The engineers all read a heavily moderated message board, a news aggregator and discussion site run by the seed accelerator in Mountain View. The message board was frequented by entrepreneurs, tech workers, computer science majors, libertarians, and the people who loved to fight with them. People whose default conversational mode was debate. Mostly men. Men on both sides of the seawall; men all the way down.
It wasn’t for me, but I read it anyway. It struck me as the raw male id of the industry, a Greek chorus of the perpetually online. The site’s creator had specified that political debate destroyed intellectual curiosity, so political stories, and political conversation, were considered off topic and verboten. Instead, the guidelines asked that users focus on stories that were interesting to hackers. I had always considered hacking an inherently political activity, insofar as I thought about hacking at all, but it seemed the identity had been co-opted and neutralized by the industry. Hacking apparently no longer meant circumventing the state or speaking truth to power; it just meant writing code. Maybe would-be hackers just became engineers at top tech corporations instead, where they had easier access to any information they wanted. Whatever; I wasn’t a hacker.
The posters experimented with new ideologies they seemed to have discovered on crowdsourced wikis. In conversations about industry stories, white papers, product announcements, and one another’s personal blog posts, they swapped notes about ethics, philosophy, and economics. What books make up the core of your operating system? the men asked one another, with great sincerity. They discussed how to preserve mental cycles, how to achieve a state of Deep Work. They debated the merits of a Hippocratic oath for developers, the existence of natural monopolies, the value creation of personal compliments, the state of the Overton window. They talked about Stoicism as a life hack. They teetered on the brink of self-actualization.
When news about the open-source startup’s gender discrimination case first came to light, the message-board commentariat had grappled with the company’s fall from grace. They pounced on a detail that had surfaced in the reports, about male employees watching their female coworkers Hula-Hoop to music in the office. The first woman in Engineering had described the employees ogling their colleagues, as if at a strip club. It’s not like watching Hula-Hoopers would make men rapists, one commenter argued—after all, not even strip clubs turned men into rapists.
Should CEOs be allowed to bring employees to a strip club? someone asked. What if the employees initiate, and they’re women, and they invite the CEO? Another man chimed in to suggest that the Hula-Hoopers were putting on a show—perhaps they wanted to be ogled. Remember, chided an ambassador from the land of evolutionary psychology: desire was an evolutionary imperative.
Side arguments had broken out about the forensics of reverting someone else’s code. Some debated the role played by the open-source startup’s choice of programming languages. Perhaps, they posited, the company’s choice of language mirrored the workplace conditions. Someone pointed out that people tended to confuse tech’s gender ratio—worse than average, he acknowledged—with its harassment rate, which was difficult to judge compared to other industries.
Men built a wildly successful company where they loved to work, and now they have to destroy it to make feminists feel welcome, fumed a prolific commenter.
A man whose handle paid homage to a cartoon cat stirred up a debate about the qualities of a positive office environment. Why, he asked, would a workplace filled with happy young males necessarily be a bad culture?
I flew to Phoenix for an annual conference of women in computing. The conference had been established in honor of a female engineer who helped develop military technologies during the Second World War, a nod, perhaps inadvertent, to the industry’s underacknowledged government origins. On the plane, I joked with my seatmate about whether the National Security Agency would have a recruitment booth: a bad joke that only got worse when I learned that the NSA was one of the conference’s major patrons.
I was not really a woman in computing—more a woman around computing; a woman, with a computer—but I was curious, and the open-source startup was a conference sponsor. All interested employees, regardless of gender, were invited to attend. While nobody was excited to explore Phoenix, a city whose downtown appeared to be a series of interconnected parking lots, the company put us up in a boutique hotel with a pool and a Mexican restaurant. The restaurant bar quickly became our new headquarters.
On the first night, my coworkers gathered over bowls of guacamole and sweaty margaritas. For many of them, the conference was just an excuse to get together in person, a reunion of sorts. Many hadn’t seen one another since the startup’s gender discrimination crisis. There was a lot to catch up on.
I hovered on the periphery, hoping the women engineers would adopt me. I found them intimidating: smart, passionate about their work, and unafraid to call bullshit, at least in the privacy of their own cohort. Some of them had unnaturally colored hair and punk-rock piercings, signaling industry seniority as much as subcultural affiliation. I had no conception of what it would be like as a woman in tech whose skill set was respected. I was disappointed to learn that it wasn’t too dissimilar from being a woman whose skill set wasn’t.
