Growing up as a girl is confusing.
I was told, “Reach for the stars, even YOU can become president!” (Evidently not.)
At the same time, I was told, “Don’t be too successful, men find that intimidating.”
This tug of war of messaging felt especially real when I was trying to date men.
Of course, this was before I realized I was a lesbian. I was 18 and trying to be the good Mormon girl who dated, because that was what I was supposed to do.
It was … not a good time.
The guys I was dating weren’t book smart.
But I am.
So when one of them started complaining about the SATs—about how school was boring and pointless—I felt stuck.
What was I supposed to do?
Say I loved learning?
Mention my 1490?
Pretend I wasn’t proud of my own brain?
I could already see it: the shift in his posture, the way his interest in me would evaporate the second he realized I wasn’t going to stroke his ego.
So I stayed silent. Nodded along. And felt a part of myself shrivel up and die.
It wasn’t the first time I made myself smaller for a man, nor was it the last, but it was one of the most visceral.
That date was the first time I fully realized what I had been taught all along:
Success and likability weren’t meant to coexist.
That was the lesson, right? Shrink yourself or be alone.
Thankfully, my parents raised me to ignore that bullshit.
Raising three daughters—something people always assumed disappointed my dad (rude. Spoiler: he wasn’t)—my parents steered us down the “you are strong, smart, and capable” path rather than the “be good and quiet and stay in the kitchen” path.
My dad is a software engineer, and believing the message that I could do anything, from an early age I wanted to do what he did.
It helped that I was pretty good at math and science.
“You’re good at things that make money,” my parents said when I had occasional flights of fancy, imagining myself as a professional ballerina or a historian. “Do what makes you money, and have all the hobbies you want.”
It was sound advice.
So, as choosing a college and major crept closer, I knew I was making the right choice by sticking to my childhood dream of doing what my dad did.
I chose Computational Science as my major, where I met the woman who would quickly become one of my very best friends, and we suffered in computational hell together, earning our degrees with blood, sweat and tears … so many tears!
After graduating, we went into similar professions, which I’m grateful for every day.
Who else could I complain with about having to babysit the transfer of nearly 8 Gigabytes of data over VPN for nearly a whole day just to update my product's build composition? Or curse with when the software management people hop on and change our Java versions, and suddenly nothing works anymore?
And of course, who else can I complain with when I’m being belittled or sexually harassed? Because yes, it happens. It happens more often and more casually than I ever wanted to imagine.
Just like I grew up knowing I wanted to be a software engineer like my dad, I grew up knowing I was going to be harassed at work.
I knew that at some point, I was going to have to decide whether to go to HR or stay quiet because some man decided the workplace was the perfect place to make some sort of move.
Why was I so sure?
For a while, I wanted to believe harassment and assault were rare.
But by high school, I already had friends who had been assaulted.
By college, I had lost count.
I wasn’t safe. I was just next.
And I didn’t stay an anomaly for long. Before I left college, I had my own story.
Then, I graduated and joined the workforce. Knowing it was inevitable didn’t make it less terrifying.
If you’ve read my piece Fictional Justice, you already know the story of Ernie.
In short, it was sexual harassment.
In an insane stroke of luck, I had a great management team who not only believed me, but stood up for me. Not even 8 hours after telling my manager the disturbing story, Ernie was no longer associated with the company.
Now, Ernie was an extreme situation (though not the most extreme), but what I really want to focus on are the even less extreme cases. The things we hear about and can explain away with things like “Oh he didn’t mean anything by it,” or “He was just being nice, you took it wrong.”
I want to talk about the things women experience in the workplace that are so casual and common that they’re dismissed, and as a result, unaddressed and perpetuated.
I had one such experience today.
For my work, I need a different badge for everything, and this morning featured me walking into another obscure building to get yet another badge.
The setup was sort of like a bank—a thick pane of glass, a tiny microphone, terrible sound quality.
Between the security beeping and the voices behind me, I practically had to lip-read the people behind the glass.
I was managing to muddle through, handing over the proper paperwork and identification. Easy enough.
Then it got harder.
“Hmm hmm hm hmmm hm hmm,” this man said.
Ok that’s not what he said, but it’s what I heard.
“What?” I asked, tilting my head.
“HMM HMM HM HMMM HM HMM,” he repeated.
“I can barely hear you,” I said.
Instead of coming closer to the crappy microphone, or even gesturing like in charades, this man rolled his eyes, sighed, and walked out from behind the glass to confront me.
