Our field is one of constant change and upheaval

I worry that as a community we are not doing enough to empower our future peers to navigate and direct this change in positive ways. I worry that new developments will continue to uphold—possibly even reinforce—the structures and biases that serve to exclude and oppress people in underprivileged groups, not just within STEM and engineering, but in society as a whole. Throughout my career, I have repeatedly found an unwillingness to question the status quo, and I believe the only resolution to this is twofold: we need to establish a more diverse set of people in every subfield of computer science, and we need to empower STEM learners on ethical issues before they enter the field.

My nearly eight years at NVIDIA working in the Compilers Organization have been instrumental not only to my development as a professional Software Engineer, but they also allowed me to build skills that help me work independently on research-style projects. I could go into far greater detail about what that means and how it qualifies me to speak on this matter, but to be honest I am not sure it adds anything to my argument or whether it is simply playing respectability politics.

Unfortunately, much of my technical work at NVIDIA has been undermined by having a largely negative experience with our industry thus far, as I have had to work so much harder personally from the emotional labor of being not only a woman, but a trans woman. Coming out and transitioning publicly at my company has not been easy, as the company’s apolitical stance is regularly twisted into unchecked tolerance for hate speech. Eventually the legal and political pressure around my body became too great and I felt forced to leave my home in Texas and move, which unfortunately required an exhausting months-long fight for relocation approval from my organization. In essence, the company was prioritizing the team’s work output above my own personal safety. After finally moving to Boston, people would ask why I moved and unintentionally unearth the aftershocks of these workplace conversations: I struggled to form responses that fully kept my anger contained. With the benefit of hindsight, it likely would have been

Years later—once I had taken over the internal NVIDIA Pride and Trans advocacy groups—I would personally meet with our CEO, Jensen Huang, to advocate policy changes making it easier for employees to move in cases where they feel afraid of persecution of themselves or their families. As part of that same meeting, I also successfully lobby to update our Reasonable Accommodations policy such that employees could have religious-style exception accommodations to projects that employees feel is causing harm, as was the case for transgender employees who were being pressured to work on Hogwarts Legacy.

However, although I could fight to change policy or support behind the scenes, leadership at the company continues to believe it has a fiduciary mandate to stay apolitical, which will always be the undoing of inclusion. It seems as though only conservative politics can dictate corporate policy at tech companies. I have been repeatedly told that leadership will never make statements showing their support of trans employees out of fear they would alienate the very people actively doing us harm. The feelings of cis coworkers are routinely prioritized over the protections of trans employees. Despite being willing to make these invisible changes in support of their trans employees, simple asks such as ensuring that intentional deadnaming (calling a trans person by their name from before they transitioned) is treated as harassment became a seemingly impossible request—one that I had to fight for over two years before seeing changed.

Institutionalized trans panic may have captured the American zeitgeist but the experience of fearing simply for being is hardly unique to being a trans woman, and this oppression affects every underrepresented minority group at nearly all large tech companies in the United States. Training, hiring, and maintaining diversity continues to be seen as being a controversial, expensive, and unproductive side project which operates as an opposing force to the central work being done at the company, instead of being a core component of it. Meanwhile, these attitudes hide under the guise that computing is exact and unbiased, all while implementing systems which are further advancing inequalities in our lived and inexact world.

This attitude is not only incorrect, it is actively dangerous.

Rather than allowing this added emotional labor of advocacy work to turn me away from the field, my desire to make the industry better through the human aspects blossomed. I felt driven to discover better ways to implement effective change in our shared STEM community, and I firmly believe the only way forward is to ensure future members of our field are more empowered to address bias and discrimination. Efforts in computer systems education to show that ethical computing issues are an integrated component of engineering as a practice are only just being explored, and I believe significantly more work is needed. Unfortunately, this focus on civic mindedness was absent from the engineering education available to me at my alma mater, as well as the majority of other colleges and universities today.

The other large critique I have given to Rose-Hulman’s computer science department (and have felt expressed by graduates of countless other Universities) is the lack of access through their computing programs to the more specialized areas of the field. The more specific a course’s subject becomes—be it computer vision, high-performance computing, cryptography, compilers, or computer architecture—the longer the required prerequisite course-chain becomes to reach it. This is frequently true regardless of whether the material in the prerequisite course is even meaningfully required in the class, as universities commonly determine prerequisite courses based on how sections of our field were discovered as opposed to whether material will be actually be additive to student learning. Often it is an expectation that learners will need to pursue a masters degree in order to enter these fields, and this restriction has the discriminatory effect of limiting field access to students financially privileged enough to afford this secondary degree. Research has further shown that complex curriculums in general exclude students from underrepresented groups.

So what should we do about it? Well, I wish I had more to say. I firmly believe that the only solutions here can come from a shift in the way we teach Computer Science, however, I am not sure I have a perfect answer here outside of a demand that we try.

Having showed you this full mosaic of myself, I worry that my application would have more success if I had obscured certain parts of it. As a transgender woman, I will forever question the internal biases of those in positions to judge me. Further, in my experience of our industry, the very act of stating my concerns with the ethical direction of this field seems to carry the implication that I do so out of my inability to do “real engineering work”, which is to say work that generates revenue above all else. It is as if my own experiences of discrimination and harassment become evidence to others that I somehow deserved it. In reality, this is clearly confirmation of the biases that believe ethical discussions run counter to the true mission of the field. If the primary goal of engineering is not to better the world for all, we have a responsibility to both ourselves and the world to rectify this immediately.