For the most part, the other women seemed glad that some of the company’s problems had been exposed. Too many people puking in the elevator, metaphorically and not. Too many unexamined disparities. The obsession with meritocracy had always been suspect at a prominent international company that was overwhelmingly white, male, and American, and had fewer than fifteen women in Engineering. For years, my coworkers explained, the absence of an official org chart had given rise to a secondary, shadow org chart, determined by social relationships and proximity to the founders. Employees who were technically rank-and-file had executive-level power and leverage. Those with the ear of the CEO could influence hiring decisions, internal policies, and the reputational standing of their colleagues.
“Flat structure, except for pay and responsibilities,” said an internal tools developer, rolling her eyes. “It’s probably easier to be a furry at this company than a woman.”
“It’s like no one even read ‘The Tyranny of Structurelessness,’” said an engineer who had recently read “The Tyranny of Structurelessness.”
It was perhaps predictable that modeling a company after an internet community would have drawbacks, but modeling a company after the open-source software community turned out to have been uniquely fraught. On top of the problems with meritocracy and the no-managers workflow, open source was historically a boys’ club. Fewer than 5 percent of contributors were women. Exclusionary rhetoric proliferated. Even in person, at technical meet-ups and conferences, men pontificated and strutted across stages with pop-star lighting while the women engineers were leered at, condescended to, groped. Can’t get sexually harassed when you work remotely, we joked, though of course we were wrong.
It quickly became apparent that I was sheltered: good communication and compassion were built into the support function. On Engineering, as the men wrote high-minded manifestos about the importance of collaboration, everyone else struggled to get their contributions reviewed and accepted. Some men shipped huge parts of the platform based on internal popularity, while women’s code was picked apart or dismissed. The company promoted equality and openness, until it came to stock grants: equity packages described as nonnegotiable were, in fact, negotiable for those who were used to successfully negotiating. The infamous name-your-own-salary policy had resulted in a pay gap so severe that a number of women had recently received corrective increases of close to forty thousand dollars. No back pay.
Over the next few days, I wandered the bowels of the city’s convention center, where eight thousand students and technology professionals had gathered in a semi-coordinated attempt to capture each other’s attention. There were booths for all the large technology corporations, and for startups from every investment-firm fiefdom. Temporary stalls draped in cheap dark fabric had been erected along the sidelines, inside of which corporate recruiters conducted job interviews. I found it reassuring to see companies focused on biotech, robotics, health care, renewable energy—staid and serious organizations that did not reflect the startup giddiness of consumer tech to which I had grown accustomed in San Francisco.
Among the computer science majors, I felt vaguely out of place, then embarrassed to have impostor syndrome at a conference designed to empower women in the workforce. I made sure to keep my identification badge, which prominently displayed the logo of the open-source startup, over my T-shirt, which prominently displayed the logo of the open-source startup. I stood behind the booth and handed out stickers of the octopus-cat costumed as Rosie the Riveter, the Statue of Liberty, a Día de los Muertos skeleton, and a female engineer—swooshy bangs, ponytail, cartoon hoodie decorated with the octopus-cat.
As I watched a flood of young women pass out their résumés and chat about careers they hadn’t started yet, I felt heartened, inspired. Perhaps I will work for you one day, I thought, feeling expansive and corny. I wished, vaguely, that I had stuck with the programming exercises the previous year. My skill set had never exactly been on the cutting edge of technology, not even close, but I already felt myself sliding toward obsolescence. There was the sense that my coworkers and I were coming face-to-face with our replacements, and I envied the younger women’s futures. I also felt, in a maternal way, responsible for them.
Everyone I knew in tech had a story, first- or secondhand. That week, I heard new ones: the woman who had been offered an engineering job, only to see the offer revoked when she tried to negotiate a higher salary; the woman who had been told, to her face, that she was not a culture fit. The woman demoted after maternity leave. The woman who had been raped by a “10X” engineer, then pushed out of the company after reporting to HR. The woman who had been slipped GHB by a friend of her CEO. We had all been told, at some point or another, that diversity initiatives were discriminatory against white men; that there were more men in engineering because men were innately more talented. Women kept personal incident logs. They kept spreadsheets. They kept tabs. Some were beginning to step forward and speak about their experiences openly. It felt like the start of a sea change.
