Season Eight Kickoff And Sponsor

Zohra 0:02

Hello friends and welcome to season eight of Insight Techcom with Zahra Mutabana. This season features a collection of conversations that explore the ideas, challenges, and opportunities shaping technical communication today. From AI and content strategy to leadership, product thinking, and the future of our profession. Each episode offers a fresh perspective from people doing the work. Let's get started. Season eight is proudly sponsored by LavaCon. Use discount code ITC26 to save $200 on registration for this year's conference. I'll share more about LavaCon later in this episode.

Meet Sharon Burton And The Book

Zohra 0:46

Hello, listeners. This is Zahara Mudabana from Inside Techcom. I'm extremely honored to be speaking with Sharon Burton. She's the editor of Women in Technical Communication. And she captures stories of women who did the work. And I'm going to we're going to dive into this book, dive into the history of the women who have shared their stories, talk about the history of TechCom in that context and learn more about our field. So this is going to be an interesting session. It's not about any particular tool or tips, it's just knowing more about the field that we have been part of collectively. And it's my pleasure, Sharon, to welcome you on my show.

SPEAKER_01 1:31

Well, thank you.

Zohra 1:32

It's lovely to be here. And I'm happy to be talking to you today. So, Sharon, in your own words, tell us a little about yourself and the journey about this, how this book came to be.

SPEAKER_01 1:43

Well, I've been in, as my my essay in the book points out, I fell into Techcom thinking, well, I'll just do it until I get bored, and then I will leverage my graduate level cultural anthropology training and I'll do something else. And so 30 or more years later, I am still waiting to get bored. It has not quite happened yet. Every time I think, okay, well, I've really done everything this field has to offer, the field shows up with something new. And of course, now we're all looking at AI, going, I don't know what to do with that. But it's all interesting, and there are interesting problems coming out of that. So because I've been in the field for a long time, I am very interested. I have been very interested in where our field has come from. You know, when I started, our field was just moving from creating documents in Word, sometimes WordPerfect, but mostly in Word, because it was free, you know, it shipped on everybody's computer. And then when I started, we were moving from Word to Frame Maker. Frame Maker was the tool. That was the revolution. Like, oh my gosh. And then when you look back, that's where we started. Women were starting to become common in our field, right? I think probably about when I started, we were probably 50-50 men, 50% men, 50% women. And now frame maker is still a tool for sure, but it's not used very often. We now have things called docs' code, right? Like which is amazing. We're now, I think the last numbers I saw were 70% women, 30% men. And when you look back for the entire time that the book covers, which is about 50 years, 50 years ago, there were 70% men, 30% women in our field, and now it's flipped. It's flipped. I find all of these changes so interesting. While we are the story in our field of TechCom, we are also the story of technology. Our story is a piece of the overall story of technology, but I think that we obviously fit into the story of technology, but we are a microcosm of the story of technology in general. Well, that really went far afield, didn't it?

Zohra 3:55

Stream of consciousness, and that's what I want to hear. A great overview and yes, story of technology. That's so beautifully put. I went to school in Boston to Northeastern, and one of my professors, I want to give a shout out to her, Marguerite Kraut, who she's retired now. But I'm not sure if you've heard of her, but she was a force of nature. I was blessed to have these stalwarts to who were teaching me, who are practitioners and also uh teachers. And as you were talking about, she would bring history alive to about technical communication. And that's how my passion was born. So the more we dive into these stories, I fell into it as well. Just like you said, I fell into this field. It was not something that even knew about it back home in India in the 90s. I'm hating myself, but that's okay. But in the late 90s, I wasn't aware of this field. And I was living in a city like Mumbai, and I had not heard of this field. Even if it did exist, it was very, very niche. I discovered it after I came to the United States. And the interesting factoid about the 70-30 flip that has happened, I think I want to dive

Why The Gender Balance Flipped

Zohra 5:05

into that. Why do you think that has happened?

