Cover of the American Phrenological Journal, 1848.
Confession: I am a woman. And I work in the San Francisco tech scene.
There have been a flurry of publications on the gender gap in technology, most recently the book Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook. There are equally numerous theories as to why so few women populate the ranks of top Internet enterprises at the engineering, management, or executive levels. Allow me to add to the cacophony by positing my own humble two-pronged theory.
Basically, for me, it breaks down into one of two paths in the gender discrimination choose-your-own-adventure:
Scenario one: The Calvin J. Candie/Larry Summers hypothesis
I am a woman who is interested in working in the hot software scene, or perhaps has just begun an entry-level job at a startup or established web enterprise. I look around and see very few women in the industry. All around me are men – some of whom are jerks, granted, but many of whom are sympathetic, progressive, iconoclastic men who certainly don’t seem like sexist stone-age dinosaurs. I admire these men; they are brilliant and powerful, and they exhibit the kind of pro-active leadership and self-confidence that I lack as a junior person in my organization.
I begin to suspect that women must simply lack those skills; otherwise, why aren’t there more of them in those positions to guide and inspire me? I know there is a severe shortage of talent in Silicon Valley, so much so that kids barely out of school are being snapped up by the Fortune 500 tech giants, so it’s hard to imagine that there are no female applicants.
I also know that in all other respects I am no different from my male colleagues: we share the same geeky cultural background, have the same humor and hobbies, believe in the same causes, and I know dozens of women like me out there in the world. The only logical conclusion is, of course, inherent differences in intelligence and talent in the sexes.
In the 1800s, it would have been phrenological literature that reassured me of my inability to be the next Thomas Edison. Today, there are various and sundry theories of inherent difference, from evolutionary biology to pop psychology. All of them tell me two things: I am fighting an uphill battle, and my gender is not predisposed to fighting or battles. And as crazy at it sounds, as mad and sad as it makes me, I kind of want to believe it. Because at least it’s not the alternative…
Scenario two: The status quo bias hypothesis
Same scenario. I am a woman who is interested in working in the hot software scene, or perhaps has just begun an entry-level job at a startup or established web enterprise. I look around and see very few women in the industry.
It stands to reason, then, that if women’s skills and talents are equal to men’s, the only thing explaining women’s absence in the industry is underlying systemic bias. It may not be the kind of overt sexism we all gasp at in Mad Men, now equally un-P.C. and verboten in law alike, but a more prosaic status quo bias upheld by both parties: women decide not to apply for jobs in technology because they don’t feel like they’re supposed to, and men don’t have to feel so bad about not hiring them if they’re not out there.
By bucking this trend, I am disrupting the status quo, whether I want to or not. If I want to be a part of that illustrious status quo, I’ll just have to pretend my difference doesn’t exist, while constantly being worried about making men uncomfortable.
(And, of course, Scenario one tells me that my gender hates making people uncomfortable.)
I can’t speak to the experience of every woman who has ever worked in technology, but I can say that I’ve oscillated between these two positions over the years I’ve worked in San Francisco. My organization happens to be a stand-out in the field – our executive director is a woman! we have, gasp, three women engineers out of fifty, a whopping 6%! But it’s hard not to suffer a certain amount of anxiety when you are an obvious minority, despite comprising 50% of the world’s population, no matter what your HR hiring practices statement says.
I don’t have horror stories of being openly harassed or insulted like some in the biz, but I can attest to a nagging feeling of inequality that’s made worse by internalized and difficult-to-eradicate paranoia. Is analyzing this data inherently difficult, or am I failing because I’m just not as good at writing code as my male colleagues? Does everybody secretly hate it when I mention gender issues? Is it better for my career to dress like a 12-year-old boy or a Sex and the City character?
No matter the situation, in my reptilian brain, it usually boils down to incompetence on my end or bad faith on someone else’s. It’s a terribly unproductive and demoralizing way to feel at the end of the workday, made more so by the fact that I know that the overwhelming majority of my colleagues don’t have this additional burden cluttering their psyche.
But the worst – the absolute worst – part of this is feeling like I’m not supposed to be admitting it; not to myself, and certainly not to other people. It feels patently absurd to indulge such paranoiac fantasies, even if they contain kernels of truth. The solution to self-doubt is self-confidence, the solution to being held back is fighting harder, fear is the mind-killer… end of story.
These, at least, appear to be the recommendations of Sheryl Sandberg. Lean in, sister! Forget about those nagging whispers of self-doubt and just work harder! I can’t blame her for this very practical, no-nonsense bit of advice; I also can’t stop blaming myself for not being able to live up to it.
Of course, it’s probably my fault that my mind is so heavy with all this negativity. If I just lighten up, I’m sure I’ll be much more likely to get that hot executive-level position one day.
Moral exhibitionism 