Eron Gjoni was a twenty-four-year-old blogger and gamer when, in August 2014, he decided to air whole baskets of relationship dirty laundry on the internet. It stunk. Gjoni posted the chronicle of his entire relationship with indie game developer Zoe Quinn, whose crime was apparently having the audacity to cheat on him (allegedly). He meticulously detailed his perceived wrongs on a website he created entirely for the purpose of bizarrely bashing her. Gjoni accused Quinn of sleeping her way to good reviews for her game, Depression Quest, which explored mental health. Quinn, he alleged, set back the cause of women in gaming. Gamergate (GG) was born.
The internet army (gamers on Reddit, tech blogs, 4chan, and other gaming sites) rallied against Quinn. They doxxed her, publishing her personal contact information, including her address and phone number, to spur harassment. They hacked her computers and sent naked pictures of her to her dad. They called her with threats of rape and death. And they blamed her for all of it, saying what they were doing was all in the name of good journalism. GGers claimed that exchanging sex for favorable reviews was endemic in the video game journalism beat and yet another reason for male gamers to hang the “No Girls Allowed” sign on the big boss door. It was later proven that none of the men Quinn was accused of having sex with in return for good reviews had, in fact, even reviewed her game, but GGers tended to ignore that.
As Gamergate gained momentum, it continued to hide behind its “ethics in journalism” mandate. Its members repeatedly and uniformly derided feminists and anyone else who spoke out against it while at the same time denying it hated, or harmed, women, a claim easily disproved by anyone who possessed even the most rudimentary Google search skills. Basic facts didn’t matter; messaging did. Again and again, proponents claimed they just wanted women to stop sleeping their way up the industry, to stop being supposed PR shills, to “respect themselves.” None of that was anti-woman, according to Gamergate proponents, who universally blamed feminists for the movement’s violent reputation. Feminists were misrepresenting and diluting their message, GGers claimed, but that wasn’t what it was about, man. Some men in the technology industry promoted the harmful message, including one Montreal-based Ubisoft game developer who tweeted regularly in support of Gamergate, a move that its members call refreshing: “I find it *very* clear that Gamergate is not a hate group. That’s a lazy smear tactic and an obvious lie.”
It’s worth mentioning, too, that like many anti-feminists, Alison Tieman and Karen Straughan are proud GGers. In 2015, for instance, the Calgary Expo kicked out both women, along with the other members of the Honey Badger Brigade, because the group promoted Gamergate at its booth. On their fundraising campaign page, which crowdsourced nearly $10,000 to send the Badgers to the expo, the women explained their “stealth” mission. “As men’s issues advocates and defenders of a creator’s rights to create unmolested, [this is] what we have to say to the nerds and geeks and gamers,” they wrote. “You are fantastic as you are, carry on.” In other words, Feminists, stop whining! Once at the expo, the Honey Badgers hung a huge “Stand against censorship” banner depicting a group of animated honey badgers waving a flag with the GG logo and the word “ethics.” In response to getting the boot, the Honey Badgers sued the expo and the website Mary Sue, which covered the incident, claiming discrimination. (For a movement that decries feminism as a bunch of whiners…well, pot meet kettle.) Super-duper-conservative news website Breitbart covered the incident, and everyone from Christina Hoff Sommers to Milo Yiannopoulos, the originator of “feminism is cancer,” tweeted support. (Yiannopoulos has since suffered a spectacular fall from right-wing grace; conservatives had no problem with his racism and misogyny but drew a line when he endorsed sexual relationships between adult males and adolescent boys.) In the end, the Honey Badgers raised $30,000 to support their lawsuit, hiring disbarred Ontario lawyer Harry Kopyto. They claim to be going to trial in November 2017.
At the time of the expo, I was editor of This Magazine, one of Canada’s oldest independent, politically progressive publications. We published a feminist call-to-action issue, saying “F*@K THAT!”—right on the cover—to all the women-centered BS we were witnessing. Among many articles, we published an essay in which the writer questioned the real cost of the hyper-misogynistic social media harassment campaign to get women off social media, off the internet, away from video games, out of the tech industry, and also, preferably, raped and/or killed. Within hours of the piece going live, our website crashed. Rumors circulated that Gamergate had done it, but we could never confirm it. The essay’s writer sent me an email saying she was “getting massacred” online for daring to argue it was impossible to know how many girls and women GG’s harassment campaign had forced out of tech: surely the number must be unfathomably large. Our harassers called us, well, harassers. They said we’d lied, that we’d besmirched their reputations by saying what they’d done was terrible. They’d only been telling the truth, they countered: women didn’t belong in technology. Our writer received the first threat. Incensed Gamergate supporters published her home address, along with her number, to teach her a lesson to never, ever speak out again.
In the months that followed Gamergate’s rise, many women who decried the movement were doxxed and physically threatened. One developer, Brianna Wu, was forced to leave her home and go into hiding. She received her first death threat in October 2014 after venting about sexism in video games in her weekly podcast: “You cannot have thirty years of portraying women as bimbos, sex objects, second bananas, cleavage-y eye candy. Eventually it normalizes this treatment of women.” The tweet in response: “Guess what bitch? I now know where you live.” It was followed by another that revealed her home address. “Your mutilated corpse will be on the front page of Jezebel tomorrow.” Wu and her husband fled their home that night, crashing on friends’ couches and in hotels for a month, never feeling safe. In the following year, she received another one hundred death threats. They still roll in with regularity.
