International Encounter

This week I've been at a big conference (around 7,000 people) in Seattle that Microsoft puts on twice a year for its employees. I've been struck with how much what we do here impacts the world. When I'm writing software, I might think about Spanish or French, but I'm realizing this week how the entire world is highly dependent on the decisions that we Americans make. For instance, someone from China commented that their Chinese characters couldn't be seen in a certain device. What was an oversight (or perhaps a design decision) on someone's part has effectively locked out an application's adoption by several million people. It's easy for me to roll my eyes at programming against "Unicode" (which in software-speak is a way of allowing all sorts of characters to be rendered on a computer), and going through other time-consuming tasks, because it takes extra work for me, the developer. But I'm realizing this week the obvious -- that what we do here makes a big differnece for real people around the world.

I'm proud to be a part of such an international company. Just to name a few examples, at lunch yesterday, I sat with a German, a Croatian, an Indian man who lives in L.A., an Asian, and an American. Tonight I went to an event for women, and I sat with two Chinese women, two Germans, and women from the U.K., South Africa, and the U.S.

The event tonight was eye opening for me. I have at times been frustrated at my position as being the lone technical woman on a team, as is often the case. I have been frustrated at sexism that comes in the back door, in the form of men not treating me badly per se, but being patronizing none the less when they treat me (albeit affectionately) like a little sister or their daughter, and not as a peer. But tonight was the first time I had ever thought about what it would be like to be a woman with technical skills in a country where women are not given a voice, period, or where sexism is actually codified in the country's laws. I get frustrated with underlying currents of sexism, but I have rarely, if ever, faced it head-on. I applaud the women I met tonight who are the ones making the difference in their respective countries to be more assertive, to be the positive change for their generation.