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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



I want to start with a sentence that took me a long time to be able to say out loud.

You were not bad at science. You were redirected away from it. And those are two completely different stories.

Most women I know are carrying the first one. The story that says the subject was not for them, that they were not a science person, that technology was always going to belong to someone else. They carry it quietly, as a settled fact about themselves, something decided long before they were old enough to question it.

The truth is almost always the second story. Not a story about ability. A story about a system. And once you see the system clearly, the appropriate response is not shame.

It is anger. The clear-eyed, useful kind.

Here is the history nobody told you. Here is the data from two countries I call home. And here is what we do with what we learn.

Once We Were Welcome. Then We Were Expelled.

Here is the part of the history that almost nobody tells you, and it reframes everything.

Between 1500 and 1800, women lucky enough to gain an education often found a home in science or mathematics. Science was considered a more appropriate discipline for women than the classics. That surprises people when they hear it. It surprised me too.

Then, between the 1850s and 1870s, everything changed.

As science professionalised, it did not simply refuse women admittance. It expelled them by definition from the newly defined field. The logic was circular and devastating. If women could not be professionals, and science was now a profession, then women could not do science. The exclusion was not an accident of the era. It was a direct response to the field becoming powerful. The walls went up precisely because what was behind them had become valuable.

By the 1870s, women could be educated in science but were barred from scientific careers. The justifications given were biology, motherhood, and the absence of precedent. All dressed up as nature. All structural.

The pattern is worth naming clearly because it repeats. Every time a field becomes the seat of power, it grows walls. The walls get a justification that sounds like common sense. Women get redirected toward lower pay and less influence and then told it was their choice.

That pattern did not stop in the 1870s. It is happening right now. In the field of artificial intelligence. In the language that says tech is complicated, that it requires a certain kind of mind, that it is probably not really for you.

We have been here before. We just called it something different.

The Data From Two Countries

This is not abstract history happening somewhere else. Let me show you the architecture of the two places I call home.

New Zealand

From 1877, when New Zealand established its national education system, that system developed according to accepted notions of the different roles men and women would play in adult life. Secondary education was offered to boys more readily than girls. The redirection was not added later. It was in the foundation.

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 confidence that science was for them. Let that land. An entire organisation had to exist simply to counteract the system's own design.

By 2023, women were 61.7 percent of New Zealand tertiary graduates but only 39.9 percent of STEM graduates. Only 27 percent of digital technology positions in New Zealand are held by women.

In the final year of high school, physics remains male-dominated while nearly 70 percent of biology students are female. Computer and engineering subjects are continually male-dominated and the imbalance is growing, not shrinking. The only technology domains where girls are the majority are food technology and textiles.

Girls pointed at the kitchen and the sewing machine. Boys pointed at the machines that build the future.

At current rates, the gender imbalance in technology and engineering at the University of Auckland is projected to persist until 2070. That is not a gap closing slowly. That is a gap being deliberately maintained.

Los Angeles and California

Women make up 42 percent of California's workforce but only a quarter of those working in STEM. And here is the number that should stop you. Fewer women were working in mathematics careers in 2023 than five or ten years before that. Not stalled. Going backwards.

For more than a decade, state and federal officials poured millions of dollars into programmes designed to boost women in STEM. The results were disappointing. The rates barely moved.

Then came the finding that should make every woman reading this furious.

Just before the pandemic, girls in California had actually done it. They had overtaken boys in mathematics and closed the long-standing gender gap. Girls had higher math scores than boys in 62 percent of California districts in 2018 and 2019.

By 2023 and 2024, that figure had collapsed to just 4 percent. In the Los Angeles Unified School District specifically, girls' scores dropped while boys' scores rose.

Girls closed the gap. Actually closed it. And then society was disrupted, the active effort to fight the pattern paused, and within a few years the pattern came roaring back. As one researcher 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 fighting it, it reasserted itself. That is not a commentary on girls' ability. It is a commentary on the depth of the system.

What We Do With the Anger

I am not telling you this to make you despair. I am telling you because anger, the clear and useful kind, is the beginning of refusal.

Here is the subtle modern version of the same pattern. Nearly equal percentages of young men and women report that their schools encouraged them toward STEM subjects. The encouragement sounds equal. But 54 percent of young men report actually learning computer programming in school, compared with only 39 percent of young women.

The encouragement was not always the variable. The exposure was.

The boys were in the room where the coding happened. The girls were elsewhere, being encouraged, in general terms, toward a future they were never actually shown.

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. That the subject was not really for her. That technology had always belonged to someone else.

And now, at the exact moment when artificial intelligence is becoming the most powerful professional tool of our generation, the same coding is doing the same work. AI feels complicated. It feels technical. It feels like it belongs to a certain kind of person, and that person has never quite had our face.

The refusal is simple. You learn it anyway.

Not because anyone finally gives permission. The history makes clear they never will. You learn it because the coding only works while you believe it was your choice. The moment you see it clearly, the spell breaks. You stop opting out of something that was never actually optional and start building the fluency that the next decade of your professional life will require.

AI does not require the physics class you were redirected out of. It does not require the computer science course the boys were quietly funnelled toward while you were in textiles. It requires curiosity and the refusal to accept a story written into you by a system that benefited from your absence.

And it is learned better in a community. That is not a soft observation. It is historical evidence. Women have always reclaimed what was taken from them by refusing to do it alone and refusing to wait for an invitation that history makes clear will never come.

The Invitation

The Silicon Poppy workshop series is being built for exactly this. A room where the first question is not embarrassing. Where not knowing yet is the starting point, not a disqualification. Where women learn the tools that were never designed for them and make them their own anyway.

The Eventbrite link will be live at linkin.bio/francescahustles when I am back in New Zealand. Watch that space.

The full written article with every statistic sourced is at socialglobalgrind.com. Read it. Share it. Send it to someone who has been carrying the wrong story about themselves for too long.

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.

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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