She changes a flat tyre. “You did that yourself?”
She mounts a television. “Ah ah… you know how to fix things?”
She writes code. “You’re really good at this thing o… for a woman.”
These are usually said with a smile. Sometimes even admiration. It sounds like encouragement. But if you sit with it for a second, you will notice something else sitting underneath it – surprise.
And that surprise is the real story.
Internalised misogyny doesn’t always show up as open hostility. It’s not always someone saying women can’t do something. Sometimes it’s softer. It shows up in lowered expectations. In widened eyes. In the way ordinary competence becomes extraordinary simply because a woman did it.
And nowhere does this play out more subtly than in tech.
We don’t say “men in tech.”
We don’t say “male engineer.”
We don’t headline conference panels as “Men Leading Innovation.”
But “women in tech” has become a category of its own.
Now, let’s be clear, visibility matters. Representation matters. Community matters. But language also shapes perception. And when we constantly attach gender to technical competence, we quietly reinforce the idea that tech is male by default and women are just… additions. Guests. Exceptions.
The phrase starts to sound empowering, but it can also carry bias baked into it. A technical jargon shaped in bias.
Think about the surprise effect:
“You understand backend architecture?”
“You led the deployment?”
“You built that?”
And then there are the compliments that feel like upgrades:
“You’re not like other women.”
“You think like a man.”
“Most women don’t even like technical things.”
They try to elevate one woman by quietly diminishing the rest. They reward her for fitting into a male-coded standard instead of questioning why competence was coded male in the first place.
Even women themselves repeat these lines, sometimes unknowingly, when teams laugh along, when organisations platform “exceptional women” without interrogating why they are seen as exceptional.
That’s how internalised misogyny sustains itself, not just through men, but through culture, through jokes, through language, through casual comments that seem harmless but keep reinforcing who belongs and who doesn’t.
Here’s the thing: technical skill is not masculine, logic is not masculine, leadership is not masculine and competence has no gender.
So maybe the shift isn’t about removing the phrase “women in tech.” Maybe it’s about how we hold it. Maybe it’s about getting to a place where it doesn’t feel like a special category. Where it doesn’t carry surprise. Where it doesn’t need an asterisk.
Maybe the goal is this:
She built it. She fixed it. She led it. She deployed it. – Full Stop.
No raised eyebrows, no shock, no qualifying praise, just normal.
The moment we stop treating women’s competence as extraordinary is the moment we stop suggesting it ever was. And that, is real progress.
Ire o.
