On "People Skills" and Women Leaving Tech
Some thoughts on the topic for Women In Tech Day
Yes, having a holiday for each and every little thing is out of control and mostly a commercialization ploy to rally consumers around targeted campaigns. But it can also remind us to sit with certain things for longer than we might otherwise. Which is what I’m very happy to do on what is apparently Women In Tech Day!
“Women in tech” is a major theme in NOTHING SERIOUS, my debut novel, and also my life. As a kid, all my bedroom drawers but one were filled with capacitors and resistors and whatever else I could get my little-kid hands on for less than a dollar at RadioShack. I spent all my free time rigging up alarm systems on my door or remote controlled lighting systems for my bedroom. If there was something I wanted—like the ability to suck on the cap of a pen and have it taste good—I built it (years later Lollipop Pens would enter the market though I maintain they were all sloppy imitations). Inventions consumed me.
There’s a strangely common belief that boys are innately drawn to things, like cars and blocks, and girls to people, hence the focus on dolls. But any doll that had managed its way into my room was likely ravaged for parts—a foot for a switch, an arm to prop a wire. Maybe I was born with this bent towards the technical, or maybe it was because my dad had wanted a boy and got stuck with two girls, so essentially treated me like a son. Maybe it was a little bit of both. Either way, “things” were my thing.
As a kid I always had heroes. To this day, I find it essential to have a few role models handy at all times to know what it is I’m working towards. My first hero was discovered while watching The Goonies; I wanted to be Data, the gang’s gadget extraordinaire. He could do nearly anything in the world simply by opening his trench coat, where all his inventions were conveniently housed.
In High School my gadget obsession morphed into a more practical love for science. Clearly a cool girl (lol), I went in early to do extra Physics problem-sets before school and made my mom drive me to the library on the weekends so I could read books on relativity. Though of course I felt like an utter freak, my gender didn’t really occur to me. It wasn’t like it was me and a bunch of boys hanging out in the physics lab. It was just me. So I felt weird, of course, but not out of place.
When it came time to apply for college, I thought Electrical and Computer Engineering would be the surest path to my ultimate goal of being a professional Spy Equipment Maker and also, according to a chart, had one of the highest starting salaries. My parents had no idea what that major meant—nor did I, really, again, this was the 90s, I was still penning my essays and stamping my applications—but a little chart told me that it would result in a good starting salary, which was all I really cared about considering I’d be graduating with inordinate amounts of debt and had no financial support system. So I penciled in the little bubble that said Electrical and Computer Engineering on Cornell’s acceptance form, eager to start.
*
It should surprise no one that Electrical and Computer Engineering at one of the country’s top engineering schools twenty years ago was nearly all men. I, however, was caught off guard. As one might guess from every detail up to this point, I was not exactly a heart-throb in High School. Even voicing a simple hello to boys back then often proved problematic. On the first day of college I remember getting to class early, sitting in the front and the middle. The seats filled, one boy after the next darting a nervous hello or going to pains to avoid eye contact. I continued to notice people notice me, even professors seemed to clock my presence. In class it was hard to focus on much, let alone the ridiculously complicated equations being written on the board, when I felt like everyone was wondering what the hell I was doing there. It didn’t take long for me to wonder that, too.
But I’d be lying if I said all the attention was bad. Though much of my brainpower was spent quelling the anxiety of feeling like I was wearing a neon billboard on my head, another part of me, the part I’m often less ready to admit, was into it. All eyes were on me! For the first time in my life I had attention—from guys. When I passed other quads, the college of Human Ecology, for example, lined with beautiful, stylish women I would thank the gods above that I did not have to compete with these droves of girls who not only cared about looking nice, but actually pulled it off.
I’d like to say I eventually got over being one of the only girls int he room, but for four years it was a pretty regular teetering between this kind of bursting pride and sudden, harrowing shame. What I do know is that I began to dress differently. Surrounded by plain, solid t-shirts, a sea of grays and blues, I quickly followed suit. A pack of Hanes t-shirts was my go-to and stuck strictly to sneakers, the occasional baseball hat for flare. In many ways this was a welcomed invitation to a club I’d always wanted to join. I’d been devastated when, come Middle School, it became clear that sweatpants and oversized Stussy t-shirts no longer passed muster for ladies. College boys, it seemed, at least the ones in engineering, couldn’t care less about how they dressed, so it only made sense that I wouldn’t, either. A win.