Not everyone was excited by the public conversation. Some prominent founders and investors, habituated to fatuous coverage of playful workplaces and unfiltered, idealistic CEOs, did not appreciate this style of media attention. They blamed journalists who reported on sexual harassment for making the industry look bad; they claimed the media were jealous because the tech industry was eating their lunch. They complained that complaints about the boys’ club discouraged girls from pursuing STEM, as if this were all just a matter of marketing. Some women, would-be scabs, chimed in to say that they’d had male mentors, and were just fine. The level of discourse could use a boost.
During the conference’s keynote speech, the CEO of a highly litigious Seattle-based software conglomerate encouraged women to refrain from asking for raises. “It’s not really about asking for the raise, but knowing and having faith that the system will give you the right raises as you go along,” he said. “That might be one of the additional superpowers that, quite frankly, women who don’t ask for raises have.” Better, he offered, to trust karma.
At a Male Allies Plenary Panel, a group of women engineers circulated hundreds of handmade bingo boards among attendees. Inside each square was a different indictment: Mentions his mother. Says “That would never happen in my company.” Wearables. Asserts another male executive’s heart is in the right place. Says feminist activism scares women away from tech. At the center of the board was a square that just said Pipeline. I had heard the pipeline argument, that there simply weren’t enough women and underrepresented minorities in STEM fields to fill open roles. Having been privy to the hiring process, I found it incredibly suspect.
What’s the wearable thing, I asked an engineer sitting in my row. “Oh, you know,” she said, waving dismissively toward the stage, with its rainbow-lit scrim. “Smart bras. Tech jewelry. They’re the only kind of hardware these guys can imagine women caring about.” What would a smart bra even do? I wondered, touching the band of my dumb underwire.
The male allies, all trim, white executives, took their seats and began offering wisdom on how to manage workplace discrimination. “The best thing you can do is excel,” said a VP at the search-engine giant whose well-publicized hobby was stratosphere jumping. “Just push through whatever boundaries you see in front of you, and be great.”
Don’t get discouraged, another implored—just keep working hard. Throughout the theater, pencils scratched.
“Speak up, and be confident,” said a third. “Speak up, and be heard.”
Engineers tended to complexify things, the stratosphere jumper said—like pipelines.
A woman in the audience slapped her pencil down. “Bingo!” she called out.
The open-source startup was still coming out of crisis mode. It was as if someone had switched the lights on at a party, and everyone was scrambling to tidy up, looking around for paper towels and trash bags, rubbing red eyes and scrounging for mints. Installing Human Resources and promoting employees with no managerial experience to middle-management roles with no authority. Rolling up the “In Meritocracy We Trust” flags. Removing “stay classy” from the job listings. Striking the culture-fit interview. Disabling the prompt, /metronome, that dropped an animated GIF of a pendulous cock into the all-company chat room. Hiring bartenders to enforce a drink limit. Wondering what else might be broken, and how quickly it could be fixed.
Call it crisis management, corporate responsibility, or catching up to the zeitgeist: the open-source startup decided to become an industry leader in the “diversity space.” The CEO hired a management consultant, a bubbly and no-bullshit Latina woman who had graduated from a top business school after attending a renowned private university in Palo Alto that was largely considered a feeder for the tech industry. The consultant’s undergraduate class, in the early 1990s, was infamous for having produced a group of entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and libertarians who had jump-started the internet economy, become dynastically wealthy by their thirties, and given back to society by reinvesting in the ecosystem. The consultant’s firsthand familiarity with this milieu—and her knowledge of who, from their cohort, had not accessed such fortune—suggested to me that it was not a coincidence she had dedicated her career to the Sisyphean task of proving to people in positions of power that discrimination in tech not only existed, but should, and could, be addressed.
