OBLIGATORY DISCLAIMER: I now work for the company that puts on Coalesce1. If that makes you want to take my review of Coalesce less seriously, I would understand! I promise it’s from the heart though.
And also—no, I didn’t love everything this year. I was bummed to be excluded from some meals that didn’t have gluten-free options, and the community track took quite a bit of digging to find sessions for. That wasn’t ideal. But I don’t want to fixate on those kinds of things. They’re completely valid points of feedback and people should say them. But life’s been a lot for me for a long time now. I just want to marinate in the fun parts of Coalesce because I could use the positivity, okay? Okay.
Here’s my review of Coalesce 2022.
Coalesce 2023 was different! I’ve been thinking about how best to encapsulate it for the purposes of this post. Here’s what I keep coming back to.
Coalesce 2023 was for. the. girls.
All my favorite talks and peer exchanges were led by women. The most exciting parts of the keynote (for me) were led by women. The Data Angels group, founded by noted badass Jessica Cherney, absolutely popped off this time. I (incidentally, also a woman) felt like I came into my own this time around and got to have the very exciting experience of giving a talk on the community track.
Overall, it was just so nice to get a break from the male-dominated-ness of this field and be overwhelmingly around other women the entire conference.
For those of you who might feel a bit squirrely about a blog post that’s going to think a lot about how positive it was for me to have a female-centric experience at Coalesce, I’d understand if you want to click away. If you’re feeling brave though, I’d request that you offer me a good-faith2 reading of my experience.
You will not find me talking shit about men at all in this post. You won’t find me making any bombastic or blanket statements about men. You actually won’t really find negativity about men at all. Instead, you’ll find my reflections on how & why I curated a female-centric approach to Coalesce this year. Hopefully, you might have some more understanding and empathy for the concrete reasons why this woman felt so uplifted by her peers in San Diego, and why some women like to seek out these types of spaces.
Peer Exchanges
I reckon that most people would prefer to talk about “the real shit”. Most of us are also not great at figuring out how to get to “the real shit”. Part of why conferences get a reputation for being exhausting is because most conversations cycle through the same small talk starters of “what do you do” “where do you work” and “how was your flight” 5,000 times. That keeps us from “the real shit.”
We also keep ourselves from the real shit all the time. Brene Brown is on the money with this one:
Vulnerability is courage in you and inadequacy in me. I'm drawn to your vulnerability but repelled by mine. -Brene Brown, Daring Greatly
Getting to the real shit in conversations requires vulnerability. Many of us fall exactly into the pattern she so succinctly lays out above—drawn to vulnerability in others and repelled by it in ourselves3.
A handful of fantastic women facilitated peer exchanges at Coalesce. These were loosely structured discussions around several hot topics in the data world. They were also a great way to get around some of the inherent fear in vulnerability with your peers.
No one had to look like the weirdo in bringing up questions around team structure & community building while remote because we were had explicit space to do it. These sessions saved attendees the mental energy it can take to bring up the real shit. That way, the actual talking about the real shit was that much more productive and well-rounded.
The topics of the peer exchanges I went to were around creating community on remote teams, and defining role boundaries in big data organizations. There’s a lot to mine in both of those topics that is too meaty for this post, so those will merit separate write-ups.
Thinking through those types of problems (of how to facilitate genuine peer exchange) requires significant empathy and emotional awareness on the part of the organizers. In my experience, women have often been quicker to include one another4 and go out of their way to make spaces more welcoming, and that was absolutely the case for the women leading these peer exchanges. I’m grateful for their thoughtfulness and effort in these sessions—they were absolutely my Coalesce highlight.
Good morning angels! (Good morning Charlie)
The Data Angels group had a WhatsApp group chat for the length of Coalesce. That was a godsend. We coordinated meetups throughout the conference, went and got coffee and ice cream and meals together, compared notes on which talks we were going to, met up at afterparties, the whole 9 yards.
Coalesce was awesome for me last year, but I had to work SO MUCH HARDER socially last year to meet people. I can’t tell you how much fun it was to have a little built-in group of friends this year to hang out with in between and during sessions. That’s the ideal for these online communities. We found each other in real life, immediately had something in common, and gave each other social support the entire conference.
The Data Angels were also willing to discuss the real shit from the get-go. I remember having conversations around role boundaries sparked by the peer exchange I mentioned earlier, asking ourselves whether self-service data is a myth and what BI tools can do to actually enable it, and the pros and cons of working at different sizes of tech companies. Those are exactly the types of conversations I found a little bit awkward to have with people I worked directly with, mostly because I didn’t want to be perceived as disloyal in any way, I just wanted to hash out what one lifestyle is like compared to another.
