NEW DELHI: Janneke Parrish, a woman who was recently fired from her company for allegedly “incredibly rude” behavior, has taken to the microblogging platform Twitter to open up about her ordeal. She said in a series of tweets that her employer let her go after she asked a male colleague to stop interrupting her when she addressed the meeting.
“I lost my job for speaking to a man the way men speak to me,” she said in her first tweet in a series of tweets, adding, “This is why women are leaving tech.” (READ ALSO : Apoorva Mehta, Founder of Indian Origin of Instacart, Resigns from Online Grocery Delivery Service)
In the following tweet, she explained why her company fired her because she did absolutely nothing wrong. “A few weeks ago, a male colleague made changes to a project I was running while offline, dramatically impacting scope and schedules. I asked him to talk to him to understand why and how we could find a way to solve problems in the future,” she said. (ALSO READ: 4 Cooperative Banks Under RBI Restrictions! Depositor Withdrawal Limit Introduced)
“During the meeting, he kept interrupting and interrupting me. I was getting stuck so I just started talking and politely told him to “please let me finish” every time he tried to step in. I said my part and then let him talk,” Parrish added in her tweets.
I got fired because I wouldn’t let a man talk about me. That’s what it’s like to be a woman in tech. It’s brutal and toxic, and this is where your gender determines your fate before you even get a chance. — Janneke Parrish (@JannekeParrish) July 20, 2022
She explained of being called by HR: “On Monday I was called to a meeting with HR where I was told I had been incredibly rude, my communication skills were lousy and I would be fired.”
“I got fired because I wouldn’t let a man talk about me. That’s what it’s like to be a woman in tech. It’s brutal and toxic, and this is where your gender determines your fate before you even get a chance,” she added.
Several other women on Twitter shared similar experiences. “It’s so annoying. I’ve had similar experiences in the games industry, so I now run my own company and develop games targeted at women/females. Guess that makes me a tech separatist. I prefer to think that they don’t deserve me,” said one of the Twitter users.
“When my mother was alive, she had a similar problem after spending months setting up a database for a company that let her go when I showed her how to delete her entire server and all backups of that database so she set it up on their last day when they arrived, no system was working,” said another user.