This article was originally drafted in 2024 but I struggled to finish it then. I was stuck wondering if I was just moaning over the past. Recently, Salma and Jo both shared thoughts that gave me the rage and energy to come back to this. Today is the day I finally have the courage to publish.

I can’t recall how many times I thought of writing something like this. I thought of riding certain waves inspired by other authors but most times the embarrassment got the best of me. During those waves this post could have been titled “When I leave tech”, “I’m still a woman in tech” etc. But today it is called “It's 2026 and women are still asked to teach others to think a little bit and not be a prick”. Temporary title.

Some weeks ago I went to a tech meet-up and one of the talks was about being a woman in tech and I am finally ready to put into words why I sat through it so uncomfortably.

It was a great speaker and everything they said was absolutely true and accurate. But I was annoyed that in 2024 we still have to teach people how to have basic human kindness, empathy, compassion and just not being a fucking prick. I was annoyed that, once again, a woman did that labour.

For every slide that brought an example of discrimination that happens, I recalled something I had either witnessed or experienced. It brought back many bad memories that I’ve tried my best to repress. It covered many examples that an HR training titled “how not to be a prick and avoid getting us sued” would cover but it mostly avoided one particular topic.

So the following isn’t a criticism to the speaker at all, or to anyone who has ever done a talk about the realities of being a woman in tech but, I have to address the elephant in the room:

A big part of the problems women in tech have is co-workers hitting on them. And the problems begin when those co-workers are rejected. And we can’t have a big slide saying “women who reject romantic advances from co-workers face retaliation nearly all the time”.

So I was just sitting there, nodding and agreeing that women are often dismissed, overlooked or ignored at work, especially if they are also caregivers in their personal life, while thinking about all the shitty things I also went through because I was once young and vaguely attractive.

But now that I am much older (I mean invisible), wiser and a lot more able to stand-up for myself (I mean I can afford to lawyer up) I can vaguely share how shitty it was to a woman in tech before it was shitty to be a woman in tech in a post-pandemic AI gobbling powered tech landscape. I could go on in very detail but it would be a really depressing post.

I started working in tech straight out of University and I would have been 21 years old. I was very junior and inexperienced with real-life complex websites. Physically, I carried a baby face for a little while so I actually looked young. I knew I was very junior and I really wanted to keep a job. I grew up poor in Portugal and all my life so far was hearing every day from my parents how we had zero money, hearing about the financial crash and how it left my dad unemployed for a very long time, Troika, and how no one my age could get a job at the time. I really wanted to do well at my first job. This was also seemingly the only place hiring around. I wanted to do well and be liked. I imagine now how some 30+ male co-workers could smell my naivety like a shark in bloody waters.

Once in a while there would be chocolates on my desk, inappropriate unprompted messages sharing how sad they were to go home to their partners, drunk messages, all sorts of accusations, gossip and giggles if I was nice back to anyone. But “it’s best not to rock the boat when you know there’s no other jobs out there” I thought. I had my own hiccups at the time. Like I said, I was quite junior but I was also met with a lot of cruelty and a lot of people thought I didn’t deserve to be there so they treated me as such. The money to employ me wasn’t coming out of their own pockets but they acted like it was. I also had the typical mistreatment for being a woman: if someone asked a question and I answered, they deemed that answer wrong by default, for example. Any compliments or encouragement from men, were met with “he only said that because you’re a woman” comments from other men. I was never going to win so for a long time I kept smiling, being easygoing and surviving.

It’s hard to switch from this mentally when you grew up afraid, unsupported and full of shame. This people-pleasing trait I had stayed with me for many years, even when switching jobs. This was okay enough to keep me afloat but not when it came to rejecting romantic advances. That’s when, of course, eventually, someone takes things badly.

In male dominated fields, especially when there’s lots of them, statistically, the bad apples are there and they make your life a living hell. From suddenly getting poor performance reviews, to punishing everyone who is friendly with you so that you are isolated, to even making odd comments about what you did in your free time which implies a level of stalking and eventually, not allowing you to own features at work so that the poor performance accusations can have legs.

