For People Like Me

Hello all,

This week I'm posting a few groups of links to resources for our continued growth and education. If you're anything like me (and I know I am...laugh with me!) most of us didn't learn enough Black History, Native American History, Women's History, White American History, or even overall world history as we were getting our educations. There just wasn't enough time or emphasis. That's why lifelong learning is so important!

We can learn now from websites like the ones listed here for Black History Month, and by participating in conferences with our colleagues, and by sharing our stories.

Celebrating Black History Month:

• SUNY Official Statement 2025
• Smithsonian Institute
• Black History Month: 30 Outstanding Black Women in Tech
• Black Women Have Always Been at the Forefront of Tech

Gearing up for late spring/summer SUNY Conferences:

• CIT at Oneonta May 20-23
• STC Lake Placid June 2-5
• SUNYLA at Delhi June 18-20

Send in your stories to the SUNY WIT MythBusters series:

As a reminder, these are the myths we will be busting in 2025:

• Myth #1: Women are not interested in or passionate about technology
• Myth #2: Tech careers are only for individuals with strong mathematical or technical skills
• Myth #3: Tech is a male-dominated field and not welcoming to women
• Myth #4: Women cannot balance family and personal life with a career in tech

You can email your stories to me or submit them to this online Google form.

I know that there are a lot of myth-busting SUNY folks out there!

All the best,
Holly

The Power of Listening in a Time of Anger and Disconnection

Hello all,

This week we are focusing on Grievance. You know, that feeling that the world — the system — certain people — are against us. And working in this WIT space, where our focus is on empowering the underrepresented, I've been feeling worried and defensive. Even though I firmly believe that "perpetual optimism is a force multiplier" as former Secretary of State Colin Powell was known to say, it can be hard to maintain optimism under some circumstances.

What drives that grievance feeling? When does it surface? Does it have any value? According to a recent interview from the podcast Hidden Brain, "Holding a grudge can feel like a form of justice, a way of punishing those who have wronged us. But psychologist Fred Luskin says that more often than not, grudges don’t hurt the targets of our anger. Instead, they only hurt us. This week, we explore the lingering effects of long-standing animosities, and how to let them go." I found this episode really enlightening, and think you will too.

One of my other regular "try to think outside the box" news sources is TrendWatching and their recent summary of the 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer called Grievance soars, anger is trending and discrimination reaches new heights ...led me to this consideration of grievance and its role in our lives. There's also a short video summary on the Edelman website that's worth watching. I grew up with three sisters, and believe me there were a lot of grievances in play all the time!

But these everyday grievances are nothing compared to what faces us now. And what's the remedy? According to the Edelman Trust, "Listen to Lead."

"There are some specific, and data-backed, guidelines that institutional leaders can leverage to build trust and reduce grievance – all of which are predicated on one seemingly straightforward but often challenging first step: listening. Listening to stakeholders – especially those consumers or employees who have a high level of grievance – about their fears, expectations, and needs must be the foundation for all action within the organization or outward into society.

These are some next steps to take:

Leave your information bubble: To learn how the public and your stakeholders are really feeling, you cannot stay comfortable. If you are used to getting information from certain news outlets, add some from a different perspective to your media diet. Search current events on social media platforms to read users’ authentic reactions in those moments. Listen to podcasts or watch YouTube series perhaps not aimed at you, but aimed at those you sell to or serve.

Keep your values consistent: Hearing what people really have to say doesn’t mean you should immediately respond to every criticism or demand. Take in the feedback and decide how to move forward based on a thoughtful and consistent set of values that are foundational to your organization. The context in which you and your organization exist is volatile – being clear on your values can steady the ship.

Act where it makes sense: Those with a high sense of grievance do not want business and its leaders to back away – they just want them to lean in where it's most effective. Regardless of grievance level, respondents believe business leaders have permission to engage with a societal issue if the company contributed to the problem, the issue harms their stakeholders, they can have a major positive impact on the issue, or if taking action would improve the business’s performance.

The sense of grievance in society has reached a breaking point: Four in 10 see hostile activism (attacking people online, intentionally spreading disinformation, threatening or committing violence, and/or damaging property) as a viable means to drive change. Wow!