When Wu later wrote on a feminist website that Ohio’s attorney general wasn’t seriously responding to a subsequent phone threat to “slit her throat,” he released a public rebuttal, saying the attention her story garnered “wasted time and resources” at his office. He wasn’t the only one who dismissed the threats. A number of high-profile Hollywood stars, university academics, and CEOs of big-name tech companies spoke out in support of Gamergate, calling the threatened women liars and attention grabbers who wrongly skewed the movement’s message (whatever it was). If that message had been misrepresented, however, the one to women and girls was clear: The tech industry is not for you. Also: Shut up.
It’s tempting to dismiss those who believe in Gamergate as few and kooky, even if they seem like a maelstrom online. I mean, one of the men who threatened us online wore a pirate hat. It’s equally tempting to say that what happens online doesn’t touch people beyond the internet, that whatever hate is spewed on social media is trapped and contained, like the pit of a peach. Moments like the one we experienced at This show that’s not true: the whole fruit is rotten.
Though women (including women of color and LGBTQ-identified women) at all types of work across all industries face discrimination and violence in the labor force, I chose to open with Gamergate because it is the most explicit example. This is an especially dismal thought when you consider, also, that the STEM fields are at the forefront of our modern economy. The threatening campaign of harassment, violence, and silencing is not only real but entrenched in the technology world, especially in video games. It existed long before Gamergate and, unless we do something about it, will persist long after.
Take Brenda Bailey Gershkovitch, who as a kid spent all her babysitting money at the arcade. Together with a crowd of boys and girls, she played Centipede, Asteroids, Pac-Man, even “stupid Ms. Pac-Man.” She received her first rape threat in 2010 when she and her co-founder announced the launch of their Vancouver-based studio, Silicon Sisters, which designs video games specifically for girls and women. Its first game, School 26, is a worldwide bestseller, with more than one million downloads in thirty-six countries.
Gershkovitch told me the trolls focused on her simply because she wanted to build games for girls. It’s not something she likes talking about. She said she didn’t show anyone the threats, opting for the “don’t feed the trolls” approach. Such an approach is, essentially, a grown-up version of the same advice parents have, for decades, given bullied children: ignore them, and they’ll get bored of picking on you. The other approach, in which you invite the trolls over for a big buffet, fulfills the fantasy of every bullied child on that same playground: fight back. The latter option is the one our This writer chose, and also the same one many prominent feminists and other Gamergate targets have picked. It’s grueling, exhausting, and can consume your days. It can come with IRL consequences, as one This reader from the US told us: “I have enjoyed my own bouts of being called a whore, a bigot, and all sorts of other names simply for expressing the view that video games could stand to evolve beyond the old, tired, sexist tropes currently so prevalent.” She added that she often tried to protect other women, including her daughter, from Gamergate attacks. In return, they hacked her computer.
In other words, as any bullied child will tell you, both approaches suck. If someone wants to make your life miserable, they will. Gamergaters seem to have nothing but time, patience, and perseverance in their campaign to rid the tech world of feminists and, by extension, women. Gershkovitch may have taken the “soldier on” approach, but she knew the stakes. She was careful to add she has tremendous respect for the women who’ve spoken out against the onslaught of Gamergate, in particular Anita Sarkeesian, a feminist video game critic who runs the popular YouTube channel Feminist Frequency, where she dissects how women are portrayed in video games. In 2012, long before Gamergate was coined, anti-feminists targeted Sarkeesian for running a successful Kickstarter campaign to fund her then-new “Tropes vs. Women in Video Games” series. She’d since become their Public Enemy No. 1. “I’m going to send her a huge fruit basket,” Gershkovitch told me, not quite joking, “to say that the shit that you’re taking is for all of us and I appreciate it.”
Sarkeesian fled her home that fall, too, as did Zoe Quinn. Sarkeesian was forced to cancel her talk at Utah State University after a deluge of threats. Among them was one from a writer who claimed to be a student at the university and threatened a mass shooting if Sarkeesian’s talk went ahead: “I will write my manifesto in her spilled blood, and you will bear witness to what feminist lies and poison have done to the men of America.” It wasn’t the first death threat Sarkeesian had received, but it was the first time she canceled an event as a result. This time, she said, she wasn’t confident police and the university had done enough to secure her safety. Utah is a concealed-carry state, meaning those with a gun permit are legally allowed to conceal their weapons. While the university hired extra security and promised to do a bomb sweep, it refused to install metal detectors or ban guns on campus. People had rights, after all. GGers later called the threat a hoax that feminists blew out of proportion, but it’s hard to see how you can reasonably laugh off death threats. (Law & Order later turned Quinn, Wu, and Sarkeesian into a composite character and aired an episode that mirrored their collective ordeal.)
Let’s pause for a moment here and let this all sink in: Sarkeesian and those like her were all feminists in gaming who vocally argued that women in the technology and gaming industry deserved to be treated better—and for that, Gamergate decided, they deserved to die.
Sarkeesian and Quinn both later revealed they had folders on their computers called “The ones we lost.” In them were digital records of all the girls who’d written to them saying they were too afraid to become game developers now; some of those girls were as young as twelve. The restrictive culture had suffocated them out. We have no idea how many girls and women Gamergate has scared away. It’s too soon to know. What we do know is that the industry can’t afford to lose more women; the numbers are already depressingly low. The knowledge that Gamergate and the man-is-might culture it celebrated were succeeding in whittling that number down even further is almost too terrible to confront.
