programmer

Lucie

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Im a uni student studying ai, i’ve joined some ai student research team over the summer for some experience and money and for no reason i can see me and the other girl in the group have been moved away from programming and onto summary work. During the team meeting today i was asked what i’d been working on that week by the supervisor/lecturer, i described the ai model i’d started since the last meeting, i got asked if i was facing any errors, and i explained that passing the data to the model was giving an error at the moment, and all of a sudden i’m being told thats really simple, its only one line of code, and the guy in my group knows how to do it. I start speaking again but the guy in my group interupts (he loves interupting like dogs love licking their balls, its a short job and only have to meet the guy 4 times but i’ve never gotten through more than 2 sentances in a row without his oh so relevant input) he says my code has that line, i think this lads never seen my code he’s thinking of his own code, so i clarify to the lecturer that no my code doesn’t have that line but if thats the solution to this error then i’ll use it. Then i’m told if im finding the programming hard, i can do a summary of some research articles for him and that itd be a big help to the group. Summarising research articles is a bit of a lackey job but i get that it’s completely necessary and sometimes doing grunt work for the team can be really important, so it’s really not that i mind. It’s that these reports have already been summarised – he asked all us 6 students to summarise them for him 2 weeks ago and show him a presentation about them. AND for some reason, the only other girl in the student team was roped right in there with me on report work, he said you can summarise those 2 reports and emily can do the other 2. I acknowledge i’m not the strongest programmer in the team. I’m most definitely not the weakest though, that much should be clear from how every week i deliver a model, including how this week in the meeting what the guy in my group had done was run the model i made, which isnt much, but he’s still considered by this lecturer to be a better programmer than me and while he is a stronger programmer, he’s consistently performed poorly in this job because of his lack of team working skills making him hard to deal with. I feel shot down even though i’m a solid coder so i think i’ll make my report and do the code too just to be fantastic and maybe prove a lil something to the supervisor

Jadzia

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When I was a little girl we got a computer and my father bought computer programming publications for children. I was so excited to learn this I jumped at it and was programmed many little programs before I was in 3rd grade, I loved it. But this computer was not for me. I was punished that I was taking time away from my brother who should be learning this. Instead I was given a 17 magazine and told to stay away from the computer and learn to be pretty. Jump forward years, as a teen I did modelling, beauty pageants, focused all my effort on being pretty for boys. If a boyfriend raped me, I was kept quiet and told boys will be boys, and my mother would make comments, ‘Well now he might marry you’ as if that was all that mattered. But as all girls do, I grew up and moved out, I started university doing a pretty girl acceptable degree, artistic design. Still under the knowledge that my greatest assets were my large breasts, petite frame, and pretty face so I could land a great guy. After a lot of hard life lessons, I finally chose to go back to what I had loved as a child and do computer programming. The computer programming program was custom made for guys that had been encouraged to play with computers since children so I was years behind. I struggled and had to work twice as hard to catch up. Most my professors would make comments that I could just give up and do something else because girls can’t do it. Most often in programming classes I was the only girl, meaning I had to be paired up in computer programming projects with a guy. Everyday I had to put up with sexual comments, and slams that being a stupid girl, from my classmates. This was done in the halls, and in middle of class in front of professors. My professor would even make jokes about a girl not being able to handle programming. I tried to take it all in stride, just laughing it off. I felt bad for them for 99% of these guys were all the stereotype of what you assume a computer programmer to be, socially awkward, and the kind of boys that didn’t get attention from girls other then their moms. I thought they just didn’t know better. I thought just smiling and laughing along was showing I had a tough skin to this kind of sexism, but because of this I didn’t feel comfortable going to any of these men and asking for help. I really needed help, the professor who was my advisor would tell me to give up like the other girls, so I couldn’t go to him. Finally I thought I had a chance when one of my male classmates offered to help me catch up. I felt like I was drowning in the educational material while dealing with daily sexual, mental abuse, and crying on my drive home everyday. This classmate felt like an answer to prayers, until after a few days of helping me, he began to rape me. Using my overwhelming feelings of helplessness in this field and extreme need for any kind of assistance, to trust him and leave the open computer labs to more private areas . Every time he raped me, I would beg and plead for him to stop, cry out screaming no, and on at least a few occasions I would hear men I knew walking by and not one even opened the door to see what the noise was. The guy finally got bored of me and left me alone when we got himself a girlfriend. I made a huge effort to go into all the programming level classes below me and found the few other girls in the program and pulled them together to help each other. I still had to work with my male classmates in projects but never trusted one again. I was the first girl to graduate from this program and I folded up my graduation gown and cap, my honor ropes, and placed them in my closet never to be worn. I got my degree but when I was invited to walk in graduation with these men as I was top in my class, I refused. I wasn’t going to be put on display for those men to pat themselves on their back to point out that ‘even a girl’ could do the program. I got my degree in spite of them, I paid not just with money but in humiliation, blood, and pain just because I am girl. I have never told anyone outside of my family this but I am sharing it with you for I hope my story will change things for no human deserves to be treated this way.