For the past year, I’ve worked at a tiny tech company in small, east coast city. I’m the only female full-time employee, and the only one in tech. I was hired as a content writer but I chose this job because while my then-recently-earned college degree wasn’t in IS or computer science, I had discovered an interest in (and aptitude for) programming and my hiring manager told me I would be able to work on small dev stuff eventually. Cut to about 10 months later and our (very poorly-performing mediocre white dude) UX designer is laid off. My manager, overall a very cool dude confident in my HTML/CSS/JS abilities, offers to let me do our previous UX designer’s job for a big upcoming project. I’m thrilled, but the only caveat is that nobody outside the dev team is allowed to know I’m doing the work. You see, his boss -the president of our 10 person company- would flip out if he knew a woman was doing anything REMOTELY resembling coding. For the past two months I’ve been doing two jobs (and whatever stupid girl-Friday type task the company’s president throws at me on a daily basis) while male devs on my team get praise for my work. My boss says he’ll tell the president that I did the work after it’s done and our client likes it. That way the president won’t prevent me from finishing my work. The dudes in my company- including my boss- hate that the president treats me like a bimbo secretary, but everyone is unable to do anything about it. Oh, and I get paid a fraction of what my predecessor made. I never believed that women today still experienced this kind of sexism until I took this job. I’m more stressed than I can remember, and I took care of a terminally-ill family for four years while in college.
