She changes a flat tyre. \u201cYou did that yourself?\u201d<\/p>\n
She mounts a television. \u201cAh ah\u2026 you know how to fix things?\u201d<\/p>\n
She writes code. \u201cYou\u2019re really good at this thing o\u2026 for a woman.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
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 \u2013 surprise.<\/p>\n
And that surprise is the real story.<\/p>\n
Internalised misogyny doesn\u2019t always show up as open hostility. It\u2019s not always someone saying women can\u2019t do something. Sometimes it\u2019s softer. It shows up in lowered expectations. In widened eyes. In the way ordinary competence becomes extraordinary simply because a woman did it.<\/p>\n
And nowhere does this play out more subtly than in tech.<\/p>\n
We don\u2019t say \u201cmen in tech.\u201d<\/p>\n
We don\u2019t say \u201cmale engineer.\u201d<\/p>\n
We don\u2019t headline conference panels as \u201cMen Leading Innovation.\u201d<\/p>\n
But \u201cwomen in tech\u201d has become a category of its own.<\/p>\n
Now, let\u2019s 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\u2026 additions. Guests. Exceptions.<\/p>\n
The phrase starts to sound empowering, but it can also carry bias baked into it. A technical jargon shaped in bias.<\/p>\n
Think about the surprise effect:<\/p>\n
\u201cYou understand backend architecture?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYou led the deployment?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYou built that?\u201d<\/p>\n
And then there are the compliments that feel like upgrades:<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019re not like other women.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYou think like a man.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cMost women don\u2019t even like technical things.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Even women themselves repeat these lines, sometimes unknowingly, when teams laugh along, when organisations platform \u201cexceptional women\u201d without interrogating why they are seen as exceptional.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s 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\u2019t.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s the thing: technical skill is not masculine, logic is not masculine, leadership is not masculine and competence has no gender.<\/p>\n
So maybe the shift isn\u2019t about removing the phrase \u201cwomen in tech.\u201d Maybe it\u2019s about how we hold it. Maybe it\u2019s about getting to a place where it doesn\u2019t feel like a special category. Where it doesn\u2019t carry surprise. Where it doesn\u2019t need an asterisk.<\/p>\n
Maybe the goal is this:<\/p>\n
She built it. She fixed it. She led it. She deployed it. \u2013 Full Stop<\/strong>.<\/p>\n No raised eyebrows, no shock, no qualifying praise, just normal.<\/p>\n The moment we stop treating women\u2019s competence as extraordinary is the moment we stop suggesting it ever was. And that, is real progress.<\/p>\n Ire o.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" She changes a flat tyre. \u201cYou did that yourself?\u201d She mounts a television. \u201cAh ah\u2026 you know how to fix things?\u201d She writes code. \u201cYou\u2019re really good at this thing o\u2026 for a woman.\u201d These are usually said with a smile. Sometimes even admiration. It sounds like encouragement. But if you sit with it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":9993,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[80,33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9992","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-career-story","category-features"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.heirsholdings.com\/hhpeople\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9992","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.heirsholdings.com\/hhpeople\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.heirsholdings.com\/hhpeople\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.heirsholdings.com\/hhpeople\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.heirsholdings.com\/hhpeople\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9992"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.heirsholdings.com\/hhpeople\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9992\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9995,"href":"https:\/\/www.heirsholdings.com\/hhpeople\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9992\/revisions\/9995"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.heirsholdings.com\/hhpeople\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9993"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.heirsholdings.com\/hhpeople\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9992"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.heirsholdings.com\/hhpeople\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9992"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.heirsholdings.com\/hhpeople\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9992"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}