SPEAKER_01 5:07

To me, that's one of the most interesting things about our field. I think when you look at the deep history of our field, when I wrote the foreword to the book, I did do some deep history research. And there is some good deep history, so I didn't touch on it. But in the 1930s and 40s, there were women in TechCom. They were few, they were unusual. That was the time where professional organizations around TechCom were starting to be built. And when you look at the list of officers, or I cannot remember off the top of my head the name of the man who has written most of the articles about our deep history. And shame on me, but I can't remember it because I'm bad at names. So there we go. But he included some photos of early organizations. And there's usually, you know, it'd be like a picture of men, and there'd be one woman, and she was usually the secretary, not a secretary, like she sat there in the role. She had the job called secretary. So she took the notes and did the formal and all of that. She was usually a Techcom person, but if there was a woman, which is not always the case, that was her. The articles talked about women who were getting degrees in engineering, and they absolutely were. In the 30s, 40s, and 50s, women were absolutely getting degrees in mathematics and engineering. But their expectations were, the cultural expectations were that she would do that job until she married, and then she would go home and she would have children and run a household and lose her mind. So when we got into the 60s, and our first story, the old, the story that goes back the furthest, starts in, I think she said 65 is when she graduated college. Those women, late, late, late boomers, early, early Xers, they started working in the field with the expectation they would continue working, that they would have professions. They might go home and, you know, raise children for a bit, but they expected they would come back. It would be a dual income economy, or perhaps their marriage would fall apart, or whatever. But there was that expectation. I think the thing about TechCom that I I have certainly appreciated, and I think is true for a lot of us, is it let us take our interest in technology, our interest in writing, our interest in logical thinking and science, and whatever it is that is the field that we wound up in, and use that without having to get a coding degree or a like I enjoyed writing code in college for a bit, but sitting up all night trying to find the missing semicolon, you know, I mean, it's fun the first time, but after that you go, yeah, no, I don't know. I enjoy technology. I love technology. I think it's awesome and it's super fun. But if my options were, well, you were a program or nothing, then I'm nothing. But techcom let me fall in love with technology and be with technology in a way that was very accessible. And I think as women discovered, because most of us fell into it. I mean, even today, there are certainly you can get degrees in this and all that, but an awful lot of us just fell into it, especially as a second career. And it makes worldwide, it gives us access to the money that is in the technology field. And that, certainly in my case, and certainly in many cases in the book, that lets us provide a good living for our children and a good living for our family. And worldwide, the one thing we know about women is if you want to change poverty, give women access to a little money. And it is shocking how little money worldwide it takes. And she will lift her family out of poverty. And she will, for her family, solve poverty. And I'm not saying that Techcom is the solution to poverty, but it is really powerful to me if you give women access to money, you give them a stable career, the things that they will change about their lives, their children's lives, and their grandchildren's lives. I mean, it's amazing to me. So again, far afield, these are all the reasons why this book was so it was so much fun to do this project. It was just so much fun.

Zohra 9:23

And I and I can see that that you've really enjoyed working on this book. I think the access that this field brought to me personally, I I can see that resonating uh through other stories. It's definitely something that I have thought about. And I went to the Writer Docs conference in Portland last month, and I saw many younger faces, and not just women. Very early on, they realized that this is what they want to do. And I'm not just talking about women here, I'm talking about men and women and all genders in between. Like it's amazing. And of course, there are other fields too, but since we are talking about Techcom, how it has enabled and empowered me and to see that.

AI Disruption And What We Really Do

Zohra 10:05

Now with AI coming into the picture, what's your read on where this would go? Do you think the representation will continue to stay the way it is? Or will it kind of again become 50-50? Like, just take a guess here for me.

SPEAKER_01 10:20

Oh, AI is interesting. It is absolutely turning our field upside down and not just techcom, it's turning the field of technology upside down. It is terrifying, but it is also interesting at the same time. And for those of us who've been in this field for a long time, we remember other what were forecast as massive shifts that were going to in techcom, or at least in techcom as we know it. And some of them did turn us upside down. And we came out, I think, the better for it on the other side, but change is scary, change management is scary. So, what do I think is AI is doing now? I think there are a lot of companies who I can't believe I'm actually saying this because when I first started in TechCom, oh, so many years ago, we talked about this. There are companies who think that all we do as a field is we sit there and we type words. We just type words, we just type words, we just type words, we type words, and then we throw them over the wall and then we go, Whew, thank goodness we did that. I guess that's a manual. And I guess that's user assistant. It's user assistance, that's perfectly fine. That is like a small piece of what it is we actually do. But for outsiders, they think, well, we just type words, we just type words, we just type words. And so there are companies who still think that's the value that we bring, that that's what our job entails. And AI can type words, so they are getting rid of their entire techcom group. Okay, that's short-sighted, but all right then, I guess they're doing that. The value that we bring to technology, to selling a product, though, is far more than that. And I think these companies are going to discover very quickly that words are not sufficient. What we bring to the party is task analysis. That's for me, that's the big one. Yes, you may have AI might may have access to the code for your software product, for example, and it may be able to write documents of some limited value to your customer because they use the code to, I guess, describe every screen. But imagine trying to book your travel arrangements based on a description of every screen. That doesn't tell you how to book your travel arrangement. It just tells you in the file name field, type the file name name. That helps you not at all, right? Like not at all. So that's just one of the things we bring to the table. So, and then there's the cost of AI, which is apparently not going down. Uh, Microsoft just discovered, just discovered, just announced that it's just discovered, let's put it that way, that in fact the cost of tokens is more than the people it let go of. So it turns out that AI is a little more expensive. We, as the industry, don't see that cost probably dropping anytime soon because it's the cost of electricity, it's the cost of water, it's the cost of building the technology. We are not at a place yet where AI is a commodity, and I don't think we're going to be there anytime soon. So is AI going to change our field? Absolutely. Do I use AI? I use it for the kind of work that we used to give to interns back in the day when we had interns, but now we have AI, so we don't need interns. And I'm I'm working on a long-term contract right now, and they have challenged all of the people at this large company to see if you can turn 30% of your job into AI-based. So they're estimating 30% of our job are those repetitive tasks that we could use AI for or create an agent or that kind of thing. And I think that's an interesting way to think about it because our brains are the part that they're paying us for. So what can we use our brains for that add the value?

