Silicon Valley, as you might expect, is crawling with software engineers. But writing code is only one of many jobs that make the industry run. Plenty of other white-collar labor is needed—and many of the people performing it are women.
These are the so-called nontechnical roles, and it’s where Silicon Valley’s stark gender divide grows even starker. Google is nearly 70 percent men; Facebook, 63 percent; Apple, 67 percent. When it comes to the “technical” part of the workforce, however, the numbers get even worse: 77 percent men at all three companies. This imbalance partly accounts for the industry’s gender pay gap, because people who are seen as less technical tend to be valued less. But what does “technical” even mean? Is a customer support associate who patiently helps customers debug their code really not technical?
We spoke to a technical writer about what it’s like to be a woman in tech perceived to be less technical, despite having the word “technical” in her title. She spoke about navigating the industry’s gender politics, why she almost left as a result, and how she found a way to stay.
In college, I wanted to be an editor. I wanted to find the next big writer and nurture their career. When I graduated, I quickly realized that wasn’t going to happen. Entry-level jobs in publishing are difficult to find, especially if you’re not in New York.
So I started looking around for a job. I’d been working the night shift at a factory to cover my student loan payments while I was finishing school. But I needed better-paying work. Eventually I ended up applying for an entry-level technical writing job, having taken a couple of technical writing courses at college.
No, I never saw myself going into technical writing. It was just the first job that I got. I took it because I needed to pay rent.
It was a financial software company, so it was a cross between tech and finance. Both are highly masculine industries that tend to have problems with women. So, as a young woman coming right out of college, I dealt with a lot of inappropriate comments.
In my interview, they had asked me some weird questions, like, “How would you react if someone was throwing paper balls at you all day?” It turns out the two men interviewing me asked that because they knew the team lead was extremely unprofessional, especially with young women. He wasn’t sexually harassing them. But he didn’t treat them as equals. They wanted to make sure that I would be able to stand up to him.
He definitely had problems. I remember going out to lunch with him and another person and he started rating the women that walked past us on a one-to-ten scale. I remember not saying anything because I didn’t know what to say.
Yeah. He was the one who divided up the tasks. And he gave me a lot to do—very soon after I arrived, I ended up with the lion’s share of the work. I was on a team of three technical writers. The other two were men, and I probably had three times as much work as they did, although I was being paid significantly less.
Well, eventually our team lead left. That made things better. I moved under a different manager, and during our first performance review he took me aside and said, “I know that you do most of the work and that you’re underpaid.” And then he gave me a 40 percent raise.
Yeah. It totally changed my career. I stayed there for about five years.
I usually compare it to IKEA. When you buy something from IKEA, the only way you know how to put it together is by looking at the instruction manual. It’s the glue that holds everything together.
There are the people who build a product—engineers, designers, and so on. Then there are the people who explain how to use the product. That’s us.
My first company made financial trading software. And we needed to explain to our customers what the requirements were for installing that software and getting it to run properly.
When I got there, we had a thirty-two-page document explaining all this. It was unusable. Customers were very confused about what they needed to do. So I turned it into a two-pager. That was my first moment of realizing, “Oh, technical writing really is necessary. I can provide real value.”
It’s highly dependent on the kind of engineer or executive you’re working with. The stereotypical dynamic is that you’re not valued. They don’t really understand what you’re doing in the room. They talk over you or talk down to you because writing is seen as a soft skill. We’re seen as humanities people. Even though technical writers are some of the only people who actually have “technical” in their role name, we’re not seen as technical. People assume we don’t know what we’re talking about.
A lot of technical writers are women. At my current job, my whole team is women. And all women in tech deal with the perception that we’re nontechnical. Which means we are paid less. You see this particularly with equity. In tech, your equity generally depends on how technical you are perceived to be.
It’s a way to devalue the craft. It’s like saying that product designers are just there to make things look pretty.
Technical writing is actually probably only about 10 percent writing. It’s a small portion of the job. Most of your time is spent on research, information architecture, content strategy—all these related disciplines. It’s not about typing words on a screen and publishing them somewhere. It’s about telling the right story to your users so they know how to use the product.
Sometimes people forget that not all software looks like email. There’s a lot of software that’s actually pretty complex. A lot can go wrong. And the stakes are high when it does. If users do the wrong thing when using a big piece of enterprise software, for example, that company could lose millions of dollars.
Absolutely. And I have found, especially in the last few years, that a lot of people don’t conform to the above stereotype. They see the value in what we do. It’s nice to work with folks like that.
I had a couple more jobs before I landed what I thought was my dream position. I would be the first technical writer at a small company. I was really excited.
It turned out to be a strange place. They were focused on creating a fun company that people wanted to work at—Ping-Pong tables, that startup feel—but without any real substance behind it. They just didn’t know what they were doing. I was one of the oldest people working there and I was twenty-nine.
The two cofounders told me they didn’t want any external documentation. They wanted internal documentation. And they wanted me to document the product not as it actually existed, but as they had originally envisioned it.
The problem is that the two cofounders had each envisioned it differently. So I would sit in a room with them and listen to them argue. “No, we meant for it to look like this!” “No, we wanted it to happen this way!” It was a mess.
