Originally a series of Tweets published June 14, 2019, probablyduring a tech conference
Dear women engineers: I am truly, deeply tired of hearing you complain about how terrible it is to be mistaken for anything other than an engineer. And God forbid anyone should imagine for a second that you work in (shudder)… marketing. 1/
You know what that is? It’s you playing straight into the PATRIARCHY. You have clawed your way to the top of the male-dominated tech hierarchy, and now you don’t want to be associated with “the girly stuff.” 2/
In the early days of CD recording, Incat Systems –- a small company in Milan, Italy –- captured most of the OEM CD-R software market, but also wanted to sell directly to consumers. This required us to provide technical support, with a small staff, from our Milan office.
To help meet that need, I became a pioneer in using online communications tools to interact with customers. There is no single innovation I can claim to have developed; I experimented with evolving and overlapping uses of new platforms and means of communication as they became available.
August, 2024: I’m coming up on the tenth anniversary of when I was diagnosed with breast cancer, and nine years since active treatment (surgery, chemo, radiation) ended. Since then I’ve been taking tamoxifen to suppress estrogen in my body because mine was a hormone-sensitive cancer.
In the early months and years, I feared that I would spend the rest of my life constantly aware that I was under the shadow of death in the form of recurrence. But that awareness faded sooner than I’d expected. Perhaps humans aren’t equipped to be constantly considering our own mortality.
Most of the time I didn’t think about cancer anymore. When it came up, I had a rote patter that I would go through: “I had breast cancer x years ago, it’s been x years since active treatment ended, and at the five-year mark it was considered cured.” As my routine checkups dwindled from quarterly to annually, I had fewer reminders.
I began wearing glasses for nearsightedness at age eight or nine – I was the classic kid who couldn’t read the blackboard, back when children were not as routinely tested for vision problems. My vision got continually worse over my lifetime; I was accustomed to needing new glasses every year. At least my near vision was okay – until I hit middle age when, like everyone else, I also began to lose the ability to focus close up (presbyopia). Around 2008 I began wearing progressive trifocals, which gave me clear vision at a range of distances. It was never perfect correction – I had trouble reading street signs while driving, for example.
I had long been under observation and treatment for high pressure in my eyes, to make sure that this didn’t develop into glaucoma. For many years this was controllable with eyedrops, but after a while any given formula tends to stop working. My ophthalmologist tried me on several different kinds over ten years, but my choices are limited by a severe allergy to one whole family of these drugs – I spent about a month wanting to rip my eyeballs out to stop the pain and itching before we figured that out.
You’re at a tech conference, one that you are attending as a tech professional with interest and expertise in the subject matter. You’re standing talking to a man – perhaps he’s a speaker whose talk you just heard, or someone with influence in your field, or you have any other professional reason to speak with him. There you are, deep in conversation, when another man suddenly swoops in and starts talking to the man you are talking to, about a completely different topic, as if he didn’t even notice you were there.
Usually, he is allowed to completely disrupt the conversation you were having. Your original interlocutor may not even notice that you were interrupted. If he does, he may throw a sheepish look at you, while going on listening and responding to the interrupter. You wait patiently until the interrupter finishes and goes away (possibly without ever acknowledging your presence), then finally resume your own conversation. No one thinks anything unusual has happened.
