Ok I'll say it

I keep wanting to say this in public, going to say it, and then retracting it.

So screw it I'll say it here.

I regret doing engineering.

I am not 'naturally brilliant' at engineering. I didn't think I would end up STILL being in an engineering job after all these years. I thought you know, I love English, but I can always have that as a hobby, but if I do engineering I'll always have a job. Engineering will be a good base degree that I can do to launch off into other things.

But then I found myself with a job in engineering. Bullied my self confidence, never very high, plummeted so I was convinced I was totally unemployable any where else and that I would never get a job anywhere else, and so I'm still here.

From a period from about the year 2000 to the year 2009 I was bullied and victimised. And because I was in such a bad mental state I didn't really realise I was being bullied as they never used that term. It was "difference of personality". I couldn't really clearly tick any specific boxes on it being bullying until the rules changed in February last year. What is more as I glanced down the next list which was victimisation I realised I had been victimised too. I'm not a victim. I don't think of myself as a victim. But according to the way the rules have changed to my bemusement apparently I am because I can tick off so much on that list too.

Sexism? Most likely. With a lot of these things it's hard to say and again I don't tend to think in those terms. Do I think it would have happened the same if I was a guy? Of course not. But as people will tell you that proves nothing.

At least the bullying stopped. And the victimisation stopped too. Although is it actually victimisation if you don't know it is? I just knew it was unfair when they took work and responsibilities away from me. And then they took more away when I said it was unfair. And then they gave me managed work.

If I had been technically brilliant they wouldn't have been able to do that to me. But instead I've always just been average as I've always just been an all rounder. I mean, that's ok because a lot of guys are too. But when you're female and you don't fit in though you have to prove yourself. At a bare minimum that requires a certain level of technical flair above and beyond your peers or else they have an actual reason to dismiss or target you rather than that they don't actually like you. If I had been brilliant then my complaints about unfair treatment would have stood. As I wasn't brilliant my flaws and ordinariness were just useful hooks. Better to have no hooks.

I'm trying to work out what exactly about engineering it is that I regret. I mean the profession itself is pretty damn cool. It's science and technology and making it useful for people and solving real life things. I mean, it's hard to argue with the awesome if you get a total buzz out of tech. And I definitely do. And I can do maths. Well enough maths to get by. And I can do the sciences enough to get by and understand what is important.

Does it mean you shouldn't do engineering though if you're not totally brilliant and maths and science? I mean, I passed all my subjects. I even had a female supervisor for my thesis so there can not be complaints of bias. I didn't choose her - I just liked the elective as I liked the real world applications of error control coding. I scraped passes but I passed. We got sympathy from other degrees because engineering was so hard compared to theirs. I am actually pretty damn proud of the fact that I got an engineering degree. (And a science degree but really that was an extra year of fun in comparison to the difficulty of engineering. Oh and all while very very medically depressed.)

So I get a buzz out of tech and love the usefulness of engineering - I think that's what hooked me in actually. And that could be a bit of my gender in that hook - the usefulness. Wanting to fix the world. Wanting to make the world a better place. To care for the world. Not that guys don't want that too. But some of that nurturing maybe?

And then the call to 'all girls come do engineering as we need more female engineers!'. Another hook to be 'useful'. At what ended up being huge personal cost.

I mean seriously, and I do mean seriously, it's kind of lucky I am still here to type this. Because the bullying I received because I was a female engineer combined with my medical depression was very almost the end of me.

So why do I regret engineering? I regret doing engineering for me personally for the years and year s of demoralising funk that I didn't even realise I was in because I thought it was just me. I regret that right now as we're starting to talk about sexism and bullying and equality and all that, that there is this huge rage in me. I find myself really angry at people trying to encourage girls into engineering while not warning them that at least for some it's a really toxic place to be. High school girls don't know. They haven't had the life experience. And yet adults and encouraging them just for some sort of societal justice? Don't they know what might happen to those girls?

I regret that the younger me wasn't told 'this is what might happen'. I regret that I wasn't given skills to know what to do with bullies and with people who discriminate against you. I regret that no one was there to me to say 'it's not you - it's the people around you - get out before it makes you think even less of yourself than you already do'.