Then
In college, I did research for a professor who said the goal of the project was to see "if we could make coding easier for women." The school was having trouble attracting non-cis-male candidates to their CS program.
At my first real programming job, I was the only woman on my team. I brought this fact up once, and one of my (male) coworkers balked at the idea that I couldn't succeed in an environment just because I was the only woman. I was surprised he got so upset, because up until then I thought I'd been doing a great job of being "one of the guys."
At another job, after a disproportionate loss of non-cis-male employees, I tried bringing up diversity hiring goals. I was told that "we weren't going to lower our hiring standards to maintain a diverse team" and "we had a diverse team once, so we'll have one again."
Now
It took a lot of personal growth to find the words to describe why all of these situations felt so awful. I evolved from a clueless, privileged, "gEndEr sHouLDn't mAttEr tHo riGHt?¿?" baby to an empowered, feminist, queer, lady engineer. As much as I cringe at how uniformed and non-vocal I was early in my career, I can at least say that I've now internalized my own worth.
And Until I'm Dead.
Because I'm constantly concerned about the number of senior women leaving this field, I feel obligated to stay put. Let my steadfastness be my tribute to all the amazing friends and mentors (both non-binary folks and women) that allowed me to truly envision myself succeeding in this career.
Maybe one day someone will look to me and realize they can be an engineer too. <3
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