The Surface of Equality
When I joined engineering, the ratio was almost comical, one girl for every ten boys. Nobody found that surprising; it’s just how things are. Someone joked that our batch didn’t even need a separate girls’ washroom. Everyone laughed.
It didn’t bother me at first. We were here, learning the same subjects, writing the same exams; that felt like progress. But as time went on, I started to notice how equality doesn’t always mean what it looks like on paper. You can be in the class, the team, the system, and still not really in it.
Now that more women are joining STEM, the conversation has changed too. It’s no longer “Can women do this?” It’s “Why do they get so much credit for doing it?” You hear things like, “Why equal pay when men can work longer hours?” or “Women get promoted faster these days.” Nobody says it as an insult; it’s just casual math. But it never feels simple when you’re on the other end of it.
Inside the Classroom
Even in hackathons or projects, I’ve seen teams add a girl because it “looks balanced.” Not because she’s the best fit, but because the form says “at least one female member.” It’s supposed to sound progressive, but sometimes it just feels like a checkbox. You can sense when you’re chosen for your presence instead of your perspective.
And then there’s the quieter stuff — the interruptions, the over-explanations, the lab banter that pauses when you walk in. The times you make a point that gets repeated louder by someone else and suddenly counts as valid. Nobody calls it discrimination, but you still walk out of the room feeling smaller than when you walked in.
Even the language shifts. Men are driven. Women are too emotional for tech. The same passion looks different depending on who it comes from.
After a while, you start to internalize it. You catch yourself hesitating before speaking up, double-checking if your idea is “obvious,” wondering if you’re being “too confident.” Not because you don’t trust yourself, but because you’ve learned to expect disbelief. Every success comes with a quiet question: was it skill, or was it tokenism?
The jokes don’t help either. “You girls have it easy, you’ll just get married anyway.” “Why stress about jobs? You’ll be in the kitchen.” It’s all “light-hearted,” apparently. So you laugh too, because explaining why it stings would just make you the “serious” one again.
Even professors carry traces of the old bias in new words. My HOD once told me to stay “extra focused” since ours is an all-female household. It wasn’t cruel... maybe even meant kindly — but it carried that familiar undertone: women need to try harder, stay sharper, prove more.
Beyond the Campus Walls
And it doesn’t end at college. I’ve heard stories from seniors, women working in the same industry we’re trying to enter. Stories of being side-eyed when promoted, or having their work quietly credited to someone else.
Stories of emotional exhaustion — and sometimes, of something worse. The kind that makes you realise harassment isn’t always a headline. It can be a colleague standing too close, a boss who calls too late, or a culture that pretends not to notice.
Somewhere between those stories and our own daily adjustments, you start to see the full picture, how equality can exist statistically, but not socially.
The Quiet Kind of Solidarity
And yet, there’s something that keeps most of us going. That quiet, wordless solidarity. The small look you exchange across the lab when someone says something off. The soft message after class that says, “You okay?” It’s not about confrontation; it’s about being seen.
We don’t need grand gestures or saviours. We don’t even need to be praised for staying strong. We just need fairness, the kind that doesn’t need to be defended.
Equality shouldn’t feel like a debate that keeps changing shape. It should just feel normal.
Representation was step one. Respect is the one we’re still earning.