Female Engineer Mistaken As Nontechnical For 6000th Time
SAN FRANCISCO, CA — Earlier today at Techcrunch Disrupt, engineer Ashley Harrison realized that she had been mistaken for someone nontechnical for literally the 6000th time when a fellow attendee she just met asked her, “So do you work in sales?”
Out of the previous 5999 instances, Ms. Harrison has been mistaken for a sales/recruiting/design/HR/operations/secretarial person at holiday parties, recruiting events, technical conferences, coffee shops, and even in company elevators. When she explained that she was an engineer, most people were either embarrassed or simply ignored the faux pas, though there was the one guy who incredulously responded, “REALLY?!? You don’t look like an engineer!” and proceeded to explain what engineers actually do.
Despite graduating from the top of her class at MIT, receiving a PhD in distributed systems from Stanford, and holding the prestigious rank of Principal Engineer at Apple, Ms. Harrison still frequently encounters people who assume she is nontechnical. “I can’t shake the feeling that it’s because I’m a woman, but I’m not sure,” said Ms. Harrison, who had once been told by a recruiter that their company was “race-blind, gender-blind, etc.” but “we don’t lower our hiring bar just to increase our diversity metrics.”
When we asked Ms. Harrison to elaborate further, she replied, “Nah, I’m being silly, that can’t possibly be it. Everyone knows race, gender, and technical ability are clearly uncorrelated…”
At press time, Ms. Harrison was considering leaving the industry to teach young people computer science at a local high school, since “according to what I’ve been hearing from everyone, tech’s lack of diversity is a pipeline problem.”