Zohra 14:02

Right. I do want to touch upon the interns who are trying to break into this career because we are going to age out at some point.

SPEAKER_01 14:10

Oh, yeah.

Zohra 14:11

Right. So we do need these young minds to enter the field. So I am very cognizant of that fact that yes, I enjoy using AI and it is evolving. And like you said, it is not a commodity at those points. So and it is becoming expensive. So there are some policy changes happening across the tech industry where there are token limitations being introduced. So I'm fortunate to have had access to a lot of the tools and training at my company. When I talk to other technical writers, I hear they haven't had that early break into it. But all said, it is definitely a tool. And like you said, we are not just writing a manual and throwing it over the wall. And that's where I have always kind of paused to think about this, Sharon. My whole purpose in starting this podcast was to kind of bring to light what technical writing does, how we bring value. In your interviews for women who came into technical writing as a career or grew within technical writing into leadership positions, how do we have others talk about the value rather than us? Because that's something that I keep thinking about.

SPEAKER_01 15:24

Yeah.

Proving Documentation Drives Revenue

SPEAKER_01 15:25

That has been the thing in our field the entire time I've been in this field. The entire time. Where I'm interested in talking, and where I'm trying the message I'm trying to bring to companies is companies are very concerned about obviously about income. That's not my God, Sharon's brilliant, right? Like we all know that. But if we can tie what we do to income, then that raises our visibility. So in today's world where you don't own a product anymore, you have to pay rent every month for the product. And even hardware has now figured out how to pay rent. You know, if you want to use, I think it's HP's printers, you have to pay a fee every month to HP for various things. It's craziness. It's the ethics of that aside. That's just the world we're we're in now. Okay, fine. But that means that every month you have to, you as a company have to show your value to the customer to get them to continue to pay, which means the customer needs to be able to use the product fully to solve its problems. I just described what we do. Right. I just described what we do. We provide the information that people need to use a product fully. And so when you tie that, it's called stickiness, by the way. When you demonstrate that good user docs, good user content provides stickiness and it does it cheaply, right? The way a lot of companies set up or work with to get customers to pay for the product next month, is they set up quarterly business reviews. And that is they have a person, a staff member, whose job it is is to reach out and schedule and talk to customers every quarter. That is the most expensive way, the most expensive way that you can come up with to find out if a customer is using the product, if they like the product, it's meeting their needs, it can't, you know, what problems are you having using the product, or let me help you walk through that. That is the most expensive way to do it. A better way is to leverage your techcom group and have them provide good user docs. Maybe we provide we use Pendo and we provide in-app ways to do things. We like that's the cheapest because it scales. It scales. Having this quarterly business review where you have to follow up and talk to that white glove treatment is an incredibly expensive way to support a product. Let's create good content. And if you look at a company like, for example, Salesforce, which has this awesome ecosystem of information that's just online, people can just use it. Even us who don't have Salesforce, we can go and poke around in there. That's brilliant. And there's a reason that Salesforce is kind of the gold standard for this because it's brilliant. And I was just talking to my boss at my long-term contract this week about there's a reason why Salesforce is the gold standard, and we should really think about that. And that's the value that we bring in TechCom. When we focus on tools like Dox's Code, which is an awesome thing, but we like, oh, DOX is code, docs is code, docs is code. It's good, right? Because we're fitting into the box that the development folks understand and we're proving our value there. But we have to also remember we've got to tie our value to the dollars and really tie our value to the dollars. That's how we show the value that we have. And I think that companies who are getting rid of their entire TechCom group and letting AI write the docs are going to be discovering within six months that, wow, yeah, no, okay, bad idea. Let's bring some techcom people back in. I think they're going to be discovering that.

