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Moral implications of being moderately successful computer scientist and a woman

I recently reached a few high points in my career that coincided, not coincidentally, with some of the worst harassment of my life. It made me reflect on how my career has been defined as much in terms of misogyny as technical excellence (I’ve garnered quite a CV in both), and how I have struggled t

Thus, when women break this norm (i.e., by demanding authority, recognition, space and not providing goods that men feel entitled to like domestic, emotional and mental labor), they are in the wrong. Before women even write a single line of code, they are already at a disadvantage: when I was 6 years old, no one would look at my pigtails and white Mary Janes and predict that I would grow up to be one of the top operating systems researchers in the world. Perhaps because women are not allowed to use “top computer scientist” as their entire identity since birth, we are better able to separate our research ideas from ourselves and coldly discuss their pros and cons.

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