You see, most people think sexual harassment is a creepy guy just putting their hands on your shoulders and try to massage you. That’s what the HR training slides show with the stock pictures right? But for me, it was mostly retaliation.

And when I changed jobs, a new batch of unknown enemies would spawn. There’s nothing like starting a new job and going through onboarding with a male colleague and everything is going great until he asks “so, do you have a boyfriend?” and you know exactly what’s going to happen next. Half of the time, they would immediately stop being nice to me. No more bare minimum human kindness. No more answering my questions without implying I am an idiot. For them, I am not a colleague who will contribute to work. I am an object and if I am not single, I am of no use. And where do you turn after this? After all, they are the x10 developer that knows the whole codebase and they are super valuable and the HR person is also the office admin who claims we are all a happy family.

It’s undeniable (and normal) that people meet their partners at work. That’s how I met my husband. So this isn’t about that. And, as we all know, there is no patriarchy without women. The other type of bullying that surprised me was when co-workers perceived me as a romantic threat. That’s a pickle in any social situation but at work it has devastating consequences too. And when that wasn’t the reason for their bullying, other male centered reasons thrived. I’ve had women talk me down and micromanage every single thing I did disguised as care but it was all down to their bias, hatred, shame and fear. Turns out my strategy of trying to be generally likable was a threat to some. Retaliation soon begins too.

Sometime in 2013, I had the courage to interject in a conversation I was, technically a part of, where I was the only woman in. This was happening while everyone was working on their computers in our little team island. They were, as you do in bro-locker-room-culture, talking about honking their car if they see, what they perceived to be, a fit woman walking on the street. I, twenty-two years old then, said “well, don’t do that. That’s really scary”.

“Why? If I like what I see, I honk”, said the (probably close to his 30s) co-worker.

“Why do you have to do that?” I asked.

“Because. So that they know” he said, shrugging his shoulders.

“Okay, we don’t know if you’re going to stop your car and do something to us” I tried explaining while having my heart broken realising who I was dealing with.

“Okay, well I am not going to do that”

“Okay, and I don't know that!”

“But I am not!”

“For a very similar reason, I try to avoid getting in the lift alone with strange men”

“Really? That’s fucking weird” He laughed.

Almost everyone involved (and deliberately quiet too) in this conversation has had daughters since. I wonder if their views have changed.

And as I wrote this shitty real dialogue, I realised that we still fucking need women in tech talks being forcibly fed in javascript meet-ups because the fucking bare minimum probably doesn’t exist in their heads at all. Maybe we need to talk about the shitty things that they do rather than the things we have to do to stay and survive in the tech industry.

I’ve never had any harassment / basic human kindness HR training at a job. So far, I’ve only seen descriptions of that being retold on the internet as a meme or in a Code of Conduct at tech events that most people scroll past. But tech companies (and their parents) clearly are not teaching “heyyyyy bestie can you please not be a monster / creep / prick?” so of course that labour is going to fall on a woman in her free time at a tech meet-up.

We have to spoon feed bare minimum and many times, they just don’t want to get it. I saw the faces around me during this talk. I saw many of them zoning out and on their phones.

But of course, our advice to women in tech is to lean-in!! Get a mentor!! Put yourself out there!! Work for free!! Be quiet!! Be the glue!!! Smile!! Be agreeable!!

No! Here’s an idea: let’s teach how to fucking gather the evidence of harassment and bullying and use the law to full extent to push HR to do something about the rockstars. Maybe, many years ago, many people would have learned a few lessons if I had the money and support to do so then. Because now I only live with hatred and disgust every time some of those people still, for a fucking wild reason or just lack of self awareness, try to engage with me on social media.

I can’t believe I am finally at a job where nothing bad of the sort has ever happened. So, at least there’s some hope. But, my god, how much I worry now wondering if there’s young women out there stuck in the same financial situation I was in the early 2010s because of AI layoffs and the manosphere and still putting up with this crap.