The thornier side of this monkey-see-monkey-do mentality was that it expanded into all parts of my consciousness. What the men around me did, I wanted to also. Part of this stemmed from the survival-esque need to blend in at all costs. But another part was plain ambition. Compared to the small subset of girls, the people excelling in class seemed to be the boys, and with unfathomable ease. Many of them had been coding for years and navigated software as if it were as natural as going for a walk. The boys were having fun, barely studying, getting dirty and playing games. I’m sure there are many boys who were as quiet and insecure as I felt, but those weren’t the ones I noticed. The ones I noticed spoke loud and laughed hard. They were running the clubs and teaching the sections. They were happily doing their thing. And I wanted in.
Not unlike my preoccupation with Data, these boys became my role models, my new heroes. Struggling through an impossibly challenging curriculum, it felt more important than ever to know what it was I was working towards. I wanted to end up on top and the girly-ness in me—wherever that came from, the ingrained nudges of Teen Magazine or my own immutable DNA—felt incompatible with what success required.
Thus began my quest to be one of the guys, a journey that would shape all aspects—professional and personal, physical and emotional—of my life for the next decade. I tagged along as they slid way too fast down hilly streets on their motorized skateboards, I screamed along to Pearl Jam as we jumped up and down on our tattered couches, I participated in Gladiator battles with Styrofoam sticks, listened to Howard Stern and watched Sylvester Stallone until we couldn’t keep our eyes open, all the while chugging Miller Lite and pretending to eat Hamburger Helper. (The body was a different story, and at that time I wanted mine to disappear).
It’s too easy to say that this was just me being who boys wanted me to be—that’s not true at all. I chose them as my examples; I admired them. It’s only in retrospect I wish I’d had more examples to choose from. The truth is, these were some of the best times of my life. A few Pearl Jam songs still make my heart race and there are a handful of Stern segments I will forever stand by. It’s impossible to decipher which parts of my fitting in was a true aligning of sensibilities (like wearing nothing but cotton and dominating Gladiator tournaments), and which were a form of self-silencing, because I hadn’t really become a person yet, not really. I was in the process of becoming, and men just happened to be my guides.
Though I’ve almost always worked in tech, I haven’t really coded since college. After graduating one of the most rigorous computer engineering programs in the country, I stopped. Why do women leave engineering, is a question everyone is always asking. By now I’m sure the reader might have a few guesses, but the explanation is so vast and complicated I’ll only attempt, here, to offer one part of an answer.
For a long time I told myself I’d stopped coding because I was too tired to keep putting up with men, tired of being the only girl in the room, of pretending to fit in. I’m sure this is true for many women, it was definitely true for me, and eventually I did get tired of it completely. But that’s not how I felt right out of college. At twenty-two I wasn’t entirely aware of my performance of self—to be honest that didn’t click until my thirties—and even if I were, I was so determined to get ahead it probably wouldn’t have mattered. I didn’t feel silenced or oppressed, most of the time I felt unique and powerful. I think I left engineering because I was still so desperately trying to win, to be even more exceptional.
By the time I graduated, as is detailed at length in my 2004 journal, I wanted to take over the world—be a millionaire, a CEO, someone in charge. I was massively in debt, as were my parents, and I was as committed as ever to making money. I think part of the reason I wanted out was because I knew I had something the boys didn’t. I could do the tech stuff, sure, but I’d realized I could also communicate in a way that most of them couldn’t. In fairness, I actually think they could communicate quite well if they’d tried, they just rarely bothered. I, on the other hand, knew how to make people like me, how to observe the minutiae of people’s moods and respond in time, how to inquire and smile and make people feel good. This was not a gift I was born with, some special instinct inherent to my DNA. In High School I was the shy person. But I had been figuring out how to fit in with my classmates for four years straight. I’d mastered a sort of likability.
With the encouragement of all of my teachers and counselors, I readily leaned into my so-called “people skills,” which they convinced me was a unique asset. The men who didn’t worry about fitting in, some of whom could barely look recruiters in the eye, were the ones who hit it off with the awkward men at no-name recruiting booths like “Google” and “Amazon,” the ones who are now millionaires hundreds of times over. But at the time, I wanted to stop hiding and be judged on more than whether or not my program worked. I thought I had more to offer.
*
It rarely occurs to women in tech to ask why the gender ratio is skewed, because we’re hit over the head with all of the various answers every day. From birth to the boardroom, women are nudged to care about people over things and to be agreeable rather than assertive. We’re judged more harshly if we’re not. It never ends: Recently, I was pitching to an investor, and he stopped me midsentence to tell me to smile.
