Seeking female distinguished engineers

14 Jan 2026 🔖 professional development
💬 EN

I hadn’t stopped to look, but … wow. Female (and other marginalized, I’m sure) individual contributors (“ICs”) in tech: the view upward gets cloudy from here in the middle, doesn’t it?

Disability justice and processing styles

Three months ago in October (Disability Employment Awareness Month), autistic ABA therapist (yeah, I know) Kaelynn Partlow posted a video that my social media algorithms decided I’d like: “Top-Down vs. Bottom-Up Processing.” She said:

“Autistic professionals can be among the most disliked and simultaneously misunderstood people in the workplace, but here’s the thing, it has a lot to do with processing styles: bottom up vs. top down. If you’re autistic, you’re more likely to be (bottom up).”

• The genius, she said, of bottom-up processors is that they “excel at finding unexpected problems before they become bigger issues.”
• The nuisance, she said, of bottom-up processors is that they often “correct others when details are off because it feels important to the integrity of the information.”
• The genius, she said, of top-down processors is that they can “summarize key points” and “delegate” relatively easily and “excel at keeping projects on schedule.”
• The nuisance (to bottom-up processors), she said, of top-down processors is that they often “fill in gaps with assumptions, context, or prior knowledge” (which can be useful, though, if there’s no actual available way to close the gaps otherwise).

Are women not allowed to be that kind of disabled at work?

Kaelynn’s phrasing “among the most disliked” sparked a wildfire in me. Because…

• Q: Guess what tech is stereotypically full of?
  • A: “Disliked” “geniuses!”
• Q: Have I ever seen an financially-ultra-well-compensated representation of the stereotype who’s female like me?
  • A: No I have not!

Uh-oh. Did my brain just pattern-associate a devastating intersection between “disliked” disabilities and women’s stereotypical requirement to be “likable” at all times?

Unfortunately, my full conversation with a search LLM got lost in a computer crash, but within minutes, epiphany-me was frantically typing:

“It occurred to me that I’ve never heard of a woman left to go off and be a weirdo IC whom colleagues don’t even really like, but whose ideas make a business so much money that they’re given their own little tinker kingdom anyway.

“I’ve never heard of a woman given a million-dollar-a-year salary specifically to to be weird, have ideas, be sloppy, and be pizza-covered and tinkering all night.

“Like, literally never.”

Neither could the search LLM. Which blew me away.

• (I know LLMs agree to a fault, but I pride myself on my ability to write prompts that get it to challenge my assumptions and change my mind. As a stereotypical bottom-up processor, I “prefer having all the details before forming a conclusion,” as Kaelynn would say. 🤣)

Rewards granted when marginalized only alongside caregiving responsibilities

Pre-computer-crash, I seem to have copied this excerpt into my phone because of the shock it left me in. While challenging the LLM to look harder and stop appeasing me and find some examples, the LLM defended its inability to do so with the following summary of its knowledge of the corpus at large of human writing (which, for the LLM, seemed to involve a bit more sociology/anthropology textbook and a bit less employee directory, oh well):

“Women are also more likely to be promoted based on proven, polished leadership and are less likely to be indulged and the latitude to be unconventional, sloppy, or eccentric while protected by the bottom line, as men sometimes are.

“Structural biases limit the very kind of ‘eccentric, lucrative individual contributor’ path that often rewards men but almost never women – even when women have the talent or temperament for it.

Most higher-paying opportunities for women are funneled through visible leadership, people management, or strategic communication roles.

Which can be misaligned for those whose strengths are creative, technical, or unusual…

…rather than social or managerial.

Yikes. To recap the LLM’s systemic trend analysis:

• Marginalized folks, “people skills” are mandatory for the big bucks. If you’re good at caregiving colleagues whose “eccentricity” is getting indulged in the name of their “genius,” then yes, 2000s American culture absolutely can put you on a career ladder toward becoming the next Sheryl Sandberg!
• Sorry marginalized folks, the big bucks aren’t available for you to be the “eccentric” one, no matter how unusually technical or creative your skills may be.
  • (As the Black community has long said of their experiences, “You have to be twice as good to get half as far.”)
• Heaven forbid a very-senior-level-titled-and-compensated marginalized person break form and “correct others when details are off” more than a handful of times a year, no matter how bottom-up of a processor they naturally are as a human and no matter what gifts their bottom-up tendencies offer humanity.
  • (As George Carlin said, “It’s a big club … and you ain’t in it!”)

Representation matters

Phew. Rant over.

Obviously, it’s not universal.

Heck, it’s not even my astoundingly well-supported personal career experience, where phenomenal colleagues have embraced this entire “odd duck” with open arms.

It’s just excerpts from late-night social media surfing that spiked frustration about broader social injustices.

But also, representation matters. I’ve still got decades left to fill in my career. If I dream of a mostly-IC career. If there’s any truth to the idea that people who look like me and are senior to me are getting funneled into people-management, to whom will I look for inspiration?

Hope in communities of practice

Speaking of “I should ask other women,” I think it’s time to get back into attending events like AnitaB. I’ve got a friend who organized them, but I haven’t been in a while.

When I rephrased the LLM question this week, I asked it in more neutral, less emotionally loaded phrasing:

“Who are tech’s ‘distinguished engineer’-titled individual contributor women?

“I can’t think of any I’ve ever met or heard speak, but you have way more data than I do, so maybe you know.”

It listed some cool ladies (their names appear below), which was inspiring.

What was really interesting, though, was the at the LLM seemed to have found them because of public speaking about their experience getting there at women-in-tech club award dinners and such.

Maybe to clear the fog when looking for female ICs I could “want to be when I grow up,” I could spend more time at underrepresented IC “watering holes.” To break out of the general-tech conference/meetup/podcast bubble I’ve recently immersed myself in to improve my tech-stack-specific skills like Azure and observability. Bonus: I’d simultaneously pay it forward, by showing up as the mid-career female IC newbies are looking for.

Hope in practical specifics

The two LLM conversations in October and January also revealed some valuable practical advice:

1. The words to look out for that often represent tippy-top of the IC track are typically called names like:
   • distinguished engineer
   • fellow
   • technical fellow
   • chief engineer
   • principal engineer
   • inventor
   • master inventor
2. Patents, patents, patents. In capitalism, that’s often what turns “IC ideas” into “make a business so much money,” as I asked the first LLM about. If I’m not interested in inventing patentable ideas, instead preferring to implement existing best practices, then I’m self-imposing an IC ceiling. Not every people-manager wants to become Sheryl Sandberg, and it’s okay if I don’t want to become Christelle Grivot, Romelia Flores, Himabindu Tummala, Serpil Bayraktar, or Cindy Osmon. If I do, though – patents, patents, patents.
3. The pizza-stain-friendly / disability-friendly / bottom-up-processor-friendly words to look out for that often represent the “middle and up” of the IC track often include names like:
   • architect
   • technical lead
   • principal engineer
   • researcher

Addendum

I ran this post through an LLM to tone-police self-censor it before going to press.

“How’s the tone? The whole world will see this, including current colleagues / managers, and future hiring managers.”

Besides calling me old (“people might not understand Carlin references”), the LLM suggested I “soften language” and eliminate the word “angry,” replacing it with “concerned,” even though the sentence where “angry” appeared literally wouldn’t hold together anymore with that substitution.

The rationale the LLM gave? “Future hiring managers” might have concerns with me having “strong opinions.” 🤦‍♀️

Also … in the end … yeah, I made the edit. Over and out.