Zohra 19:02

True. And even for on our end, the disconnect between tying our profession to the dollars, the return on investment on the business side is something that we are now starting to speak. And we've been trying to fit into this dev mold. And now we're trying to break away from that and talk about how we are actually bringing value to the business itself, the bottom line.

SPEAKER_01 19:24

We're enablement.

Zohra 19:26

We are enablement. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 19:27

We are enablement. One of the things I love about what we do is we cross multiple groups. And so we make a mistake when we try and, well, we'll just be in development. We'll just talk about our what we do in terms of development or in terms of marketing, or we cross multiple groups. The downside to that is when you cross multiple groups, it's hard to show your value overall because we stand in multiple places. But we just have to change our message depending on who we're talking to. You know, when we talk to marketing, it's one message. We talk to development or engineering, it's another message. When we talk to the being counters, it's another message. But it's the same thread throughout. Yeah.

Documentation As Institutional Memory

Zohra 20:07

Yeah. An interesting uh incident that happened where I work. Of course, we are all using AI tools. And like other companies, there have been reduction enforced. We've also had some. That said, the product manager that I work with, we've lost institutional knowledge because of that, because of the rifts that we've had. And what happened was we were looking for some information, which was we are moving from a legacy version to uh to a more modern version of a product. And now we don't have that institutional knowledge. So what do we do? Guess what? That is when they went scrambling and looking for documents. And and I'm happy to say that we we had the legacy documentation in very good shape. We fed it to an agent, and now it's almost training us the knowledge that was lost, unfortunately, but filling in some of the gaps for us. So that documentation surfaced at a time when there was nobody else that we could go and talk to. And that is something that you don't think about, right? So as you build your agents and as you train them, it's not just the content that is going to be written, but also the content that has pre-existed, right? You're kind of building that connection, a business narrative that you have to think about. The content is not working in isolation. Um, and it protects you, it buffers you in these times of learning and upheaval, so to speak.

SPEAKER_01 21:29

And I'm gonna bring us right back to the book on this one, because when we don't understand our history, whether it's us as a field or a company understanding the decisions that were made for the last 15 years, we lose important things. We make the same mistakes over again. And when we have our history captured, we can learn from that. And one of the things that I'm concerned about, we've lost STC, which is Sad in the United States, a big deal for us losing STC. We've lost that institutional knowledge that was easily available to us. I did not do the book simply because we lost STC. And it I actually didn't think about the book and the loss of STC until it started showing up in the essays I was reading. And I went, oh yeah, uh, we have done that. But we also, as a profession, to touch back on what you said a little bit ago, as a profession, we are aging. When you go to a conference now, and I haven't been for a bit, but I noticed this 15 years ago. When you go to a conference, we're skewing much older. Yes. And those people are going to be leaving soon. That's a little unnerving. And by those people, it's actually, I may be part of that cohort, which is odd and unusual and unexpected. I did not know that. I suddenly am getting older. But what happens when those people leave? We are going to lose that deep history, that the ways that we've navigated significant industry change before, the ways that, and you're discovering at your work, the ways that we have solved these problems in the past have influenced where we are now. And if we don't understand why we are the way we are now, we don't have those decisions, we don't know what the reasonable next steps are. Systems don't appear out of nowhere. For example, at the at the contract I'm working at now, they've done an excellent job of documenting their processes. I mean, really excellent job, but they have a lot of staff who've been there for 30 years, 30 years. And those people are going to retire at some point. And when they go, all of that information that's in their heads about how this has all worked and the ways it's all worked over the years and all, it's gone. It's going to walk right out the door. And there's no way to capture all of that. Even if you ask them to spend a year writing it all down, they're not going to capture all of it. They're not. It's not possible. It's concerning. And I'm concerned that that people think that AI is going, well, we'll just ask AI. Really, though? How will you ask AI? And AI lies, by the way, it lies. So yeah, that's the problem. You have to verify almost everything.

Zohra 24:12

Yeah, exactly. I mean, no doubt it's I use it day in, day out. It's a great tool. It definitely amplifies my productivity, if I may say that. But does it replace me? I don't believe so, because like you said, we are the creators. We are thinking out of the box. And that is what is being lost in this whole current trend of layoffs.

LavaCon Spot And Discount Code

Zohra 24:39

This episode is sponsored by LavaCon, the content strategy conference taking place this October in Charlotte, North Carolina. With more than 70 sessions and workshops featuring speakers from companies like Salesforce, TikTok, T-Mobile, and Amazon. LavaCon brings together content strategists, documentation leaders, and content professionals to share practical ideas you can apply right away. And yes, it's known as the Fun Conference 2 with networking events, therapy dogs, comfort llamas, storytelling, and karaoke. Use discount code IDC26 to save $200 on registration.

