Woman in Tech, Part Two: Cool Girl

Last month, a few posts ago, I wrote about what it was like to be one of a handful of women in my undergrad computer science program (mostly, it was lonely). The impetus for writing about my career was seeing a lot of online vitriol aimed at childless, educated women — and since then, it feels like the rhetoric has only intensified, with a lot of arguments taking for granted that “DEI” programs (standing for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) in corporate workplaces were a shameful overreach on the part of liberals, getting in the way of hiring based on merit.

I started my professional tech career in the “pre-DEI” years of the mid-2000s. My recollection of the general feeling was that it was generally accepted that women entering historically male STEM fields was a good thing, and sexism was a bad thing, but there wasn’t much pressure on employers to take major steps to diversify their workforces. The conventional wisdom was that the absence of women was a “pipeline issue” — that once we fixed the issue of young girls abandoning interest in STEM as teenagers, more women would naturally enter the tech workforce without companies having to change much of anything beyond curbing the most egregious instances of sexism and harassment. Computer camps for girls and Strong Female Role Models were supposed to do the trick by themselves. Women had already entered many other professional fields in droves, so why would tech be any different?

My first job out of school was for a company that made accounting software, which was exactly as dull as it sounds. I was hired to work on some auxiliary add-ons for the main project, and it didn’t involve much coding; I correctly identified it as a dead-end job. A friend had recommended that I read a book called Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office (a precursor to Lean In). The message was a familiar one: if you want career success, you should be more assertive in advocating for yourself, rather than waiting for your industriousness and competence to be noticed. But when I spoke to one of the higher-ups — a woman and the wife of the CEO — about my career goals, asking if I could perhaps move to a role involving more coding, she smacked me down hard: I remember her shaking her head, appearing almost affronted, saying: you have a lot to learn.

So, I found another job. The company was a consultancy that mostly farmed programmers out on contract to investment banks, and they were looking for coders who wanted to move to New York City (I wrote a bit about the banking side of the work in this past post). They had a whole pitch for young Canadian workers: they’d take care of the visa and put me up in a shared apartment (for which the rent would be deducted from my paycheck). The prospect was thrilling — the big city! —, the pay was more than double what I was making at the accounting company, and soon I packed my belongings into a large hockey bag, went long-distance with my English Literature boyfriend, and hopped on a plane.

They didn’t tell me when I was hired that I would be the only woman, but it was announced to the gathered crowd in the lunchroom when I was officially introduced to the company: meet Cecily! She is our first female developer. After the announcements, another coworker scooted next to me in the banquette and told me in a low voice: “You’re not actually the first woman. Last summer we had an intern named Callie.¹” Where was Callie now? He didn’t say.

The company maintained a handful of apartments in a building at Reade and West Broadway, and I shared a 3-bedroom with two male co-workers. The rooms were allocated according to seniority: the guy who had been with the company the longest got the big room with the ensuite bathroom, while I and the other roommate shared the common bathroom. I felt a sense of petty grievance over this — as a woman living with two men, shouldn’t I get the private bathroom? — but knew it would be a pretty bad look to ask for preferential treatment based on gender, so I mostly grumbled about it in private. And, in truth, I was being entitled and a whiner and it was just fine.

The other developers at the company were mostly young, single men, and the company CEO often talked about how he wanted to foster a working culture that was more than just professional — he liked the idea of everyone living in the same building, socializing together, partying together. And, to a large extent, that’s what we did. Of course, that came with blurred professional boundaries: off-color or outright offensive jokes, and the sharing of questionable opinions and confidences. The men gossiped relentlessly about each other, speculating and complaining. They probably gossiped about me too. I remember after one particularly memorable party, getting pulled aside more than once with an inquiry from people who weren’t there: I heard so-and-so was an asshole to you.

A lot of the things people said casually would be HR-report caliber today, but back then I laughed it off — I knew the others would despise me if I complained, so I didn’t. Mostly it was harmless, but occasionally it wasn’t, and sometimes the remarks would get to me. I especially hated being talked to by the men in a condescending way, as though I were a not-very-bright child. But was I good at my job, good enough not to be spoken to that way? I honestly have no idea, since performance reviews were infrequent and unstructured, and code reviews were haphazard or nonexistent. I always felt like I was winging it, but everyone else seemed to be winging it too. Eventually, a second woman was hired, and she didn’t seem bothered by anything, so why should I stew over any of it? I wanted to be a Cool Girl, to be liked. And I was in New York! I was wearing those American Apparel polo dresses and going dancing every week when I wasn’t going to the opera. I learned how to eat oysters and drink whiskey. It was the year before the financial crisis and I was having a great time.

The company did have a diversity program of sorts, although they never would have called it that, and it wasn’t created with equality or social justice in mind. One of the big company initiatives was the Improv program. The CEO (who did not participate himself) thought that improv training would help the techies improve their social skills and perform better in client conversations. Everyone willing was heavily encouraged to enroll in the classes. I’m not sure whose decision this was, or what exactly their reasoning looked like, but at some point it was determined that an all-male improv class was untenable. To remedy the issue, a group of five or so actresses were hired to take the class with us, all friendly and in their twenties. And their informal duties eventually went beyond extemporizing dialogue: they came to official events and parties, and were integrated into the social life of the company. I heard a rumor that they were even enlisted, at one point, for recruitment purposes: asked to join potential new hires and other employees on a boozy night out.

I don’t want to make it sound more sinister than it was; I think the relationship the hired improv participants had with the employees was genuinely friendly. And it was certainly a relief for me, as an unpaid participant in the workshops, to have them there — the class was a lot more fun and less awkward that way. I liked them, they were great company. But it did rankle me that the New York office employed more women — more than twice as many! — to bolster the social life of the company than they employed as technologists. It was hard not to shake the feeling that the company of women was being offered to male employees as a perk, along with the apartment.

When I hear nostalgia about the “pre-DEI” era, a fabled time of “masculine energy” when HR departments were less fearsome and men didn’t have to worry so much about what they said, I think they’re imagining workplaces like tmy former employer, which on the surface was full of bro camaraderie. In one conversation about those shared apartments, I remember someone I worked with expressing sympathy for my male roommates — they were to be pitied, because a female presence meant they couldn’t feel fully at ease (as the interloper, my discomfort was irrelevant). But I also remember how clearly those men wanted the company of women, how they sought it out from me and the improv participants and whoever they could meet outside their working life. They were often vicious with each other but seemed lighter and more relaxed in mixed company — among women who weren’t their professional peers.

Postscript: I, too, wanted the company of women. I left New York and transferred to the company’s Toronto office after it turned out to be impossible for my boyfriend to get a work visa to join me in the USA. His friends were scholars and musicians, and in that group I felt less like a curiosity and more like an equal. I felt a growing disgust for tech workplaces, and quit entirely not long after, saying I never wanted to work in tech again. I also remember saying that I wanted to be among my own kind — by which I meant artsy people, writerly people, and other women. I took a sabbatical and spent a year taking English Literature classes, and after that, I got a job at an opera company. But, of course, I was pulled back in — not by money, but by a cause.

If you missed it, here’s the first post in this series, where I talk about my experience as a computer science undergrad.

You can read more about the banking side of my NYC job in this piece, which among other things is a review of the play The Lehman Trilogy. I learned a lot about credit default swaps and mortgaged-backed securities the year before they started popping up in the news.

1. Not her actual name