Documentation is the source of truth. It’s not marketing. It’s not sales.
You’re there to be honest with the user. You have to be willing to talk about the limitations, the bugs. You have to be willing to talk about the behaviors that will break everything. It’s important because if users don’t trust your product, they’re not going to use your product. Technical documentation is the place where you build that trust.
There’s a push and pull sometimes between the various groups. When I talk to folks in marketing, they’re looking at it from the perspective of how to sell the product. When they see a piece of documentation that describes the product less positively, they don’t understand why it needs to be said that way. So we have a conversation, and try to come to a middle ground where we both feel comfortable. Then, once they’re not paying attention anymore, I sneak back in the stuff that users really need to know.
Despite the issues I mentioned, I found a way to move forward. I started writing internal documentation. I created a style guide and I laid the foundations for having technical content more widely shared within the company. I was working well with the developers.
My manager and I had a great working relationship. I had a good performance review. Everything was roses. Then I got pregnant with my second child and I started to take some time off. Just mornings here and there when I woke up and thought, I can’t do it. I’m going to throw up—I can’t go into work. At the time, I had a two-hour commute each way.
I hadn’t told my company that I was pregnant yet, because conventional wisdom says to wait till you get to that twelve-week mark when things feel safer. When I reached that point, I had a conversation with HR. The company was so small that they didn’t have a formal HR department, just a guy who was filling that role. He had no official training, but he was a nice guy. So I pulled him aside and asked about maternity leave. There was no policy in the handbook, because I was the first person at the company who had ever been pregnant.
He said he would talk to the cofounders and get back to me. That sounded good to me. I figured the maternity leave wouldn’t be great, but it would be something.
Soon after, on the day I was planning to announce my pregnancy to the rest of the company, one of the cofounders pulled me into a conference room. He told me that things weren’t working out so they were going to eliminate my role.
He also said that because I was technically negative in my time off—those days when I was too sick or tired from pregnancy to come into work—I owed the company five days’ pay. Normally, it doesn’t matter if you’re negative: you just keep accruing days and it evens out. He told me he wouldn’t make me pay them back for those days, but in exchange, I wouldn’t be getting any severance.
I was very upset. I told him I was about to announce that I was pregnant. He said he didn’t know.
I’ll never know if he knew. But I’m pretty sure he did. There is no smoking gun I can point to. But my guess is that the HR guy told him. He probably figured it wasn’t worth it to pay for maternity leave, so it’d be easier just to get rid of me. And it wasn’t illegal, because they eliminated the role, not the person.
No. People told me I should have, but I just couldn’t. I was so upset at the time, I signed the paperwork and went home sobbing. I was tired. I was pregnant.
I also didn’t want to rock the boat. Because the worry when you’re a woman in tech is that if you raise your voice, you’ll get branded as a troublemaker. Tech is actually kind of a small industry. You don’t want to be the woman who’s not easy to work with. I was so scared at that moment that I didn’t do the right thing.
I did. But it’s hard to find a job when you’re pregnant. It was my second pregnancy and I was already showing. Then I had the kid, which didn’t make it any easier. Trying to find a job with a newborn is impossible.
My husband was working, which meant we were on his health care. But his salary wasn’t enough to pay all of our bills. So I had to bring money in one way or another. Fortunately, I found contract work. Contract work has saved me time and time again.
I would take care of my kids during the day. Then I would put them to bed and start working. I was really doing two jobs at once.
I probably averaged about four hours of sleep a night. I would wake up around 5:30 a.m. and go to bed around 1:00 a.m. I would take naps with my kids in the afternoon. That was how I got through. I would force my toddler to take a nap when the baby did. Then I would take a nap with them.
It was a delicate dance. I was very tired for about two years.
It wasn’t all bad. Contract jobs typically pay well, so I was able to pay off a lot of things, including my student loans. That was great. But I was out of full-time work for almost two years, which was terrifying.
There was a long period where I didn’t think I would. I was just done. I didn’t want to work in tech anymore. I wanted to go a completely different route. I was kicking myself for taking that first technical writing job, thinking, What did I get myself into?
I used to ask my daughter, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” And when I was working full-time, she said, “I want to be a writer, like you!” Or, “I want to be an artist, like Dad!” He’s a designer.
Then, after I had been home for a while, her answer began to change. Even though I was still doing contract work, she didn’t really understand that. She just knew I was at home. So she started saying, “I want to be a mommy, like you.”
Now, there’s nothing wrong with being a full-time parent. It’s a super admirable thing to do. But, personally, it broke my heart to hear my daughter say that. I didn’t want to be instilling that idea. So in that moment, I decided that I was going to find my way back to tech. I was going to find a place to work that wouldn’t treat me in the way that I had been treated.
I focused on remote jobs. I figured that people who trust their employees to work from home will treat them like adults.
And eventually I landed at a wonderful place. Most of the people who work there are remote. I’ve been there almost four years. I’ve been promoted three times within that time period, and I’m leading the team now.
Being able to work remotely is the entire reason that I’ve been able to keep a full-time job while having two small children.