Women who speak out against the tech world have been taking that shit for a long time. In March 2013, Adria Richards, a developer evangelist for email delivery firm SendGrid, tweet-shamed two men sitting behind her at PyCon, the largest annual gathering for techies who use and develop Python, a computer programming language used by organizations such as Google and NASA to write code. While a woman presenter was speaking, the two men had made jokes about “big dongles” and “forking” (technology terms used out of context, in this case, to refer to male genitalia and sex, respectively) in direct violation of the conference’s code of conduct. As the woman speaker thanked the event’s sponsors, the men apparently giggled: “You can thank me; you can thank me.” Presumably, they meant with a sexual act, though I don’t want to guess which one they’d like “thank you” to have been.
Richards said: “I realized I had to do something or [that girl] would never have the chance to learn and love programming because the ass clowns behind me would make it impossible for her to do so,” she later said. She publicly called out their conversation, took a photo of the two, and tweeted it using the expo’s hashtag. She then tweeted at staff, asking them to do something about the men, and sent another tweet with a link to the conference’s code of conduct. Shortly after, organizers escorted the men out. One was later fired, and the male technosphere unleashed its fury on Richards, posting both death and rape threats on Twitter and Hacker News, a respected industry discussion forum. 4chan users also targeted SendGrid with a DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack, shutting down the company’s website in a baldly stated mission to “ruin her [Richards’] life.” In response, SendGrid fired her. As a developer evangelist, it was her job to help the company achieve a critical mass of users for its product, and SendGrid said the controversy prevented her from being effective in her role.
In his 2015 book, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, journalist Jon Ronson interviewed Richards and one of the men who’d been fired—one who’d managed to keep his name secret. When Ronson asked the man what lessons he’d learned from the shaming, the man responded that he’s less friendly and more distant with female developers. When Ronson asked him to give an example of how he talks to female colleagues, however, the man replied: “We don’t have any female developers at the place I’m working at now. So.” He’d found a new job almost immediately. At the time Ronson interviewed her, Richards was still unemployed.
The tech industry is littered with stories like these, ants all swept under the rug. Yet when Gamergate blew up the internet, much of the media talked about it as if it was the start of sexism and misogyny in the sector, imagining, perhaps, that everything before this was hunky-dory. That wasn’t quite true, but it was the big reveal—like the Wizard of Oz, except in reverse. Instead of finding out a harmless old man was running the show, women discovered it was indeed Oz, the great and terrible. We’ve been plunged into a horrific Technicolor dream, so surreal we don’t want to quite believe it’s real.
In many ways, Gamergate has become a catch-all term for the rampant misogyny against women in technology. As it metastasizes, it’s become many things: a great, malignant series of events; a movement of people who believe feminism is ruining video games and technology; a vicious campaign against any woman it deems responsible for said plunge into hell; and, also, arguably a place where casual hate against women is not just legitimized but watered and tended, like a garden. If you’re like me, it’s also a nightmare, a glimpse into a sadly probable future, one in which few little girls will learn how to code or make video games or even spend their afternoons like I did, cross-legged, glued to the TV, fingers finely dusted with neon-orange Doritos powder, trying to beat the big dungeon boss.
No matter how Gamergate started, or how it’s grown, I fear this is what it wants: to build an impossibly high rampart that keeps women and girls out. But technology is not a unique bastion of workforce sexism. The boys’ clubs have planted their ugly tree houses and hung their “no girls!” signs in any number of industries, albeit not as violently. Women are vastly underrepresented and underpaid in media (especially among opinion columnists and in sports journalism), Hollywood (on screen and behind the scenes), engineering, industrial design, manufacturing (where the gender gap has drastically widened since the 1990s), and too many more. That means, in case you’ve blessedly forgotten, that a very narrow segment of the population controls and makes just about everything we use and consume, including our gadgets, apps, gear, cars, buildings, movies, TV, books, newspapers, magazines—et cetera on into infinity.
Unsurprisingly, depressingly, it’s been proven that men target men in talent hunts and men talk to men when showcasing expertise. In 2013, a US study revealed that, for the first two months of the year, only 19 percent of newspaper stories quoted women. That statistic is not uncommon. New York Times reporters are four times more likely to interview a dude. Women consistently account for less than 30 percent of speaking roles in Hollywood. No wonder: we also comprise only 7 percent of directors. We could, all of us, in every living-wage job or high-paying industry, have “ones we lost” folders. Everywhere we turn, women are being silenced, shut out, emphatically and implicitly told to go away. Well, let me repeat: Fuck that. If those of us who’ve been pushed out ever want to be more than squatters in a man’s world, we need to acknowledge our dismal surroundings, do a feminist Miley Cyrus “Wrecking Ball,” and then get to building our own awesome shit.
Of all the many social trends that are emblematic of women’s inequality in the workplace, none is as longstanding or as starkly evident as the wage gap, and, thus, none has been so consistently attacked and dismissed. It’s so battered that, in September 2016, during the height of the presidential PR war in the US, the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR) released a tip sheet titled “Five Ways to Win an Argument About the Gender Wage Gap.” The 79.6 annual wage ratio figure in the US, the sheet acknowledged, is often derided as “misleading, a myth, or, worst of all, a lie.” (Canada’s wage gap ratio is actually slightly worse at 72 cents, down from 74.4 in 2009, giving it the seventh highest gap out of the thirty-four countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.) The IWPR authors contended, however, that the naysayers were often disastrously simplifying a complex figure, usually explaining it away as a woman’s “choice” to work in lower-paying jobs or her “choice” to leave the labor force once she had children (sarcastic air quotes are totally mine and 100 percent intended). In reality, a plethora of research has shown that underlying factors are far more complicated, ranging from discrimination in pay, recruitment, job assignment, and promotion, and—yes, sure—lower earnings in traditionally women-centered occupations, as well as women’s disproportionate share of the family-care pie. (Why can’t we ever get a larger share of, say, the lemon meringue pie? Wouldn’t that be nice and also delicious?) But that doesn’t make it a lie, argued the authors, and what’s more, the very reasons it can be explained away—those listed above—are precisely the reason we can’t fall into the mythical-thinking trap.
