Ellen Chisa on gender and technology

This is interesting:

I was vehemently against the Society of Women in Engineering (SWE). I thought anything that called attention to being female hurt me. That it would make people think I’d gotten my role for being “female” instead of for being excellent. I felt degraded. I felt like “those women” were making me less likely to succeed. They couldn’t compete on excellence, so they made shit up about how the playing field wasn’t level. They just weren’t good enough. Other women were the problem, not me.

It wasn’t that long before things felt wrong, but I refused to notice.

My senior year of college, everyone asked me why I wasn’t moving to San Francisco with my boyfriend.

It came from nowhere. I’d always been “more driven.” I ran for student government. I took a year off to start a company. I cared so much. I’d found the perfect job for me. Everyone had encouraged me to pursue my dreams.

Yet, we both had job offers in SF, and we both had them in Seattle. They were equally good. Still, everyone asked me why I wasn’t moving to SF with him. Only one person asked him why he wasn’t moving to Seattle with me.

Maybe it was because SF sounded cooler for what I wanted to do. Maybe it was because “women care more about close relationships.” I have no idea. It was the first time things didn’t seem fair.

But I knew the better job was in Seattle. I moved to Seattle and moved on with life. I kept being excellent. I got my first promotion. Just being excellent was enough. I kept repeating it to myself. A mantra, a self-reassurance.

But things kept feeling wrong.

There weren’t many senior women around. There were posters in the women’s bathroom talking about “work life balance,” but men were never invited to work life balance events. No one found it ironic that we expected women to solve work-life balance all on their own.

Maternity leave was months longer than paternity leave. Everyone I worked with was married to a woman who used to work at Microsoft. Most of the women stopped after they had kids.

I tried to mention that it seemed weird that parental responsibility always fell on gender lines. Everyone said, “Oh that was just my family. My wife wanted to stay home. There’s no systematic issue here. If you want to work, you’ll be able to. It’s just my situation.”

I’d always believed in just being excellent, so I kept trying to be excellent. But it was getting harder and harder to ignore that there was some issue beyond it.

No one wanted to talk about that issue.

At some point, I just snapped. While in college everything felt like an equal playing field, at work it suddenly didn’t. Being excellent hadn’t worked for the women who came before me. I started trying to bring up issues.

I picked an easy one to start with. Something that seemed obvious to me: when we talked about subscription services, we didn’t use our external term — admin. Instead we used internal slang — dadmin. The unsubtle implication was that the man would buy all the tech for the home.