Women in S.T.E.M., how do you cope with the lack of female colleagues on your job/college? Do you find it stressfull?

5 comments

1. I actually enjoy it a ton. Although my field is male dominated I still work with lots of women.
   The work is stressful itself not because of my colleagues.
   I’m also the type of person who goes to work to work and not make friends to hang out outside of work. I still really enjoy my coworkers but I don’t get involved in any work drama or things like that.

2. I’m an engineer.

   I changed jobs recently and the lack of women at the new place is definitely a bummer. Previously I worked daily with tons of women, both as engineers and in other roles.

   Now I see 3-4 women a day and don’t work with them directly. All my immediate coworkers and supervisors are men, and the people running the process I support are too. I’m the only woman in my department, and until recently was the only female engineer on-site.

   On the flip side of that though, the GM for our site is a woman and an absolute badass. I’ve gotten to know her pretty well and she’s actively pushing for us to improve our diversity, it’s awesome.

3. I’m an engineer in the healthcare industry. For the most part it hasn’t been an issue. The people I work with everyday respect me and my work. A lot of the more administrative tasks have fallen to me and I tend to be the glue that fills in the blanks for my coworkers. Sometimes I need to prove myself more than my male colleagues just to be taken seriously. I can see the doubt in their eyes when I arrive to fix their problem or sometimes they’ll turn to my male intern instead. It gets annoying, but thankfully those situations don’t happen too often. It grinds my gears when some of my male coworkers complain about our company only hiring women, implying we’re only “diversity hires” and ignoring our qualifications. I then point out that their flawed reasoning for this claim is based on the 2 overqualified women hired two years ago while ignoring the 11 men hired since then. Sometimes it feels isolating when I’m the only woman in a room of 30 men and I don’t have much to contribute to their conversations about golf/cigars/other “manly” hobbies I have no interest in, but thankfully there are a few who try to keep me included.

4. I love it! Worked at a bank with an almost complete female environment (HR). Switched to IT with almost only men. No talking about kids, births, who is pregnant and who isn’t, when I am expecting. Just talk about sports, games or other fun stuff/hobbies. No women is a real blessing!!

5. I’m a network engineer. and it’s hard as there is some serious boys club vibes in a lot of environments. the best thing I did was find a job where they were trying to diversify. there are two of us here now and my senior, she is now an active member of the highering process. it’s a positive step in the right direction, things are changing at least