A few months after my friend Natalie got a coveted job at one of the big four tech companies, one of her colleagues Photoshopped her face onto some porn and made it his desktop background. She complained to their boss, who asked him to remove it. He replaced it with a photo of her face Photoshopped onto a Gorilla.
Nat has it harder working in tech than I did. She’s blonde, gorgeous in a classically feminine way, and that rarest of creatures: a woman engineer. She’s right in the middle of things, working at the forefront of AI research in one of the most powerful companies in the world. I was merely a product manager at a tiny startup in Cape Town, somewhat insulated from the bro-iest pits of the tech world. It was still more bro-ey, though, than I thought possible.
***
I never meant to end up working in tech. I didn’t have any kind of career plan at all, really – I went to university because I figured I should, and picked the two subjects I’d enjoyed the most in high school: English and math. My supportive but baffled parents asked me what I planned to do with this combo and I honestly couldn’t tell them. I was just “following my passions”.
My passion for math soon dwindled. The problem was that math lectures were at 8 a.m., while my humanities lectures didn’t start until noon. I lived on campus, so I’d roll out of bed at 7:30, still half-asleep, slump to calculus still wearing my pajamas, and then sleepwalk back to bed. This was enough of a factor to base major life decisions on at the age of eighteen.
The bigger issue was that I just didn’t feel like I belonged with the math people. There were about 100 kids in the class, and I think 10 of us were women, and it was hard not to feel like we were huddled together like buck surrounded by mostly well-meaning but socially inept leopards. We faced an uncomfortable amount and type of attention, far too many people offering to tutor me on basic concepts I knew better than them; two separate boys who were sort-of stalking me. The first day of class, I sat down next to a dude who cheerfully said he’d memorized the first fifty digits of Pi and, before asking if I wanted to hear them, began to recite them to me.
I’m not sure why the math department at the University of Cape Town was lagging so far behind the rest of the world in 2005. In the late decades of the twentieth century, most STEM subjects at universities went from being mostly men to gender-equal, and many of them are now women-dominated. There is one stubborn exception. Until 1984, computer science was following the same trajectory: women making up a larger and larger proportion of students, peaking at 37% that year. Then there was a sudden drop-off which has never recovered. Today in the United States, women make up 20% of computer science graduates, and uniquely among STEM fields, the numbers have been falling rather than rising. This phenomenon is well-studied, and the most compelling explanation (popularized by a widely-cited 2014 NPR’s Planet Money investigation) is that the drop tracks exactly to when computers moved into the home and began to be marketed as toys. Toys for boys.
The easy camaraderie I found in my humanities classes couldn’t have been a bigger contrast. There, I felt like I’d found my people. Fellow queers and theatre nerds, holed up in my friend Lydia’s flat drinking vodka out of chipped mugs, singing Bob Dylan and discussing Audre Lorde and Chinua Achebe until the early hours. I was half in love with everyone I knew. We were deep in the classic liberal arts undergraduate project of deconstructing gender, and absolutely certain that the decolonial Marxist feminist praxis we were busy inventing for the very first time was going to change everything. We were insufferable, but damn we were having a great time.
I was getting much better marks for math, but I dropped it after the first year. I steered the rest of my undergrad firmly into the humanities, winding up with a degree in English, Religious Studies and Linguistics, and parents who were even more concerned about my career prospects.
They were right to be worried. After my degree, I wandered aimlessly into PR, faced with the sudden tragic realization that bills existed. I was bored and disengaged, supposed to be writing copy for internal corporate magazines and instead spending far too much of my workday scrolling Twitter. The timing of this couldn’t have been better. This was the late noughties and being young and having a Facebook account was enough to position you as an “online marketing expert.” The Arab Spring happened in 2011. In South Africa, still blinking into the light after the end of Apartheid and decades of media censorship and global isolation, we felt like we were watching a democratic media revolution in real time. Technology was cracking open the world. I got a side gig as a gadget reviewer, then started co-hosting a tech podcast, and sidled from there into the industry proper.
It was a younger and more optimistic time to work in tech, or perhaps I was just younger and more naive. But we honestly felt like we were going to fix all the world’s problems. I spent my days learning to code and my weekends at hackathons. A friend convinced our local dive bar to accept Bitcoin around 2011, so we were constantly slinging “a couple of Bitcoins” to pay each other back for beer (I sold most of mine before 2013, but I have friends who didn’t and retired in their thirties. I try not to think about it). I made a chatbot that gave you live updates on South Africa’s informal taxi network. A buddy and I built a video game where you threw bloody tampons at then-Presidential-hopeful Donald Trump’s face. I coached aspiring startup founders in rural villages and made joke websites with my friends. I knew a guy trialing a Universal Basic Income experiment using the blockchain in a township outside Johannesburg, and a woman who’d set up a free coding school in an under- resourced part of Cape Town. I was involved in more “Women in Tech” groups than I could count, inevitably branded pink.
