F-Bomb

by Lauren McKeon

  Because they’re such a funny bunch, anti-feminists also like to claim that labor laws and the workplaces they govern have skewed too heavily in favor of women. A lot of really bad men’s rights editorial-style cartoons, for instance, lament affirmative action and claim that women have lighter workloads, better work-life balance (ha!), and more flexible work days. Women are also apparently blessed with lower expectations and easier performance evaluations from superiors and are less likely to be injured on the job, which is true but (whoa!) context matters: women are underrepresented in industries, such as construction, that have high workplace injury rates.

  This particular anti-feminist crowd likes to troll social media for prime “But, men!” opportunities. Toronto restaurateur, feminist, writer, and all around badass Jen Agg provides an example of this in her 2017 book I Hear She’s a Real Bitch (a nod to the kind of sexist BS any women with strong opinions faces in male-dominated industries, like the restaurant biz). When the Toronto Star ran an exposé on the truly disgusting sexual harassment one woman pastry chef faced on the job at a Toronto restaurant, including having her breasts grabbed and her rear violently smacked with a metal flipper, Agg started tweeting about breaking the culture of silence and later spearheaded a one-day conference called “Kitchen Bitches: Smashing the Patriarchy One Plate at a Time.” In response she received tweets that asked her whether she believed young men also had a hard time in kitchens. Agg agreed it was true that it was an “industry-wide” culture problem that needed to change “from the top down.” So then she got tweets like: “[Jen Agg] thinks abuses women suffer in the kitchen is more important than the more common male abuse.” Typical.

  By capitalizing on women’s anxieties about doing/having/being it all and simultaneously crafting these neat little pretzel knots of logic, anti-feminists have helped strengthen the silence. Many women wholeheartedly believe the narrative that they must not rock the boat or that they can rise up the corporate ladder if they just focus on their success. It’s a palatable enough lie to swallow. Few of the women I approached to talk about their experiences in the technology field wanted to draw attention to themselves. Few agreed to speak right away. And when they did, many of them brushed off their sexist experiences or spoke of them in hushed, but-it-could-have-been-my-fault-actually voices. After one office tour, I stood incredulous as my guides, two women who’d co-founded an innovative environmental app for businesses, told me the tech industry had no problem with their gender. They munched on wasabi-covered crunchy peas from the communal kitchen in their shared office as I looked out onto the warehouse-style floor. Of all the dozens of tech companies in the space, theirs was the only one with female staff. In our fifteen-minute tour, I saw more foosball tables than women. But still, they told me emphatically, it’s no big deal. I grew to expect the accusing look and admonition. Stories that highlight discrimination and harassment, these women told me, don’t make it easier for them—as if I’d conjured up the sexism on my own. Over dinner, Janet Bloomfield did, of course, accuse me of that exact thing and asked me, quite pointedly, if I was a “stupid bitch.”

  It was like these women had all read the same self-help book. I imagined it was called something like How to Move Past Violent Misogyny in the Technology Industry, or even Nine Habits of Highly Effective People in Denial. As much as it frustrated me, I understood. Some women just want to work, not be Xena, Warrior Princess, defender of women who like computers (or math, or finance). But it’s dangerous to push the sexist tech culture to the back of the closet, like an old Super Nintendo. Dismissing such a damaging culture is too much like buying into the post-feminist lie, like saying, “We are beyond all that. Women can make it if they want to, if they really try, but only if they stop whining.” If only it were that simple. If we ignore the sausage party, we’ll simply be served a different menu.