The myths IWPR countered in its tip sheet made regular appearances in my interviews with anti-feminists: that women choose to work in crappy jobs; that the most commonly used wage gap statistic doesn’t take account of differences in job sectors or hours worked; or (as we tackled in the previous chapter) that women just don’t want to work. It’s true that some industries and occupations don’t reflect the annual earnings wage gap. Some are even worse. In the US, women physicians and surgeons earn 62 percent of what men earn; financial managers earn 67 percent, despite making up a larger percent of the job sector; chief executives earn 70 percent, and make up only one-quarter of that particular high-earning, high-power slice; and, even in jobs such as retail (sales) and housekeeping/janitorial (supervisors), the number hovers at 70 percent. In occupations where women’s earnings are close to on par with men’s, including maid/housekeeping positions, food preparation workers, office clerks, and even bus drivers, certain glum caveats remain. Those women a) also tend to comprise the majority of workers; or b) the jobs tend to be especially low-earning and precarious; and c) any higher earnings reflect successful collective bargaining among unions, making those jobs the exception, not the rule. Sometimes, there’s even option d) a nasty combination of the above factors and other less easily identifiable ones.
What’s more, studies are now showing that the gap is already evident one year after college or university graduation, and it only continues to grow over the course of a woman’s lifetime. Call me morbid, but it makes me picture the wage gap as a big skull with a gaping maw. In 2012 the American Association of University Women (AAUW) released a study called “Graduating to a Pay Gap” that examined this grim trend. It discovered that one year after graduation, women were already earning just 82 percent of what their male peers earned. That number shrank after the study—perhaps anticipating ant-feminist outcry—controlled for hours worked, occupation, the former student’s major, and their current employment sector. But it didn’t disappear. Women teachers earned 89 percent of what men earned. In sales occupations, the gap sat at 77 percent. And among business majors, women earned just over $38,000 in their first year’s salary, while men earned a tad more than $45,000. Women tended to also dedicate a higher share of their salary toward paying off student debt. “The pay gap has been part of the workplace for so long,” wrote AAUW authors, “that it has become simply normal.” But it doesn’t have to be.
In the previous chapter, I challenged the opt-out myth, arguing that, in many cases, evidence shows that the phrase “push out” might be a more accurate one. But just how bad is the so-called motherhood penalty? In her research work on the wage gap, Claudia Goldin, the Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University, discovered that the opt-out penalty can differ greatly by occupation. Among those who took an eighteen-month hiatus in employment over the course of fifteen years, women with MBAs experienced a 41 percent earnings decrease, women PhDs experienced a 29 percent wage decrease, and those with MDs saw a 15 percent drop. Goldin’s work also showed that MBAs tended to take more time off, largely because their jobs prohibited them from working more flexible schedules. As a result, they opted out entirely.
In subsequent research, Goldin also discovered that women with high-earning spouses tend to have lower labor force participation rates. And if you think women fare better once their children are no longer infants—a logical assumption given the time demands post stork drop-off—think again: the impact of birth on a woman’s workforce participation only grows over time. High-earning jobs, particularly in our always-connected modern world, tend to reward long and continuous work hours. Such hours are not often tenable for women who are expected to take on the primary caretaker role. “A flexible schedule,” noted Goldin, “often comes at a high price, particularly in the corporate, financial, and legal worlds.” That price can be even higher, however, for employees in fields in which a missed work day or an inability to meet a rigid schedule won’t just result in a lost promotion but very possibly a lost job. Many of these women don’t have a higher-earning spouse to fall back on, either because they’re single parents or because their partners tend to be in just as much of a jam as they are. To get an idea of just how much family can affect work and how reticent employers are to enact policies that might retain employees, we can examine the Athena-sized jump of Family Responsibilities Discrimination (FRD) cases in the US.
As the name suggests, FRD cases are those that are filed based on discrimination against employees because of their family obligations, whether that’s pregnancy, motherhood, fatherhood, or even caring for a family member. Over the past decade, such cases have risen 269 percent; employees have won 67 percent of those cases, and employers have forked over half a billion dollars in settlement fees. Cases that involve pregnancy are the most common FRD claim. Some of these cases, as reported in WorkLife Law’s 2016 report “Caregivers in the Workplace,” can involve subtle discrimination: women, for example, who are denied professional development opportunities because supervisors see them as less committed or more unreliable after they have children, or supervisors who believe mothers should be home with their kids and give new mothers less challenging assignments, later telling them they can’t advance because they aren’t ready.
Discrimination can also be blatant. Here’s a small sampling of the 4,400 cases the WorkLife Law report surveyed. In one case, after a front-desk worker took time off to care for her sick daughter, a supervisor allegedly asked her, “How can you guarantee me that two weeks from now your daughter is not going to be sick again? So what is it: your job or your daughter?” In another, a woman who was called into work on scant notice received a text from a supervisor that read, in part, “Look Melissa you have a child whom is medically disabled you do not belong in the workplace or in my clinic…! Go home [and] stay with your daughter—that’s where you belong, not here.” A pregnant part-time grocery store worker provided a doctor’s note informing her supervisor she couldn’t lift more than fifteen pounds and was terminated in response. A pregnant woman security guard, diagnosed with anemia, asked for permission to wear a second coat and was fired. In still another case, a woman was passed over for a promotion and was told it was because she already “had a full-time job at home with her children.” And it just goes on and on.
