quitting my job. The thought crossed my mind at least a few times a week in 2020.
Her mentorship and my previous struggles are another one of the reasons my little group felt so important. Finding mentors is a struggle and I believe its important to have a few mentors, since each will have different advice and perspective. Mentors who have shared life experiences with you are particularly important, since they may have overcome hurdles that you’re facing right now. Mentors that don’t look like you will share things that open your eyes to parts of life you haven’t experienced. Mentors can also be allies when you need them; offering assistance getting through a difficult problem or advocating for you when you’re not in the room. Our group may not be the same as one-on-one mentorship, but I do think it offers a lot of the same benefits. When it can be a struggle to find one mentor, let alone multiple, having a cohort of people to lean on can be a good alternative.
The support I received during the pandemic from my coworkers and bosses taught me that support, no matter how small and trivial seeming, absolutely matters. Reaching out and just asking “how are you?” can make a huge difference to someone. Having a place to feel comradery and less outnumbered than usual can lift an invisible weight from your shoulders. A goofy, silly “lady’s night zoom” meeting sounds trivial but for some of us it has the safest way to interact since the start of the pandemic.
Getting through the darker parts of being a woman in tech can feel like rolling a rock up a hill only to have it roll back down again. Having other women who understand and mentoring each other gives us all more energy to get back to pushing. If enough of us are doing the same thing, perhaps we’ll find the hill flattened one day.
The pandemic has been hard on everyone, in many different ways. My biggest accomplishment last year was not hosting the enterprise architecture conference or earning an AWS certification like I had planned. My two biggest accomplishments in 2020 were safely making a tiny human during a pandemic and starting a safe community at work for women in IT. Neither were on my list of challenges I expected to meet in 2020, but I think I learned many things about myself from both of them.
