In a Panel of women in tech we had 3 generations 20 years in, 10 years and just about to start. The fascinating part of it was that in all the questions and all the themes it all varied depending on where you were in your career. Were you jaded and frustrated, were you questioning yourself and your experiences, or were you just excited as you looked towards your future. I could see myself in all the comments. The fear of being judged lesser because I was a women, the fear that I would get special treatment or be dismissed because I was a women, and the fear that I wasn’t good enough.
We are taught from the first day of school work hard, study, get A’s and you will move up to the next grade. And yet 20 years into my career, and witnessing lesser people get promoted, I have realized its not really that way. There are “other” factors that we are not taught during the course of our education, why some people progress and others move slowly. Those I saw promoted before me, I knew what they were capable of, I knew what their work output was, and of course I am more capable, work more than them, see more than them, do more than them, have greater breadth, etc. But what I have yet to understand is the why. I am to discover more of that this year in 2019 as I experiment and socially engineer opportunities for myself.