Diversity and Gender Quotas

I have noticed recently that I’ve been getting a lot of attention from prominent tech companies for senior engineering management roles. My friend and I were talking about it today and we spoke about an email that I received recently that mentioned gender and diversity as being the key drivers for their interest in me… my friend asked me how I felt knowing that it is the reason why I’m being approached. It made me think of how I started.?

I come from more humble beginnings than many would know. When I was a child, my father moved jobs a lot. So every two years I was a new girl in a new school.?Being quite the chubby girl I was easy to pick on. I think we all know how brutal school children can be, and so school years were very tough for me. I remember being chased around the school with children beating my legs with sticks as they found them too fat. I asked my mum one day how can I make it stop. All the bullying that was hurting my soul. She said something that would change the entire ethos of my life. She said that in order to be free of them, you need to be the best. The brightest shining student in your class that everyone can recognise and no one can beat. They won’t be able to touch you then. I took those words as religion and spent my life striving to be the top of every class in every school. She was right, there was something I couldn’t be beaten on. No one can subdue an unconquerable mind.?

I chose Software Engineering as a profession because of the potential employment prospects in Pakistan. In that world, you only get a job when you know someone who knows someone. Reeking of nepotism and corruption is every industry including tech. After getting my MSc. degree from the UK, I went back to Pakistan and desperately tried to find a job. The men (and they were all men) were more interested in staring down my body than my actual ability. I would go into an interview with all the enthusiasm in the world and then endure men staring at my chest the whole time instead of listening. I felt ashamed, disrespected and disgusted. Eventually, I decided to return to England and try my luck finding a job here.?

I remember being called in a company based in London for my first job interview. I was so nervous and excited. You’ve got the job, they said. But you can’t start straight away. You need to do some training and for that you need to deposit some money that would be our insurance to give you the training. Naive and inexperienced, I paid them the money, and got scammed out of the entire ￡500 I had with me at the time.?

For three months, I lived with a Pakistani family in London who took money as rent and gave me a rat infested floor to sleep on without a mattress. Day after day, I would be trembling out of fear every night and go through phases of depression and self pity. I didn’t give up still.?

As luck would have it, I got myself an interview in a company in Bournemouth. For the first time after university I got treated fairly and assessed on my ability. I started my job as a Graduate and I couldn’t have been happier.?

In the years that I worked as a Software Engineer in various companies, I came across a strange behaviour amongst the engineering community. Needless to say, Engineering is a male dominated industry. I believe there are more reasons for that then just low number of female engineering candidates. The biggest and most damaging is the treatment of female engineers in software companies. In my experience, and of the women I spoke to, women are treated as mentally inferior, confused and less talented than their male counterparts. When I was a graduate engineer, I volunteered for a lot of roles within teams focused on knowledge sharing, training, and quality. Instead of being appreciated for going the extra mile, I was criticised for wanting to do admin instead of my engineering job. My stats were ahead of my male counterparts who didn’t try to communicate or make things better. But they got all the credit. In important projects, when I was paired with a man of less or similar level of experience as me, they were always given the responsibility of making the decisions. Sometimes to the detriment of the project itself.?

I have been ridiculed, insulted and bullied all through my career as a software engineer. Some making fun of my keenness to do better as being desperate. All this is disappointing I know,?but even through it all, no one could ever question my work ethic, my knowledge of the domain or the technology, the quality of my contribution, or the results that I brought every single time.?

The story is not all doom and gloom. I have had some major successes in my career too. One of the best decisions I made was to come back to 288 Group. A place that allowed me to flourish and treated me with respect. I am appreciated, and my opinions are heard. ?

So, coming back to where I started. When my friend asked me how I felt, I told him ‘It feels great’. I know the hustle to overcome the hurdles, the constant and relentless persistence and grit it demands.?And when the colour of your skin and your sex is not being used against you but working for you, for a change, that’s an excellent place to be.?

Perhaps this is a message to everyone who might have been noticed due to a gender or diversity quota. We must not forget that it is you who overcame the constant uphill battle against preconceived notions, and unjustified treatment in the first place. If you have been given a chance, take it all in. Today is yours for a change. Until the next hustle begins. Onwards and upwards…