  The tech industry is, in fact, unkind to many women. Claims of a sexist, fratty culture have followed Uber for years, finally coming under a particularly harsh spotlight when Susan Fowler, a high-profile engineer, detailed her year at the company on her blog. In addition to charting a drastic drop in the number of women at the company (from 25 percent down to 6 percent in under a year), Fowler wrote about some truly jaw-dropping treatment of women. For example, she says the HR department ignored numerous complaints of sexual harassment and discrimination. In most cases, HR staff said the men in question were too important for the company to discipline and appeared to blame Fowler for making a fuss. When she pointed out how few women were site reliability engineers (SREs), like herself, she was again shrugged off—by a woman HR rep. “She [countered] with a story about how sometimes certain people of certain genders and ethnic backgrounds were better suited for some jobs than others,” wrote Fowler on her blog, “so I shouldn’t be surprised by the gender ratios in engineering.” Sound familiar? Fowler quit shortly after. When she left, the number of women SREs had dropped to 3 percent. This was also around the same time that Uber’s CEO, Travis Kalanic, joined Trump’s economic advisory council. More than two hundred thousand people reportedly joined the #DeleteUber movement in protest, and Kalanic quickly resigned the advisory council position. Uber has denied it has a misogynistic culture and pledged to investigate.

  “Technology is becoming less and less hospitable for women,” Brenda Bailey Gershkovitch told me during our interview at the height of Gamergate. I’d spoken to her and other women for a Flare magazine article on the harassment and discrimination of women in technology. The piece was assigned before Gamergate, but I eventually switched focus to cover the newest “get out” campaign focused on women in the tech industry. Gershkovitch reminded me that discrimination was present in the industry long before GG boiled over, too. Looking at the harassment online, in her life, and in the industry itself, she added, “This is the version of us being in the house in the 1950s.” She was right, of course, but women weren’t being told just to get back inside the proverbial house. They were told to spend the twenty-first century’s economic boom forcefully stuck in their homes, safely making Bundt cakes (or whatever) while men got to remake the world. Sure, some women, like Gershkovitch herself, aren’t stuck in a millennium version of Pleasantville, but they are woefully few. If anything, the handful of women at the top, like Yahoo CEO Marissa Meyer, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, and YouTube’s Susan Wojcicki, have fooled us into thinking this means women are everywhere.

  Across Canadian universities, only 39 percent of technology, engineering, math, and computer science grads are women, and men overwhelmingly land jobs at the top tech firms. In 2014, only twenty-four of the Canadian companies included in Deloitte’s list of the fifty fastest growing technology firms had women in their executive ranks. Only two of those included CEOs, and only six listed women as founders or co-founders, a coveted title in technology that can help lead to a chain of bigger and better start-ups. Even though the head of Twitter Canada, Kirstine Stewart, is a woman, women make up only 10 percent of Twitter’s tech staff, 15 percent of Facebook’s, and 18 percent of Google’s. At the time I spoke to Stewart for the feature article in Flare magazine about women in technology, she was busy penning her answer to Sandberg’s bestseller corporate feminist call-to-action, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. She acknowledged tech’s culture was a problem of a chicken-and-egg nature. “But I think you can’t change that culture unless there’s more of you,” Stewart said. “We need to make sure there’s more of us.” Stewart’s book, released in 2015, is called Our Turn.

  I liked her optimism, but is it our turn? I was first drawn to this question in June 2014, during what I thought would be the most controversial no-thanks-don’t-want-any-women-in-tech scandal of the year (thanks, Gamergate; how wrong I was). At the end of that month, Whitney Wolfe, the twenty-four-year-old former Tinder vice president of marketing, filed a sexual harassment and discrimination suit against the popular dating app company. Her case was rife with allegations of sexual harassment on the part of Tinder chief marketing off
icer Justin Mateen, who was Wolfe’s boss and also her ex-boyfriend (they dated for only a few months before Wolfe broke it off). She alleged the company stripped her of her co-founder title in November 2013, claiming having a “girl” co-founder devalued Tinder and “[made] the company look like it was an accident”—presumably meaning no tech start-up would dare have a female co-founder on purpose. (And, indeed, at that time women had founded only 3 percent of tech start-ups in Silicon Valley.)

  Screen captures of dozens of disturbing text messages sent during work hours show Mateen’s increasingly possessive and demeaning post-breakup behavior toward Wolfe. He sent especially vitriolic texts after he saw her talking to other men. Wolfe repeatedly asked Mateen to stop threatening and harassing her; he did not. Instead, his campaign against Wolfe allegedly culminated at an April 2014 company event in Malibu, at which, in front of CEO Sean Rad, he called her a “whore,” a “gold digger,” “a disease,” and “disgusting.” Humiliated, Wolfe headed toward the exit, where one of Rad’s guests spat on her. Rad soon sent her a text reading, “Your employment continuing is not likely an option at this point.” Wolfe felt bullied into resigning shortly after.