My hope is that we can learn to listen more and work our way through and out of these challenging times.

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Finally, exciting news... WIT is ready to start collecting stories from you for our upcoming Mythbusting series that will run in March.

As a reminder, these are the myths we will be busting in 2025:

• Myth #1: Women are not interested in or passionate about technology
• Myth #2: Tech careers are only for individuals with strong mathematical or technical skills
• Myth #3: Tech is a male-dominated field and not welcoming to women
• Myth #4: Women cannot balance family and personal life with a career in tech

You can email your stories to me or submit them to this online Google form. I know that there are a lot of myth busting SUNY folks out there!

All the best,
Holly

Better Allies Snippet #1 (The Ally Journey)

This month we're starting with the first chapter of Karen Catlin's book Better Allies 2nd ed.

After an introduction covering Catlin’s work as V.P. of Engineering at Adobe, and their experiences with discrimination against talented women and minorities—often unintended—we begin with Chapter 1: The Ally Journey. Catlin writes:

“Allyship is a process. Even seasoned allies with wide open minds are constantly learning and absorbing new information about how to leverage their privilege to support people who are different from them… your first tip for being an ally is to be open to learning, improving, and changing your opinion. And recognize that being an ally is a journey.”

This opening sets the stage for us to approach these concepts with a growth mindset, and to use our skills and experiences as SUNY employees as part of that journey.

On page 12, the book delves into the issue of privilege:

“Understanding privilege is key to becoming a better ally. At its core, privilege is a set of unearned benefits given to people who fit into a specific social group.”

Further:

“People who are marginalized in multiple ways experience amplified marginalization and drastically reduced privilege. This is due to intersectionality, the fact that the combination of someone's identities creates an intersection of overlapping and compounded oppressions.”

Catlin defines intersectionality in the book, and other definitions are easily found online as well.

“Now here's where it gets tricky: Privilege is often invisible to those who have it. This means that many people get defensive when someone points out their privilege. And many people are quick to respond that they've had their fair share of difficulties and faced down prejudices too. But privilege is not about who you are as an individual as much as it is about what groups you belong to and how these groups are viewed and treated by society… Being privileged doesn't mean you've never worked hard and it doesn't necessarily mean your life has been easy.”

We are all advantaged in some ways and disadvantaged in others. Striving to be a better ally requires us to be more self-aware of our particular privileges.

On page 17 Catlin reminds us that “privilege is often a key ingredient in cultivating professional confidence.” Examples include:

• Confidence that you're getting paid equitably.
• Confidence that when you make a point in a meeting others will pay attention.
• Confidence that people believe you've landed your current role because of experience and potential.

So, you can use your positions of privilege to help others. On pages 18-27, the book covers different types of roles that allies can play. The ally roles covered include the:

1. Sponsor: when you support the work of a specific colleague
2. Champion: when you speak up for others in public
3. Amplifier: where you ensure that the voices of others will be heard
4. Advocate: when you enable someone else to get an opportunity and use your power to bring others into exclusive circles
5. Scholar: where you learn as much as possible and then bring that information out to your network
6. Upstander: when you speak up for others acting as Catlin says in “the opposite of a bystander.” The upstander “pushes back on offensive comments or jokes even if no one within earshot might be offended or hurt.”
7. Confidant: when you listen to others and create a space for them “to express their fears, frustrations and needs.”

Catlin closes out chapter 1 by explaining that we are all imperfect people, we're all learning, and as allies we need to be OK with sometimes getting it wrong. Being afraid to speak up because we're not quite sure we're going to do it in the right way means we do nothing. An imperfect ally is still better than the silent bystander.

Rituals, Community, and the Rhythm of Life

Hello all,

Many of our modern rituals have ancient roots, including the seasonal ones. As someone who loves winter snow but not the bitter wind, when the days start getting longer again I also hope for an early spring. And when the seed catalogs start arriving in my mail—then I'll really be feeling it! But now we know—from the groundhog for 2025...six more weeks of winter.

