The Privilege of Being Oblivious
Some working environments are too uncomfortable to be ignored.
By Mel Chua
When discussing how to attract more women to engineering, it is often said that women don’t want to “just focus on the tech stuff.” They want to “do humanitarian work that makes a difference in the world.” But in my teenage years, I would have vastly preferred to “just focus on the tech stuff.” I wanted to choose the privilege of being oblivious and keeping my head down and immersing myself in the beauty — the sheer beauty! — of STEM for STEM’s sake. I didn’t become an electrical-computer engineer to work on educational technology or hearing aids. As my former roommate put it, “I just geek out about nerdy stuff, OK?”
But I couldn’t “just geek out.” The environments where I was trying to learn and do “nerdy stuff” were socio-technically broken in a way that made it hard for me (as a disabled minority woman, among other things) to join in. If I wanted to become part of the technical community, I had to start by fixing the technical community. For instance, meeting facilitators often forgot I was deaf and had to rely on lipreading. So I started stepping up to run meetings, and interruptions dropped, quiet people started speaking, notes got taken for remotees…meetings improved for everyone.
To simply exist inside engineering, I had to terraform it. But when you’re manufacturing the air you need to breathe, you don’t have energy to do much else. I got a reputation for building technical communities, but all I wanted was to belong to one. “It’s great to leave a legacy helping future postdocs,” one classmate explained, about to leave a technical position where she had campaigned for maternity leave. “But I didn’t come here to be a social crusader. I came here to do research.” Successful start-up founders have noted that it was easier to start a company than to be treated properly at any existing one they could find. It shouldn’t be this way. Diversity is not the responsibility of “the diverse.”
It felt like I could only enter the makerspace as the community-clean-up crew. Part of me resented that, but…at least I was in the building, right? I also saw my “community work” make it possible for others to enter and do the things they wanted to do — the same things I wanted to do. By the age of 23, I’d consciously decided to let my own STEM learning slide so I could make theirs possible. I am good at “community work” and did come to genuinely love it, over time. I also found that when I drifted toward “humanitarian” projects, the social environments tended to be healthier. There were fewer issues, I met less resistance when I went to patch them, and people recognized and valued community labor instead of looking down on me for not writing code full time.
But if I had the choice, I would have never gone into “community work.” I would have focused on “shiny tech stuff” that didn’t save the world at all. I would not do community-facilitation-anything, and I would not be thoughtful about women or minorities or disabilities or any underprivileged group in engineering. I would be oblivious to all my privilege. I’d be a kernel hacker, or an embedded geek, or something “hard-core technical” – because I could be.
I have always wondered what I might have grown up into, if I had learned STEM in an environment that was ready for me — without my having to fix it first.
Mel Chua is a Ph.D. student in engineering education at Purdue University. She would like to thank Kristen Dorsey, Janet Tsai, Juliana Bernalostos-Boy, Pearl Donohoo-Vallett, AnnMaria De Mars, Deb Chachra, and others for their contributions to this essay.