“And use it to fuck with them.” If I had any sexual power, I didn’t want to inhabit it in the office. “Just inhabit your sexual power,” she advised. One friend told me she regularly made fun of her CEO for having a gigantic dick, which she had discovered after sleeping with him. Others enjoyed the power play of workplace flirtation. Some liked to scare and shame their colleagues for unabashed sexism. Some took it as an opportunity to educate and course-correct. Other women I knew who worked in male-dominated offices outside Silicon Valley all had unique coping strategies. My job had placed me, a self-identified feminist, in a position of ceaseless, professionalized deference to the male ego. We should have gotten along better than we did, but it seemed impossible to bring our outside interests into work: They felt out of place and a little sad, like an outfit that looks put-together and chic at the beginning of the day but preposterous and overreaching by dusk. I was a sociology major with a background in literary fiction. She was also a poet, I learned, which excited me. A new account manager worked on a treadmill desk and led a daily series of midafternoon crunches and push-ups to combat enervation and get our endorphins flowing.

The other women were smart, ambitious, and a little quirky. I enjoyed these outings, even if they bore the metallic taste of duty-less a support network than a mutual acknowledgment. My job had placed me, a self-identified feminist, in a position of ceaseless, professionalized deference to the male ego.įrom time to time, the women in the office would go out to a nearby wine bar with fake fireplaces and plates of sweating charcuterie and try to drink it out. Advocating for their career advancement ordering them pizza.

Affirming, dodging, confiding, collaborating. I was always fixing things for them, tiptoeing around their vanities, cheering them up. But men were everywhere: the customers, my teammates, my boss, his boss. Does that make sense? I’d ask every few minutes, as gently as a tutor, giving them space to shift the blame back to me.īeing the only woman on a nontechnical team, providing customer support to software developers, was like immersion therapy for internalized misogyny. I apologized, over and over, for mistakes that they had made. I would explain how to fix their problems, and find ways to take responsibility. When the software didn’t behave as expected, the men wrote in to me. My job was in customer support, and meant my days were full of men: programmers and data scientists, analysts and marketers. The company had 20 employees, four of whom were women-a decent ratio, in 2013. At the age of 25, I moved from Brooklyn to San Francisco to work for a data analytics start-up.

Uncanny valley by rachel anna wiener