Trading One Stereotype for Another?

I came across this great article in Huffington Post about a black woman who loves code and fashion. My one nitpick is this sentence:

Being a young girl naturally you are drawn to clothes, jewellery and the latest trends

The whole point of the article is to break down stereotypes, and yet with this sentence, Watts just trades one for another. All girls are not ‘naturally’ drawn to fashion, just as all boys are not ‘naturally’ geeks.

As a young girl, I was naturally drawn to horses, dogs, bicycles and other girls. One of the reasons I went into web development was the relief of NOT having to jump through ridiculous (to me) fashion hoops at work every day.

Watts could simply have personalized that sentence and avoided taking me out of the flow of what she was saying, and into writing a rebuttal in my head. That said, It’s great to see more black women showing up in the tech world. Maybe one day we can have TWO black women developers in Portland.

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