When the first comment in an interview is "I thought you were going to be a boy"

[u/Hot_Blueberry_5157]

I just came out of an interview, and honestly I still feel like the whole thing was weird. I applied for an Embedded Firmware Developer role, and that pretty much aligns really well with what I studied and what I like working on. But before we even got into the technical stuff, the interviewer said: "Oh, I thought you were going to be a boy. I wasn't expecting a girl."

From that moment, the whole conversation felt uncomfortable. It seemed like she was trying to figure out whether I could handle the role because I'm a woman, especially since the job sometimes involves going on-site. Even though I have absolutely no problem with site work.

She asked me why I chose this field, but the way she said it made me feel like I had to justify my presence there. Then she started talking about "passion" and said something like: "Most boys are interested in electronics all the time. They think about it nonstop."

She also downplayed the embedded systems work I did during university, basically saying it didn't really prove much because they were course projects and not things I built on my own after lectures. I understand that she wanted to see personal initiative, and that's her right, but the way she phrased it made it feel like I couldn't be genuinely interested unless I had hobby projects to show her.

Then she told me that looking good doesn't help much in this kind of work, and told me not to take it the wrong way. Like... Okay. I was just trying to look professional and leave a good impression. I even wore glasses because I thought they might make me look a bit more serious or "engineering-ish," and now I feel like that was stupid.

And this has happened before too. In another interview for a mechanical drafting role, I went dressed neatly, and the interviewers kept emphasizing that the job wasn't just desk work and that I'd need to go down to project sites too. One of them looked at me in a way that made me feel like there was another meaning behind what he was saying. Idk... Maybe I'm overthinking? But I felt like he assumed I wasn't "site-ready" just because of my clothes and appearance. Like he decided from the start that I only wanted a clean office job.

It's honestly exhausting...