Being a CS Girl in a World That Did Not Expect You

There is this moment I keep coming back to. I was sitting in my first algorithms class, and the professor asked us to pair up for a coding exercise. The guy next to me turned to his other side first. Just like that. No drama, no words. Just turned away.

I remember thinking: okay. Fine. I will just figure it out myself.

And honestly? That ended up being the theme of my whole CS journey.

. . .

I did not grow up seeing women who looked like me in tech. The movies showed us hoodies and boys in basements. The textbooks had no faces at all. When I told my relatives I was studying computer science, half of them asked if I meant "computer teacher." The other half just nodded politely and changed the subject.

I am not saying this for sympathy. I am saying it because I think a lot of girls in tech have had that exact conversation at some family dinner, and nobody really talks about how quietly exhausting it is.

. . .

The thing about being a woman in CS is that you are constantly doing two jobs at once.

There is the actual job: writing code, debugging for three hours only to find you missed a semicolon, learning new frameworks, pulling the late nights. And then there is the invisible job: proving that you belong there. Answering questions that your male classmates never get asked. Smiling through the "oh, you actually know how to code?" moments. Being twice as prepared so that when you speak, no one second guesses you.

It wears you down in ways that are really hard to explain to someone who has never had to do it.

Me waiting for someone to acknowledge my pull request was valid all along. (via Giphy)

. . .

But here is what nobody tells you about being a CS girl either.

The friendships you build with the other women in your program are unlike anything else. We find each other somehow, in the back rows of lecture halls and the quiet corners of labs at midnight. We share notes and job leads and the particular kind of tired that comes from being underestimated all week. We celebrate each other loudly. That feels radical in spaces where we are often expected to compete.

. . .

I travel a lot now. And one of my favorite things is meeting women in tech from completely different places and realizing we all have the same stories. The internship where someone assumed you were in HR. The code review where your perfectly valid suggestion was ignored until a guy said it five minutes later. The way you have learned to own every room you walk into even when your heart is pounding.

We are everywhere. We are building things. We are not going anywhere.

. . .

If you are a girl thinking about CS, or already in it and wondering if it gets better: it does. Not because the world magically changes, but because you figure out who you are inside it. You learn to trust your instincts. You stop waiting for permission to call yourself a developer, an engineer, a programmer. You find your people. And your people will surprise you constantly.

. . .

One day, you are the one in the front row, and some younger girl walks in looking the way you used to look. A little uncertain, a lot capable. And you make space. You move over. You say: sit here.

That is the whole job, really.