The Coded Poppy: We Were Never Encouraged. That Was the Point.
Part of The Silicon Poppy Series
The Coded Poppy: We Were Never Encouraged. That Was the Point.
By Francesca Alexander, Founder, The Intelligent Marketing Studio at Social Global Grind
Part of The Silicon Poppy Series
You were not bad at science. You were redirected away from it.
There is a difference, and it matters enormously, because one of those is a story about your ability and the other is a story about a system that was built to send you somewhere else. For most women I know, the truth is the second one. And once you see it clearly, the appropriate response is not shame. It is anger. The useful kind.
Let me show you the history. Because this did not start with AI. It started a very long time ago, and it was deliberate.
Once, We Were Welcome. Then We Were Expelled.
Here is something almost nobody tells you.
Before the American Civil War, women were actually welcomed into the sciences. Between 1500 and 1800, women lucky enough to gain an education often found a home in science or math. Science was seen as a more appropriate discipline for women than the classics. Then, between the 1850s and 1870s, that changed. RNZ
As science professionalised, it did not merely refuse women admittance. It expelled them, by definition, from the newly defined discipline. The logic was circular and brutal. If women could not be professionals, and science was now professional, then women could not practice science. RNZ
Sit with that. The door was open. Then the field became powerful, and the door was closed specifically because it had become powerful. The exclusion was not an accident of the times. It was a response to the value of the thing being protected.
By the 1870s, women could be educated in the sciences but were barred from pursuing scientific careers. The reasons given were that women's biology made them unfit, that their natural roles as wives and mothers precluded professional careers, and that there were simply no precedents for hiring them. Become Wealth
The same pattern repeats every single time a field becomes the seat of power. The powerful field gets walls. The walls get a justification dressed up as nature, as practicality, as common sense. And women get redirected toward the subjects that lead to lower pay and less influence, and then get told it was their choice.
New Zealand Built This Into the System From the Start
This is not abstract history happening somewhere else. It is the architecture of the country I now call home.
From the time New Zealand established a national education system in 1877, the formal education system developed according to accepted notions of the differentiated roles men and women would play in adult life. Secondary education was initially offered to boys more readily than to girls. NZ Motorsports
The redirection was built into the foundation. Not added later. There from the beginning.
Women remained less likely to study the STEM subjects that led to high-paying jobs. By 1985 the situation was concerning enough that the New Zealand Association for Women in the Sciences had to be founded specifically to give girls and women a supportive environment to gain confidence in science. NZ Motorsports
Think about what it means that a dedicated organisation had to exist by 1985 just to convince girls that science was for them too. That is not a neutral playing field. That is a system that required active intervention to counteract its own design.
And the design held. By 2023, while women made up an impressive 61.7 percent of New Zealand tertiary graduates, their representation in STEM fields remained disproportionately low at just 39.9 percent.
Only 27 percent of digital technology positions in New Zealand are held by women. In the final year of high school, physics in New Zealand continues to be male-dominated, while girls cluster in biology, where nearly 70 percent of students are female. In technology subjects, computer and engineering classes have been continually male-dominated, and that imbalance has become more pronounced over time. Food technology and textiles are the only female-dominated technology domains.
Food technology and textiles. In 2018. The girls were still being pointed at the kitchen and the sewing machine, while the boys were pointed at the machines that build the future.
At current rates, this gender imbalance at the University of Auckland is projected to persist until 2070. The Conversation
That is not a gap closing slowly. That is a gap being maintained.
Los Angeles Spent Millions and Watched It Get Worse
Now look at the city I come from, because California tells an even darker story.
Women make up about 42 percent of California's workforce but comprise just a quarter of those working in STEM careers. Fewer women were working in math careers in 2023 than in the five or ten years before that. Read that again. Not stalled. Going backwards.
For more than a decade, state and federal officials poured millions of dollars into boosting the number of women in STEM. The results were disappointing. The rate of women who attain those degrees has hardly improved.
And here is the part that should make every woman reading this furious. Just before the pandemic, girls in California had finally overtaken boys in math and closed the long-standing gender gap. Girls had higher math scores in 62 percent of California districts in 2018 and 2019. By 2023 and 2024, that number had collapsed to just 4 percent. In the Los Angeles Unified School District, girls' math scores dropped while boys' scores rose.
Girls closed the gap. They actually did it. And then the moment society was disrupted, the old patterns came roaring back, and the progress evaporated. As one expert put it, when society is disrupted, you fall back into bad patterns.
The bad pattern is the redirection. It is so deeply coded that the moment we stopped actively fighting it, it reasserted itself within a few years.
The Coded Poppy
This is what I mean by the Coded Poppy.
The resistance women feel toward technology was written into them. Not chosen by them. Coded, in the deepest sense of the word, through more than a century of educational systems that welcomed them and then expelled them, that pointed them at biology and textiles while pointing boys at physics and machines, that required entire organisations to exist just to counteract the default.
The conditioning is so subtle that even now, nearly equal percentages of young men and women say their schools encouraged them to pursue STEM. Encouragement is not always the variable. The exposure is. Fifty-four percent of young men report learning about computer programming in school, compared with just 39 percent of young women. The boys were in the room where the coding happened. The girls were somewhere else, being encouraged in general terms toward a future they were never actually shown. Amazon
That is the Coded Poppy. Not a woman who lacks ability. A woman who was systematically positioned away from power and then handed the story that the positioning was her preference.
And now, at the exact moment that AI is becoming the most powerful tool of our generation, the same coding is doing the same work. Tech feels like it is for someone else. The someone else has a face, and it has never quite been ours.
Here Is What We Do With the Anger
I am not telling you this history to make you despair. I am telling you because anger, the clear-eyed, useful kind, is the beginning of refusal.
You were not bad at this. You were steered. The steering was deliberate, it was structural, and it is still operating right now in the way AI is being framed as technical, complicated, and not quite for you.
The refusal is simple. You learn it anyway.
Not because anyone finally gave you permission. They were never going to. The history could not be clearer on that point. You learn it because the coding only works as long as you believe it was your choice. The moment you see it for what it is, the spell breaks.
AI does not require the physics class you were redirected out of. It does not require the computer science course that the boys were quietly funnelled into while you were in textiles. It requires curiosity, the willingness to ask, and the refusal to accept a story written into you by a system that benefited from your absence.
We learn it together. In the community. The way women have always reclaimed the things that were taken from them, by refusing to do it alone and refusing to wait for an invitation that history makes very clear is not coming.
The Silicon Poppy workshop series is built for exactly this. Soon to be announced on Eventbrite link will be live at linkin.bio/francescahustles when I am back in New Zealand.
They expelled us from the room once. They have been keeping us out, by design, ever since.
We are walking back in. Bring your anger. It is the most useful thing you own.
Francesca Alexander is the founder of The Intelligent Marketing Studio at Social Global Grind and the Hustle and Glow Network, a business community for founders building with intention across Auckland, New Zealand and Los Angeles, California. She hosts the Hustle and Glow Podcast, a long form conversation series on marketing, identity, community, and what it actually takes to build something real. Find her work at socialglobalgrind.com and join the community at hustleandglow.com and linkin.bio/francescahustles
