Axes, Solving Systemic Problems, and Power

@theunitofcaring and @shieldfoss explored one of the contradictions we have about professional environments and how they can support minorities. This is a subject @rasienna discusses a lot. Sometimes people note than an intensely tribal office culture can exclude people who don’t share the interests and backgrounds of the prevailing employees. Sometimes people note that an extremely standardized, corporate environment is based on rules set up by the kyriarchy, and will be most accessible to people used to those rules.

Informal vs formal. Or even more fundamentally, chaos vs order. Which way lies more justice?

And it is tremendously easy to get tricked by this question. You can see some examples where one method led to the exclusion of an otherwise worthy worker or member of the community, and feel “Damned informality, it must be a tool of oppression!”

Someone didn’t get what the office jokes were about and so acted awkwardly. Informal office culture doomed their career.

... or, someone didn’t go to the right college and have the right standardized experience and classes, and no one appreciated the intangible of diversity they brought to the team over the Generic White Guy With A Good Resume, so an overly formal office culture dooms their career.

It’s easy to tell yourself this story, and end up crusading against that type of office culture everywhere. Now you’ve assigned yourself to chaos or order in some never-ending battle, and you think it’s what will always benefit the disadvantaged.

Here’s the thing: Power doesn’t give a fuck about chaos or order. It’s power. It will figure out how to flow either in a very informal environment, or how adapt to an extremely rigid one. If one group systematically has more money and representation and influence, then they will do just fine, whether you’ve got a casual laid back office that feels like a family, or a corporate hierarchy run solely by forms and algorithms.

Our enemy is always Power. Millions of women and black people and people without a college education are held back from anyone seeing their potential, because they don’t look or talk like the people with money and influence. When you see instantiations of this discrimination, you should try to stop it, and give a hand up to those people. You should always sympathize with the excluded.

You don’t need to say “all informal offices are toxic” or “all corporate hierarchies are inherently patriarchal.” Different people flourish in both chaos and order. There should be workplaces for either of them. There should be a workplace for the hispanic coder who gains knowledge of a new part of society because of how many friends she meets at work. There should be a workplace for the single mother who needs to fit a very consistent schedule so her children and babysitters aren’t caught flat-footed. There should be a workplace for nerds who make friends by showing off their code, and there should be a workplace for autistic people who can’t navigate social vague-spaces. And in a country of 330 million people, it’s pretty easy to find one.

This inference can occur on any axis our mind can pattern match to. We can see one example of oppression that occurred in a certain environment, and construct a narrative for why that environment always produces oppression and the opposite end of the spectrum does not. Masculine vs feminine, fast paced offices vs slow, non-profits vs private sector,  tech sector vs brick and mortar , on and on all the binaries we can invent.  And they should be treated as just-so stories until proven statistically significant.

Be compassionate. Be open-minded about candidates from non-traditional backgrounds. Be aware that even candidates who look traditional may be suffering their own lifelong oppressions they don’t wish to talk about. You can fight classism and racism and sexism on an individual basis by treating them like individual people.

Do not be that ideologue who says “because sometimes tribal chaotic office culture can go bad, it’s always a red flag” or “because corporate order is bad, no one would ever want to work in a Faceless Corp.” The world is a lot more complex than that.