My thoughts from an online discussion with other female Olin engineers on this NYT article on", edited for context. In particular, we brought up the (well-worn) claim that women don't want to "just focus on the tech stuff" and want to "do sociotechnical/humanitarian work that makes a difference in the world."

I've built my career as a "technical community person" who "thinks beyond the technology," and as a teacher and researcher of learning environments -- so this may come as a surprise to people who know and have worked with me. But if my teenage self had had her way, I would have VASTLY preferred to "just focus on the tech stuff."

As a kid, I wanted to choose the privilege of being oblivious and keeping my head down and immersing myself into the beauty -- the sheer beauty! -- and joy of STEM for STEM's sake. I didn't become an ECE to work on educational computers or hearing aids or anything like that. As my friend (and former roommate) Kristen Dorsey said, "I just geek out about nerdy stuff, OK?"

But I couldn't "just geek out about nerdy stuff." The environments where I was trying to "learn about nerdy stuff" were sociotechnically broken in a way that made it hard for me (as a disabled minority woman, among other things) to join in. If I wanted to even start being part of the technical community, I had to start by fixing the technical community -- patching the roof and fixing the plumbing, so to speak -- before I could even walk inside and start to live there. And when I patched the leaking roof, I patched the roof for everyone, and other people who needed non-leaky roofs to be in the community could now... be in the community as well!

For instance, I got really, really good at facilitating meetings because it was the only way I had to make meetings accessible to me -- when other people facilitated meetings, they'd often forget I need to lipread, so... I just quietly started leading them myself, and ended up making meetings work better for everyone. And I found that when I drifted towards "humanitarian" projects, the people there were much more conscious of sociotechnical things and more likely to have already-healthy environments, so I would have less leaky roofs to patch, and less resistance when I tried to patch the roofs -- and people actually recognized and valued roof-patching labor instead of looking down on me for not writing code full-time.

After a while of patching roofs and unclogging toilets and plastering the rotten drywall, I got a reputation in industry for being really, really good at open-source software/hardware (technical) community facilitation. It's almost as if I could only enter the makerspace as a janitor. And part of me resented that, but never said so. But, I told myself, at least I was in the building. And I saw that my "janitorial" work made it possible for other people to enter the building and do the things they wanted to do -- which were often the things I wanted to do, too! -- and so I thought: okay. That's okay. At least somebody gets to do it. I can see my gift to the community doing so much good, that I will give up my desire to learn and do the technical things -- so I let my own STEM learning slide. I am good at "community work," and I did come to genuinely love it, over time.

But if I had the choice, I would have never gone into "community work." I would have chosen -- if I had the choice -- to focus on "shiny tech stuff" that... didn't save the world at all. If my teenage self had had her way, I would not do community-facilitation-anything, I would not be thoughtful about women or minorities or disabilities or any underprivileged group in engineering... I would be oblivious to all my privilege. I'd be a kernel hacker, or an embedded geek, or something "hardcore technical," Because I could be.

But I didn't have the wherewithal (or the desire) to shovel all the stuff out of the way that I would have to do in order to do that. If you think of "caring/environmental labor" as a sort of tax some people have to pay in order to get to "learning/doing technical things," my tax rate has always just been too frickin' high.

So I have been "the full-time community person who is ridiculously good at tech stuff that she no longer gets to do," instead of "the technical person who understands and listens to and cares about inclusion and community." Because I cannot not patch a leaky roof. But I have always wondered what I might have grown up into, if I had learned STEM in an environment that was ready for me -- without me having to fix it first.