Yesterday I showed up for an engineering meeting to find that it had been canceled some 2 hours prior. The organizer apologized and re-got my number so that it won’t happen again. But I have to wonder… will it?

That feeling of showing up and realizing I wasn’t in the know brought back some related unpleasant memories from my last engineering company. Reliving them now still makes me ANGRY… incredulous… stupefied… disappointed. I was left out of critical meetings, left off of critical emails, unintentionally excluded from so many things, so many times that it stopped being forgivable.

Each time I pointed it out there was always surprise from supervisors and colleagues: “You weren’t invited to this meeting I’m headed to? We need you there, come with me now!” or “You didn’t hear about the huge problem in China everyone else was freaking out about last night? I can’t believe you were left off of this huge email chain about it, because its your responsibility to fix it.” or “Haven’t you seen the new design for this critical mechanism? Everyone’s talking about it.”  It was so often no, no, no, no, I didn’t hear about it, no one told me, I wasn’t included, I wasn’t invited, but now I need you tell me about it quickly so I can get caught up and on the level with what actually is going on in this madhouse so I can now deal with it and do my effing job.

Most of the time I attributed the oversight to ignorance instead of malice – I am young, okay, and was in an nontraditional role (systems engineer) which many of the traditional mechanical-electrical-software folks were not used to dealing with. But after a couple years with the same folks, I mean SERIOUSLY? I was the ONLY systems engineer… I worked on a core team with only 5 other folks…I was very active and did a LOT of shit for the team and the company… yet only about 2 out of 5 gradually learned to remember me while the others consistently, repeatedly, (pointedly?) forgot.

I hadn’t realized how much it was driving me crazy until one day – I will not soon forget – it was an 8:30am meeting to triage a huge in-production design problem. We were reviewing a new design solution when everyone in the room began referencing something I had not seen nor heard of. Even the INTERNS in the room were in the know and participating in the discussion while I pondered, stupidly, if I had misunderstood the few drawings I had seen or if, once again, I had been left out of the preparation and content of the meeting entirely. A friend noticed my confusion, pulled up his email and showed me what he had received the day before – details, drawings, calculations, explanation, test results of the new design–!!! ARGH!!!  yeah, no shit that would be super helpful to actually participate and do my friggin job!

I totally cracked… why were the interns included when I wasn’t? Looking back, I can almost justify it thinking that the interns had performed some of the tests and were directly involved, okay, but still — WHY couldn’t they have included me too? WHY was it so hard for them to remember that I was there? I SAT NEXT TO THEM! Was I truly invisible? Why did the managers leave me out and refuse to use mailing lists so everyone would be included? Was it because I didn’t do a good job?  Did they respect the opinion and input of the interns more than me despite 3 years of living/breathing/smoking the product in all stages? Why did this happen all the time? If they knew enough to invite me to the meeting, why didn’t they include me on the necessary info?

I snapped… I picked up a plastic part of the product and threw it, hard, on the table in front of the mechanical engineering manager who I clashed horns with most frequently. It was HIS interns who were in the know. As I hurled it in front of him, I started vehemently crying and screamed, “I’M ON YOUR TEAM! I’M ON YOUR FUCKING TEAM!! WHY DON’T YOU INCLUDE ME!!!” This was at approximately 8:47 am on a Thursday morning. I had been at work for less than an hour. In that time, I had reached a total public meltdown and reacted violently. But I’m not a psychopath, I swear! Or at least I wasn’t until I started working in engineering……

It became a sort of a joke afterwards. I remember telling close coworkers later that afternoon about what had happened in my morning breakdown. In some ways I felt triumphant because I finally got the question out in a way that could not be ignored. None of my friends were much surprised that I had reacted as I did though – they knew my frustrations and lived them too.  Meanwhile, the professional relationship with the mechanical engineering manager had already been pretty terse but now sank to unprecedented levels of fake-niceness and general assholery. He still left me off of emails and meeting invites, but made a really big deal out of the the ones he included me on. Yeah… thanks for that, jackass. The rest of the core team and my manager thought it was mostly funny, and indicative of the overall “stress level” the team was under.

