My thesis instructor very specifically told me that the project that I wanted to pursue, which was centered around food preparation, was not "serious" or "innovative" enough, while totally being ok with the non-educational games that people in my thesis class were making. I thought that getting out of school would change this, but oh wow, did it not.

I went to work at a startup right after graduation, and while I applied for a job as a coder, I was hired as a sales rep because they thought it would be a waste not to use my "talents" in a client facing capacity. I hated sales, have super phone phobia, and despite, I guess, being pretty and in my mid-20s and blonde, did not feel comfortable doing this at all, but I had 80K in student debt, so I took it.

My hiring was only the beginning of the sexual harassment that I faced from my bosses, as well as from the coders in the company, and one of my bosses spent a lot of time telling me what I should wear, which almost always included shorter skirts and higher heels, to client meetings. And then when I wasn't meeting the production numbers he wanted because, surprise, I'm not good at sales, I was bullied and gossiped about.

I left the tech field entirely after that, really bruised and soured on the whole thing, and went into the arts and have never looked back. While there's plenty of misogyny in every field, what I experienced in tech is hardly unique to me, and it's hardly an experience that, I am sure, a lot of people on here have experienced and don't really want to deal with every day. So yeah, un-CWed tech toots flooding my TL sucks.

And I also don't want to trigger people who've been chewed up and spat out, because I don't want to participate in any part of the oppressive machinery.

But... I worry that this means that the only face tech presents here will be the unfriendly face that rejects CWs and thinks that if you can't deal with stuff you should just get off the internet -- and that will *also* play a role in perpetuating the oppressive divide.

Is there a way to be techy *and* welcoming?

Thots?

@woozle Is CWing somehow hiding your toots? Like, why not just CW them? A handful of people (some of whom are, I believe, white cis-men, even!) do it, and it doesn't seem to hurt their interactions with anyone.

The idea that it's more important to make a presentation than to honor people's sensitivities applies no matter the topic.

@woozle That is, it's not a great idea. (Sorry for the confusing structure of that previous sentence.)

@SuzanEraslan
...and thank you for relating your unfortunate experiences, and I'm sorry (and angry) that you were treated that way.

I think I'm partly somewhere in between the anger and denial phases about the fact that this STILL HAPPENS; hence knee-jerk questioning of the necessity for CWs.

But yes.

(Speaking of tech... wouldn't it be nice to have an auto-CW option in Mastodon, where posts are CW by default and won't let you post w/out a CW description?)

@woozle OMG, I would LOVE that last option! I CW stuff most of the time, anyway, just because I kind of like being able to title stuff-- I feel like I honestly read *more* toots with CWs than I do those without, because it's a time saver! "Ooooh, I like dogs! I like selfies! I feel like reading about assistive tech today! I'm in the headspace to handle being angry about homophobia!" Otherwise, I generally scroll past if it's more than a single sentence, if I'm honest.

@woozle And thank you for your support-- as I said to someone else, I'm lucky that tech wasn't my dream, but that I went into it as a way to expand my toolbox as an artist, so walking away was purely a relief for me and didn't feel like I was surrendering my long held dream. But it makes me sad to think of all the stuff that tech is missing out on because it lacks non-masculine perspectives.

@woozle My focus in grad school was on wearable tech, and when Google glass came out, my immediate thought was, "Wow, could they have MADE this any uglier and unwearable?"

@SuzanEraslan Related to accessibility-in-tech is the way a lot of open-source coders seem to think everybody should ultimately use the command line for everything, and GUI is just for marketing or something. They don't understand that even a lot of very technically-oriented people (such as myself) with bad working memories really *need* GUI in order to be productive, even if we can do a lot of stuff on a command line when required.

@woozle Yeah, that totally makes sense-- I tended to love really low level code more than higher level stuff for sort of the same reasons that I love working with hardware more than any kind of coding. The more complex and higher level a language gets for me, the more I start drowning in the text.

@SuzanEraslan hee -- I remember writing this arty-looking line-drawing thing directly in debug.exe, back in the early 1980s. That was huge fun, once I was able to get it working. To have full control of the hardware like that.. magic.

@SuzanEraslan That's a fair point. I certainly don't take the view that it makes them unavailable. I guess I'm... reflexively assuming that anyone who feels triggered by tech would see "tech" in the CW and skip on past...

...but then again, if they know me as being generally a friendly, non-kyriarchy-supporting kind of person, maybe they won't.

I *will* try to make a point of CWing tech stuff from now on.

@woozle It's also just a matter of, yeah, sometimes I'm totally fine with it and I still have an armchair curiosity of what's going on in that world, you know? But the constant barrage of it puts me back in that world-- like I'm in a room full of dudes who are going to, for instance, put their drunk arm around me at a work function and tell me that they're interested in sleeping with me like it was just on offer and all they had to do was mention it.

@SuzanEraslan <grimace/cringe> This makes me want to go take a shower just thinking about it. If I *ever* come across that kind of behavior in any of my spaces...

@woozle I hope you won't take offense to my use of the word here, but Guuurrrrrllll... you better throw those creeps out.

It's really nice to hear someone saying, clearly, that they will make sure that behavior isn't tolerated in their communities, because the response I got from other women in my program when this happened to me and I talked about it? "Well, you have slept with 2 people in our program." IN 2 YEARS, ONE OF WHOM WAS MY LONGTERM BF.

@SuzanEraslan I identify more as "girl" than "woman" anyway, so no offense taken ;-)

And yeah, no, I do not tolerate intolerance. https://issuepedia.org/Tolerance_of_intolerance

Exactly what does sleeping with people have to do with sexism, I would ask...

Oh, right! It's a convenient double-standard used to dismiss any complaints that women might have, thus covertly aiding the cause of sexists everywhere while still seeming "reasonable". I must have forgotten for a moment.

@woozle HA HA HA HA HA HA HA, yeah, wow, it's so easy to forget when stuff is totally unreasonable BS.