At a dinner party to celebrate a friend’s accomplishments, I met a retired mechanical engineer who had a wealth of experience in mining, on oil rigs, in designing mechanisms, and generally working in engineering.
Before we had gotten all the “and what do you do” meet and greet questions out of the way, this engineer started a story about this “nice lady engineer” he hired long ago. It went something like this, “Oh, this lady, this lady engineer… she was the nicest, sweetest person that I ever got to work with. When we first brought her in and were looking at her resume, wow, it was stellar. 4.0 GPA and all these honors across the board, I had to ask her if she ever made mistakes! Turns out at her college if you didn’t like your grade in a class you could retake it and they would only record the higher grade. She said she once took piano as a lark, got a B, and had to retake it to get an A to keep the 4.0 going!”
Yes, that was the story he remembered about his former colleague – a couple things really stand out to me from this:
- she was a “NICE LADY ENGINEER”. First and foremost, a NICE LADY before being an ENGINEER. Hmmm…
- he didn’t remember a story about her from work, about something she designed or a fire she put out in the workplace… instead he remembered and focused on a cute story about her education, which emphasized her perfection and “sweetness.”
- This is totally, totally, totally, NOT ME or most of the female engineers I know. In fact, just earlier on the same day, I had a related conversation with an old coworker who was explaining to me how I am remembered in our former workplace. She quoted my former intern’s words: “She was nasty… the good nasty.”
I am not a NICE LADY engineer… instead I am a NASTY WOMAN engineer.. and I am totally okay with that, especially since it’s the good nasty, after all ;).
When I started working, I was stuck thinking that I had to be nice all the time – that people had to perceive me as SWEET and NICE for me to be able to fit in and assimilate in the workplace. Of course, that veneer of sweetness was short-lived as stress levels rose, responsibility increased, and fecal matter hit the fan in all the projects under my purview. My true nature surfaced: curt, short, and cut-the-bullshit-direct to enable me to deal efficiently with the never-ending shit storm… and I know that’s what I am remembered for, above all. The ability to get things done despite my low-level position and beyond what people expected from me. I couldn’t have done any of that – I could not have excelled at my job – had I still been preoccupied with being a “nice lady.”
Engineers are frequently not “nice” – why would they be? Instead, engineers are passionate – so passionate that meetings get dragged on endlessly to debate minute details that only engineers would actually care about… so passionate that design engineers frequently get over-invested in their design concepts and refuse to see the flaws…. so passionate that engineers set up mini-shops in their homes to do more engineering at home, as a hobby (what other professions do that?). I mean, if you had to choose just one attribute required for all engineers, wouldn’t you pick passion over niceness? Passion gets you through the long hours and serious lows, way past the stage of “nice.” Passion is what makes you stick to your guns and follow through with your good idea while you simultaneously bash someone else’s.* Sure, passion can bring conflict and resulting “nastiness” — but at least it’s from a genuine place. And if it does get remembered as nasty…rest assured that it’s way better this way than being a “nice lady.”
* intentional sarcasm… heh heh.