WHEW… so what does this mean now? It reminds me of a study referenced by Virginia Valian in her book Why So Slow: the Advancement of Women. [See also the "The Advancement of Women in Science and Engineering" Report to the Chemical Scientists Roundtable available online and crudely excerpted here]:

As a result of gender schemas that portray women as less professionally competent and ambitious than men, women end up with less information and less public notice than do men. Compared to men, women have less access to informal routes of information and are less likely to be given opportunities by their superiors to receive public notice. For example, a [1996] study of the Johns Hopkins University Department of Medicine within the School of Medicine demonstrated that senior faculty were six times as likely to suggest names of junior male faculty rather than female faculty to chair conference sessions. Qualified junior women were also less likely to be identified as candidates for promotion compared with qualified junior men (1). Thus, women are not as likely to be identified as star material, and as their careers continue they become less and less likely to be perceived as important scientific contributors to their field.

It should be emphasized that the claim here is about tendencies. Not every woman will experience problems. Even women who do experience problems will not experience them at every point in their career. Rather, on average, women will have more difficulty than men do.

(1) Fried, L.P., et al. (1996). Career development for women in academic medicine: Multiple interventions in a department of medicine. Journal of the American Medical Association, 276, 898-905.

It helps a little bit to see my past experiences through the lens of gender schemas and probabilistic tendencies, but it’s still disappointing. How do we make a change? What can I do to make sure I am not forgotten again? How to I ensure that it is my name that comes to mind when colleagues and supervisors are creating distribution lists or recommending for promotions?

In the short term, I’ll doublecheck with a friend to make sure that someone has my back in keeping me in the loop on meeting cancellations and the like. In the long term, I am still experimenting and dreaming of solutions. It has been almost one full year since my product-throwing escapade, and I am happy to report that I have not hucked any innocent robotic products towards any humans since.

[Virginia Valian, Ph.D. Distinguished Professor, Department of Psychology--Hunter College]
[Amazon.com - Why So Slow: The Advancement of Women by Virginia Valian]
[The Advancement of Women in Science and Engineering - A Workshop Report to the Chemical Sciences Roundtable (2000) by Virginia Valian]

A couple of weeks ago I attended a friend’s office holiday party as his date (we will call this friend Simon for anonymity purposes, and also because Firefly references amuse me). We work in the same industry, so I know many of the people at his company, previously worked for one of the company’s co-founders, and can talk shop with the best of them. Seldom in the history of office Christmas parties has a date actually been legitimately interested in attending — we figured this would work out well.

And for the most part, it did. Simon did a great job of introducing me to his coworkers and mentioning my background, so I had some great conversations with them.

But a handful of people didn’t react so well. There seemed to be a kind of automatic blind spot for their coworker’s dates. They’d brought their dates with them, but after the initial introductions, I was ignored — presumably so we women could chat amongst ourselves. The most egregious situation, though, was one in which a guy I was introduced to had heard of another company I’d worked for and had a ton of questions about it, which he eagerly asked — to Simon. And every time Simon said “You should ask Kaylee — I mean, she’s the one that worked there” and I would speak up, the guy would ignore me and keep asking Simon the questions.

After we walked away from this conversation, Simon and I had a good laugh over what we found to be a classic case of sexism.

But then later, while we were seated with some interns, my former boss came over to say hi. I was a little flustered, since I hadn’t really seen this guy since I’d left his company, so we traded niceties, talked about my new job, he took my picture to send to some friends at his office, and then he got up and left.

As he left and I was congratulating myself on not being THAT flustered, Simon said something like “Wow, he just did not want to talk to me.” I asked what he meant. “Well,” he said, “I kept trying to jump in to the conversation, but he just ignored me and talked to you.” I immediately started kicking myself for not having had the presence of mind to introduce him — as he’d so consistently done for me at the rest of the party — but then he said, “Man. It really sucks to feel like an arm charm.”

Simon is an excellent feminist in his own right so I’ve never felt like he really needed a “told you so!” moment. But generally speaking, I feel like moments like this are really important for our guy friends to have. We can rant and rave all we want, and the good friends will listen, but actually experiencing a crappy feeling from being ignored in a reverse gender dynamic situation is a much more powerful thing. I feel bad that my cluelessness in the situation put Simon in this awkward spot; but in a way, I’m a little glad that he really gets how, even when we can step back and laugh at it, it really does indeed suck to feel like an arm charm.