A seat at the table for women engineers

After my time in the Computer science program with only a handful of women or minorities in my track and no female professors despite being a large city college I had become accustomed to working in male dominated environment. 

So it was not surprising that in the early part of my career I was often the solitary female developer on many teams. I had also gotten used to not seeing women leaders in the development part of our organizations. As I advanced in my career to the role of team  lead, architect, or principal I chose to ignore the microaggressions, questioning of my technical competencies and being asked to take notes or organize meetings.

 I was consistently called sir by one of my managers as he had never had a female report, kicked out of a colleague’s office called  little girl due to his frustration on not understanding the design pattern I was using for my design. Underpaid compared to my male colleagues, not promoted, and told I was not tough enough to be a leader. This was all despite my constantly outperforming my teammates completing more tickets off the board, architecting and leading projects and earning 3 software patents.  

So what do you do when confronted with all this institutional sexism? As luck would have it a female engineering director joined a company I was working for. She took the time to listen to me and include me in the higher visibility projects, got me raises, promotions and bonuses for my accomplishments. I asked her to be my mentor and she still is to this day. 

I took all of what I had experienced and learned and decided that no other woman or minority would have to go through what I had. I helped start or joined the women’s groups at every company I worked at. Mentored inside and outside of work starting mentorship programs if they did not exist. Shut down bullies in teams and meetings. Made space for the quieter voices in the room and coached others to this as well.

I have given talks on diversity and why it is critical in engineering. This field requires you to be creative, able to come up with new ideas, and think outside the box and look for inspiration in unexpected places. A nonhomogeneous team or organization excels at these tasks as people are not forced to use the same way of thinking or techniques. 

I love my male colleagues and many of them have become great friends. Over the years I have found many more like minded men and HR now supports women in leadership and shuts down the bullies. Unfortunately I am not seeing as much growth in numbers in the STEM fields and women there in leadership as I would like and it breaks my heart. I feel these fields change lives and make the world a better place.

I will continue to do what I can so everyone has a seat at the table and sees someone like them sitting there as well.