It’s important to remember, too, that any solutions must take into account women’s various work experiences and their various lived experiences. Just as we must not default to white, middle-class, able-bodied, straight women when we’re discussing the challenges, we can’t default to them while we’re discussing the solutions either. The near 80 percent gap that’s often quoted is a better representation of white women’s earnings relative to white men’s. As discussed in previous chapters, that number shifts dramatically when we consider race and other factors that can influence employment and employment opportunity. “The solutions that you come up with will depend on what you diagnose as the problem,” Chandra Childers, a senior research associate with IWPR, told me. “And if you don’t understand the specific circumstances of each group of women, and even differences within those groups, that’s really going to influence what you think the problems are and then what you think the solutions are.” Still, some universal things could help.
Canada and the US have the most expensive child care in the world, sharing the top three spots with Ireland. (Hi, Ireland! Welcome to our sad club!) In thirty-three states in the US, the annual in-state college tuition costs less than full-time child care for a four-year-old. In Massachusetts, for example, the annual cost of infant care is $17,062; annual tuition is $10,702. Infant care is also 15 percent more than average rent and takes up nearly 20 percent of an average family’s income. A minimum-wage worker would need to work 43 full-time weeks to pay for one year of care. And that’s just for one child. No wonder most can’t afford it.
In Canada, Toronto is the most expensive city for daycare, at a median of $1,649 per month for infants and $1,150 per month for preschoolers. Vancouver and Calgary aren’t far behind. Indeed, the only province where parents fare well is Quebec, where the government subsidizes care; in Montreal the median monthly cost is just $164. And though Quebec’s system isn’t perfect—wait lists are long and spots don’t necessarily go to the families that need them most—it isn’t hard to imagine how big a difference affordable child care could make. That’s particularly true for women who are more likely to be the parent who leaves the labor force to care for children. Women’s lower earnings are often used to justify moves like these, putting women in a vicious cycle.
Stronger maternity and paternity leave polices, particularly in the US, would also go a long way in guaranteeing that women on-ramp easily back into the workforce. Think of it as collectively helping them train for the sprint and the marathon. And the hurdles. Hell, everything. Raising the minimum wage would certainly help, especially the tipped minimum wage in the US, which sits at a terrifying $2.13. More laws allowing transparency when it comes to wages will also help. They would allow women to see just how persistent their wage gap is and to use the information to better bargain. Women and girls can be encouraged to enter traditionally male-dominated fields. Even negotiation training can be rethought so it doesn’t implicitly reinforce the idea that women are simply the pits at bargaining, and if they could negotiate better the gap would disappear. Neither are true. “What I worry about is sending the message that if women just negotiated, that would make the gender gap go away,” Hannah Riley Bowles, a senior lecturer in public policy at Harvard Kennedy School, told me. “And that’s just not an okay message.” Her pioneering research has shown that women aren’t just imagining things when they perceive they’ll be treated more negatively than a man for attempting to negotiate. Employers like their women to fall into stereotypes: to be team players, to be selfless, to not ask about money. Never mind that her research also shows at-home negotiations—the division of domestic labor and child care—also factors into a woman’s ability to negotiate shrewdly and successfully at work.
This is where it gets really sticky: determining how much those gender expectations hamper a woman’s success in the workplace. Even if we enacted more policies and actually followed them this time (ahem, pay equity legislation), even if we untangled the thicket of reasons for the wage gap and gender disparity in the workforce, how much would plain discrimination still stand in the way? A January 2016 National Bureau of Economic Research working paper found that “unexplained factors” accounted for 38 percent of the wage gap. That is, even once you establish control variables—differences in jobs, experience, and hours worked, for example—the gap remains. These “unexplained factors” are usually attributed, in large part, to discrimination, a shadowy thing that no control group can eliminate. Combine these challenges with the blatant discrimination women can experience in the STEM fields and you have a real-time case study of what happens when an industry has a thousand ways, both subtle and overt, to let women know the workforce is a difficult place for them to thrive.
Then again, if you’re an anti-feminist, widespread workplace discrimination is feminist make-believe and none of this is true. As we saw in the last chapter, the anti-feminist movement largely tends to breeze past the complexity of women at work, capitalizing on the anxieties and impossibilities of work-life balance to present an answer that is seductively simpler: women don’t want to work, or, at least, most women don’t want to work, especially in male-dominated fields. Let’s remember what Karen Straughan told me when I asked her why she thought feminism was restrictive and prescriptive when it came to the ways in which it told women they could behave: How far are you willing to push people to do things that they otherwise would not do? The anti-feminist world view dictates that feminism is making women feel guilty for not studying physics, or engineering, or other male-heavy post-secondary fields. Feminism is also designed to make men feel awful, said Straughan, for even being in an engineering class, because, according to feminism (apparently), they are actively and meanly pushing women out. While most feminists would likely agree that it’s worth examining learning environments and diversity as well as the roadblocks women, people of color, and those who are LGBTQ-identified must hurdle over to reach those classrooms (or else land smack facedown on the pavement), I haven’t yet heard any say men don’t belong in them at all. Advocating to open the door wider surely disrupts the status quo and challenges “the way it’s always been,” but it doesn’t close the door on men. Neither does the push to examine and dismantle existing workplace conditions, culture, structures, and supports (or rather, more accurately in most cases, the lack of support).
