In the United States, visible minorities who choose to enroll in computer science at university represent between 7% and 12% of all enrollments. Not enough! With such under-representation, it’s very common for there to be only one marginalized person per team or even in the whole company.
Being the only representative of your identification group brings its share of unpleasant situations. Here are a few examples.
The weight of representation
When you’re the sole representative of a group, you end up representing the whole group, whether you like it or not. Let’s take the example of someone from the LGBTQ2S+ community. You become the reference for what the whole community thinks, likes and wants in life. “You, you’re gay, tell us what you think about such and such a case!” That’s the kind of question asked.
It’s called tokenism, which means imposing the burden on one person to represent all the other members of their group. It’s a very heavy responsibility, and one that she hasn’t necessarily chosen.
Perpetual questioning
In an article for Medium, Elizabeth Grace Becker talks about how hard it is to walk into a room full of men, knowing they’re all going to ask her lots of technical questions to prove she belongs. “I do everything I can by preparing as much as I can. I look back and analyze myself,” she says.
It’s draining always having to prove to others that you’re credible in your profession. Especially when you realize that other employees aren’t treated the same way. Stephanie Volftsunest is the technical manager of an all-female technology startup. She remembers the days when she worked with men only. “It was harder for me to earn the same respect as my male colleagues,” she stresses. Studies prove that the toxic world of technology is one of the reasons why women leave the industry.
Stress levels
According to a study by Indiana University, being a woman in a male-dominated environment increases stress levels. Researchers wanted to know how cortisol – the stress hormone that regulates changes in our bodies, such as blood sugar levels, metabolisms and immunity to disease – fluctuates in different situations. They observed that women had less healthy cortisol levels as a result of negative working conditions. The study indicates that these stress levels are specifically linked to interpersonal stress, as opposed to job or personality stress.
“You don’t look like an engineer”
Ellen Leanse is a Silicon Valley pioneer. She joined Apple in 1981, then worked at Google and is now a professor at Stanford University. She told an anecdote: she’s walking down the street in Palo Alto wearing a sweater from a previous event at Google. She meets a man wearing the same shirt. They stop dead in their tracks and look at each other. “Are you an engineer?” she asks him. “You work in human resources,” he replies.
Is this an isolated case? Far from it!
Here’s another anecdote from Ciara Byrne, a machine learning researcher. “Once, in a bar, a guy explained to me, using very simple words, what a bug was. Last week, at a developer meeting, someone asked me what I was doing there and I had to explain that I had given the introductory talk.”
Then there’s the time I attended a lecture on artificial intelligence given by PhD candidate Gita Ghiasi Hafezi and the first comment was from a man. “This is wrong,” he said. Pity…
We only show part of our personality
Lindsay Grizzard was the only developer on her team. She tried very hard to fit in and blend in with the dominant culture, even if it meant leaving out a part of herself that didn’t fit in with the majority.
“I became “one of the boys”, so to speak, which meant talking only about video games and Dungeons & Dragons – which I can do without a problem because I’m a nerd – but those were the only conversations I had. I couldn’t expose more than half my personality,” she recounted.
What happens when you can’t be yourself? You put on a shell and spend a lot of energy pretending to be someone else instead of being yourself.
