The Loneliest Girl in Tech — at Work | by I Don’t Wanna Talk About It | Aug, 2025

The mould has evolved over decades. From Revenge of the Nerds, to Geeks, to Hipsters to Tech Bros. Despite this evolution, it still remains stubbornly male-centred, remarkably narrow and boring 🥱

For such a “disruptive” industry, the conformity is shocking.

Not fitting the mould

I was very hard to place anywhere in life, let alone in tech:

• very feminine, yet not male-centred or particularly interested in men
• not the “traditional Indian girl” but neither was I whitewashed
• opinionated but quiet, strong-minded but sensitive
• someone who valued authenticity over perfection, truth over pleasantries…
• who could speak about everything from world religions to WWE, and
• a fashion chameleon who loved wearing lehengas, all types of dresses, steampunk, Hot Topic, tye-dye and paisley bell bottoms. My favourite jean cut is The Cropped Flare 😍

For me, there is no other way to be. I couldn’t imagine being so narrow, one-dimensional, limited and labeled. But the tech world loves exactly that.

Most people I know have dynamic range too. Why should anyone hide that? Why should you suppress the parts of yourself that aren’t “on-brand” in tech? Otherwise, you become just another sheep.

How the mould held me back

Employers couldn’t see me as a culture fit. Some likely doubted I could do the job. What could a woman who wasn’t channeling Steve Jobs know about design and coding?

My communication style was wrong. I once received feedback that I was “too confident.” Why not hire me and hold me accountable to what I confidently said I could do?

The Indian woman stereotype trap: I was expected to be one of two types: pathetic and grateful (like they’re doing me a favour) or fully assimilated (talking like them, channeling my best “model minority” energy). When you’re neither type, you’re treated with suspicion.

People went out of their way to discredit me. A potential employer once told a recruiter they thought I forged a reference letter because fonts differed in places. They could have googled the company and called directly, but ok.

Even years later, a male front-end designer who didn’t know basic CSS smugly told me that I didn’t “look like a Designer.” According to him, I looked like a “Professional Secretary or maybe a Business Analyst.”

The same man I had to teach:
display: inline-block;

☠️

I was fired from my first job because no one had patience for a graduate. They expected me to perform at the same level as my colleagues, who’d all been working for several years.

What followed was 8 and half years at 6 different jobs, with about 15 months of unemployment scattered throughout.

The early years were brutal. Sometimes I just focused on the day or task ahead. Other times I’d spiral, wondering if I’d be stuck in mediocre jobs forever. I didn’t have many female friends since every work environment was male-dominated. It was profoundly lonely.

But in those years I never stopped learning on my own: Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Flash, Joomla, Magento, Drupal, PHP, Javascript, WordPress.

Then, at 28 years old, lucky Job #7 happened. Someone wanted to pay me 50% more than I’d asked for 🥳

The pay was great.
I got to move to my dream city.
I was outsourced to a big corporate.

As a contractor, they wanted maximum value out of me. I saw it as a perk because I got really great projects to work on.

B-2-B web applications, B-2-C mobile apps. All my projects had lots of attention on them. Even the internal app was important because it would be used for in-store operations.

I knew the other senior designer expected me to run to him for help eventually, positioning himself as the saviour. While I was incredibly intimidated by my first project, I knew it had to succeed. My contract renewal depended on it.

I designed and delivered on time. 💅🏼
I can’t say the same about the developers though.

When the application launched later that year, it was a huge success for our team. But not for me. Neither the organisation nor the contracting house acknowledged my contribution.

All my projects followed this pattern. I was like the elves in “The Elves and the Shoemaker” — an invisible force getting design work done while others were celebrated and highlighted.

Invisible Excellence

The interesting part was I’d get positive feedback from colleagues at other contracting houses, who were surprised that I’d been excluded from recognition.

My contracting house never gave feedback, neither did the seniors I reported to. Yet my contract was renewed year after year.

When I finally left, my manager called to say she loved that she never had to check up on me. Located in a different city, she got updates at Senior Programme Management calls.

I was supposedly, “The easiest person on her team! The work always got done, everyone was happy, and there were never any personal issues to manage.”

When Women Don’t Support Women

My 7 jobs, up until this stage, were truly from a different era: extremely male-centred, hierarchy-obsessed, with rampant racism that was unacknowledged.

