Woman in Tech, Part One: School

The last time I interviewed for a job as a software engineer, the hiring manager asked me if I’d feel comfortable joining an all-male team. My reply was something along the lines of: “If I had a problem with it, I wouldn’t have lasted very long in this business.” And it’s true — because of the profession I’ve chosen, I’ve become accustomed to often being the only woman in the room.

I don’t say this to valorize it. Women are far from the only group underrepresented in tech (and white women like me are comfortably represented in many other prestigious professional fields — in only a few do we count as “diverse”). But now that women-in-tech and similar DEI programs are being rolled back in many workplaces, and because I find myself much more frequently exposed lately through politics and social media to speech that is explicitly misogynistic and directed at educated, childless women in particular, I’ve been thinking a lot about what my career has meant to me, and specifically what it’s meant to work in a field that has remained stubbornly male-dominated as long as I’ve been in it.

Occasionally a male colleague will pull me aside to ask me what it’s “really” like for women in tech right now, often because they have daughters and are wondering how to advise them. Usually I tell them that it’s sometimes difficult (and that school was especially difficult) but that it’s treated me well as a career, that overt discrimination is rare, and that I’ve always had many opportunities for advancement. And all these things are true.

Still, it did shape me. And it’s been hard for me to explain why, if things are as okay as I describe, decades of women-in-tech programs have failed to make much difference even as women have caught up or even surpassed men in many other difficult and demanding fields. I have three close women friends who retooled as tech workers mid-career, leaving the arts and humanities behind and securing jobs at large companies. All three of those friends have since burned out and left their jobs; only one of them plans to re-enter. I myself burned out and exited the field early in my career (and then re-entered a couple of years later). Why did I leave; why have I stayed?

This is too large a topic for one post, so I’ll start by talking about my education and follow up in future posts (depending on how I feel about this one) with other phases of my career.

When I was young, no one expected me to go into tech. I certainly wasn’t groomed for it. I spent a lot of time playing computer games and got excited by new technology, but never showed a lot of interest in programming, hardware, robotics, or the like. My strongest and most beloved classes in high school were English and History; in math and the sciences I performed decently well but not spectacularly. I was also obsessed with classical music and opera, and strongly considered trying to become a musician. But it was clear that I wasn’t really talented or disciplined enough, so I set that idea aside.

When it was time to choose a major in university, I wanted to be pragmatic. If I wasn’t going to be a musician, I reasoned, I should study something that pays well so I can pursue music on the side, and maybe one day afford a Steinway piano. And so, misguidedly, I decided to become a business major (I think I had an image of myself wearing beautiful dark suits). But my business classes were a flop and I was a flop in them. It didn’t feel cerebral enough for my taste, I didn’t like my classmates, and I started skipping classes out of a combination of boredom and contempt. My grades were okay but not great. I started looking around for something else. A literature professor whose class I had loved gently warned me away from English — maybe only twenty percent of grads had interesting jobs in their field, he said. And I had no reason to believe I would be in that twenty percent.

At a party one night I was flirting with a guy who told me he was a Computer Science major, and I thought: that actually sounds interesting. I took a couple of introductory classes to find out if I had the aptitude and the interest — and I did. Programming felt intuitive to me, and I found myself wondering why people kept saying it was hard. Building little programs that did useful things, or at least an imitation of useful things, felt gratifying and fun. So I made the switch (I never saw the guy again).

This was in Canada and over twenty years ago, and it was very much a different time. The dot-com bust of 2000 was fresh in everyone’s memory, and no one saw becoming a computer programmer as a path to riches. It was common for people to assert that there wouldn’t be any programming jobs in a few years, arguing that everything would be outsourced to India. Jumbo FAANG pay packages (and lavish perks) weren’t on anyone’s radar; Google was still just a search engine and Facebook was Ivy-league only. “Brogrammer” culture also hadn’t taken hold yet; in the popular imagination it was still the domain of geeks of the old-fashioned sort. Professors on the computer science department listsrv lamented the state of student enrollment, which was apparently plummeting. How can we get students interested again? they asked. A lot of people responded with answers, but (this would be remarkable today) no one proposed anything akin to what we would now call a DEI program — such things were, as far as I could tell, totally nonexistent.

When I told people I was going to study Computer Science, once in a while they’d raise an eyebrow and say with some skepticism: isn’t that mostly guys? The number I heard bandied around was ten percent — ten percent of computer science students were women. And that proved to be accurate. Every time I entered a new classroom, I counted them. Fifty-person classes had five women. Hundred-person classes had eight to ten. In one of the intro classes, the professor announced during the first lecture that the class had a 40% failure rate. One of the few other women in the class got up right then, grabbed her laptop, and walked out. I noticed that the women never sat together, but were always scattered across the classroom. I didn’t try to meet them.

And they hardly ever spoke up in class, for good reason. I dug up the livejournals of a few of my classmates (it was that era). One guy devoted an entire paragraph to making fun of a girl in his class who had asked what was, to him, a stupid question (the question: “what is SSH?”) and gloated in his superior intelligence. Occasionally, if a woman asked a question in class, there was audible snickering.

At first, I was proud of being in a male-dominated field, being able to think of myself as special, as one of the few women tough enough to hack it. It brought out some bad qualities in me, an I’m-not-like-the-other-girls way of thinking that would be rightfully ridiculed today. And the consequence was that I became insecure. I knew I was very conspicuous in the class, and felt uneasy. For a while I wondered if I should wear my glasses every day instead of contacts, stop wearing makeup, and dress more androgynously to blend in a little better. Then I went through a phase of presenting as even more feminine as a gesture of defiance, feeling obstinate as I put my lipstick on: fuck you, this is who I am, I’m not changing anything. I was aware of the misogynistic accusations leveled at women in male fields: that they’re only there for male attention and approval, and that they use their feminine wiles to extract special treatment and favors. So I made a point of never asking for help, not even from the professors and TAs. I didn’t join any study groups and never went to office hours. And I never asked questions in class.

