this is a bit
I am a woman, which for the most part is a visibly obvious differentiator between me and many of my peers. Several anecdotes come to mind — walking in early to a Donald Knuth guest lecture and getting asked if I was lost. Chatting with some fellow research assistants about a upcoming machine learning conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), when one of them mentioned how excited he was to attend an afterparty called “TITS.” On the first day of my software engineering internship, having someone say to me, “You’re one of the nontechnical interns, right?” — in the middle of the dev environment setup workshop, no less. Having my identity fall in the minority has made it (sometimes literally) hard to get my foot in the door. Beyond these cursory interactions, however, I have continually found myself facing hurdles due to my identity, goals, and opinions.
My parents were not pleased when I immediately fell in love with computer science after one quarter at Stanford and decided to major in it. My mom told me my social skills would go to waste and that I couldn’t be a “coder forever” because it wasn’t “ladylike.” My dad told me it would be more suitable to go into consulting or finance. I disagreed with both of them in several ways, and I had a few goals of my own. After finishing my degree, I want to create technological solutions for civic and societal issues, like modernizing the electoral system, or battling discrimination. Women are a minority in computer science, and even more so in these areas, which rarely come with the nice benefits and end-of-year bonuses that would help support my family and put my younger sister through college. At each step, I struggle to balance my personal aspirations with expectations and responsibility, whether familial or otherwise.
I have not allowed these challenges to be a barrier for me; rather, I see them as evidence that change is sorely needed. Going forward, my goal is to use my skills to work on high visibility and high impact problems, so that young women who share my passions and ambitions have someone to look up to. Last summer, as a software engineering intern at Airbnb, I built a machine learning pipeline to detect discriminatory language and product features to improve the reporting process. I hope to continue to make this kind of impact as I progress in my career, but on an even larger scale. Ultimately, I hope to equalize respect for women and respect for those wanting to do good in the tech industry by engineering solutions for real-life problems and setting an example of tangible change.
