Yes, All Women
I am twenty-two years old. I started coding less than four years ago when I enrolled in my first computer science course in January of 2014. Still, I have enough stories about sexism in technology to populate this blog post.
I am not writing this blog post in order to suggest that as a white woman who works in technology I am severely marginalized, nor do I wish to escalate these incidents beyond sharing them in this post.
I am writing this blog post to let other young women know that they’re not alone, and harassment is never their fault. I am sharing these experiences because I believe, as Michelle Lee says in the tweet below, that “tech might finally be ready to see the 1,000 little cuts women face every day.”
The experiences I share in this post range from mild to more severe. I have left a handful of notable experiences and details out of this post in fear of burning bridges.
Sports Bingo
My first day of work at a new job a coincided with the week the Warriors won the 2015 NBA Finals, so my all-male team was talking about the parade when I walked in for stand up on my first day. One of my teammates asked me if I liked sports, and I responded that I loved Giants baseball. He didn’t believe me, and proceeded to quiz me about players on the team.
The BDSM Enthusiast
The first systems class you take at Stanford is notorious for being one of the hardest classes in the core. In the first lecture of this class, the man sitting next to me introduced himself to me. After class, he insisted on walking me home despite my reluctance and the fact that he had a bike with him. On the walk home, he asked me if I was a virgin, if I liked to be tied up in bed, and about other kinks. I didn’t know what to say so I laughed awkwardly. When I later rejected him, he sent out emails encouraging the student body to vote against funding for a student group I was in a leadership position for. When I ran into him in office hours for a computer science class eighteen months later he exclaimed, “Wow Sasha! I didn’t know you could code.”
Human Resources
In a room with a handful of male engineers where I was by far the youngest one of the other engineers remarked, “HR ruins company culture. Sasha, if we were ever doing anything rape-y you could tell us.”
Lowering the Bar
When I spoke up about being the only woman on a team of thirty engineers where I was also an intern, I was told repeatedly by multiple engineers that they “wouldn’t lower the bar to hire diverse candidates.”
No Stupid Questions
In a cryptography class I took at Stanford a man sitting near me snickered several times at a woman’s questions which he apparently thought were simple. I glanced in front of me at his computer and saw he had a grading matrix open on his computer; he was the class teaching assistant. For the rest of the quarter I avoided attending lectures in person, and I didn’t go to office hours. I ended up getting a C in the class.
Further Education
Stanford offers a popular program for undergraduates where you can apply to get a coterminal master’s degree alongside your undergraduate degree. Early in my Stanford career, I was excited about the program, and asked my male computer science adviser about my chances. He told me that with my 3.4 cumulative GPA and 3.0 engineering GPA I had no hope of getting into the program. His comments had a strong impact on my decision not to take the GRE or apply to the program. I have since seen several students with GPAs comparable to mine get accepted into the program.
Printing in Python
While working as an intern one summer, I asked my mentor for help with a domain specific Python question. He didn’t know the answer, but he referred me to another male engineer I didn’t know who he thought could help. The new guy did not answer my question, but he did spend the next thirty minutes explaining basic Python syntax to me, a concept I was very familiar with given the fact that I had been hired to write Python code at work.
Job Advice
A man I went to high school with who now attends an ivy league university reached out to me on LinkedIn recently. As far as I remember we had never before talked. He was wondering if I would be willing to hop on a phone call with him and give him some advice about how to get a software engineering internship at Google. Despite the fact that white men who attend ivy league universities aren’t my prime mentoring candidates, I agreed. One of the first questions he asked me was whether or not I knew how to code. I told him that yes, I was a computer science major and software engineering internships at Google were challenging to get. His takeaway from the phone call is that he would “take the intro to CS class and then apply.” Needless to say, he didn’t get the job.
Can I give you my number?
I was working in a lounge of the office where I was an intern with my headphones in when a full time engineer I had never met before approached me. He ushered at me to take out my headphones and says, “You’re absolutely gorgeous. Can I give you my number?” When I politely declined, he fist bumped me.
Most of these experiences were not horrible or scarring. Rather, many women in technology experience lots of small incidents daily that add up. For every story I have shared here, there are countless others that women and underrepresented minorities (URM) who don’t have the power to speak up and risk burning bridges have had!
If you take away anything from this article, I hope it is to support all URM in technology, not just those of us who have an audience. If you’re inclined to give monetarily, Black Girls Code and Trans*H4CK are two worthy causes.
