Stepping Off the Bus: My Life In Tech

A lot of people are wondering why the educational system and corporate high tech world are losing women at transitional stages. Obviously I can't speak for everyone, but for me the answer is that after ten years working at high tech start-ups, I took the next transition as the perfect opportunity to step out. I'd had enough. At a certain point, I just got off the bus at the next stop it made.

The only obvious misogyny I can think of is that back when I was fielding customer calls, about once a month a man would ask me to transfer them "to the Unix department." To their credit, when I explained that I was the Unix department, they were universally sheepish. I received marriage proposals at about the same rate, although to be fair, so did my male coworkers. And I feel that as a rule, my coworkers always treated me fairly.

The hardest part for me was the alienation. Few girls do Linux, and fewer still do Unix. For ten years, I was "the girl." The only female in a department of 5, 10, 50, 200. That's no exaggeration. At one point in my career, I was the only female on an entire floor of about 200 men. They were nice, the men. It's just that there were so many of them.

The difference was most visible when I worked on a floor which was split between operating systems. Windows on the right, and Unix on the left. The Windows department maintained an even gender balance. On the left side? I was The Girl. Make of this what you will.

Many people suspected that I had been hired for the Unix team as an affirmative action kind of thing. I suspected that, as well, which is why I worked so damned hard to be the best. I studied at least three times harder than any of my male counterparts, because I felt that I had to continually prove myself. This wasn't all bad - it's what drove me to be so damned good at my job, which definitely paid off. But it was hard.

Did I miss out on career opportunities because I was excluded from after-work socializing? It's certainly possible. I saw a number of male colleagues promoted past me, even though they didn't have the same technical skills that I did. And I can't help but note that those colleagues were frequently invited out to dinner and drinks after work, whereas I was not. It wasn't anything personal, I'm sure. The guys just wanted to cut loose and hit on girls, and nothing drags down that experience like inviting a girl along.

I learned to be very careful with my coworkers. For most of them, being male Unix geeks, I was the only female with whom they had regular contact. I occupied a psychological slot somewhere between "den mother" and "female confidante." They craved my attention and validation, and they would take any perceived snub from me much more personally than they would from another man. I sometimes imagined them as baby chicks, gaping wide and peeping for my attentions whenever I passed by. I did what I could, but some days I just wanted to walk past everyone, sit at my desk, and do my work.

Later in my career I worked in a Unix department which had somehow been filled with jocks. That was a lot more difficult. Locker room humor was the rule of the day, and I spent my days working with my headphones on, playing music to drown out the conversation around me. At that job I began to feel that all the testosterone surely wasn't good for me. I daydreamed about buying SCUBA gear, so that I could breathe air that was free of male hormones.

When I stepped off the bus, the job I took was tangentially related to eBay. Did you know that eBay sellers skew more female than any other sales industry? It's true - more than half of eBay sellers are women. Last I heard, only about 20% of brick-and-mortar store owners are women. After the past ten years being The Girl, it was such a relief to be back in a gender-balanced world.