"Kicking Technical Ass": Talking about Women in Tech with Dina Bennett

Interview date: October 18, 2019

Dina Bennett and I sit in an IKEA restaurant, sipping our coffee and discussing a wide range of subjects from unconventional first jobs to working in a position she wouldn’t have imagined being in when starting her profession. Dina began her career as a freelance technical writer, but her desire to learn bounced her around varying positions until she finally ended up at her current job as a Senior Information Experience Professional. This wide range of positions and work environments has led her to a variety of opportunities that have made her wise, open-minded, and enthusiastic about sharing all the knowledge she gained.

She tells me that one of the things that excites her the most about being a writer is getting to learn new things when working on projects. “There’s always things changing, there’s so much to learn. And I love to learn, I love learning constantly,” Dina admits. “It’s one of the reasons why I stayed with this and I haven't moved on to do other things.” Although she has worked as a technical analyst, a business analyst, and an editor, she loves the writing aspect that brings her in direct contact with new products that she needs to learn about. When writing a manual or any text for the user interface for a project, Dina notes that it's so important for the writer to learn all the details of a product and how it works. You need to be unafraid to go to the designers and ask questions, and make sure you understand the answers: “You need to be able to say, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. Here’s a piece of paper, draw it out for me. I don’t care if you have to sit there and explain it to me like I’m three, I need to understand this to be able to do what I do best.’” Not knowing is an asset because you’re in the best position to know what your end-user will need to understand what the product does and how to use it.

This is some of the advice Dina gives to the younger writers that she mentors. Next to learning new things, Dina loves taking others under her wing and teaching them the important lessons she learned from her 20 years of experience. She admits that she especially loves working with young women writers in technology. We spend some time talking about the challenges women face in the industry.

“It’s getting better, I assume. Because I have seniority, it makes it quite a bit easier to navigate through the world. I don’t put up with bullshit anymore,” Dina says. “If there is somebody saying ‘oh no no, you don’t need to know that right now, dear,’ it’s like, ‘yeah, okay, can I talk to your manager?’”

We laugh. “Do you still get comments like that?” I ask.

Dina admits that, even now, there are still some people in her industry that she needs to interact with who still act like the engineering and technology fields are not a place for women. Especially in North America, the industry is still quite male-dominated. It can be pretty intimidating, especially as a young woman just beginning her career.

“And certainly when I started, all the things I didn’t know... it was hard. For that one main contract where I had to learn everything, that was great. There were a lot of women in my department—there was only one guy,” Dina recalls. “It was an absolutely amazing environment.”

My first experience in the writing industry as a junior editor was similar to Dina’s first job environment. My boss was a woman, and so were most of the people in the Communications department that I worked in. Even my two English editor mentors were women, only a few years older than me. Used to that environment, I hadn’t faced the challenges that many women face in the industry, especially in a more technical field like Dina works in. She reminds me that some fields are still very much considered a “boy’s club,” and that there's still work that needs to be done to change that—though some progress has been made to improve the way women move around in the industry.

“It can be a bit of a challenge as a woman in technology, but it is getting easier, and a lot of older ones are helping a lot of the younger ones,” Dina says, smiling. “As I said, I do mentor male writers, but I love mentoring female writers a little bit more because I like seeing more of us wandering around and kicking some technical ass.”

It’s a great thing Dina is doing what she does: teaching young women just starting their writing career to be confident and not let other people in the company intimidate them. We need more mentors like her creating a strong and empowering environment, encouraging us to work together, share our experiences, and learn from each other—just as we did.