Navigating Contemporary Woman-In-Engineering-Hood

It’s hard — and maybe impossible — to define what it means to be a woman. As an engineer, I have understood womanhood in terms of what has been reflected back to me by the men who surround me. I don’t just let who I am flow freely. I act always in response to how I believe I will be perceived. I am playing a game where I put myself in the mind of a sexist and then try to tailor my behavior to rebuke whatever could be expected of me.

I’ve been sexually harassed (computer engineering definition) in professional settings by men who were my colleagues and superiors, but those harrowing moments actually did not play a role in defining my identity. They were awful and traumatic, but I would argue that the more impactful sexism within engineering, the kind that has eaten away at me for years and molded me, is more difficult to identify and eliminate. My entire understanding of womanhood has been shaped by a more insidious type of sexism that would go unnoticed by anyone who doesn’t see their own gender.

My earliest memory that I can recall where I experienced the toxicity of a male-dominated environment was my physics class in high school. I was the only girl in a room of twenty students. We had a class clown who would say vulgar things every day, and one day he shouted, “Want to hear a joke? Women’s rights!” The class burst into laughter. The teacher (a man) did not correct him.