Meanwhile, biological proponents tend to address the “why” by declaring that differences between the sexes clearly exist, letting the claim hang heavy with unwarranted implication. Unfortunately, this statement is as obvious as it is irrelevant. As many have already pointed out, there is no definitive data explaining how such factors would specifically relate to an individual’s interest in programming. Any proven biological difference is small, and its link to STEM abilities is tenuous.
Engaging with the “biological” argument about women in tech is less an issue of free speech than that of complete and accurate speech. And this carelessness has consequences. The dissemination of false assumptions often perpetuates those very assumptions. Ultimately, stereotypes are born — “women aren’t interested in tech” — which not only affects how women are viewed by others, but how we view ourselves.
At the heart of this debate and so many others is that we do not consider women’s lived experiences to be valid data. In this argument, women who work in tech are the experts, and that makes some people uncomfortable.
When I look back at my coding years, it’s not that I felt left out or harassed or treated unfairly outright, although I know many women have. But that I was always the one who had to adapt. Being myself (whoever that was) didn’t feel like an option, because even just being a girl felt wrong. My biggest strength ended up being this ability to fit in with other people—my so-called people skills. I resent that the men in my class weren’t going to bother themselves with my comfort, so if I wanted to get by I had to busy myself with theirs. I resent that I was so caught up in the performance of it all, I forgot how much I actually liked the work.
This is not uncommon. Studies show that, through high school, women have the same abilities in STEM but perform better than men in things like linguistics, which encourages women to lean into those areas because they have a unique advantage. Studies also show that as women enter an industry in greater numbers, the pay in that industry declines over time. In other words, women could do what men do, but we choose not to because we are relatively better at other things — but we also get paid less to do them.
Deterring women from programming fundamentally affects financial equality. Computer science is currently the highest-paying industry, and that’s not likely to change anytime soon. Not to mention technology is increasing controlling our minds and our lives and it behooves all of us to encourage women to participate in the creation of it. If we perpetuate narratives that deter woman from these careers, we have to acknowledge the social and economic implications such messages have on women’s futures and, in many ways, their freedom.
After college, eager to capitalize on my “people” skills, I went into management consulting, where I excelled. You could throw me at any client (it was tech consulting, most were men) and I would fit right in. But eventually I got bored with strategy meetings and client relationships and took a pay cut to work with nonprofits. If the actual work wasn’t interesting, at least I could make a difference doing it, I figured. Women’s overrepresentation in socially-minded work is something I address head on in NOTHING SERIOUS. Capitalism is inherently at odds with the values of feminism, a huge reason why women increasingly drop out of leadership positions as they grow more confident with themselves and their values, which I’ll write more about soon.
Over time, though, I missed the quiet logic-oriented mindset that coding offered but I figured I’d been away from it for too long. It’s true that women often go into more “people” oriented jobs, but the bigger, more important question is why. I would argue that my biggest challenge at one of the top engineering programs in the country, a challenge that 86% of the students did not have to consider, was how to excel at people skills; my own private thesis. So yes, by the end I was an expert, a reader of minds, could make anyone feel comfortable, but one could argue that was the last thing I was interested in.
All I know is that now, nearly two decades later, I’ve chosen to be a writer. After years managing large teams and complex problems, navigating people and comms and leaning into the more social side of my hyper logic-oriented brain, with an MBA from a top ten business school, I’m back to sitting in front of a computer in isolation for days and sometimes weeks at a time, connecting ideas and sentences like complex blocks of logic, without interacting with any human at all. And not since I was a girl wiring up alarm systems in my tree-chair, have I loved anything more.
Other news:
Insanely, I’m taking over the HarperCollins Instagram account today to promote NOTHING SERIOUS in honor of Women In Tech Day! This is at once and INCREDIBLE opportunity and my actual ultimate nightmare. Social media makes me me feel 😬🫠😵💫
Follow along here! 😊
YES.
I worked in tech for many years, also expending much effort on being “one of the guys” (it helped, in grad school, that those 3-pack undershirts were incredibly cheap). The worst part of being the only girl in the room wasn’t the isolation or the discrimination but the sense that my personhood - my interests and intellect and my body, which continued very stubbornly to me female - was inherently not only self-contradictory but somehow unreal.
Thank you for writing this. I don’t think all women in tech have this experience, at least anymore, but it’s wonderful to read it expressed so sharply.
I appreciate your deeply nuanced take / life experience here Emily. As someone who was never encouraged to interact with “things” (combined with a religious overzealous attitude about being a “helper”), I didn’t have your experience with engineering or coding or computer science. But I did experience the absolute necessity to read a room to “survive” professionally. For a neurodivergent person, it was essentially masking plus.
Thank you for sharing.