Do not call me a feminazi
“Don’t ask Charlotte, she’ll just say she prefers it pink”. Ah, another beautifully blunt sexist comment. I stood up, walked around and looked at the screen to be horrified that the design for their website was a horrific mixture of pink and green. I looked at them and bluntly said “Why would you put pink with green like that?”. In all fairness the developer had just been following Google’s material design and didn’t agree himself, however the comment thrown at me by the other person wasn’t really that necessary. Luckily I’m an absolute (as we’d say in Manchester) ‘gob-shite’, and exclaimed “Well that was sexist!”. But there will be some women out there who don’t know how to react to this and they’ll let it trample them down and eat at their self confidence.
The first couple of throw away comments were easy to ignore but the more and more that came at me purely angered me. I read an amazing quote the other day which said “We can do anything you guys do, but we can do it bleeding”. Now I’m not here to say we are superior to you men, there’s a huge majority of men out there that treat us equally and 5 times out of 10 these comments aren’t said deliberately to piss us off but oh believe me they do and unfortunately there are still men AND women out there that feel the need to be sexist.
What I find interesting is that I worked in a pharmaceutical company before my job now and I was treated with so much respect despite me being an apprentice that I never experienced any negativity like I do now. I’ve been here for 8 months now and I can’t count the comments made on both of my hands.
Now my absolute favourite one so far has been that I’ve been told time and time again that I should start using Googles new App Maker, because “You’re much better at the design of things and you seem to get frustrated when you’re coding.” I am a web developer and let me tell you now that I am DAMN good at front end and back end coding, they just never give me a chance. Go to google and type in web developer jokes and you’ll find this:
Being frustrated has got nothing to do with me being a woman and me being better at design. Now I know what you’re thinking — He never said it had anything to do with you being a woman. Let’s be honest here, it goes way back to the ‘boss vs bossy’ argument, and if a guy gets frustrated with his code he’s a dev but if a woman is frustrated they’re just not cut out for their work, it’s just too hard for them. I think the fact that I’ve had distinctions in all of my modules so far and have breezed through my NVQ course shows that I am super dedicated and that I love to pick up new languages and learn them to a standard as high as I can possibly get it just like everyone else… but every time that comment is made I find myself sitting back and thinking “I’m being stupid trying to learn all of these languages, I’m not getting anywhere with them”. Seriously?! No!
I went to a session held by the wonderful Liverpool Girl Geeks; they have bootcamps that teach young girls how to code and the amount of times they turned to me after I gave them help and said “I’m so stupid” was absolutely heart breaking, it genuinely upset me so much that I cried at my girlfriend for a good 15 minutes later that night. Where does this attitude some from and why? It’s so unfair. One of the girls had only missed a speech mark, the code was written beautifully but she focused so much on that one error.
One amazing thing that happened was that I was explaining JavaScript functions and variables for about 10 minutes to this one girl and at the end I went “Does that make any sense at all?” To which she replied “Yeah, it’s just like Python.” and I just looked at her and went “You let me struggle for 10 minutes when you knew Python?!” And they laughed and I could just tell that it must have made them feel on top of the world that they knew something that I didn’t. They taught me a bit of python and I taught them bits of JavaScript and it was incredible! We don’t give young girls enough credit — they’re hiding their knowledge away because they’re too scared they might get it wrong.
For a lot of women that have been devs for a while they’ve learned how to ‘adapt’ to it, they find themselves changing jobs to avoid the situation or they know how to just ignore it and get on with their work. Now tell me what’s wrong with that sentence? WE shouldn’t have to adapt to anything, we deserve every right to be as sleep deprived and high on caffeine as our fellow devs and love every single moment of it, just kidding. But in all seriousness we’re still being held back. Like I said it seems to only be a minority out there now that have sexist tendencies and the majority of praise and support I’ve had has come from men not just in my team but on social media as well (shout out to Chris Oliver from GoRails!) but the problem is that there are still those minority out there and those ‘harmless’ little comments have women too scared to take a chance full stop — there’s not enough of us.
Some people do have common sense
We need to voice out and let everyone know that it’s not ok to have those tiny comments made at you. Just because they’re small comments and you can deal with them doesn’t mean they should get away with it, imagine those young girls, do you want them to be in a situation like this? Do you think they would be able to deal with it like you can? It’s time we stood up and said no where we feel it necessary. The same goes for you guys that are in female dominated fields of work and have had those kinds of comments thrown at you. It’s so simple, sexism is boring now. Voice out, lets speak up about this.
This blog has taught me an important lesson. I use the word ‘but’ too much.
