As a Woman in Tech, I Realized: These Are Not My People
As a trans woman in tech, who was also raised in a very gender normative environment (i.e. I was expected to conform to gender norms for boys as a child), I certainly see her point. I got into technology a child mostly because that what I could do within the environment&#x27;s &quot;boy&quot; social role.<p>Fast forward a couple of decades, and relative to pretty much all cis women of the same age, I have many more years of experience of playing around with technology in my free time, and many <i>fewer</i> years spent doing the &quot;empathising&quot; activities which the author refers to in the article - exactly the kind of activities which girls are often nudged towards. As a consequence I am pretty good with technology.<p>And yet the more that I grow as a person, connect with who I am, and grow in my options, the more I find playing around with tech less fulfilling than e.g. spending time on relationships. I&#x27;d spend evenings tinkering with Linux when I was 13, but I&#x27;d be unsatisfied as hell doing that today. And I envy women and girls raised in environments that were more conducive towards them engaging in empathising and self-expressive activities - if that were me, it&#x27;s unlikely I&#x27;d have gone down a tech track.<p>We need equality and freedom, but men and women are biologically different.<p>And it&#x27;s not a coincidence that my first HN comment in years of reading is on an empathising topic, not a technology one... Women can be great engineers, we just rarely care to become them, unless circumstances unnaturally push us towards it - I suspect this is why it is developed countries which have the fewest women in tech, as wealthy people have the most options to choose from. Of course this is all generalisations and averages and there are true exceptions on both sides.