“People don’t take me seriously because I’m a girl,” I said to a friend about the computer science graduate seminar we were taking my junior year of college.
“People don’t take you seriously because you talk like a Valley Girl,” he said. Subtlety was not his strong suit, but he had a point. I sounded like I belonged at the mall in Los Angeles, not in a computer science class at Harvard.
What a revelation: People discriminated against me not because of my gender, but because of behaviors associated with my gender. Since then, as I am often the only woman in the room at work, I have learned to adapt my behaviors to be taken more seriously. Of course, it would be ideal if people accepted women as they were, but expectations and biases do not change overnight. In the meantime, here are some lessons I have learned during the many years of my PhD program in computer science, a field that is only 20% women.
Find out more about these effective communication tips for women here.
