The tacit, and sometimes open, acceptance of stereotyping of men and women lead to some work environments being male dominated and others being female dominated. As engineers, being women in male dominated environments, this article describes what is it that we can do about these unfavorable perceptions to successfully thrive in our environment.

In our engineering/tech careers, we’ve found ourselves in the minority more often than not and it’s the same in other male-dominated industries like finance, comedy, politics, and even professional cooking! Some of the classically held stereotypes like women simply don’t perform as well as men in Math, and some resulting unfair treatment of women in management positions or politics where they are often held to a completely different set of preconceptions and standards that their male counterparts are adding to the lack of women in these industries.

Obviously, being women who break these stereotypes, we do disagree with these perceptions/stereotypes, but the fact is that most people do believe these are true. If such is the common perception among our colleagues and in our workplaces, here are a few things you can do to avoid being stereotyped: hone your skills – anything that can be measured and demonstrated will act in your favor, learn the language of the workplace, be assertive, learn to delegate, learn to not be a perfectionist, network more, and, lastly, highlight the unique perspective you bring to any solution.

This is by no means an exhaustive list of what you can do, but being aware is the first step. If you’re more aware of the environment you are in, you observe better and are can pro-actively find solutions to potential issues you may face as a woman in a male dominated workplace.

Surprisingly, this is not yet another male bashing rant on how women in technology are expected to dress geekily in order to be taken seriously by their male colleagues. If you’re expecting to read a complaint about the perception that a well dressed woman is just not as technically inclined as the sloppily dressed guy, you’ll be disappointed. If you expect to read that a woman’s high heels clickety-clakking as she walks down a corridor (a non carpeted one, of course) is a sure way to reinforce the glass ceiling, it’s not exactly true.

You will read no such thing here (well, except for the part where we said you wont read it here). Dressing up geekily to leave no doubt about your technical capabilities is actually a gender-neutral issue. It’s one of those “when in Romem dress in a toga” thingummys. A man who wears a well ironed dress shirt, or God forbid, a suit and tie, is just as likely to face much the same criticism from the silly folks who’re immature enough to make such dopey clothes-to-skills associative inferences. Even the most open-minded, who will consciously not even dream of discriminating in such ways, do subconsciously talk in a different language with a less geeky looking person. It’s how you communicate with someone from your own tribe/hood vs someone from a different tribe (tech vs management). Clothing style is a kinship thing.

Having said that, we do wish it wasn’t the reality though. We do wish to clickty clack down the assembly lines (if only OSHA approved steel-toed stilettos like we lobbied them to – as always OSHA seems to be too short-sighted to see the potential of a genius idea like stilettos with steel toes!), but then the assembly technician would call us “young lady” or “Miss” and start talking all formally. We would never know what part of the design frustrates the assembler unless he’s comfortable enough to swear in front of us. With a tucked in polo shirt, blue jeans accessorized with enormous safety glasses with side-shields, a hard hat, steel toed boots (those that make you look like you’ve got mickey mouse’s feet!) and a pony tail though we can be slick camouflaged spies. Observe the environment in it’s native state (in your face Heisenberg!). Oh, and don’t forget the ear plugs, the cursing does get a bit uncomfortable.

Alice, the fictitious female engineer constantly in an irritable state by virtue of being surrounded by incompetent, yet highly rewarded, men around her, has an amazing coping mechanism: Fist of Death!

We highly recommend all females working in technology fields learn this technique by meditating upon Alice for precisely 3.1415 mins before going to bed every night.

Most of us witness live demonstrations of daft behavior by colleagues on an everyday basis: their inability to understand that when we speak we’d like them to listen to what we say instead of focusing on our upper torsos; their eagerness to append the “emotional female” tag to us in order to discredit us; their inability to understand that just because we are female doesn’t mean we can’t hack etc etc etc.

On such occasions, the “fist of death” (acquired through aforementioned meditations) will come in handy to punch someone’s head into his shirt sleeves. For some mysterious reasons it is deemed unacceptable to practice this technique overtly by the unimaginative HR departments. Nevertheless, we shall rebel and covertly train the troops to launch the ‘Fist of Death’ offensive to quell imbecility. After all, who’s going to go squeal that he got beat up by a girl in the parking lot?

The monkeys are at it again! Take a break from convincing the I-can’t-believe-they-weren’t-weeded-out-by-natural-selection thick-headed folks who steoreotype women as being inept with technology. The monkeys are out to prove them wrong!

A study by a Scotland University primatologist hints that female-driven technological innovation could be the norm with the primate species. His observation is that the females were much more keen on using the different tools for the same task than males. The behaviour is also seen in chimpanzees where the females tend to use tools more prolifically than males, and invent new ways to crack nuts or fish for termites.

Read the full article here
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/10/bonobo-tool/

Woohoo! So many women technologists in one spot!

On an entirely unrelated note, I wonder if any men tried to gatecrash the party mouthing “I’m technically a woman”. The idea of free drinks and basking in the glowing company of so much beauty and brains in one spot might be inducement enough for some people to try shenanigans like that.

So there we were, serenely existing in our own little worlds, what with the sun continuing to rise in the East and set in the West and all, until one fine day it occurred to us that there is no fun site dedicated to our fairer sex working in technology! Well, ok, if you want to be all exact about it, there are many sites for women working in engineering/technology fields, but here’s how they are generally classified:

(i) the sites that are dedicated to the “causes” of women in tech. Great people. Want to really help increase the number women in engineering/technology fields, help us out with common problems and all that sort of stuff, but having fun doing it is not their top-most priority.

(ii) and then the odd blog post here and there that assumes women in tech are nerds who wear old sweat pants and generally spend most of their lives hunched over a soldering iron or laptop or petri dish!

There is no site for the not-so-nerdily-dressed tech-chick hunched over her soldering iron, laptop or petri dish to hang out! Where is the hood to hang out and diss the rest of the populace from? Where is the lair to hatch our world domination plots from? Where is the turf we can use to play with our own rules?

This being the state of affairs at the time of discovery of this grave injustice, we decided to jump in, ready, fire and aim style, and start rambling on this blog. Here’s what we think is going to be this site’s future:

(1) create forums for us to brag, diss, discover and discuss ideas

(2) blog posts to attract google’s attention and be found (and perhaps be helpful once in a while?)

(3) a catalog of gifts for the woman engineer/technologist. Kind of like the museum gift store where everyone wanders in to take a look at the novelty stuff. If people buy, great! If not, it’s ok.

And, oh, just to clarify, even though we’re engineers, we know there are a lot of women working in technology fields (like IT or biotech) who are in the same boat, hence the engineer/technologist.

And yes, another important note, we’re not serious enough to have mission/vision/ideals/values etc for this site. “Just chill with the sistas” will be our unofficial motto.

That’s the plan as of Oct 29, 2010. We’ll leave this out in the ether and watch with curiosity how it unfolds.