Yet Straughan didn’t seem to put much stock into the idea of an old boys’ club either, suggesting both that it doesn’t really exist and that, if it does, it’s the natural pecking order. “If she’s happier studying to be a psychologist than she would be studying physics, then why are we making her feel guilty for not studying physics? Or making her feel like a failure to the [feminist] cause?” Straughan asked. “And why are we making him feel guilty for being in an engineering program? Why are we saying, ‘There aren’t enough women there. What are you horrible men doing to keep women out?’” This sort of argument provides a convenient loophole: it doesn’t dictate what women must do, but preaches acceptance of what a woman is naturally inclined to do. It also removes systemic barriers and reduces everything to (unfettered) personal decisions. Straughan once told me she doesn’t like feminists because she can’t imagine them ever doing rough-and-tumble stuff, like climbing trees, so I doubt she adheres to the traditional idea that a woman must be dainty and sweet. But like other anti-feminists, she strongly believes if a woman wanted to do something, she’d do it, period.
Anti-feminists are fond of accusing any feminist who criticizes structural barriers of “damseling,” a derisive term that is particularly popular when it comes to discussing labor equity challenges. While talking about workforce discrimination, for instance, Alison Tieman once told me that “presenting narratives of female victimhood inclines women to see the world not in terms of what they can do but in terms of what is done to them.” If we really want women to fulfill their potential, she adds, society should encourage them to view the world in terms of not how they’re acted upon but how they act upon it. This can-do message that anti-feminists consistently return to celebrates women who have toughed it out while simultaneously condemning to their sad fates those who haven’t been able to do the same. Of course, they likely wouldn’t put it that way. They’d call it choice, and a natural one at that. Then they’d not-so-kindly ask feminists to stop making shit up, to stop making such a fuss, to stop calling out sexist work culture, and to just let everybody do what they do best: namely, the same sorts of things they’re always supposed to have done.
Because they’re such a funny bunch, anti-feminists also like to claim that labor laws and the workplaces they govern have skewed too heavily in favor of women. A lot of really bad men’s rights editorial-style cartoons, for instance, lament affirmative action and claim that women have lighter workloads, better work-life balance (ha!), and more flexible work days. Women are also apparently blessed with lower expectations and easier performance evaluations from superiors and are less likely to be injured on the job, which is true but (whoa!) context matters: women are underrepresented in industries, such as construction, that have high workplace injury rates.
This particular anti-feminist crowd likes to troll social media for prime “But, men!” opportunities. Toronto restaurateur, feminist, writer, and all around badass Jen Agg provides an example of this in her 2017 book I Hear She’s a Real Bitch (a nod to the kind of sexist BS any women with strong opinions faces in male-dominated industries, like the restaurant biz). When the Toronto Star ran an exposé on the truly disgusting sexual harassment one woman pastry chef faced on the job at a Toronto restaurant, including having her breasts grabbed and her rear violently smacked with a metal flipper, Agg started tweeting about breaking the culture of silence and later spearheaded a one-day conference called “Kitchen Bitches: Smashing the Patriarchy One Plate at a Time.” In response she received tweets that asked her whether she believed young men also had a hard time in kitchens. Agg agreed it was true that it was an “industry-wide” culture problem that needed to change “from the top down.” So then she got tweets like: “[Jen Agg] thinks abuses women suffer in the kitchen is more important than the more common male abuse.” Typical.
By capitalizing on women’s anxieties about doing/having/being it all and simultaneously crafting these neat little pretzel knots of logic, anti-feminists have helped strengthen the silence. Many women wholeheartedly believe the narrative that they must not rock the boat or that they can rise up the corporate ladder if they just focus on their success. It’s a palatable enough lie to swallow. Few of the women I approached to talk about their experiences in the technology field wanted to draw attention to themselves. Few agreed to speak right away. And when they did, many of them brushed off their sexist experiences or spoke of them in hushed, but-it-could-have-been-my-fault-actually voices. After one office tour, I stood incredulous as my guides, two women who’d co-founded an innovative environmental app for businesses, told me the tech industry had no problem with their gender. They munched on wasabi-covered crunchy peas from the communal kitchen in their shared office as I looked out onto the warehouse-style floor. Of all the dozens of tech companies in the space, theirs was the only one with female staff. In our fifteen-minute tour, I saw more foosball tables than women. But still, they told me emphatically, it’s no big deal. I grew to expect the accusing look and admonition. Stories that highlight discrimination and harassment, these women told me, don’t make it easier for them—as if I’d conjured up the sexism on my own. Over dinner, Janet Bloomfield did, of course, accuse me of that exact thing and asked me, quite pointedly, if I was a “stupid bitch.”
It was like these women had all read the same self-help book. I imagined it was called something like How to Move Past Violent Misogyny in the Technology Industry, or even Nine Habits of Highly Effective People in Denial. As much as it frustrated me, I understood. Some women just want to work, not be Xena, Warrior Princess, defender of women who like computers (or math, or finance). But it’s dangerous to push the sexist tech culture to the back of the closet, like an old Super Nintendo. Dismissing such a damaging culture is too much like buying into the post-feminist lie, like saying, “We are beyond all that. Women can make it if they want to, if they really try, but only if they stop whining.” If only it were that simple. If we ignore the sausage party, we’ll simply be served a different menu.
