By Ibba Rasul-Bernardo
This is one of the most difficult articles I’ve ever had to write. The challenge: write an article about women and technology. First off, I’m a guy. I’m a guy who grew up in a family of incredibly brilliant and successful women. My grandma was the first female muslim senator in the Philippines. My mom was one of the youngest cabinet members ever, and she lobbied and created the National Youth Commission. My sister is a young lawyer who left a very lucrative career at a massive law firm to fight the good fight by joining the supreme court.
What makes this difficult is how can I even begin to write about the challenges women face without somehow demeaning them, which is the last thing I’d ever want to do. Coz I’d get whooped at home.
Sadly, the world is full of misogyny even sadder it comes from the higher echelons of society like cough cough top elected officials. In Silicon Valley and the tech startup space, it seems that sexism is all over the headlines; from Ellen Pao and her travails in Reddit and recently Susan Fowler at Uber who wrote that her manager propositioned her for sex on her first day.
To be able to at least try to understand what women in Tech in the PH go through I interviewed several prominent ladies in the tech space about their journey. The good news is that in general, the PH Tech and Startup space is pretty good when it comes to respecting women. I spoke to women from VCs to Devs to founders. The bad news is that there’s still a long way to go for full equality.
One of the women I spoke to works for a massive techish company and used to be an IT teacher in one of the big universities. During her time in university in the early 00’s only 20% of her batch in her IT course were women. After graduating, she taught till a couple of years ago, in 10 year that percentage grew to 50%. These stats closely mirror the workforce of a tech company that I’m a partner in Thousandminds where 7 out of 38 developers are women. As the dev work pool increases, I’m sure that we will be hiring more and more women coz really there’s no difference.
As I spoke to more women in tech, I learned quite a bit. Most of these brilliant women had all experience “Mansplaining.” It’s ironic that I, a man, will be explaining Mansplaining. But, before women start trolling me, my objective is to try to explain Mansplaining to men. After learning the term, I immediately messaged one of my female partners and fearfully asked her if it was something that I had ever done to her. To my relief she said no, and that I was a good boy. Yehey, bonus points to my upbringing.
So what is Mansplaining? why did it instill such fear in me? Well, it’s basically when a Man like me, starts condescendingly and patronizingly talking about something they have little or no experience or right to talk about… like Mansplaining. Aussie big boss lady I know gave me the best answer, it’s like a guy telling a woman what sanitary napkins to buy coz he knows the brand and the technology. Unless that dudes privates bleed monthly he has no clue what he’s talking about.
We’ve got a lot of bad things going on the PH, there’s definitely inequality but when it comes to women’s rights it seems like we’re on the right track. In the top universities, more women are getting accepted into degrees like IT, Medicine and Law. To the point that some schools are a bit concerned since very few guys are getting into the courses. Rightly so, coz guys are dicks.
Ibrahim ‘Ibba’ Bernardo has been working with marginalized and underprivileged groups by giving them access to relevant technology. An IT entrepreneur since he was 22, he’s the founder and CEO of Sari Software Solutions. His involvement in base of the pyramid (BOP) projects include: Solar Energy Foundation’s Ride for Light which brought solar energy to far-flung off-grid areas, E-Dalaw which enabled virtual visit of inmates by their indigent families, and Buhayko.org for teaching blogging to underprivileged students living in slum areas. Ibba also wears other hats as a technology and motorcycle journalist, entrepreneur and IT lecturer and is currently the founder of IAM360, a Virtual Reality startup based out of Hong Kong.