Joy, Helpfulness, And Honor In The Stories

Zohra 25:12

I think you had reviewed about 69 stories spanning, like you said, roughly 50 years. What bad tones emerged and what surprised you the most?

SPEAKER_01 25:21

So there's a couple of, and I'm going to say this with so much, there's just so much joy here for me. One of the things that I loved about editing all of these pieces was for most of the women, for most of the women, there was this joy about doing this work. There's just this joy that comes through. And I love that. I love that our field, and I've known this about us for a long time. Our field, TechCom, we are incredibly helpful people. We are motivated. If you think about fundamentally what we do, what we are doing is we are helping people use their tools or gain information. We are a helping group of people. And when you start reading the, for me, at least when I started reading the piece, the submissions, I really got this sense of these women were just delighted that they could do this and help people. It's not necessarily that women are saying that, but you start to hear that message underneath that it's like, yeah, I got to solve interesting problems and I got to make a difference. And I love that for us. I love that for us. So that was wonderful and awesome and surprising. I found it and I still find it deeply moving that we all just showed up and we did the work. We just did the work to the best of our abilities. We showed up and we did the work. Part of, I'm sure there are people listening going, yes, Sharon, that would be called a job. You show up and you do the work and you get paid and you go home and that's the job. Sure. But there is bravery isn't the right word. There is a lot to admire about showing up, doing the work to the best of your ability. And some of the people in this book are the best people in our field. So when they showed up to do the work, it was with significant gifts. You show up and you do the work to the best of your ability because you think it matters. And I find that moving. I'm hoping that when other people read the essays in this book, that they, I'm hoping they also find that moving. Because you could just show up and just do the work and go home and who cares, right? But that's not the stories that these women told. It mattered to them that that they do the best they could do, even when it was hard, even when your boss just gestured and said, I don't know, those are the secretaries, I guess. It has not been easy to be a woman in tech over these years, but you still show up and do the best you can. And I find that honorable. Yes. That may be the right word. Honorable.

Zohra 27:55

Yes, yes. Sharon, I kind of want to lean into the fact that yes, everybody shows up, they do the job, and they get rewarded for it. In our field, you are always part of a larger team. When you have innovation sprints or these hackathons, you are part of a group and you're contributing, but you never get the mention. Yet you participate, yet you show up. That is the message that is lost. We are always playing under the radar.

SPEAKER_01 28:24

Yep. I think everybody who's listening has sat in a team meeting, company meeting, and they've talked about, yay, the blue team, they rock, they ship the product on time. And then they put the names up of the blue team who rocked and got the right. They show the slide, and the writer is sitting there going, Yeah, I wrote the docs and my name's not up there. And I'm not at all surprised that my name's not up there because why would my name be up there? I'm only, oh, wait, part of the team that helped ship the product. And we've all had that happen. And it is discouraging every time it happens, even if it's the 20th time in your 30-year career that it's happened. It's still discouraging. And it's sad at how delightful it is if you work at a place where they remember the writer and your name is up there with everybody else. And you go, Yay, my name is up there with everybody else. I feel like I'm part of the team. No, you were part of the team. And I think that's part of why TechCom tends to, we tend to, I'm going to use a word that isn't quite the word I want, but we tend to protect our own. We tend to look to each other for that validation because we have been taught that looking to our company for that validation, it may not happen. We may, but if we look to our fellow techcom people and go, yeah, you know what? I worked seven days a week for six weeks and I got that project done. And the feedback the customers are giving is that those are really outstanding docs. We take that to other techcom people, and other techcom people go, yay, you, yay, yay, right? Because we know we know how difficult it is. And that's sad that that's what we have to do, but yay, that we figure out that's that's the way to do it because we know we deserve to get that feedback just as much as the engineering team or the marketing team.

Being Overlooked And Finding Validation

Zohra 30:13

Exactly. I am going to take that one step further and say that it becomes all the more important as we bring these stories, uh, the essays that you've shared in your book. And what we've touched upon connecting what we do to the dollar value is extremely important because that is the only language that is understood. And we have to step out of protecting and validating each other within the community and shouting from the rooftops about the actual bottom line that we affect and impact and bring value.

SPEAKER_01 30:45

Yeah.

