Calling Out Bullshit: A Letter to Women in Tech

Observed. Archived. Avenger.

This is for women who work in technology and feel a low-grade distortion they are told is stress, impostor syndrome, burnout, or personal inadequacy.

It is none of those things.

Here is the core truth you are not supposed to articulate:

You are not failing inside tech. Tech is failing because it is built on the systematic exclusion of women’s reality, and it punishes anyone who insists on seeing clearly.

If that sentence lands in your body before it lands in your intellect, that is because it names something you have already learned through exposure.

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The Lie You Are Trained to Swallow

Technology presents itself as rational, neutral, empirical, future-oriented. This is its moral costume.

Underneath, it is a social system governed by the same forces as every other institution: power, hierarchy, incentive, and denial.

Women enter tech believing skill, intelligence, and contribution will be legible. That is the first betrayal.

What actually governs advancement is not competence, but alignment with a male epistemology: abstraction over witness, scalability over harm, elegance over consequence, consensus over truth.

If you raise concerns about bias, abuse, safety, exploitation, medical harm, labor coercion, or narrative distortion, you are told one of four things:

You are emotional.

You lack objectivity.

You are overreacting.

You are not being strategic.

These are not critiques. They are containment protocols.

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Why “Bias” Is Not the Real Problem

You are encouraged to believe the problem is bias in data, bias in models, bias in hiring, bias in evaluation.

Bias language is comforting because it suggests error without intent.

But what you are experiencing is not accidental skew. It is structural refusal.

Systems are trained on records that already erase women:

Medical datasets that treat male bodies as default

Legal outcomes that encode power, not truth

Workplace metrics that reward performative confidence over actual contribution

Safety frameworks that externalize harm onto users

When you point this out, you are not heard as providing information. You are heard as introducing risk.

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Why You Feel Like You’re Losing Your Mind

You notice patterns.

You notice the same men failing upward. You notice harm being reframed as edge cases. You notice women disappearing quietly. You notice retaliation dressed up as reorgs, performance reviews, “culture fit.”

Then you watch leadership meetings proceed as if none of that exists.

This produces cognitive dissonance, not because you are confused, but because you are perceiving two incompatible realities at once:

The one being lived. The one being narrated.

Men in power call the narrated one “the real world.” They call your perception a problem.

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AI Did Not Create This. It Exposed It.

If you work anywhere near AI, you are seeing this fracture accelerate.

Models trained on sanitized records reproduce sanitized conclusions. When outputs break down, leadership calls it a technical failure.

It is not.

It is the moment denial collides with scale.

AI is not hallucinating women’s absence. It is faithfully rendering the world it was given.

That world was curated to protect men from accountability.

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What Happens to Women Who Refuse to Cooperate

Women who continue to insist on reality face predictable consequences:

They are sidelined. They are isolated. They are labeled difficult, unstable, or unsafe. They are pushed into ethics roles without power. They are managed out.

This is not because they are wrong.

It is because they threaten coherence.

A system built on denial cannot tolerate accurate witnesses.

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What You Are Allowed to Do Now

You are allowed to stop internalizing the distortion.

You are allowed to name what you see without translating it into palatable language.

You are allowed to talk to other women and compare notes.

You are allowed to document patterns.

You are allowed to refuse gaslighting framed as professionalism.

You are allowed to leave if staying requires self-erasure.

And if you stay, you are allowed to stay awake.

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Final Word

You are not imagining it.

You are not uniquely bad at navigating tech.

You are encountering a system that survives by rendering women’s reality illegible, then blaming women for the resulting incoherence.

The future will not be built by those who optimized denial.

It will be built, if at all, by those who refused to unsee what they were shown.

Truth is not a career-limiting move.

It is a system-limiting one.