Thoughts from the Grace Hopper Conference (2024)

This past week I attended the Grace Hopper Conference (GHC). My original motivations for attending were that 1) as a 3rd year PhD student, I was yet to attend a conference (due to timing of qualifying exams, illnesses, and having things to present about), 2) I won free registration, and 3) one of my best friends lives in Philly, where the conference was being held, and I could stay with her. However, it ended up being a very eye-opening and informative experience, if not exactly for the reasons I expected.

One of the conversations I had that keeps resurfacing in my mind was with two women who worked at YouTube in London. They joined me at a table outside of the convention center where the conference was being held to eat and take pictures with their lunches. In addition to being cool and worldly (Francesca was from Italy and Maria from Venezuela), both of them were down to earth and honest. When we were discussing the size of the conference and just how many people were there, Maria said something along the lines of, “Yeah, you think you’re special as a Latina woman in tech. But then you come here and realize there’s a million others just like you.”

This made me think of a line from one of the amazing movies my boyfriend still needs to see(!!), The Incredibles. In the movie, there’s a young boy named Buddy who greatly looks up to the main character of the movie, a superhero known as Mr. Incredible. After Mr. Incredible rejects Buddy when Buddy asks to be his sidekick, Buddy goes on to become a supervillain called Syndrome who kills off established superheroes one by one and whose powers consist of highly advanced weapons/wearable tech he’s developed. Anyway, there’s a point in the movie where Syndrome has captured Mr. Incredible and is monologuing about how one day, he plans to sell his technology to regular people so that everyone can become superheroes. Then he says the line Maria got me thinking about: “And when everyone’s super… no one will be.”

I’ve thought about this line a lot a lot as I’ve reflected on how I sometimes felt special when I was the only girl in one of my classes. But the feeling of being special and unique was really only dominant when I wasn’t thinking about feeling not listened to or avoided. When I would explain ideas and my male group members wouldn’t make eye contact, my dominant feelings were frustration and wishing there were more girls in the room, not celebrating my uniqueness.

As I write that, there’s two things I want to clarify. 1) More guys that I interacted with in the mechanical engineering department at Georgia Tech than not were perfectly fine at treating me like a normal person. It was a minority that seemed to treat me differently than male classmates. 2) I definitely do believe we should be encouraging women to enter fields they were traditionally barred from participating in, or even showing interest in. But remember, Syndrome was the villain in The Incredibles (that might be more due to his tendency to kill off superheroes and his prioritization of making himself look good AND THEN pursuing egalitarianism, but still). And from Maria’s comment and my own feelings of special-ness that I’ve experienced, it is just an interesting thing to recognize that you, as one of the minority people in the area, do lose some of that special-ness feeling as more people like you join the field. But maybe that feeling wasn’t coming from a very good place anyway. What does it mean to feel special because other people that look like you either didn’t have the same interests or the same opportunities to get to where you are?