Conferences As A Career Strategy

SPEAKER_01 30:46

That brings me to one of the things I've got a couple of proposals in for a couple of conferences. And I know that we've got, you know, there's other conferences about to happen or going to be happening that are planning, et cetera. If you're listening to this and you're thinking, okay, fine, all right, fine, I will figure out how to connect what I do to the being counter language. Fine, fine, fine. A great way to figure that out, to find that out is to attend a conference. For example, LavaCon. LavaCon is the one that I love for this because LavaCon almost always has at least one track where it is how to demonstrate our value. Because demonstrating our value isn't something that you can figure out how to do once and then you're done. Over the course of the time I've been in our field, how we prove our value, how we demonstrate our value to companies has shifted as what companies are looking at is shifting. For example, if you had told me there's a word called stickiness that talked about how often customers are in a product, if you told me about that word 15 years ago, I would have laughed. I would have laughed. I would have said, no, you just wash your hands and then you don't have stickiness anymore. That's silly. But that's a real term now that we use. So knowing the current language when you are talking to product managers or whoever it is you're talking to really, really helps. So if at all possible, attend conferences, even if, even if all you can do is go for one day, talk to your the company you're working for and see if they will pay for it. Maybe you can volunteer, volunteer at the conference and you can get a significantly reduced rate. That sometimes works. Write the docs, I think. I'm pretty sure it's write the docs.

Zohra 32:24

I went as a volunteer there. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 32:26

Yep. You can go as a volunteer.

Zohra 32:29

LavaCon offers that. Do they? That's wonderful. I believe that's wonderful.

SPEAKER_01 32:32

Yes. Yeah. Just figure out a way to get there. And then once you're there, even as a volunteer, you can often, you know, while people are all in presentations, you can sneak away and attend a presentation. And that's expected that you'll do that as part of like being the volunteer. So that's a terrific way to start finding out what's the most recent way to talk about our value to companies.

Zohra 32:56

To companies, yes. That's a great suggestion. And because this season is sponsored by LavaCon. There you go. Right? It is a great platform. And the opportunities that we are seeking and that we want to kind of share, look for such platforms, attend conferences, find your value, create your value, and spread that value.

SPEAKER_01 33:20

Yeah. Again, I love LavaCon. Not only is LavaCon like usually have some of the best speakers in the business in the US, but the food is also great, and I'm also a foodie. So there's always that. There's like, okay, well, maybe, maybe I wasn't fascinated by every single presentation I saw today, but the food was really good. So it's okay.

Zohra 33:39

I'm looking forward to it because this is going to be my first LavaCon and I'm I'll be presenting there.

SPEAKER_01 33:43

You're gonna love it. You're gonna love it.

Zohra 33:45

I am really excited about it.

SPEAKER_01 33:47

Yeah, you're gonna love it. It's just really a good

Cross Cultural Sisterhood In TechCom

SPEAKER_01 33:50

conference.

Zohra 33:50

I want to go back to the book and talk about the different narratives as they revealed about the actual evolution of technical communication. Did the stories challenge any of your assumptions that you held about how the field developed?

SPEAKER_01 34:05

Oh, that's an interesting question. My education is all cultural anthropology. Before I fell into Techcom, I was on track to be to finish my PhD in cultural anthropology. So I am naturally wired to be very interested in other cultures. I find my own culture very boring, and I'm in search for the better culture, you know, the one that I like better. And I'm convinced it's all of them, and I just need to find all of them and learn everything I can. I think what surprised me was how common the experience of being a woman in techcom was, regardless of the culture that she came from. That struck me. Like I, as I was reading, I was thinking because techcom showed up in India in the 90s, late 90s, when the Western world, specifically the US, looked around and discovered there were other countries in the world where really bad at this. And every now and again we discover there are other countries in the world. That's wow, who knew? And we looked as the technology world looked and found India and went, wait a minute, India has a lot of engineering people. What if we do something and we'll call it, I don't know, offshoring, and we'll move a bunch of our jobs to India? That would be fantastic. And it was, it was fantastic for India, like fantastic. And out of that came TechCom. And the book has some of the first women who were in techcom. We we captured those stories, which I I can't tell you how delighted I am. And I was shocked at how similar our experiences were. You know, just it also delighted me. One of the things I've always wanted to know, and I think what interested me in cultural anthropology, I've always wanted to know what's it like to be a woman in other cultures, to just be a woman, to just exist as a woman. What's it like? You know, like what's that like? Is it how is it different? How is it the same? How does it change as you move through space and you move through life? And and I got to have that question answered a little bit in this book. I was being a woman in Mexico in TechCom, being a woman in Poland in TechCom, the experiences are very similar. Obviously, there are different experiences throughout the book, obviously, because there's different women over time and all that. But also how similar our experiences are as women in techcom, as women in technology, and as women just navigating through space, you know, holding a job, raising our children, working in bro cultures, not working in bro cultures, because most of us have worked in a bro culture once and went, no, I'm never doing that again. That's no, no, no, thank you. No. I would rather wait tables again than work in a bro culture because bro culture is just abusive. It just is. It's abusive to women. And I don't need to get paid to be abused. I just don't. I just don't. And I think most of the women in the book who worked in a bro culture would agree. Yeah, no, no, no. We'd rather wait tables, we'd rather do anything else. No, no, I do not need to drive to work crying and drive home crying. I don't need to do that again. I found that inspirational. I hate that word, but I do. I hate that word because it gets used for everything. Oh my gosh, that was so inspirational. But it's it is comforting to me to find those things that are common about us as women, regardless of where we're from. I find it comforting that I could travel to India or Poland and sit down with a group of women in Techcom and know that we have certain things in common.