  For many working women, and not just those in the tech industry, news of the Tinder scandal landed like a punch in the gut. A trio of Toronto women in the advertising and marketing field were especially livid and felt compelled to do something. Together, Shauna Roe, Rachel Kennedy, and Monica Remba, in the heat of a furious discussion on how a dating company could fail to recognize the value of women, landed on a brilliant idea: What if the women of Tinder just left? How would the company survive? Would Tinder realize it needed women? The three launched a Tinder boycott campaign, in which they called upon women to replace their Tinder profile pictures with a giant X. The campaign, dubbed “Swipe Strike,” went live less than a week later but failed to connect with women of the Tinderverse (where active displays of feminism did not, often, equal successful hook-ups). “We were so rattled,” Kennedy told me shortly after the launch. “Is it really that bad [out] there? In this day and age, is it really that bad?”

  Stuff like this made me feel like it would never be our turn, but I was eager for someone to prove me wrong and to answer Kennedy’s question. In search of that answer, I turned to Martha Ladly, a professor at OCAD University in Ontario, whose PhD in the philosophy of technology focused on the ways women do—and don’t—occupy spaces in technology. (Ladly was also one of the Marthas in the late 1970s Canadian New Wave band Martha and the Muffins, whose single “Echo Beach” won her a Juno.) We spoke in 2014, during the height of Gamergate. Ladly told me that, while hard data did not exist, she’d heard anecdotal evidence that the representation of women in tech was improving, but slowly. Without proof—indeed with most data showing the opposite—this struck me as wishful thinking. Either way, we both agreed one big caveat should keep women from feeling self-congratulatory: being a little bit better than our start of near nothing still wasn’t anywhere close to something.

  Ladly recounted one recent experience in which she’d volunteered to do an outreach program at the Lassonde School of Engineering at York University in Ontario. It was geared toward kids and teens interested in entering the engineering and technology fields. The workshop, said Ladly, was packed, and yet only two of those in the room were girls. After the workshop, as Ladly wandered through the university’s halls, she noticed that the higher-level classes suffered from the same ratio: mostly men, with so few women they may as well have been playing hide-and-seek. Those that were in the room, she added, were usually at the back. She saw no women professors. Describing the experience to me seemed to make her baffled and angry all over again. “We have to make it more attractive for girls to go into these fields,” she said. “Somehow we’ve got to figure out how to do that.”

  Two years later, it seemed we hadn’t. In September 2016, Suzanne Stein, an associate professor and director of the Super Ordinary Lab at OCAD University, and Prateeksha Singh, a graduate research assistant at the lab, published an article in the Globe and Mail. They revealed that women’s representation in the tech field was actually better in the 1980s. So much for progress. Stein, borrowing a phrase from mathematician and design theorist Horst Rittel, called it the “wicked problem.” The particular wicked problem in the technology industry, she and Singh wrote, was that despite numerous insights and proposals for change, no significant change occurred. Or in other words, as Stein put it to me later, “It’s this big hairy whole idea, and there is no solution.” The problem with sexism and society, she said, is that it’s so deeply ingrained it manifests itself in numerous ways, so how do you tackle an infinitely headed hydra?

  Take, for instance, the surprise connection she found between her research into the tech industry and her other, separate project looking at domestic abuse. She discovered many shocking and undeniable parallels. Rules of engagement within both realms condone the disrespect toward, and bad treatment of, women. Compare the two, and the power and control wielded by abuser and co-worker or supervisor become mirrors. And that’s just one disturbing observation among many. “Many of us have stopped talking about solutions and started talking about interventions,” Stein added, “because there’s no one answer.”

