About Alina
I have a daughter Alina who is almost two years old. I mostly share photos of her on Facebook and keep my tweets to non-kid things. I did this without really thinking about it much, except for a vague feeling of “I shouldn’t post too many baby photos on Twitter,” where I am followed by professionals in the tech industry. A part of me wanted my identity as a mom to be less visible on Twitter. Unless of course I could post things that were sufficiently nerdy but also adorable, like this picture:
My reluctance to let my mom life and professional life mingle turns out to be sort of a legitimate concern. A study conducted at Cornell by Shelly J. Correll sent fake resumes to employers, with only two variables—female/male names and indication of involvement in a parent-teacher association. The recent NYTimes article summarized what they call the Motherhood Penalty and Fatherhood Bonus:
In her research, Ms. Correll found that employers rate fathers as the most desirable employees, followed by childless women, childless men and finally mothers. They also hold mothers to harsher performance standards and are less lenient when they are late.
So maybe my subconscious was just trying to protect me from the biases that exist in our society today. I mentioned this guardedness I have when talking about Alina to some coworkers recently, and they said vehemently that they love hearing stories about Alina and seeing this different side of me that is such a big part of who I am as a person.
While women in software engineering are already scarce, women with small children are even more scarce. Our engineering team is 27% women, but I am the only one with a small child. What if instead of keeping Alina under wraps, I talked about her and the issues my husband Tyler and I think about when raising her in today’s society? Will I be slightly dinged by people with biases against working moms? Maybe, but rather than trying to associate myself with a childless group to appear more competent, I could be a more vocal example of the many kick-ass working mothers who are making their situation work for them, and we can change these biases. There’s also the fantastic Motherboard Podcast (my interview is episode 2), which broadcasts interviews with mothers in the tech indsutry to address “the need for better role modeling around the transition to parenthood for women who are already isolated as a minority in tech.”
So I’ll try to share more stories about Alina here and on Twitter. For now, here are some fragmented thoughts about Alina, a scattered glimpse into our lives as parents.
Alina is just starting to string words together, and you can have a short conversation with her. She understands most of what we say, and can answer “yas” and “no” with some accuracy.
I’m sort of worried that she will be an extrovert, because I have no idea what I would do. I have this dream that when she’s a little older, we could all walk over to the library to pick out some books and then settle down with blankets in the living room to read quietly all afternoon.
She likes books already, and will bring books to you and plop down on your lap. Sometimes when it’s very quiet in the house, I’ll peek around the door to her room and see her flipping through a book, and my heart fills with happiness. Of course, some other times, everything from her drawers will be strewn all over on the floor.
Tyler jokes that she can be anything she wants when she grows up, “a mathematician, a computer scientist, a physicist…so many options!” But really, when we’re both software engineers, it’s hard to not secretly hope that she’ll be building computers in Minecraft and hacking on iPhone apps in a few years.
I basically don’t have any guilt about working and sending her to daycare. I know I can be a better mom to her when I’m fulfilled by my job—she loves daycare and I love working. But, and this is where you may realize how ridiculous this all is—I do have some guilt about my lack of guilt—should I feel guilty about leaving her at home with a babysitter when she’s sick, because I’d much rather be at work than with a sick child? What does that say about me?
It’s easy to say that society and media and other parents have narrow expectations for gender roles that shape our children, but it’s hard to admit that we too possess those biases. I constantly ask myself if I would treat a boy differently, like when I tell her “be careful!” when she wanders a little too far, or get frustrated when she’s being particularly fussy (if she were a boy, maybe I would just sigh and say “boys will be boys…”).
We buy mostly gender-neutral clothing and toys for her, not because we hate pink, but because there are so many things in this world (almost all, in fact) that are not gender-specific, and categorizing everything “for boys” or “for girls” seems like an awfully good way to condition her brain to do that for things like certain school subjects, careers, interests. She’ll have enough of that from other people anyways.
Last of all, she is funny. If she hears someone say the word “funny,” she also says “FUNNY” and then laughs “HAHAHA.” I once took her the library where she farted loudly in a public space and then looked at me and said “FART” proudly, and then pointed to her butt.
And this is what happens when you ask her to make funny faces.