He was a tad more polite as he directed me to sit in a particular spot to have my photo taken.
As I was sitting, he did something both confounding and totally normal:
He smiled down at me, patted my arm a couple times, and said, “There we go, sorry about that.”
And he took his place again behind the glass.
What the hell?
It happened before I could react. Before I could snatch my arm away, before I could tell him not to touch me.
My stomach flipped. Heat crawled up my spine. I wanted to tell him to keep his hands to himself.
Instead, I sat there. Looked toward the camera. Had my picture taken. Waited for my badge.
And then I left.
The whole drive back, my brain looped through the usual excuses. He was just apologizing. It was harmless. It’s not a big deal.
I was just “There, there, little lady”-ed, I thought to myself.
This instance by itself isn’t necessarily a big deal. I don’t think this man is evil or a bad dude. I think he may even have been genuinely apologizing for his rude behavior earlier.
But it’s the small things like this that prime us to dismiss and excuse the bigger things later.
With Ernie, I made excuses for his behavior. I convinced myself that it wasn’t that bad, he was just being friendly, maybe he wasn’t my sort of guy, but that didn’t make him or his behavior bad.
But actually, his behavior was bad. It just took me a few days to let myself realize it.
And why did it take me so long? And why did I excuse him in the first place?
Because of situations like the badge guy—the small ones that seem harmless, so we brush them away.
Every time we excuse bad behavior, we make it easier to excuse again.
That’s how patterns work. That’s how our brains work.
We make self-doubt a reflex.
And then one day, you’re sitting in a car with a man like Ernie, convincing yourself he’s just being friendly.
We need to prepare ourselves to be certain and to stand up for ourselves.
This doesn’t mean calling every man who does anything at all suspect a predator or an abuser.
This doesn’t mean screaming at every little thing.
It means pointing out the small things.
I wish I had spoken up to that badge guy and said, “Thanks for the apology, but I’d appreciate it if you didn’t touch me without permission.”
Calling out behavior doesn’t have to be big or loud. It just has to happen.
Still, it sucks that we have to think and live this way.
I’m a professional, a software engineer who’s praised by every team I work on. I win multiple awards a year for the work I do, and yet this stranger thought it was his place to treat me like a wild horse who was getting too antsy.
Or maybe just treat me like a woman.
I’ve dealt with a lot of things related to being a woman in the tech industry:
Sexual harassment
Demeaning jokes about women and gay people
Old men trying to get me to do their job for them
Not having a women’s restroom on site (while being on my period … that was NOT fun)
In the grand scheme of things, a condescending remark and some pats on my arm aren’t the greatest struggle I have had to face at work, but it was certainly the weirdest because it was so normal.
And I can’t help but wonder …
Would he have done that if I were a man?
Somehow, I think not.
Ciiippphhheerrr, maybe you whine. Not EVERYTHING is a gender thing!
Oh my young padawan, but it is.
The thing is, this isn’t just about one man in one room with one moment of misplaced condescension. It’s about something bigger. Something older. Something that has been with us from the beginning.
You see, what is sex if not the first “othering” of humans?
The idea that women should be seen, handled, or treated differently isn’t just cultural—it’s ancient. It predates everything else we use to divide ourselves. And like all things that have been around forever, it’s insidious as hell.
Before we were global enough to travel the world and see different cultures, ethnicities, religions, and anything else we could construe as a difference between “us” and “them,” there was man and woman.
People who gave birth, and people who didn’t.
And it all spiraled from there.
Gender became a tool of oppression, the first of its kind. Sure, we can argue all day about whether it was necessary for human advancement, if it ever could’ve been any other way, blah blah blah. And honestly, I may even agree with you on a lot of it.
But that doesn’t change the facts of present day.
However and whyever gender as an oppressive construct happened, it happened.
It was perpetuated over tens of thousands of years, and here we are, stuck with more of it in 2025 than I would've thought possible, given how hard women have worked to equalize it.
The “gender thing” runs so deep that even staunch feminists like myself struggle with internalized gaslighting.
A man made me feel uncomfortable and belittled, and my first instinct wasn’t anger. It was to excuse him.
That’s the real danger—the way the smallest slights pile up, training us to shrink, to doubt, to let it slide.
Until we stop excusing the small things, we will never stop the big ones.
In a world where 'I can be anything,' I am still a little lady who’s in over her head.
But go on. Tell me again how feminism has gone too far.
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