Zohra 37:42

You're almost explaining uh sisterhood to me, I feel like. You're right. I am.

SPEAKER_01 37:47

I didn't even think about that, but you're right.

Zohra 37:49

Yeah. Yeah. Uh and I I just got a little emotional here because when you mentioned that, you know, you found a similar pattern, a similar rhythm to life as women entered and the ebbs and flows kind of that connect us, even though we may not know each other across cultures. That's so beautiful. This book brings that to life. As I was reading this, and I was just what I did was I would open the book and I would not pick the person. I just I would just open a page and read. Yep.

SPEAKER_01 38:22

That's a great way to do it.

Zohra 38:25

Yep. And and I ended up reading so many different perspectives, and it almost in every story there was this echo of what I went through in my career because I've been in this career for a long time. So it definitely spoke to me.

SPEAKER_01 38:42

Yeah.

Zohra 38:42

Yeah. We've you've done a great job. It's it's beautiful that we've captured these stories.

How To Record Your Career Before It Fades

Zohra 38:48

Are there experiences and practices or lessons that current practitioners should be documenting so that that is not lost as they become history?

SPEAKER_01 38:57

Oh gosh. I am trying very hard. And I don't know why I'm doing this, but if you read my piece in the book, you'll go, yeah, well, this is on brand for you, Sharon. Because I don't know. I just I get ideas and then I just go and see if they work. And some of them do and some of them don't. And the ones that don't are usually painful, but there it is. I'm very interested right now in trying to capture the history of women in technology and other people who live on the edges historically. Historically have been on the edges. So I've got a call for writers out right now for women in engineering. I'm looking for, again, women of retirement age, whether or not they've retired, but it have been in the field for 20 or more years. Because I think that we need to capture these stories. We need to tell our own history. No one's capturing this history. I'm shocked. I was shocked to discover that this history is not being captured. You know, yes, we have the capture, you know, the history of Bill Gates, or the history of the really big people who ran huge companies, yes. But they're not the ones who did the work. I mean, they're not. We, regular people, we built this field. We built these things, these all these things that we look around our world now and we see, you know, cell phones and GPS and like who knows what. We did that. We did that. And that history of what we did needs to be captured, if nothing else, captured to as primary documents for future historians, which is a weird thing to think about, that future historians may be interested in our story, but that's what history is people looking back and being interested in what life was like. So there's that. And looking at now the project I've got to start looking back on my career. To be honest, I wish I'd kept better notes because as I was writing, it was shockingly difficult to write the story of my career. I was surprised. And I got that same feedback from a lot of the writers that, you know, they submitted their piece and then we started working on it together. And they were like, I was shocked at how difficult this was to write. Not because they'd forgotten things necessarily, but it just it's difficult to sit down and write your career. It's just difficult. And so part of me wishes I'd kept better notes because part of me wish I'd kept better notes. So maybe that's a thing that if you're in the field now, and not necessarily a daily journal, but maybe like uh an annual journal, like your own job performance review. I don't know, something like that. Because it this stuff matters. I mean, it really does matter. And the way technology, the technology that my students, because I I also teach at the University of California, Riverside, I teach engineers, and the the coaching I give my students on the last day is that they're building the future. They're going to build the future that their children and grandchildren think of as daily, as normal. They're going to build that. And I find that so exciting for them. I can't wait to see what it is that they built. I just cannot wait. Well, we did that too. And I think we should tell our stories.

Zohra 42:03

Oh, I'm I'm excited. I'm excited for you. And I think women in engineering, we should definitely capture all those stories because, like you said, our daily life that we are writing is the future.