***
Tech has its own culture, and there was a lot about it I liked. After the humanities’ stance of perpetual victimhood – “we are all helpless within the systems of exploitation we were born into, viva la revolución” – I liked the proactivity and problem-solving orientation of tech. I liked how challenging the work was. I liked self-optimization and “biohacking” and productivity culture and Pomodoro timers. I liked being around mostly other child-free twenty-and-thirty-somethings primarily absorbed in our own pleasure and self-actualization. I liked, most of all, the money.
The perks! Ah, the perks. We had fully catered “family lunch” twice a week. The food was better than the conversation. It was the time of Peak Tech Bro, and I now know far more about Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, bouldering, Andrew Huberman, Wim Hof, William Askell, polyamory, hard sci-fi authors and Jordan Peterson than I would like to. A lot of the men wouldn’t touch the food, instead picking carefully weighed dry chicken breast and white rice out of plastic Tupperwares to make sure they hit their macros. I liked many of my colleagues, but they weren’t my people.
I soon started to notice that there was a persistent, almost willful incuriosity about the complexity of the problems we claimed to be solving – especially when those problems were rooted in structural inequality rather than in individual behavior. The solution to everything was social media, then it was an app, then it was the blockchain, then it was AI. We hired a lot of engineers, but not a lot of people who understood the industries we were so gleefully disrupting. We were Messianic hammers seeing the whole world as a nail.
***
In PR and marketing, the gender skew ran so far in the other direction that I once got a job interview purely because they read the name “Sam” on my CV and assumed I was male, and they were desperate for some diversity.
Tech was stubbornly skewed the other way. At a casual glance, there seemed to be a lot of women around. We were product managers, designers, PAs, office managers, marketers, scrum leaders. Anything that required emotional intelligence or communication skills. Support roles. But it was the engineers who had the power and the pay, and they were without exception men (the race dynamics were even worse). Even today, women hold 40% of jobs in the US tech industry, but only about a quarter of the technical roles. In AI research, women make up just 12% of the workforce.
The stereotype of the male engineer having no relational or emotional skills is a myth, but like all myths, it shapes reality. I’ve never felt myself to be a particularly feminine woman, but working in tech made me feel far more womanly than I’d ever felt. Emotional labor was relentlessly specialized and strictly gendered. My job was to define the features the engineers built, but really my job was to convince the engineers to build what I wanted them to without stepping on their egos. This required Machiavellian emotional strategies and manipulation. Once, I tried just giving a direct instruction to a junior engineer who was two years younger than me (which, again, was literally my job), and he responded by rolling his eyes and saying “Yes, Mom.”
My manager was a decade older than me, and she was the best boss I ever had. She was brilliant, competent, one of the rare deep thinkers about the problems we were trying to solve, and she’d essentially been playing the role of CEO for many years while our actual CEO focused on fundraising and TED talks. Then one day, out of the blue, he hired some dude who knew literally nothing about our industry to oversee her. She was expected to just accept it gracefully and keep playing competent “number 2” to an utter buffoon. I’d naively grown up believing that things like this didn’t happen anymore.
***
Technologies are not neutral. They’re built by humans and they encode the values of those humans, which means they reflect the cultures they arise from. The morality baked into most tech products is what I’d call Male American Individualism.
I briefly lived in San Francisco working as a researcher for a tech company that processed remittances from rich countries to poorer ones. My job was to talk to the actual users. The customers were mostly recent immigrants sending money home, and it was fascinating how many of the assumptions made in the design of the app didn’t suit them. To take the most basic of examples: the assumption that every individual user would want their own account. This drove our customers nuts. They wanted to share an account with brothers and sisters, to see when someone last sent money to Mom. Every design decision contains a whole worldview.
You can tell a lot about an industry’s culture from what drugs everyone’s taking. Finance runs on cocaine and Ritalin. The arts rely on SSRIs and Ecstasy. The tech industry’s obsessed with psychedelics, both as work-aid and as a replacement for spirituality, which tells you everything about what the tech industry truly believes, which is that the key to life is individual personal transformation. And also, that the tech industry is much weirder than it thinks it is.
***
The tech bros won. Tech culture has become mainstream culture because all culture is now mediated by its products. The way we find love, follow news, relax, build things, how we understand ourselves and each other – all of that is now filtered through products made by a technical workforce that’s roughly 75% male, mostly from a country that makes up 4% of the world’s population, and is extremely fucking weird.
Six years ago, I made the financially ruinous decision to leave the tech industry to become a writer. I’d like to say this was a principled stand; but really it was that I wanted different colleagues. I never felt the ease, the familiarity, the fluency in tech that I feel with book people. I’ve returned to my tribe. I do worry what it means, though, that so few women stick it out in tech. Those are the rooms where the most important decisions shaping the world today are being made, and we’re not in them.
I understand this is a very Humanities take, I’m sorry, but math was at 8 a.m.
