Everything changed when I joined the tech industry. I was around almost all men and, unlike in school, I had to spend the days with them – I couldn’t leave when my classes were over. At times, I’d have one other woman on my team, and we always became close friends . I worked with a few men who were overtly terrible, but I also found that even among men who didn’t behave egregiously, there were still challenges to being the only woman on my team.
It can be difficult to tell during the interview process what a company will be like, so I learned to find people who’d worked there before to ask. Toxic masculinity is often much quieter than the people promulgating it. I was surrounded by aggressive men who yelled on the phone in the middle of cramped office spaces, but their sexist remarks came in at a lower decibel. One man suggested I wasn’t sufficiently interested in the company because I didn’t smile enough.
I was a data scientist and wrote code most of the day, but I hadn’t been a computer science major in college and there was a lot I didn’t know about the specifics of certain databases and programming languages. I had colleagues who almost seemed to expect it when I made a mistake, and I found that so disheartening. I did work harder than my male coworkers, but I didn’t want toAlthough this sounds like a joke, I do strongly support women’s right to be as mediocre at their jobs as men are.
As the only woman on my team, I developed empathy for anyone who feels separate from the rest of their community. Not much in life is actually a zero-sum game, and diversity certainly is not. I was on teams with only one or two people of colour, and some of their complaints bore strong resemblances to mine.