In a division with 8 women (and 17 men):

• 3 women occasionally had normal conversations with me
• 3 didn’t acknowledge my existence. We’d look through each other
• 1 kept interactions purely professional but polite
• 1 sat next to me for four years treating me with contempt, using initial friendliness to size me up before spending years gossiping about me

I didn’t expect instant friendship. I understood that most of them were a decade older than me, frustrated with their job and just trying to get on with their day. But the dynamic was bizarre.

So I turned to my colleagues in another city for work and tech chats. I fantasised about starting a company together but it was clear they preferred their job.

Sometimes my own issues got in the way: did they not take me seriously?

Today I realise it could have been anything: me, economic stability, self doubt, they liked the predictability of a job. #Girlbosslife looked exciting from the outside. But for some people, the actual doing part is not something they enjoy.

Learning in the Shadows

Despite six years at my corporate job, I wasn’t given learning opportunities — not even a Skillshare subscription. Instead, I taught myself:

• UX best practices to keep up with industry standards
• Bootstrap because I saw it mentioned on Twitter
• Zurb Foundation when a colleague recommended it
• React and Angular (failed at both, but tried)
• iOS and Android design by studying their guidelines
• Sketch because it was the new industry standard, and I hated Photoshop
• UX workshopping from YouTube
• Handlebars.js from a colleague, over 2 days

I applied all these skills while watching others get sent on courses and have certifications funded.

Remember that unremarkable woman who was promoted to head our Design Department? She was lucky. Her entire UX course was funded. All she had to do was wear glasses and plain black t-shirts — forgettable but somehow memorable in that Steve Jobs way.

Some of us exist in the company’s blind spot. Don’t let that stop you from learning and progressing.

So there I was, watching unlikely people get promoted, upskilled and fast-tracked, even though I hadn’t heard of significant projects they’d worked on.

I was frustrated, so i decided to quietly quit (more on that in a future post)

I started to take freelancing more seriously — applying for more work, bigger projects, and collaboration opportunities.

I tried partnering with a colleague: male, Black, we had shared interests and career aspirations. It was initially exciting until I realised he was just another guy expecting me to work for less pay. I quit.

Finding new work was a constant struggle without a strong network. My previous jobs had all been dead ends. It was demotivating and depressing.

I lost my passion between the job search, freelancing and a few collaboration experiences. I considered doing other things. I wrote fiction, invested more in my social life, attended women’s tech conferences.

Nothing really satisfied.

My next job had 6 women on the Design team, 2 men. It was one of the most memorable periods of my career for so many reasons. When I eventually left that team, I threw a farewell party at my home.

Someone who knew me from my corporate job was surprised and mentioned how I’d changed. That wasn’t true at all! Throwing a farewell at home is exactly me when I like people and they feel safe. No one was remotely “safe” at that corporate job.

Self-employment followed next. I was excited but also intimidated.

At first I revisited feelings of isolation:

• was I charging correctly
• how do I respond to RFPs
• how should I promote my services
• I wished I had someone to brainstorm ideas
• I wanted someone better at UI design to refine my screens

But slowly, I joined teams and met people.

I worked with local and international companies, all highly multicultural. The mould was finally broken. Everyone was brilliantly unique.

I made lots of work-friends from all walks of life and I brought much more of myself to work.

The tech industry’s narrow definition of who belongs creates unnecessary isolation. Some people start believing something’s wrong with them, and some may even assimilate. Ugh!

Realisations:

1. Authenticity threatens systems built on conformity
2. The right people will value you as you are, not ask you to hide parts of yourself because of their discomfort
3. Isolation often means you’re in the wrong room, not that you’re the wrong person
4. Validation and praise is a fickle, subjective thing. Seek your own.

The loneliness wasn’t about being unlikeable or difficult. It was about working with people who didn’t know how to work with anyone outside their narrow expectations i.e. the tech guy archetype or the quiet, grateful-just-to-be-there woman.

It’s also interesting how loneliness had nothing to do with the lack of people. People were everywhere. New, annoying personalities were always thrown my way. But for people like me, loneliness is often experienced in the presence of people.

I’ve actually never felt lonely when I’m physically alone.

So I suppose you could say that the most “disruptive” thing I did in my career was refuse to become someone else to make others comfortable.

I still crave a mastermind group or a small network of non-competitive colleagues for tech discussions and mutual support. At my age, it feels almost embarrassing that I keep searching for it instead of building it myself.

Maybe this is a start?