Tell me about the women engineers you respect professionally
I am struggling with female role models in tech. Opening this post for constructive, helpful advice. Can people please share their experience with women engineers whom they respect and whose advice they value? How did the woman engineer earn your professional trust and respect? When she gives her opinions that may be against popular advice or against your gut feeling, what compels you to stop and listen? What about her communication style is able to reach you?
Hedi Lamar
This has to be my first time seeing “white American”
I cannot comment about women engineers but I can give you an example from women in IT consulting world. I am a male and my first mentor in the consulting world was women. She had immense experience of the industry and applications that everybody stood and listened to her. I credit her with all my success in my career. She has very plain sense of dressing and very normal communication style. But, she always lead by setting examples herself. IMHO, I will respect person who is humble, has rich industry experience and very straight forward way of communication. Also, I will not listen/like male if that person will throw attitude and speak BS.
Male here. Infrastructure architect I once worked with, sort of my mentor, was an Indian woman. She completely owned her area of work - knows how to fix, makes suggestions to improve, answers questions immediately. No nonsense communication. She, in turn, considered Neha Narkhede a role model. Never met her, but apparently used to read her responses on the Kafka forums/groups back in the day, and the engineering rigor of answers was more than enough to admire her.
Neha from LinkedIn I think
Yes. Same.
I had tears in my eyes when I ran into Radia Perlman at a conference. I had so few technical women in front of me, for essentially my entire career. It's great to identify with someone, to see that it was/is possible for women to create amazing things.
(Male here) Female engineers/Professors have always been instrumental to my career so far. My Research advisor was a newly minted PhD from MIT when I joined her group, and she is easily the smartest person I have seen in my life. My best friend (female) is one of the best engineers I have seen in my life- she helped me prep for internship interviews and took review sessions for all the classes we took together in grad school (kind of owe my degree to her). The smartest person in my internship at LinkedIn was a female (ML engineer). I love to be mentored by females because unlike (many) men, they don't treat you as competition and are very kind hearted. However I feel a little uneasy with your question. What does gender have to do with role models? I am a male but consider Marissa as my role model (still trying to pull off that 130 hour week) apart from many other males and females.
And to answer the rest of your questions- the only way to earn my respect is by being smarter than I am. Gender doesn't matter for me.
So how does she prove herself smarter than you?
Why not go to the next Grace Hopper to meet some women in tech and hear their stories?
I did go there. There are random women there, I am specifically looking for women engineers that people respect professionally and trust their professional judgement. If she told you to do something that you were not sure of, you would do it her way because you respect and trust her advice.
All of them? I respect all of them because they’re human beings and everyone deserves respect. However, a few, about 2, lost my respect. But that’s a different topic.
Thanks. I am specifically asking about professional respect and trust for their professional judgement
Remember Jeri Ellsworth? She was awesome