the fine line of glass

The hashtag #techtok on TikTok has 9.1 billion views, and it’s made up of videos discussing cool technology, gaming setups, and tips on how to break into the tech industry. Recently, people have been noticing that the tech sector is quite cult-like, pointing out how everyone and their mother seems to be making TikToks on how superior these jobs are and why young people should be developing skills early on so they too can obtain high-paying jobs. For me specifically, considering my social location as a young, feminine-presenting person, I get a lot of videos on my For You page about women in STEM—particularly tech—and the pros and cons of these types of jobs.

STEM is a group of academic disciplines involving science, engineering, technology, and mathematics. It’s notorious for being gendered in a way that supports men in the field and excludes women through outright barring their participation, or through microaggressions, and making their work or school environment hell by treating them like assistants or little girls. Hicks’ “A Feature, Not a Bug” talks about the discrimination women in the tech sector experience and how gendered this profession is when it comes to the social perception of the jobs, the hierarchy within the profession, and pay distribution.

Intersectionality plays a part in this topic as well, as BIPOC women and queer women will have different experiences in STEM classes and STEM occupations than a white heterosexual cisgender woman.

[TikTok by @ellelillylew]

There’s a ton of promotion of women in STEM, with universities and jobs trying to convince women to choose this field as their major or career so the organization can fill their EDI considerations. They market this idea of women breaking the glass ceiling, whilst doing nothing to decrease the discrimination women face in these fields, doing nothing to protect these women from the glass shards that cut their skin.

Women are expected to be resilient and stand their ground and be successful to demonstrate that women deserve equality in this field. But why does a woman have to be successful to be respected? Why do women have to put up with discrimination at all? Welcoming more women in the tech sector won’t change anything if the welcome is paper thin.

An article by Harvard Business Review called “The Dark Side of Resilience” mentions that “too much resilience could make people overly tolerant of adversity.” Many of the resources designed to help women in STEM are centred around the woman finding ways of dealing with the discrimination— like the NAVIGATE Project, a training program which aims to teach women how to “navigate effectively past instances of bias, inequity or discrimination in the workforce.” The onus is not on the work environment and the tech culture changing. It’s on the woman to expect a discriminatory work environment and deal with it.

Code.org did a series of great videos introducing the Internet and its different functions that make it work, but all I could think about was their subtle mission of putting women’s voices to the forefront— they were the ones explaining everything in the videos.

Though Code.org is an organization dedicated to supporting women in computer science (I mean, from their website homepage alone they mention that they have 60 million students, and 27 million of the students are young women) I can’t help but wonder how exactly those

women students are treated in their schools and work environments. Will they be creating

TikToks teaching other women how to stand up to sexist coworkers in the future?

That mission of amplifying women's voices by not just Code.org but schools and other institutions helps a great deal in giving representation and normalizing women in tech. But I guess I'm looking for more accountability from the corporate side of things, and changes in the societal norms that make sexism expected in the workplace.

[analogy of the glass shards definitely came from a tiktok i watched but can't find anymore. it was worded differently but this analogy did not come from my own brain!]