Oooo to be a black woman in a supposedly male dominated field where all your co-workers are male and the higher ups are white. Whoo chile. They justified paying me less because "I didn't have the experience," even though I had been performing "information security" related work for seven years and had seven years worth of institutional knowledge, meaning when shit broke they all came to me to fix it.
When I was finally promoted into an official info sec position, my seven years with the company LEADING their SOC suddenly didn't matter. I was instantly deemed unknowledgable like I was some noob off the street. They wouldn't even give me the "Infosec Engineer" title. They slotted me into some other BS title with a lower pay band. I missed out on bonuses and pay bumps my co-workers got simply because I didnt have the same title despite doing the same exact work. My direct supervisor at the time, an asian male, fought hard for me but ultimately lost. His words to me, "touch all you can touch learn all you can learn, then get hell out of here" he knew I was being shafted by his bosses, moreso because I was a woman and "info sec is sooo hard" but I'm sure my race played into it as well.
My co-worker another asian male had my back as well. He told me how the higher ups (supervisor's bosses) would question him in his one on ones about my performance, they asked if he felt I was meeting the challenges of the job. He thought the questions were bullshit because I was more than pulling my own weight and brought knowledge from my previous position with me about their systems and processes they didn't even have.
Then came the intern. White male, senior in college only job he ever had in his 18-19 years was at a hardware store. They decided to hire him. No one questioned his ability to meet the challenges of the job, no one treated him like he didn't know what the hell he was doing, even though he didn't. They gave him the info sec title and the salary to go with it then asked me to train his ass. I found out he was making significantly more than me because he blabbed to my co-worker and my co-worker pulled me aside and told me, because the unfairness of it pissed him off.
I went to the EEOC, I chose not to fuck with HR because I didn't believe they would have my back. EEOC pretty much told me there was nothing they could do. So I planned my exit. Found another job making more than the intern and left. My last two weeks these people were scrambling to get me to write guides and instructions and shit so they could cover my tasks because they didn't know how to do them. I wanted to be like fuck ya'll but I didn't want to leave my co-worker in the lerch because he looked out for me and I appreciated that.
But yeah. It was very demoralizing. It made me question my own abilities, if maybe I was overestimating them. Thank God I had people looking out for me who were like "no its not you, its them". I learned a very valuable lesson about my worth and not letting anyones bigotry dictate that. But that experience definitely broke my rose colored glasses, I was super niave and I'm now I'm hyper wary and aware of how the sexism and racism of white male leadership can affect my fucking livelihood.
More people in places of privilege need to challenge and speak out about this shit when they see it happening.
germansingergirl
baratheonpilled
romaincrisis
jbbartram-illu
izzy806
snowghoul
dailybridgerton