That type of social support is terrific to have at a conference, especially when you go alone. There were quite a few folks who went to Coalesce as their sole company representative. It was really special to have a point around which we could all rally from time to time. For me, it was helpful to not have to feel in “networking mode” the whole time and just to have time to chill with the Data Angels. When I have worked in male-dominated fields (which data still is!), I have often found that women are much more readily friendly and familiar to one another. It’s an unspoken camaraderie thing.
I became a recruiting maniac for Data Angels. Anyone who looked remotely female-presenting got talked into joining the Slack. Maybe it’s good I’m moving into a post-sales role. 🤪
The occasional rockstar moment is good for you
I got to give a community-track talk at Coalesce this year. Maybe it’s cheesy to say, but it was a career highlight. It took place a week to the day after my last day at my last job. It felt like a really loving send-off to my last job to spend 25 minutes talking about what improving data literacy can look like if you adopt teaching tools5.
Also, if you’ll allow me to indulge in a little bit of self-congratulatory bullshit, I really love public speaking and always have. My theater kid energy has never gone away, and I find that gets me a long ways in front of a crowd. The preparation for a talk isn’t always fun and can be monotonous, but the actual giving of the talk is electric.
It’s fun to find ways to involve the crowd. A little call-and-response can be enjoyable, selectively making eye contact with attendees in the crowd can help with the feeling of connection during the talk, and making people laugh or think is just better than any mind-altering activity I’ve ever participated in.
It helps to have a sanctioned place to be this way, too. I’ve certainly run into my fair share of people (of all genders, but I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t more frequently men) who are turned off by my confidence and just love to find little ways to poke holes in it. I’m not sure if some men just communicate in little elbow-y jabs and I’m just taking it too seriously.
Every now and then, some men who have just met me will say things like “wow, you just have….a lot of energy”. Or they’ll hit me with a sarcastically toned “love the confidence!”. Maybe it’s just a socialization tactic I’m missing, but it feels like a dig6. The women I hang out with these days don’t do that shit, they build me up. And I turn right back around and build them up too. It was nice to hang out with these exact types of women at Coalesce who didn’t see each other as threats, but rather friends to learn from and celebrate their accomplishments.
It is amazing to have space and time to practice a skill that you know you’re good at, and to have your friends build you up for it. I love being a hype woman for other people, it was just nice to be on the receiving end of the hype.
It’s always the hallway track
Last year, Coalesce felt like my warm welcome into the data world. This year, it was homecoming. This year was sinking in to the relationships I have built with women in data, and building more of them. This year was having more experience in a data role, and having some wisdom to show for it. This year was finding every brilliant woman I could and hyping the shit out of her work, because couldn’t we always use more brilliant and insightful women doing good stuff?
Coalesce 2022 built my confidence in my career transition. At Coalesce 2023, I got to use that confidence. It gave me a deeper enjoyment of meeting new people, and building other women up. That’s priceless.
Now if you’ll excuse me, my cat has had a really big day. He’s asleep on my lap and something tells me he needs to get wrapped up in his favorite blanket and put to bed. Go pet your cat, subscribe, tell your friends. You know the drill.
✌️😍✌️ yes i am hype about it
pun intentional
course, there’s exceptions to everything. i’m a bit troubled by the amount of content i see on the internet where people who know someone who died by suicide post about the person who died in the name of mental health awareness. Or the near-constant need for successful women to also post about how they are just really messes with their own mental health, as if being a successful woman is only valid if you’re depressed while doing it. I don’t know where the line is between vulnerability and oversharing and just plain tragedy porn, but let’s pretend like everyone knows where that line is for the sake of this post, okay?
yes i know chad, some women aren’t like this. i’m just sharing my experience ok!?
I will write the blog version of this as well. I am not above content reuse.
i am begging you to not assume i am saying every man i meet is this way. many are fantastic, and in fact at my last job, the people who stuck up for me in sexist situations were men. but when you work in a male dominated environment, it’s hard to not run into this kind of behavior. women my age just tend to not be about the bullshit so it’s easier to avoid tomfoolery when you’re around more women.
"The women I hang out with these days[...] they build me up. And I turn right back around and build them up too."
I think a lot of guys could learn from this. Stick too many dudes in a room together for too long and it starts looking like a Wolf of Wall Street parody. Women are generally better at rolling their eyes at the "hustle and grind" mentality.