SPEAKER_01 42:16

Yes. Right? Yes. Yeah. My grandchildren are in their early or late teens, early 20s. They they don't think of cell phones as weird. That's just normal, boring

Everyday Tech Becomes Invisible History

SPEAKER_01 42:27

stuff. Right. Like my grandson didn't even want a cell phone because that's how boring it is. Well, you and I remember when cell phones were, you know, Motorola bricks. Oh my gosh, yes. I remember I was uh when I was a waitress, there was this guy who would come in, this one place I were I was a dinner waitress, and he would come in about once a week, often with the same young woman, but not always. He was clearly a dater. And he was in a fancy car and he would come in and he had one of those mobile phones that were literally the size of a and shape of a brick. And he always put it on the table and and would just roll our eyes at him because he obviously thought he was a big deal and you know, all of that. Well, now we've all got cell phones, and we my husband and I went to dinner last night, and we both put our phones face down on the table because we tend to not look at our phones when we're when we are having dinner together on Friday night. But everybody had their phones. It just struck me. It just, yeah. So I remember when cell phones were a big deal.

Zohra 43:27

In a nutshell, kind of captured history there, Sharon. Yeah. Right? Yeah. That story of from a break to where we are at today, where it's a commodity.

SPEAKER_01 43:35

Yeah, yeah. Now we we drop and we drop and break our phones and go, well, damn it. And then we go to another one.

Zohra 43:41

Exactly. And that's why it's so important for us to capture these stories. And we've had such a great

Read The Book Slowly And Be Proud

Zohra 43:47

conversation. We are at time. But I want to capture your last anything that we may have missed that you would like to add to.

SPEAKER_01 43:55

Oh gosh. I hope that people will buy this book. One of the things that amuses me, if you're looking at the hard copy book and you're thinking, oh gosh, it's almost $50. Well, if you take the price of the book, you divide it by the number of the writers, it turns out it's about 75 cents a story, which is also historically about the what we got for every dollar a man got for the same job. And that deeply amuses me, but we will move up beyond that. The way that you're reading the book is the way I recommend to people that they read the book. Don't start at the beginning and read it through because you can't wait to see how it all ends. It's not that kind of book. You want to just read a couple of the stories and really be thoughtful about them. The stories that these women are sharing with you are the stories of their lives and they're telling you what mattered to them. And I think if you read it from that lens, you can't read more than two or three of those stories before you just have to put them down and just you have to think about it because it's like, wow, her life was really and still is because all of these writers are still alive. Her life, like, she really did some stuff. And what is it that I'm doing in my life that maybe is similar? Like, am I doing stuff too? The answer is probably yes, by the way. It's probably yes. And the things that she's proud of, am I doing those things too? Maybe I should also be proud because women are terrible about being proud of what we've done. We're we're the worst. We're just absolutely the worst. But let's remember to be proud of the things we've done. We're doing awesome stuff. Let's stop and and be proud of that for a few minutes. So maybe that's my last thoughts on it.

Pay Gap Reality And Why History Matters

Zohra 45:34

Thank you, Sharon, for sharing that. The survey of the salaries within TechCom, the results were released uh, I think just last week, if I write the docs, they ran their own survey. They were about close to 800 respondents, and women are still there is that gap between what women earn and what men earn in the same role, even today. So when you told me what each story costs, women versus men, it it's it breaks my heart. It breaks my heart.

SPEAKER_01 46:09

Yeah, I mean, you know, here's the good news. When my mother entered the back into the workforce after our us kids got old enough that she could go back into the workforce, she was earning, I think it was like 60 cents, 60 cents for every dollar a man earned. Well, now we're like what 80 cents for every dollar a man earns now, I think. And there's still no parody. So like that's improvement, right? Like 20 cents from the woman who was born in 1934 and went back into the workforce in 1975. Maybe we shouldn't focus on that so much 50 years ago. But yeah.

Zohra 46:44

But yeah, the point is that we have to talk about it. Only then can we make this, and that is the purpose of to me capturing these stories so that we can move the needle without knowing that history where you come from, how are you going to move that needle? How are you going to bring that positive change?

SPEAKER_01 47:01

Exactly.

Zohra 47:02

Thanks, Sharon, for capturing these beautiful, moving, quote unquote, inspirational stories, stories about us, and and we are there in those stories.

SPEAKER_01 47:12

We are, right?

Zohra 47:13

As much as the stories are being told to us. So yeah, it kind of reflects. So definitely, please, listeners, buy this book. You will not regret it. You are contributing to that history, that small piece of history that is being written today. And with that, Sharon, thank you so much for coming on my show. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.

SPEAKER_01 47:32

I've had a wonderful time. Thank you.

Zohra 47:34

Thank you, Sharon. This was a great conversation.

Final Thanks And Listener Requests

Zohra 47:37

Thank you for listening to Inside Techcom. If there's a guest you would love to hear on the show, please let me know. And don't forget to follow and catch every episode on your favorite podcast app. See you next time.