The tech industry is, in fact, unkind to many women. Claims of a sexist, fratty culture have followed Uber for years, finally coming under a particularly harsh spotlight when Susan Fowler, a high-profile engineer, detailed her year at the company on her blog. In addition to charting a drastic drop in the number of women at the company (from 25 percent down to 6 percent in under a year), Fowler wrote about some truly jaw-dropping treatment of women. For example, she says the HR department ignored numerous complaints of sexual harassment and discrimination. In most cases, HR staff said the men in question were too important for the company to discipline and appeared to blame Fowler for making a fuss. When she pointed out how few women were site reliability engineers (SREs), like herself, she was again shrugged off—by a woman HR rep. “She [countered] with a story about how sometimes certain people of certain genders and ethnic backgrounds were better suited for some jobs than others,” wrote Fowler on her blog, “so I shouldn’t be surprised by the gender ratios in engineering.” Sound familiar? Fowler quit shortly after. When she left, the number of women SREs had dropped to 3 percent. This was also around the same time that Uber’s CEO, Travis Kalanic, joined Trump’s economic advisory council. More than two hundred thousand people reportedly joined the #DeleteUber movement in protest, and Kalanic quickly resigned the advisory council position. Uber has denied it has a misogynistic culture and pledged to investigate.
“Technology is becoming less and less hospitable for women,” Brenda Bailey Gershkovitch told me during our interview at the height of Gamergate. I’d spoken to her and other women for a Flare magazine article on the harassment and discrimination of women in technology. The piece was assigned before Gamergate, but I eventually switched focus to cover the newest “get out” campaign focused on women in the tech industry. Gershkovitch reminded me that discrimination was present in the industry long before GG boiled over, too. Looking at the harassment online, in her life, and in the industry itself, she added, “This is the version of us being in the house in the 1950s.” She was right, of course, but women weren’t being told just to get back inside the proverbial house. They were told to spend the twenty-first century’s economic boom forcefully stuck in their homes, safely making Bundt cakes (or whatever) while men got to remake the world. Sure, some women, like Gershkovitch herself, aren’t stuck in a millennium version of Pleasantville, but they are woefully few. If anything, the handful of women at the top, like Yahoo CEO Marissa Meyer, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, and YouTube’s Susan Wojcicki, have fooled us into thinking this means women are everywhere.
Across Canadian universities, only 39 percent of technology, engineering, math, and computer science grads are women, and men overwhelmingly land jobs at the top tech firms. In 2014, only twenty-four of the Canadian companies included in Deloitte’s list of the fifty fastest growing technology firms had women in their executive ranks. Only two of those included CEOs, and only six listed women as founders or co-founders, a coveted title in technology that can help lead to a chain of bigger and better start-ups. Even though the head of Twitter Canada, Kirstine Stewart, is a woman, women make up only 10 percent of Twitter’s tech staff, 15 percent of Facebook’s, and 18 percent of Google’s. At the time I spoke to Stewart for the feature article in Flare magazine about women in technology, she was busy penning her answer to Sandberg’s bestseller corporate feminist call-to-action, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. She acknowledged tech’s culture was a problem of a chicken-and-egg nature. “But I think you can’t change that culture unless there’s more of you,” Stewart said. “We need to make sure there’s more of us.” Stewart’s book, released in 2015, is called Our Turn.
I liked her optimism, but is it our turn? I was first drawn to this question in June 2014, during what I thought would be the most controversial no-thanks-don’t-want-any-women-in-tech scandal of the year (thanks, Gamergate; how wrong I was). At the end of that month, Whitney Wolfe, the twenty-four-year-old former Tinder vice president of marketing, filed a sexual harassment and discrimination suit against the popular dating app company. Her case was rife with allegations of sexual harassment on the part of Tinder chief marketing officer Justin Mateen, who was Wolfe’s boss and also her ex-boyfriend (they dated for only a few months before Wolfe broke it off). She alleged the company stripped her of her co-founder title in November 2013, claiming having a “girl” co-founder devalued Tinder and “[made] the company look like it was an accident”—presumably meaning no tech start-up would dare have a female co-founder on purpose. (And, indeed, at that time women had founded only 3 percent of tech start-ups in Silicon Valley.)
Screen captures of dozens of disturbing text messages sent during work hours show Mateen’s increasingly possessive and demeaning post-breakup behavior toward Wolfe. He sent especially vitriolic texts after he saw her talking to other men. Wolfe repeatedly asked Mateen to stop threatening and harassing her; he did not. Instead, his campaign against Wolfe allegedly culminated at an April 2014 company event in Malibu, at which, in front of CEO Sean Rad, he called her a “whore,” a “gold digger,” “a disease,” and “disgusting.” Humiliated, Wolfe headed toward the exit, where one of Rad’s guests spat on her. Rad soon sent her a text reading, “Your employment continuing is not likely an option at this point.” Wolfe felt bullied into resigning shortly after.
For many working women, and not just those in the tech industry, news of the Tinder scandal landed like a punch in the gut. A trio of Toronto women in the advertising and marketing field were especially livid and felt compelled to do something. Together, Shauna Roe, Rachel Kennedy, and Monica Remba, in the heat of a furious discussion on how a dating company could fail to recognize the value of women, landed on a brilliant idea: What if the women of Tinder just left? How would the company survive? Would Tinder realize it needed women? The three launched a Tinder boycott campaign, in which they called upon women to replace their Tinder profile pictures with a giant X. The campaign, dubbed “Swipe Strike,” went live less than a week later but failed to connect with women of the Tinderverse (where active displays of feminism did not, often, equal successful hook-ups). “We were so rattled,” Kennedy told me shortly after the launch. “Is it really that bad [out] there? In this day and age, is it really that bad?”
