I wrote this originally in Spanish for the magazine "Matilda y Las Mujeres En Ingeniería En America Latina II" published by The Latin American and Caribbean Consortium of Engineering Institutions (LACCEI). The original text can be found in their website.
When I graduated from Computing Engineering in the Instituto Tecnológico de Costa Rica, I was one of the ten women in my graduating class. Those ten women listened for four years that women in engineering are ugly, and if they're attractive they had someone else doing the work for them (and didn't earn their grades). Nobody did the work for me, so my conclusion is that I am an ugly engineer.
Six months prior to my graduation I had started working as a developer in a start up. We were ten people total and I was the second woman to get there. The company kept growing, mostly in males. Chats started to bubble up for video game matches, but the topics soon started changing. In the beginning it was harmless pictures of models, actresses, influencers. Later on the women in the pics starting losing their clothes and found a job in porn. The comments of my coworkers grew vile. In the beginning they were compliments, enough to blush some but could still be considered flattering. Later it was vulgarity and misogyny. In the final stage they were discussing our female co workers. But never me, I was complicit, one of the boys club.
Bored from the lack of professional challenge, I decided to apply for a Masters program in the USA, and I was accepted. With excitement I started the preparations to leave my first job. I was received by a faculty full of enthusiasm, eager to make science and tech in that small department. My boredom vanished. With geographical and intellectual distance in between, I was still in that chat group from my previous job, but reading it was no longer as tolerable. I am not prude, I stand for sexual freedom and have nothing against porn, but the comments there were making me sick. I finally decided that that was beyond my boundaries and I did not want to take part of it. With a bit of guilt, left the chat group. I felt lighter and did not understand afterwards why it took me so long to see how wrong the whole situation was. I had spent years trying to be one of 'them', because my other options were to be the ugly engineer or the sexualized object that was rated and ranked in a strict thigh, torso and face scale.
The time to find an internship arrived, I wrote my applications and was called for interviews. My college (male) friends unanimously decided that my applications were successful because I'm a woman, I disappointedly agreed.
Some other day I found in my inbox an email about some event to apply to: Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, which would be in Dallas. A part of me was in deep disagreement with the existence of such events and what other people called "special treatments", but the scholarship caught my attention and it was a good opportunity to explore my professional and academic options for the future. I won the scholarship and attended the conference.
A few weeks before departing to Dallas, I got a more emails inviting me to interview for Google and Facebook. I never applied to any big tech companies, it was impossible for me to get hired there, plus the interviews are no joke and I was trying to figure out the meaning of research, molecular biology, simulations, GPUs and thesis writing. I felt conflicted about getting "gender benefits", but still interviewed, with far more success than what I anticipated.
Ten months later I moved to California to start in my new Software Engineer position at Google. And in a company so progressive to provide free food, clean towels in the gym and tampons in the bathrooms, I thought all my self doubt was now in those macho mouths of the past. But a few months later, a manifesto became public, written by a Googler: "Google's Ideological Echo Chamber". It gained a lot of unexpected support. It proposed that affirmative action to include minorities in technology are extreme and illogical measures. The author argued that women are more interested in people than in things and have a tendency towards social sciences, arts and more neurosis risk. After I read that, it was very hard to avoid asking myself if I matched this description, or if I hadn't really earned that Silicon Valley desk. To my great relief, the author was fired.
When I hit a year in this massive tech spiderweb, I requested a transfer and moved to Zürich. Back then, there was a second scandal in the press because some journalists had found out that the father of Android, had left the company years ago because of sexual harassment complaints, but with no less than a $90 million exit package. For what I understand this is a common strategy to prevent such a "tech genius" from going to work in a competing company. Very unproductive days followed, reading polemic articles and email threads with angry words. I had heard the story before. Amongst Android employees this mischievous behaviour was well known. But the professional admiration for him was above it all.
A peaceful protest was organized in all Google offices around the world, with impressive participation numbers. I went and got myself a coat because the weather forecast said we'd have zero degrees (Celsius) for the upcoming walkout day and I was new to the city and new to the winter. When the day came, no one in my team attended, I was the only women in the team. It's still unclear to me if something was achieved with the walkout, but I found my first friend in Switzerland. I remember having heard many sexual harassment testimonials read with a speaker, and some gentleman who said he stood against these situations because his girlfriend was a victim of harassment and he was directly impacted. Most of the Walkout organizers left the company within a year.
"University me" thought I didn't need any special treatment, strongly doubted affirmative action and echoed the stereotypes of women in engineering. In retrospect, all this helped me gather strength to finish university and graduate next to people who would openly doubt my abilities, people who would sexualize me, treat me like a man or just label me as one of the "ugly engineers".
At some point I was proud to be breaking stereotypes by being the only woman in the room. But 8 years after starting my tech adventure, my feelings have changed: I'm tired. I don't want a stereotype to break, I want it not to exist. I don't want to have to explain why conferences for minorities in tech are important, I don't want to be distraught at work thinking how to face that colleague who called me "sexy" that time in a work event and how to let him know that it made me very uncomfortable, and I want to have more female friends in my field.
I want to tech. I want to make systems that help people, perfect digital tools, write elegant code, discuss module architecture and build things that work. I want the satisfaction of successfully compiled code and passing unit tests. And I want to do it with more women at my side. I want my work and effort to be recognized. I don't know if #MeToo or Walkouts are helping, or how questionable the evolutionary psychology of that one manifesto is, but I know that coming into a challenging work environment woke me up from my professional slumber and that I plan to stay where I am, building software.
