Being a Woman in Tech Isn’t That Hard

why I never felt out of place in tech until people told me I should

Whenever I tell another woman what I do, she almost always asks: “Is it hard, working with all men?” I’ve come to dislike this question. It feels like I’m being asked for a sob story I always fail to deliver. “Not really,” I’ll say, watching her eyebrows rise skeptically. This wasn’t always my answer. For a while, I did see myself as downtrodden, trying to hold my own in a male-dominated field. But over time, I’ve come to see things differently. The supposed difficulties of being a woman in tech are wildly overblown — and the narrative that says otherwise does more harm than good.

In my primary school, we were all in the same math class until the fourth grade, when our scores began to divide us. I truly can’t remember what the school called these groupings, for we only ever called them “the dumb math class” and “the smart math class.” The gender divide was stark: girls dominated the dumb math class, and boys the smart. This was my introduction to boy-dominated groups. But it was a natural transition. No one ever asked if I was “okay” or if it was “difficult” being one of the few girls. Life continued on as normal — except that sometimes I was surrounded by boys, scribbling away on pre-algebra problems. Through high school, I continued on in the advanced math track. Here, too, my class was mainly boys. Still, no one talked about my gender. It was expected that I could keep up with the boys.

It was not until I entered college that the narrative of being a “woman in tech” emerged. I started in my university’s engineering school undecided, but quickly chose computer science. I wanted to build things. I wanted useful skills. I had always been a gender minority in my math and science classes, so when I sauntered into class that first day, taking my seat beside mostly boys hardly registered. And yet, my college couldn’t stop talking about it! They boasted that our CS class was 30% female — 10% higher than the national average. There was the Society of Women Engineers, the Women in Computing club. I joined these, and initially felt a bit of pomp at my newfound status as somehow special. Yeah, I thought to myself, it is tough out here! But privately, I started to feel a kind of uncertainty I’d never felt before. Are they trying to warn me? I wondered. Am I not capable of getting this degree?

me in college lol

And there was a little piece of me that knew that it was wrong to feel “special” so early in my career. I wanted to be special for doing something great, or interesting. I wanted to earn it. What is so courageous about going to class with mostly men in it? For the most part, my male peers were extremely kind to me. I did most of my group projects with two other women in the major — and two men, too. My affiliation with them had a lot more to do with their organizational skills and my total aversion to pulling an all-nighter to finish an assignment. I liked to start projects the day they were given. Many of the women I knew did the same. A lot of the men — though not all — were procrastinators.

If anything, I started to notice that being female elevated me in the field. There were organizations devoted to helping me. There was a female student mentor assigned to me. There were special slots at job fairs reserved just for female students. Once, when I was frustrated about a test score, I cried in front of a professor (I wish crying was on command — but unfortunately, it is not. I have this awful, involuntary reflex where the moment I get upset, tears burst out of me). He started quizzing me on the spot, saw I knew the material, and changed my grade. I can’t help but think that if I’d been male, things would have played out differently.

The professional world echoes the same story: that being a female engineer is uniquely difficult. But it is not hard to just exist as a woman in tech. Yes, men have said awkward, borderline inappropriate things to me at work. For sure, there are some conversations I can’t really participate in, or don’t want to. But none of these things are an affront to me. If anything, people tread very carefully around me, and I can feel it.

There are “hardships” of being a woman in tech — these I can acknowledge. For one, I gravitate toward being friends with women. I feel more comfortable around them — more able to be myself. That sense of ease is harder to find in a room full of men. I’ve also found the emotional mismatch tough, at times. I am sensitive. Plenty of women aren’t as sensitive as I am. Still, women, on average, tend to be more responsive to emotional cues than men. I think I could argue, without much pushback, that software engineering attracts the sort of male who’s not terribly concerned with presentation. Feedback is blunt, frequent, and sometimes just straight-up public. This can definitely offend my sensibilities — but is not a plight.

The more I focused on this topic, the more I realized that the real challenges of being a woman in tech come from differences between men and women — not from injustice. No one is to blame for these differences. If anything, the woman has chosen a field that prizes hard technical skills, undervalues emotional intelligence, and is, by nature, quite solitary. I can tell I move through problems differently than my male coworkers. This can lead to friction. But this is no one’s fault. There is nothing unfair about it. It just is. If I wanted no friction — if I wanted to be surrounded by women who pick up the same cues I do, who share my interests — I could have chosen a different career.

