There’s Room at the Top.

My parents wanted a boy and, instead, they received five girls. Una bendición disfrazada. This has been an existential contemplation for me every now and then because as a young girl, I heralded No Doubt’s “Just a Girl” as a philosophy. Through my experiences being both a woman and a Mexican minority, I have waded through the deep waters of patriarchy through extended family, discrimination for both identities, and as Brown describes being left out: forgotten.

It’s these recurring histories of forgotten women that have constituted our realities, both in the past and as it continues today. While many remember the successes of the ‘genius founder’ Steve Jobs, many more forget that the foundations of computing and the respective science were built by women. In the time of WWII, women were essential in calculating missile launches, Earth orbits, and other software developments. In fact, the first US Army computer was made by a woman. And yet, you Google “computing inventors” and all but one are male.

It's a silence that is both brutal and even deadly. In a world where critics and technologists exclaim that “Great Art can only be made by one man”, what becomes the voice of a woman, or any other identity left out of the image? The industry of technology, especially with developing technologies such as artificial intelligence, has a lot to consider in this regard but, how can someone make technology for all, with the minds that represent only a few?

It’s reading about the perpetuated experiences, the pressures, the ignorance-packed claims placed on women, that lead me to wonder how can it ever change? As an aspiring entrepreneur and social philanthropist, I continue to delve into the different cogs to this working discriminatory machine. And while this can be explored through the lens of psychology, technology, anthropology, and much much more, my mind drifts more towards trying to understand the patterns of discrimination and fighting against them.