Even our seemingly silly rituals like Groundhog Day often have deeper meanings. As detailed in this Groundhog Day: Ancient Origins of a Modern Celebration, this midpoint between the solstice and the equinox was an important holiday for some ancient Europeans. They brought this ritual to the Americas, and it evolved over time.

"The best known Groundhog Day ceremony occurs each year in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. This annual festival traces its origin to 1887, when members of the local Elks Lodge first went to nearby Gobbler’s Knob to consult a groundhog about the weather. The observance developed into an annual tongue-in-cheek ceremony at which the groundhog, given the name “Punxsutawney Phil” in the 1960s, communicates his prediction to the “Inner Circle,” a group of men wearing formal suits and top hats. Though it’s only one of many Groundhog Day ceremonies held all across the United States and Canada, the Punxsutawney event is certainly the most well-known, especially since it became the basis of the renowned philosophical comedy film Groundhog Day, which the Library of Congress inducted into the National Film Registry in 2015."

But this feeling of anticipating/yearning for a new season is not only historical/agricultural, it applies to the seasons of our lives and the seasons of our careers. It also calls us to the community. Because these midpoint season rituals aren't things we do alone. In higher education we have seasons too. Most of us just started a new spring semester, with all the semester cycles of library and technology and administrative work. Our higher education seasons don't align perfectly with our agricultural seasons or the seasons of our careers, and that can leave us feeling out of sync/off balance. And when the external world also seems off balance, people and things can start to fray.

The remedy for this - find your community and sustain the rituals and activities that mark time, that offer support and comfort, that celebrate achievements, that bring you peace.

All the best,
Holly

Redefining Masculinity and Debunking Myths in Tech

Hello all,

Last Friday's 5 Ally Actions from the Better Allies org listed this one below as their #4 Redefine masculine energy. As much as I loved the content of this ally action, what I really loved even more was the concept of redefining something that doesn't serve you or your values. We are not stuck with the definitions embraced by others. Yes, it takes courage and effort to redefine the status quo, but that's what communities like WIT are for.

#4 Redefine masculine energy

On a recent Joe Rogan podcast, Mark Zuckerberg said he thinks the corporate world would benefit from having more masculine energy. As Axios reported, “He didn’t explicitly define the term, but seemed to be relying on the broad stereotype that men are more aggressive than women: ‘I think having a culture that, like, celebrates the aggression a bit more has its own merits that are really positive,’ he said.”

In response, Brad Johnson, PhD posted on LinkedIn, “Mark Zuckerberg is right. We need More MASCULINE ENERGY in 2025!”

Johnson then boldly redefined what masculinity can and should look like as a partner, parent, and leader. Here are just some of the examples he provided:

• Take your full parental leave.
• Leave loudly for family events or caregiving to normalize this for others.
• Teach your sons to respect women and your daughters to demand respect.
• As a leader, embrace empathy, generous listening, humility, curiosity, collaboration, transparency, and accountability.
• Advocate for equity and inclusion.
• Courageously disrupt sexism and racism.

All are great actions for better allies.

For our SUNY WIT male identifying allies, if any of these actions can fit into your toolbox, that's great and thanks!

And let's redefine technology careers again by busting through some of the myths that have taken hold in the public perception. IBM has a blog post that features common women in tech stereotypes and then showcases real women in tech who disprove these. It's really inspiring, and makes me want to do something similar for SUNY. Check out the blog Breaking Down the Myths which Deter Women From a Career in Tech.

Then, please let me know if you or someone you know in SUNY would be willing to be featured in a new WIT Weekly Wisdom series called SUNY WIT Mythbusters that will profile SUNY employees.

The SUNY WIT Mythbusters series will run through the month of March for Women's History Month. Send in your profiles now!!

As an homage to IBM, we will start with the same 4 Myths they disprove in their blog.

• Myth #1: Women are not interested in or passionate about technology
• Myth #2: Tech careers are only for individuals with strong mathematical or technical skills
• Myth #3: Tech is a male-dominated field and not welcoming to women
• Myth #4: Women cannot balance family and personal life with a career in tech

All the best,
Holly