This, I think, was James Damore’s point. I was in college when his memo hit the internet like wildfire. I didn’t read it — I just absorbed what the headlines said: that it was a sexist screed. It wasn’t until years later, when I finally read it for myself, that I saw the argument he was actually making — that the gender gap in tech might stem more from differences in interest than from discrimination. And I found myself agreeing.

Articles like this one often lament the drop in women earning computer science degrees — from a high of 37% in 1984 to around 21% today — and chalk it up to rising “computer science stereotypes” that center men as the default programmers. That’s the dominant explanation online. And while I don’t doubt that cultural attitudes shifted, I find it strange that this is treated as the only explanation. That kind of consensus — that there’s just one story to tell — makes me extremely suspicious. Here are a few other theories:

1. Computer science became a lucrative career path after the 1980s, and men are more likely to prioritize salary than women.

2. The early adopters of CS as a field were not representative of sustained interest — the 37% figure may have been a historical blip. Similarly, women today are freer to choose their paths — and perhaps 20% representation reflects genuine preferences rather than a problem to be fixed.

3. As demand grew, CS programs ramped up math requirements and introduced weed-out courses, making the major more technical and less appealing to women.

And what exactly is the ideal outcome — is it a 50/50 gender split? Why should that be the goal? Women outnumber men in college by more than 10%, yet no one seems alarmed by the imbalance there. Psychology majors are 79% female — is this a crisis? The fixation on parity in tech, and only tech, feels arbitrary. Who is it actually helping?

From what I saw in college, many of the women in my program gravitated toward product management, not software engineering, after we graduated. They preferred the cross-functional nature of that work, the communication, the human element. Women, on average, value social interaction more than men. And we would be lying to them if we said computer science was a social career.

There was no collusion of men to dominate computer science. In most of the stories I’ve heard, video games were the gateway. My limited foray into computer games was an occasional Sims binge, where I used cheat codes to decorate multi-million dollar houses and forced my Sims to have many children. While I was doing that, boys my age were playing Skyrim, Runescape, Halo. They knew about graphics cards, the guts of their machines, and which console wars were worth fighting about. The first words my brother knew how to spell were “pause” and “start.” This article argues it was “the rise of home computer companies, like Apple, focusing their marketing efforts on boys and men, which might have contributed to shifting cultural attitudes that persist today.” As if there was an evil scheme to market specifically to boys. But what if they marketed to boys because boys were more interested in computers? And that might make them faster, maybe even more passionate, students of computer science. I could be resentful of this (and I have been), but what’s the point?

One of my best friends is also a “woman in tech”. We met on our first day of work. And she’s going to hate this article. I know it is a sensitive subject, but I think I have a different kind of clarity to offer. Being the only girl in math class felt natural to me — because no one made a big deal of it. It wasn’t until everyone started insisting I was at a disadvantage that the doubt really crept in. It can make you crazy. Every hard class: I’m not sure I can do this. Every promotion — did I earn this? Or is it because I’m female. The obsession isn’t healthy. It creates more fear, more fragility. It is making women more anxious, more unsure that they can handle it, when truly — they probably can.

The landmark study by Dweck et al. (1978) really resonates with me here. In this study, boys and girls were given progressively difficult puzzles to solve. The teachers, also a part of the study, monitored the students as they worked. When the girls struggled, teachers tended to encourage them: “You are doing so well, this puzzle is just really hard.” Boys, in contrast, were told to focus, as if the problem was just their effort. In the end, the girls walked away feeling there were puzzles out there too hard for them. Boys walked away with the sense that they could solve anything if they just tried harder. This is the road to hell, paved with good intentions. The teachers were likely being kind to the girls — they were trying hard, well-behaved, and genuinely focused. Boys, meanwhile, were more likely to be rabble-rousing — and were pushed harder as a result. But this kindness didn’t help the girls, in the end.

Likewise, the effort to uplift women in tech may come from a good place, but I don’t believe it helps. Treating gender as a looming crisis in tech, speaking in hushed tones about how hard it must be — that’s what made me feel fragile. I was stronger — and more at ease — when no one was constantly reminding me I was different.