My grades improved considerably from what they were in business school and I started making the dean’s list. And the material was intellectually satisfying — I felt genuinely challenged, in a good way. One pleasant surprise was the higher-level math courses, a total delight after having always found math boring in school. Ring theory and linear algebra felt mind-blowing in the way I’d always hoped to have my mind blown by knowledge.

Still, no matter how well I performed academically, it was obvious that I would never read as “smart” to the men in class unless I made an obnoxious show of demonstrating it. Occasionally guys would ask me, unprompted, if I needed their help with the assignments, or needed them to explain concepts. It was a mostly harmless way of making conversation, I knew, but often I was further along than they were, and they certainly never asked for my help. More than once I was assigned to a group project and attended the first meeting to discover that everyone else had already met without me, drawn up a plan, and divided the work amongst themselves, leaving me out entirely (“you can write the tests,” they said. “Or the documentation”). It was assumed as a matter of course that I would have nothing to contribute.

Most of the students read Slashdot religiously (a then-popular tech news site). One year while I was in the program, the site pulled an April Fool’s prank. A post explained that they knew most of their readers were male, so they’d made some changes to try to attract female readers. The changes in question: the color scheme was turned pink, the tagline was changed to “OMG!! Ponies!!!” and the headlines were written in a “girly” style with lots of exclamation marks and emoticons. It was one of those online annoyances that shouldn’t matter, but it bothered me for days. Was that what those guys really thought of women?

All the work was done on Linux computers, which I didn’t have at home, so I did all my assignments in the on-campus computer labs. They were boisterous places, full of shouting and camaraderie among the students, but I didn’t fit in with them and wasn’t making friends. I went on a few dates with guys in the program, but couldn’t shake the feeling that they wanted a true “geek girl,” which I wasn’t. My first long-term boyfriend, whom I met during this period, was a grad student in English Literature, and I was relieved and happy to be with someone who wanted to talk about books and with whom I didn’t have to perform “geekiness.” We stayed together for eleven years.

During this period I was reading and writing a lot. I was feeling the absence of the humanities in my life, and was trying to educate myself as best I could, mostly by reading classic novels and a smattering of philosophy books. I also started reading a lot of feminist writers, in particular Simone de Beauvoir and Germaine Greer¹. I had a feeling that in order to survive in computing I would need to cultivate within myself an unshakable sense of my right to be there.

In my last year of the program, I received an email from one of the female faculty members, inviting me to an informal gathering of women undergrads in computer science. I attended, along with about ten other women, and was relieved to hear that they, too, were always left out of group projects, that they were afraid to ask questions in class because they felt other people wanted to think of them as stupid, and that they felt the same insecurities that I did. They complained that when they asked for help from professors they were treated with dismissiveness and impatience (I never experienced this, but only because I never talked to the professors). One of the questions the organizer asked: it’s one thing to be an A student, but what if you’re a woman and an average student? Would you feel okay in the program if you were getting C-pluses? The women in the room all agreed: they were doing well academically, which helped them feel like they belonged there. But if they’d been getting C-pluses (the mandated class average by which all grades were curved), they would have dropped out. I knew instantly that was true of me as well. I needed to cling to pride in my achievements, because otherwise the loneliness would have been too much.

And later in the program it was my turn to gloat, when the LiveJournal guy (and others) complained about performing poorly in their classes. A few of the self-proclaimed geeks dropped out of the program. They couldn’t hack it in the end, and I could, I thought to myself with some satisfaction.

Reading this over, it doesn’t paint a very flattering picture of me: insecure and judgmental, wanting to be thought of as intelligent, constantly on guard, always feeling like I needed to prove myself. I wasn’t a very friendly person, and probably wasn’t very pleasant to be around. And, really, how much hardship was there in the end? No one was overtly trying to keep me out, and my story was a success story. Couldn’t I just have learned the material, done the work, and not worried about whether I “belonged?” That would have been a lot healthier. But all of the armor felt necessary at the time. When people ask me why women don’t study computer science, despite the financial incentives and the women-in-tech programs, it’s this armor I think about (I give no credence to the things people throw around on the internet about shape rotators and tail distributions). My best answer is that, unlike other intellectually and personally demanding fields where women are well-represented, computer science has a popular subculture around it, separate from the actual profession and field of study, that often makes a point of being alienating and vocally resents intrusions from outside.

Almost a decade after I graduated, I was talking on some kind of women-in-tech panel, and mentioned how my classes back then had only been ten percent women, and that the women didn’t talk to each other until we’d been gathered together for that purpose. We should talk to each other, was my basic message; it helps. One of the women in the audience raised her hand, and said that she felt diversity programs only ever benefited privileged white women (this was the peak of the Lean In era). I agreed with her that those women benefited disproportionately, and I think studies have borne this out. After the panel she came to find me, and said she was currently a computer science student at my alma mater. It’s just as bad now, she said; it’s still only ten percent women, and we still don’t talk to each other. It was disappointing then to hear that so little had changed. Now it’s been another ten years, and it’s slightly better: the proportion of women getting computer science degrees is now closer to 20%. I have to imagine that, with social media, they’re talking to each other now. I hope it’s helped.

1. Germaine Greer had hateful things to say about trans women, and isn’t someone I would recommend now. But her writing was a comfort to me at the time.