Five years ago, I stood in front of a boardroom presenting to the top executives of the startup where I was VP of R&D. It was a special offsite, our yearly strategy meeting, and one of the most important gatherings of the year. Even though this group met weekly and I was a regular part of those meetings, this day felt different. The stakes were higher, the audience more focused, and the visibility greater.
My boss, the SVP of R&D, and the female co-founder had retired six months earlier. In her place, the company had hired a new male SVP who had been on the job for only three months.
For the previous five years, I had led R&D, growing the team from 15 to 75 people, with 30 of them joining in just the last year. Together, we had built complex software capable of processing hundreds of millions of events a day in Amazon, technology our customers depended on to keep their environments secure. We were preparing to double the R&D team again and scale to processing billions of events a day. And though we did not know it at the time, we were less than a year away from Unicorn status.
For anyone outside the startup world, Unicorn status means that a private company is valued at over one billion dollars. It is the kind of milestone that transforms a scrappy startup into a major player, and it was a huge deal.
There were fewer than ten people in the room that day, and only one other woman in the room was the head of HR.
I stood at the front, presenting R&D’s achievements and our plans for the following year.
Every question asked about my presentation was directed to my new boss.
Not me, the person who had built the team, led the work, and carried the expertise.
To my new boss.
The man who had been there three months.
The man who was still learning the job.
The man who, to his credit, kept redirecting the questions back to me. He was a good one, one who knew how to stick up for his employee.
But the message was unmistakable. In that room, authority automatically belonged to the man, simply because he was a man.
It was a stark reminder that men are granted respect by default, while women are expected to fight for every scrap of it.
It was infuriating.
Shortly after that meeting, I was removed from the weekly leadership meetings. My boss was considered “up to speed” now, and he would take my place at the table.
The whole thing made me livid. At the time, I could do very little about it. Speaking out would have endangered my job, so I could not tell the world what had happened. But I could do something. I could take that anger and turn it into words. I could write about my feminist rage and how I believed we could channel it into change without telling the whole story.
That day in the boardroom crystallized what I had felt for years. So I wrote What to Do With Your Feminist Anger, not just to vent but to give women tangible tools to fight back. I shared practical actions we can take in the boardroom to support other women who face the same dismissals and interruptions I did.
The response was explosive. Some women left comments on the story, but most messaged me directly. Thanking me for writing about my anger, thanking me for the tips on how to deal with it, and for the ideas to counteract the misogyny. Mostly, I think they were happy to be seen.
So why dredge it back up now?
One to share the whole story, a story I have kept inside me, and I feel needs to be released because my job would have been at risk if I had told it five years ago. And two, because I was wrong about one thing in the article.
I was wrong about where we were in the fight for equality, equity, and inclusion for women in the workplace.
I Thought That Was the Hardest Part
You see, we have hit the hardest part of the process. The part where everyone knows that increasing diversity in tech is the right thing to do. The powers that be, Old Boys Club and the 20 something Mark Zuckerberg wannabes, know that companies with better diversity numbers, especially at the executive level do better financially than those with little to no diversity.
They truly believe they are doing positive things for change, but their unconscious biases are undermining their good intentions and alienating the women, people of colour, and other minorities who work for them. — me, 2020
Back then, I believed that the business case for diversity was widely accepted and that we were now in the complex process of breaking down our unconscious biases. I thought the fight was about persistence, about keeping the pressure on while biases slowly eroded.
I was wrong.
Today, we’re in a worse spot. We’re not just battling unconscious bias in well-meaning rooms. We’re watching political and cultural forces dismantle diversity efforts outright. Trump and his regime have emboldened leaders to roll back DEI initiatives across industries. The culture wars have turned DEI into a dirty acronym, and the message to women, people of colour, and other marginalized groups is chilling: you don’t belong here.
The hardest part wasn’t five years ago. The hardest part is now, when the progress we fought for is being deliberately undone, and we have to decide whether we’re willing to fight for it all over again.
I know I am. I hope you are too.
Anger as a Tool, Not a Weight
The instinct when you see injustice is to rage. And that rage is valid. But if we turn it inward, we burn out. If we throw it back indiscriminately, we lose potential allies. Anger is powerful, but it needs to be wielded with precision. Unchecked, it wears you down. I know because I’ve carried it, and I think it was a significant contributor to my burnout.
Five years ago, I wrote about turning feminist anger into action. Those tools still work. They worked in boardrooms then, and they still work now.
Redirect the floor: If a woman is interrupted in a meeting, give her space to finish.
“Thanks, Matt. Rosa, I was interested in what you were saying before you were interrupted. Please continue.”Hand the mic back: When someone directs a technical question to a man instead of the woman expert, make sure she gets the credit and authority she deserves. “Shruti, as the designer of that code, would you agree with what Kristof has said?”
Name the source: When someone repeats a woman’s idea as their own, re-attribute it in the moment.
“Thanks for resurfacing Katarina’s idea, Amir. I think it is particularly useful here..”Refuse unpaid office housework: If you are “volunteered” to take notes, pass the task along. One simple rule I like is that the last person to join the meeting takes the minutes. Or, given today’s environment, let AI handle it altogether.
These are small acts that chip away at a culture that sidelines women. They mattered then, and they matter now.
From the Inside to the Outside
I am not in the boardroom anymore. I have stepped away from corporate life, but not from the work. Today, my focus is on mentoring women in tech. I help them navigate tricky dynamics, prepare for opportunities, and walk into rooms with the confidence to make their voices heard.
Last week, I put out a call on LinkedIn to women in the Waterloo Region who wanted in-person mentoring. Twelve signed up. I chose seven, and I will start meeting with them in September. This next chapter is about investing directly in women who are ready to grow, so there are more role models for the next generation to look up to.
This is the next chapter of my feminist anger. I am investing directly in women who are ready to lead. If DEI programs are being torn down from the top, then we will build women up from the ground, one leader at a time and one generation at a time.
Building Our Own Network
The old boys' club has always relied on connections and loyalty to protect its own. We need to be just as intentional.
Build your network.
Share opportunities.
Recommend women for roles they might not hear about otherwise.
Advocate for each other when the room isn’t friendly.
Champion other women when they aren’t in the room.
We may not control the political climate, but we can control the community we build around ourselves. The more we invest in one another, the harder we are to erase.
I still believe what I wrote five years ago:
We cannot allow our anger to force us to give up.
The work is more complex now. The stakes are higher. But as long as we keep building each other up, the movement will outlast the backlash.
Where We Go From Here
Our anger is not the problem. The real danger is letting it fade into silence. Five years ago, I turned my anger into words and tools women could use. Today, I am turning it into mentorship, into building networks, and into lifting the next generation of women higher than we stood. I am still running Code Like a Girl, amplifying the voices of women in tech. And I am writing about it now, naming the problem, refusing to let it be silenced.
The challenges are greater now, but we are not powerless. We have each other. And if we keep investing in one another, if we keep showing up for each other, the movement will outlast the backlash.
So let your anger move you. Let it push you to act because the next chapter of this fight belongs to all of us.
Want to Be a Better Ally?
If you are looking for resources on how to be a better ally to women in tech, I cannot recommend Karen Catlin enough. Her weekly newsletter, 5 Ally Actions, goes out to more than 40,000 readers and is packed with practical, thoughtful ways to step up.
Since 2021, I’ve published Karen Catlin’s 5 Ally Actions every week on Code Like a Girl. Every single issue is gold. I can’t recommend it enough.
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