  Stein has a throaty laugh. It burst forth often during our conversation, when she seemed to find something funny or ridiculous, or even, it felt like to me, as a ward against some darker, dismal truths. She laughed now. “I think some of the reluctance to embrace feminism,” she said, “is that once you open that door, everything comes out of it.” This is not to say that feminism can’t be fun as well. As part of their research project, Stein and her team developed several games to help with solution building to increase diversity in tech. One of those games, the Feminist Theorist Card Game, encourages women to embrace the pluralities of feminism and to problem solve though different theoretical lenses. Another game is Ceiling and Ladders. The idea with these games, Stein told me, is to encourage brainstorming, reduce finger-pointing, and take the high stakes out of crafting solutions. Stein called it the “magic circle of gameplay.”

  Through these actions and many others, feminists try to tackle the wicked problem, though, of course, it’s tricky. Women in the field can’t seem to agree on how to make it better. We step carefully because of the many minefields. Women are wary of rocking the boat, of not being team players, of others targeting us, of losing our “cool girl” status, of further pigeonholing ourselves. To that last point, Martha Ladly told me that women are often still viewed as assets because they’re supposedly more emotionally intelligent than men, or are better communicators. Not enough hard science backs up these widely held assumptions, she added, and what science exists is mostly of the junk variety: poorly executed studies that, in the end, show no causality (woman + company = more feelings!). Besides, Ladly quipped, “I don’t want to be the one that has to wear the emotional-intelligence hat.”

  As she spoke, I wondered what a feminist hat would look like. A 3D vagina? An abstract pink triangle? A 1990s ankh? Sparkles? I feared no matter what it looked like, nobody would wear it. The anti-women faction in the tech industry was winning because it had eroded feminism. We could see similar effects in other industries. The new message was that feminism would hurt women, not help them. If women wanted to participate peacefully in these male-dominated industries, particularly the tech world—if they didn’t, in other words, want to face death threats, rape threats, or have a loogie hawked on them at a party—they had to abandon the f-word. They could be bro-ish, and they could be nice, and maybe they could even feel like they could belong, if only they weren’t feminists. That was the deal.

  Except it’s a lie. After months talking to women in the technology field and beyond, I learned it doesn’t matter what they call themselves, they are still on the other side of the castle wall, and sometimes those inside even catapult rocks at them. We have to acknowledge all the multitudes of challenges if we want to work toward solving the
m. I desperately want women to succeed, but it seems impossible if we continue to characterize Gamergate as anything but a full-scale, far-reaching, and coordinated attack on women; if we go on pretending the wage gap doesn’t exist and workplace policy doesn’t harm us; if we continue to accept and even celebrate the opt-out narrative; if women continue to remain silent about their experiences (both good and bad) and be satisfied with the few who speak out; if we inadvertently feed the false belief that sexism in the industry affects only an unfortunate minority; and if we continue to follow the post-feminist narrative that just because some have made it, all will make it.

  We have so many reasons to fear speaking out, but if we don’t I am more afraid our future daughters will have even fewer good career choices than their grandmothers and great-grandmothers. It will never be our turn; we will be left behind—again.

  And this (un)merry-go-round cycle of history repeating doesn’t apply only to women at work.

  7

  It’s your fault: How anti-feminists narrowed the definition of rape and revived the deadly, viral culture of slut shaming and victim blaming

  From age sixteen to now, the night I was raped has played on a loop inside my head. I must have thought about it a million times, and never when I wanted. It’s an intrusion that doesn’t end, sometimes lurid and Technicolor bright, other times like I’m watching a scene behind a thousand panes of stained glass. It all depends on how much I allow myself to remember, how much I can’t forget.

  I can tell you I said no. I can tell you I struggled. I can tell you the rough carpet rubbed a burn against my bare back. I can tell you that we were underneath his parents’ pool table; it felt like a cave with only a few feet between the floor and the table’s stained underside. I can tell you there was a condom, purple and grape flavored: a latex slime that made me gag. I can tell you that it didn’t last very long, that my kicking feet and my screams freed me, made him afraid his parents would hear. I can tell you that I ran, but he grabbed me tight before I could reach the stairs. Don’t tell. You’re overreacting. You wanted it. Just calm down. I love you. Just. Don’t. Tell.