At HQ, we assembled in small groups in the Rat Pack room for unconscious-bias trainings and roundtable discussions. The conference room could have served as a soundstage for a show about 1960s advertising executives, if not for the flat-screen mounted at one end, on which a grid of employees, disembodied in London and Tokyo and South Carolina, bobbled and glitched. We sat around the heavy wood table, swiveling in orange bucket chairs, and talked about microaggressions, intersectionality, and the cultural values embedded in code. I eyed the silver bar cart and the elegant midcentury credenza, and wondered whether it might also be worth spending some time on the cultural values embedded in interior design.
The consultant knew her audience. She pitched diversity to us as if it were enterprise software. Many companies treated diversity as window dressing, she said: diversity and inclusion were used as a PR play, a nice-to-have, which often manifested as a siloed office on the Human Resources floor that occasionally proffered tax-deductible gifts to uncontroversial nonprofit organizations. But diversity, the consultant explained, wasn’t just about doing the right thing. We needed to see diversity as a business asset, and as central to the value proposition. It was critical for innovation and needed to be treated as such, at every level of the company.
Most of my coworkers were excited about the diversity and inclusion initiatives. Like the majority of tech workers I knew, they were open-minded, smart, and receptive to new ideas—though for some of them, the discussion was hardly novel, only overdue. That the company was starting to take them seriously was hugely gratifying.
There was a smaller subset, however, for whom viewing power through an intersectional lens was a new way of looking at the world, one they were being told was not only the new normal in their workplace, but a morally correct position. They asked whether, by focusing on diversity, the company was lowering the bar. Just asking questions, they said: What about diversity of experience? What about diversity of thought? Tech had a lot of Asians and Asian-Americans, they pointed out—maybe not in leadership roles, but still, shouldn’t that count for something? They argued about the pipeline problem. They argued about genetic predisposition. They argued that tech wasn’t perfect, but at least it was more open-minded than other industries, like finance. They internalized the critique of meritocracy as a critique of open-source. The consultant listened patiently as my colleagues microaggressed her.
“Meritocracy”: a word that had originated in social satire and was adopted in sincerity by an industry that could be its own best caricature. It was the operating philosophy for companies that flirted with administering IQ tests to prospective and existing employees; for startups full of men who looked strikingly similar to the CEO; for investors undisturbed by the allocation of 96 percent of venture capital to men; for billionaires who still believed they were underdogs because their wealth was bound up in equity.
I understood why the idea appealed, especially at a time of great economic insecurity, and especially for a generation that had come of age around the financial collapse. Nobody was guaranteed any future, I knew. But for those who seemed to be emerging from the wreckage victorious—namely, those of us who had secured a place in an industry that had steamrolled its way to relevance—the meritocracy narrative was a cover for lack of structural analysis. It smoothed things out. It was flattering, and exculpatory, and painful for some people to part with.
The consultant assembled a task force of employees, a sort of internal focus group, and called it a diversity council. I applied to join; my desire to be a teacher’s pet was so deeply ingrained, it was basically pathological. Once a week, twenty of us sat around a conference table and discussed the startup’s problems. We complained. We divulged. We processed. A woman who built internal tools recommended that the men read Feminism Is for Everybody, and they solemnly nodded. It all felt like intellectually engaged, important work. I couldn’t believe I was getting paid to do it.
Late one morning, on the way to HQ, I spotted a middle-aged man in the light-rail station wearing one of the octopus-cat hoodies. He was sitting upright on a piece of cardboard, a bent paper cup beside him, and was not wearing shoes. On his ankle was an open wound. Below us, I could see a train, maybe mine, pulling in. I rushed through the turnstile, wondering if I should have given him money, then wondering if I only felt that way because of the octopus-cat. I found a seat on the train and pressed my head against the window like a child.
The train emerged aboveground and onto the Embarcadero, curving past a gigantic pop-art sculpture of a bow and arrow. The bay glittered and lapped, seagulls descended on a neglected bakery bag, and I felt disturbed. The man seemed like a novelistic apparition, a hallucination.
When I got into the office, I described to a coworker how surreal it had been, like whiplash. It was the city’s socioeconomic gap personified, I said. It felt even more significant that the man in the light-rail station was black, and not just because San Francisco was losing its black population at a rapid clip. To my knowledge, our company had just two black employees.
Just so on the nose, I said. My coworker nodded. “That is really sad,” he said. We stood there, as if observing a moment of silence. “I wonder whose it was,” he said. “We’re not supposed to give away the hoodies.”