Our Chief Engineering Officer, Natalie Glance, shared some of her formative experiences growing up and how this impacted her professional path. We're so glad she proved them wrong. 💚 #duolingo #womenintech #engineering
I often get asked about my experience working in tech as a woman. But really the formative moments happen much earlier than in the workplace; they happen growing up as a girl. They come from the media, they come from your parents, from teachers and from your friends. Some of these experiences are positive and life-changing and some are negative and influential in a way that gets buried deep, in the same way that other childhood experiences get buried. What was life-changing in a positive way was my parents’ influence: they instilled in me a love of learning from a very early age. My dad was the one who taught me math. When I was five, he taught me rudimentary algebra and soon had me solving (very easy) systems of linear equations. A few years later, I remember watching him sketch out a visual explanation to the concept of integration for my brother who was taking calculus and thinking “oh, that makes sense.” I loved math; I loved the “aha” moment of solving a hard problem or understanding a new concept. In fifth grade, my school had me take an IQ test and a math assessment. They told me that I was ready for algebra and I was thrilled. But it wasn’t until seventh grade that I actually got to take algebra; in the meantime, they had me self-study pre-algebra in the library during math period in sixth grade. Then in seventh grade I took the SATs as part of a Johns Hopkins study to identify students with “exceptional mathematical ability.” I did well enough to be invited to the annual recognition ceremony. At the ceremony, they shared statistics from the past several years: the only children to get perfect math scores were boys. They also shared study results purporting to explain why this was so: apparently, boys’ brains were better at visual reasoning than girls’ and this meant that girls could never be at the top of the distribution. This wasn’t just society telling me I’d never be as good at math as the boys – it was an apparently rigorous scientific result. I remember thinking: how am I supposed to disprove that? I’m only one person – it’s unlikely that I would be the girl to prove them wrong and be as good as the strongest boys. Even if I ended up being the best at math in my school (which I was) or win the math contest for my county (which I did), odds were good that I’d never be competitive at the national level (which I wasn’t). As adults, we rationally know that it's very hard to be the token person who has to prove the worth of their group. But it doesn’t start in the workplace. It starts much, much earlier than that, and that sense of being “less than” is buried deep. It’s only years and years later, now that I’m telling this story, that it occurs to me that those scientific results could be flawed. It’s not surprising I didn’t get a perfect score on the math SATs when I was 12. The test assumed knowledge of algebra and geometry, and I was only midway through learning algebra – nothing to do with my so-called girl brain.