64 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER30, 2019
company that was overwhelmingly white,
male, and American, and had fewer than
fifteen women in engineering.
For years, my co-workers told me,
the absence of an official organizational
chart had given rise to a shadow chart,
determined by social relationships and
proximity to the founders. As the male
engineers wrote manifestos about the
importance of collaboration, women
struggled to get their contributions re-
viewed and accepted. The company pro-
moted equality and openness until it
came to stock grants: equity packages
described as “nonnegotiable” turned out
to be negotiable for people who were
used to successfully negotiating. The
name-your-own-salary policy had re-
sulted in a pay gap so severe that a num-
ber of women had recently received cor-
rective increases of close to forty thou-
sand dollars. No back pay.
In the convention center, I felt out of
place among the computer-science ma-
jors, then ashamed to have impostor syn-
drome at a conference designed to em-
power women in the workforce. At a
Male Allies plenary panel, a group of en-
gineers circulated bingo boards among
attendees. In each square was a different
indictment: “Refers to a feminist as ag-
gressive”; “‘That would never happen in
my company’”; “Asserts other man’s heart
is in the right place”; “Says feminist ac-
tivism scares women away from tech”;
“Wearables.” Wearables: the only kind
of hardware men could imagine women
caring about. At the center of the bingo
board was a square that just said “Pipeline.”
The male allies, all trim, white exec-
utives, took their seats and began offer-
ing wisdom on how to manage work-
place discrimination. “The best thing
you can do is excel,” a V.P. at the search-en-
gine giant, whose well-publicized hobby
was stratosphere jumping, said. “Don’t
get discouraged,” another said. “Just keep
working hard.” Women bent over their
bingo boards, checking off boxes.G
oing into work was not manda-
tory, but I still wanted to be a part
of something. In the office, I staked out
an unclaimed standing desk among a
cluster of engineers and left my business
cards next to the monitor. I took meet-
ings in an area atop the indoor shipping
container, on couches where an engi-
neer was rumored to have lived for sev-
eral months, before being busted by our
secret service.
I was employee No. 230-something. Ihad no trouble identifying the early em-
ployees. I saw my former self in their mo-
nopolization of the chat rooms, their dis-
dain for the growing sales team, their
wistfulness for the way things had been.
Sometimes I would yearn for their sense
of ownership and belonging—the easy
identity, the all-consuming feeling of
affiliation. And then I would remind my-
self, There but for the grace of God go I.I
stopped going into the office. Sup-
port met once a week, for an hour,
over videoconference. I prepared for
these meetings by brushing my hair,
closing the curtains to the street, and
tossing visible clutter onto my bed and
covering it with a quilt. I would log in
and lean into my laptop, enjoying the
camaraderie and warmth of a team. For
an hour, my studio apartment would fill
with laughter and chatter, conversation
tripping when the software stalled or
delayed. Then I would stand up, stretch,
replace the tape over my laptop camera,
and open the curtains, readjusting to
the silence in my room.
Some days, clocking in to work was
like entering a tunnel. I would drop a
waving-hand emoji into the team chat
room, answer a round of customer tick-
ets, read e-mail, process a few copyright
takedowns, and skim the internal social
network. In the chat software, I moved
from channel to channel, reading infor-
mation and banter that had accumu-
lated overnight in other time zones. Af-
ter repeating this cycle, I would open a
browser window and begin the day’s
true work of toggling between tabs.
Platforms designed to accommodate
and harvest infinite data inspired an in-
finite scroll. I careened across the Inter-
net like a drunk: small-space decoration
ideas, author interviews, videos of cake
frosting, Renaissance paintings with fem-
inist captions. I read industry message
boards and blogs, looking for anything
to hold my interest. I learned that the
e-book startup had been acquired by the
search-engine giant, which had shut down
its app. I watched videos of a xenopho-
bic New York City socialite, whose great-
est accomplishment was playing a suc-
cessful businessman on reality television,
launch a Presidential bid. I watched mar-
riage proposals and post-deployment re-
unions and gender reveals: moments of
bracing intimacy among people I would