Stuff like this made me feel like it would never be our turn, but I was eager for someone to prove me wrong and to answer Kennedy’s question. In search of that answer, I turned to Martha Ladly, a professor at OCAD University in Ontario, whose PhD in the philosophy of technology focused on the ways women do—and don’t—occupy spaces in technology. (Ladly was also one of the Marthas in the late 1970s Canadian New Wave band Martha and the Muffins, whose single “Echo Beach” won her a Juno.) We spoke in 2014, during the height of Gamergate. Ladly told me that, while hard data did not exist, she’d heard anecdotal evidence that the representation of women in tech was improving, but slowly. Without proof—indeed with most data showing the opposite—this struck me as wishful thinking. Either way, we both agreed one big caveat should keep women from feeling self-congratulatory: being a little bit better than our start of near nothing still wasn’t anywhere close to something.
Ladly recounted one recent experience in which she’d volunteered to do an outreach program at the Lassonde School of Engineering at York University in Ontario. It was geared toward kids and teens interested in entering the engineering and technology fields. The workshop, said Ladly, was packed, and yet only two of those in the room were girls. After the workshop, as Ladly wandered through the university’s halls, she noticed that the higher-level classes suffered from the same ratio: mostly men, with so few women they may as well have been playing hide-and-seek. Those that were in the room, she added, were usually at the back. She saw no women professors. Describing the experience to me seemed to make her baffled and angry all over again. “We have to make it more attractive for girls to go into these fields,” she said. “Somehow we’ve got to figure out how to do that.”
Two years later, it seemed we hadn’t. In September 2016, Suzanne Stein, an associate professor and director of the Super Ordinary Lab at OCAD University, and Prateeksha Singh, a graduate research assistant at the lab, published an article in the Globe and Mail. They revealed that women’s representation in the tech field was actually better in the 1980s. So much for progress. Stein, borrowing a phrase from mathematician and design theorist Horst Rittel, called it the “wicked problem.” The particular wicked problem in the technology industry, she and Singh wrote, was that despite numerous insights and proposals for change, no significant change occurred. Or in other words, as Stein put it to me later, “It’s this big hairy whole idea, and there is no solution.” The problem with sexism and society, she said, is that it’s so deeply ingrained it manifests itself in numerous ways, so how do you tackle an infinitely headed hydra?
Take, for instance, the surprise connection she found between her research into the tech industry and her other, separate project looking at domestic abuse. She discovered many shocking and undeniable parallels. Rules of engagement within both realms condone the disrespect toward, and bad treatment of, women. Compare the two, and the power and control wielded by abuser and co-worker or supervisor become mirrors. And that’s just one disturbing observation among many. “Many of us have stopped talking about solutions and started talking about interventions,” Stein added, “because there’s no one answer.”
Stein has a throaty laugh. It burst forth often during our conversation, when she seemed to find something funny or ridiculous, or even, it felt like to me, as a ward against some darker, dismal truths. She laughed now. “I think some of the reluctance to embrace feminism,” she said, “is that once you open that door, everything comes out of it.” This is not to say that feminism can’t be fun as well. As part of their research project, Stein and her team developed several games to help with solution building to increase diversity in tech. One of those games, the Feminist Theorist Card Game, encourages women to embrace the pluralities of feminism and to problem solve though different theoretical lenses. Another game is Ceiling and Ladders. The idea with these games, Stein told me, is to encourage brainstorming, reduce finger-pointing, and take the high stakes out of crafting solutions. Stein called it the “magic circle of gameplay.”
Through these actions and many others, feminists try to tackle the wicked problem, though, of course, it’s tricky. Women in the field can’t seem to agree on how to make it better. We step carefully because of the many minefields. Women are wary of rocking the boat, of not being team players, of others targeting us, of losing our “cool girl” status, of further pigeonholing ourselves. To that last point, Martha Ladly told me that women are often still viewed as assets because they’re supposedly more emotionally intelligent than men, or are better communicators. Not enough hard science backs up these widely held assumptions, she added, and what science exists is mostly of the junk variety: poorly executed studies that, in the end, show no causality (woman + company = more feelings!). Besides, Ladly quipped, “I don’t want to be the one that has to wear the emotional-intelligence hat.”
As she spoke, I wondered what a feminist hat would look like. A 3D vagina? An abstract pink triangle? A 1990s ankh? Sparkles? I feared no matter what it looked like, nobody would wear it. The anti-women faction in the tech industry was winning because it had eroded feminism. We could see similar effects in other industries. The new message was that feminism would hurt women, not help them. If women wanted to participate peacefully in these male-dominated industries, particularly the tech world—if they didn’t, in other words, want to face death threats, rape threats, or have a loogie hawked on them at a party—they had to abandon the f-word. They could be bro-ish, and they could be nice, and maybe they could even feel like they could belong, if only they weren’t feminists. That was the deal.
Except it’s a lie. After months talking to women in the technology field and beyond, I learned it doesn’t matter what they call themselves, they are still on the other side of the castle wall, and sometimes those inside even catapult rocks at them. We have to acknowledge all the multitudes of challenges if we want to work toward solving them. I desperately want women to succeed, but it seems impossible if we continue to characterize Gamergate as anything but a full-scale, far-reaching, and coordinated attack on women; if we go on pretending the wage gap doesn’t exist and workplace policy doesn’t harm us; if we continue to accept and even celebrate the opt-out narrative; if women continue to remain silent about their experiences (both good and bad) and be satisfied with the few who speak out; if we inadvertently feed the false belief that sexism in the industry affects only an unfortunate minority; and if we continue to follow the post-feminist narrative that just because some have made it, all will make it.
We have so many reasons to fear speaking out, but if we don’t I am more afraid our future daughters will have even fewer good career choices than their grandmothers and great-grandmothers. It will never be our turn; we will be left behind—again.
And this (un)merry-go-round cycle of history repeating doesn’t apply only to women at work.