AI engineer Jess Davis still remembers how much she loved tech as a child.
In those younger years, she would excitedly wait for her dad – an electrician – to bring home different circuit boards for her to inspect and play with.
They would be added to her collection of geographic toys and science kits that kept her engrossed for hours.
The opportunity to take this passion forward didn’t come till university because her small co-ed private school didn’t offer tech as an elective – something Jess says should be a standard offering at every school today.
Fortunately, she had a couple of wonderful teachers who inspired her to pursue maths and physics.
But once she got to university, her bubble burst.
Jess walked into a cohort of hundreds of male students with only one other woman.
The isolating experience was compounded when she began experiencing microaggressions from male peers.
“My first day itself was okay,” she says.
“It was more like the second semester, when you’re doing group assignments and stuff.
“I was in a physics major, it was like me and one other girl in that whole major.
“I felt like something wasn’t right. I didn’t feel like I belonged, but I didn’t recognise what that was until later on.
“I’d be hanging out with my friends and there was a guy who hadn’t done [physics] since high school, but they’d check my answers against him.
“In my last year of uni, we were going to a lot of industry nights [and] that really disheartened me because there were questions like, ‘Oh, are you here with your boyfriend?’. And I was like okay, clearly I don’t belong and I just don’t want to be around these people.”
In these moments, Jess often felt undermined and second-guessed because she wasn’t one of the boys.
But one of the worst experiences she had was during a group assignment, when one male teammate described to her how he wanted to commit a violent sexual act against her.
“That just had me in tears before we had to go and present our assignment together to the whole class,” she said.
“That was the worst instance but there were many little things where you’d almost think it’s insignificant [until you look back].”
Recent research reveals that women STEM students experience higher rates of sexism and discrimination than those in non-STEM fields.
In one study led by think tank HEPI, which surveyed over 3,000 students in the UK, it found that women in STEM subjects like physics and engineering can be twice as likely as peers outside these faculties to be confronted with such experiences.
Unfortunately in Australia, Jess’s experience is not an isolated one and it sheds light on what women face in male-dominated industries.
“It was pretty lonely, I didn’t have any female lecturers or teachers at uni,” she says.
“There’s definitely been moments where I have almost left.
“The first thing that made me stay was in my second or third year, I finally met one girl in one of my classes and we became friends and that really helped – like more than I could have suspected, you know.”
‘Why I stayed’
Despite her experiences, Jess says she managed to hold on thanks to a small network of trusted women she was finally able to connect with.
“It wasn’t until I became a tutor and one of the subjects I was tutoring had another female tutor,” she says.
The duo connected with another woman lecturer and began meeting regularly.
“She actually started a little support group,” she says.
“There were like three of us female tutors and we would just sit in this classroom, have a coffee and vent about how arrogant the male lecturers were being basically.”
After connecting with these women, Jess realised that more needed to be done.
“This small network of women around me really helped me feel like ‘oh okay, this hasn’t just happened to me’,” she says.
“It happened to them and I felt really angry on their behalf and it kind of hit me differently than it did when it was me.
“I had this guy friend in our course who was lovely and we hung out with him all the time, but when we talked to him about this stuff, he just had never even thought of the experiences we were having.”
After realising how little awareness there was about what women were confronted with on campus, Jess wrote a blog post on Medium.
“I was like this is unacceptable,” she says.
After it was published, a couple of faculty members reached out to Jess and together they set up a committee dedicated to improving the experiences of women studying computer science.
Changing the narrative
Jess now works at Bain & Company as an AI engineer alongside some of the women she connected with at uni and is immensely grateful she never left.
As Australia grapples with rapidly changing technology and ongoing skills shortages, Jess’s story highlights the type of practical changes needed to improve the experiences of women entering these fields and ensure their long-term retention.
She often points to Harvey Mudd College, which actively changed its computer science courses by redesigning how they ran, encouraging research experiences, and sending students to conferences.
The former president of Harvey Mudd College, Maria Klawe, wrote in The Conversation that this dramatically increased the number of women doing science majors.
“They redesigned their introductory computer science courses to focus less on straight programming and more on creative problem-solving,” says Klawe.
“They included topics to show the breadth of the field and the ways in which it could benefit society. In order to reduce the intimidation factor for women and other students with no prior coding experience, they split the course into two sections, black and gold (Harvey Mudd’s colors), with black for those who had prior programming experience and gold for those with no prior experience.
“This worked wonders to create a supportive atmosphere.”
These kind of changes can help ease the “macho effect”, reduce intimidation and help bring more visibility of women on campus for students who feel alone, says Jess.
She says men also need to be included in conversations about the experiences women face, unconscious bias and discriminatory behaviour.
In addition, she notes that women-focused industry events to meet and hear from professionals at different stages of their career can help make clearer what kind of path to take.
“I want to work with female leaders, I want to feel like someone’s invested in my success and is looking out for me, I want to work on problems that feel impactful,” she says.
“100 per cent I’m glad I stayed.
“I love all the people that I’ve gotten to work with and the kinds of problems I’ve gotten to solve. “It’s a really rewarding career that’s much more people-focused than you would think when you’re in your first year of uni. There’ll be lots of points throughout your journey that you’ll want to quit. Try to find a support person to talk it through and give it another go.”