Sure — a comment here or there can seem harmless. But it piles up, and sometimes it feels like you’re drowning. Somedays, the work it takes to persist is too much. There are days when I feel like I don’t belong, that I’m working double-time-and-a-half to reach the same levels of success. And I stick at engineering because I care, because I’m good at it, and because one of the things I have worked on is my confidence — but sometimes, it’s just hard.

I’M A FAKE.

A part of me still genuinely believes I am not as technically inclined as my male classmates. I am always the “manager” or the “secretary” on group projects. I self-select to do less technical work because deep down, I don’t believe I fit here. I only had one work term that was technical — all of my other work terms were “summer camp”.

And yet — in the same moment, I know that I graduated with distinction from electrical engineering last year, and am now in a graduate program in biomedical engineering. I know that I’m not stupid, and I know that I have the ability to do technical projects. But I’m still making the pretty powerpoint on group projects and avoiding prototype design — because just because you are aware of it doesn’t mean that impostor syndrome goes away.

And that is work I will be doing for the rest of my life.

I’M STUCK IN THE MIDDLE.

I don’t know if first-year Jeanie would recognize me now. At this point, I’ve adapted to a male-dominated environment and gotten good at it — I have no qualms about confidence in most situations, I can take a joke and control my temper when needed, and I find that I talk more and more to make sure that my thoughts get heard. I’ve tailored the way that I communicate to the environment in engineering, and I see it whenever I’m in a place with gender parity. When I’m in working environments that are predominantly female, I’m thrown for a loop. I find myself cutting others off, listening less, and acting more aggressively.

Some days it feels like I’m walking a fine line: when my field feels like it is actively pushing me back, but I no longer fit in more traditionally female dominated places. I’ve worked so hard to get where I am — but what was the cost?

I DON’T SEE MYSELF HERE.

It frustrates me to no end that some days I am still the only woman in the room. All of the shortlisted candidates for the new Applied Science Dean were white men. None of the current department or program heads are women. Although we have female associate deans and associate heads — that’s it. They are, quite literally, second. I look at my undergrad department of electrical and computer engineering and I can count the women instructors: 6 full faculty members, 1 emeritus professor, 2 sessionals and 1 post-doctoral fellow. This is a department which houses over 1000 undergraduate students, and has nearly 100 instructors.

This means that every single one of those women is a role model. When there are so few women, the asks to mentor, to help, to champion diversity — they’re never ending. It’s the extra, side-of-the-desk work that piles on — work that is important and critical, but work nonetheless.

I’M TIRED.

I’ve gone to industry mixer events and had an alumni trap me in a corner behind a couch and repeatedly (drunkenly) insist I go to some bar with him and his friends. This happened last year, at an event I was running. This is not an unusual occurrence: when I related it to a few of my female friends, the response was “is it really an industry event, if no creepy old alumni hits on you?” And when you think about how this is one of the few opportunities that our students are exposed to industry, to engineers in the field, outside of co-op placements — is it any wonder why retention is an issue? There are countless stories in the news about discriminatory and frankly unsafe environments in tech companies — from Google, to Uber, to academia.

It’s not just in tech. The word assault has been smeared across every news outlet this year, and last month you couldn’t move without reading a #metoo story. The President of the United States has proudly admitted to groping women. The national inquiry into Missing & Murdered Indigenous Women has been plagued with resignations, and has all but dropped off the news. Welcome to 2017, where gun violence is on the rise in America, and the 1989 Massacre is dwarfed by the 14,000+ gun deaths (including 323 mass shootings) in the United States this year alone.

There is nothing more exhausting than reading, hearing or seeing the dehumanization of people like you. And that is the work I hate the most.