There’s a million doctor’s appointments and school functions. They don’t actually take that much time. But if you’re working on-site, you just can’t do them all. You can’t take your kid to that twenty-minute doctor’s appointment that they need to get antibiotics. You can’t show up to the thirty-minute classroom party where the parents just stand in the corner.
So being able to work remotely has really enabled me to be there as a parent and not give up those things that matter to me, while still being able to contribute professionally in a meaningful way. When you work remotely, you don’t have to feel guilty about asking your boss if you can work from home one day or leave early another day.
For instance, at one of my former full-time positions, I had wanted to take my kids trick-or-treating on Halloween. The trick-or-treating starts in my neighborhood at 7:00 p.m. I had a two-hour commute, so I had to leave work at 3:00 p.m. to get home with enough time to put my kids into their costumes. My boss told me I was allowed to leave early, but that I would have to come in early the next day. So the following morning I was in the office at 5:00 a.m. I turned the lights on that day, just so I could take my kids trick-or-treating.
I shouldn’t have to choose between my kids and my work. Working remotely means I don’t have to.
Exactly. There are a ton of women who had to leave tech when they had kids. How do we support women who are trying to come back into the industry when their kids are a little older and they’re ready to make that transition? What resources can we provide?
It’s frustrating to have to face this problem, because it’s very specific to women. In general, women are still expected to fill certain roles in the home and be a parent in a way that men aren’t.
Yes. Not just from the perspective of whether they’ll get the job, but also how much they should be paid. Because people assume that if you’re out of the industry for a few months, you’re behind on things. There’s a belief that the technology is moving so fast that if you fail to keep up with it even for a moment, you’ll no longer have the relevant qualifications. Women already face a huge pay gap in tech, and this sort of thing just exacerbates the problem.
My first boss at my first job, the one I was telling you about, once made a comment along these lines that I will never forget. He said that women should be paid less when they take time off to have a baby. Because if they’re out of the workforce for a month or two, they’ll be less valuable when they come back. Therefore their pay should be docked.
That’s a surprisingly pervasive attitude among men in tech. They think women who are taking maternity leave are doing it for fun or something. They think we’re hav- ing a vacation. So why should we make as much money as men?
Put in place better programs to train their managers. Managers have an enormous amount of power. As I’ve moved into a leadership role myself, I see how little training there is. I hire people, I promote people, I give them raises, I sponsor them, I coach them—and I do all of this with no real training. There’s nothing preventing me from imparting my own biases. And that’s a terrifying thing to see from the inside.
Yeah, it’s a totally different set of skills. But there isn’t much agreement on what those skills even are. For most people, it’s a complete black box.
When I moved into a leadership role, I joined Slack communities where managers give one another advice. Some of the things they say are pretty wild. The women and nonbinary folks had to create another private channel just for us, where we talk about how we can influence the men to not be shitty.
So, yes, we need better criteria for who we promote into management and better training to remove people’s biases, or at least be aware of them. We need to be more intentional about the kind of environment we’re trying to create, and understand the roles that individual managers play in creating that environment.
Let’s say you have salary ranges for the different levels of a particular role. That’s a way to help standardize pay and reduce gender disparities. But those ranges can be as big as a hundred thousand dollars. And it’s up to the manager to place a new hire within that range.
So, all the time, I see men who are hired in at higher rates than women with the same amount of experience. Again, it all comes down to the individual manager. Maybe that manager saw something that makes them see the woman as a little less technical. Maybe that woman wasn’t at a well-known company. So they bring her in lower because they have these biases against things that women have no control over, and which does not actually speak to the value they will bring to the organization.
These conversations have been happening in back channels for a long time. Not just around women, but around any minority group in tech. If they’re not happening in back channels, they’re happening within people’s heads. We know what’s going on. We know the situation.
Now there’s this heightened scrutiny. People are calling out things for being unjust, and that’s great. But the heightened scrutiny is not necessarily productive. The media, for example, can be exhausting. There were articles written about my company a couple of years ago that I found really frustrating.
Because we were having these conversations among trusted back-channel groups internally. Then all of a sudden it became a public issue and the narrative was taken away from us. The media makes you out to be victims. You become part of a bigger story about women being mistreated in tech. It’s really tiring after a while.
Yes, that’s exactly it.
I mean, just look at the entire situation with James Damore.2 The story was all about him. It was all about his beliefs and his backstory. He was the subject. He got to have all the autonomy and the agency.
The Damore thing is also interesting because it demonstrates how, as the conversations around diversity become bigger and more visible, people who are not from underrepresented groups start to join them. You see a lot of new voices coming in who don’t really have the context to participate constructively. They don’t really understand the situation, but they feel entitled to offer their opinions. So spaces that were previously smaller and more trusted are now being expanded, and it’s usually not for the better.
You can no longer use those spaces to vent. Instead, you’re being asked to defend your existence within tech on a larger stage. So a lot of women just back out of the conversation completely, because they don’t want to be put in the position of being the voice of all women.
So the conversations are louder. There are more people involved. But that doesn’t necessarily make them better.