Double Bind

by Robin Romm

  But then one of the dodo-rare parents of Facebook reached out. She was my would-be grand boss (boss of my boss), and she was older than almost everyone at Facebook (though still younger than me). In the soothing tones of a rescuer trying to talk someone off a ledge, she explained how she would leave every day at 5:30 PM, and that the time between when she got home and her kid went to bed was sacred—no one at work could reach her. It was only after bedtime that she would plug back in. She was reassuring proof that it could be done. I didn’t know it then, but this was the trickle-down influence of Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer and future author of the best-selling, how-to success book for women, Lean In.

  What decided it was my looming fortieth birthday. As the clock ticked down on my thirties, it dawned on me that the chances of an opportunity like this coming around again were slim. Like the vanishing “pops” in a pot of popcorn on the stove, tech opportunities for people in middle age are observably few and far between. Like it or not, this could be my last chance to leap. Yes, I was a parent now, but did that mean my life of pinballing from one interesting opportunity to the next was truly over? Were my rat brain years behind me, or was there still juice left in this orange? This was my ultimate lean-in moment, before I’d even heard of leaning in.

  I took the job.

  Evany axiom #3—Always ask

  Before I signed on the dotted line with Facebook, I negotiated for more stock and more salary, citing my bouncing new baby and new grown-up familial obligations as my rationale.

  Far too few women do this, but after having it beaten into my brain during my four years at the women’s college Mills, I know that one of the main reasons women don’t get paid as well as men is that they simply fail to ask for more. So I’ve made it a lifelong practice to always ask—even if they say no, you’ve already cracked the door open to future discussions: “Let’s revisit it again at my three-month review.”

  When I later went to work at Pinterest, I did the same thing. Only this time, I told them I’d just finished reading Lean In, and for the good and fairness of womankind, I simply had to ask for more. The recruiter laughed. And then she came back with a better offer.

  A word of warning: If you’re thinking of negotiating your next salary (and you should), make sure you head into battle armored with a firm number (based on well-researched competitive salary information), convincing arguments about the value you bring, and an unshakable confidence (imagine the most self-assured man you’ve ever known). Infuriating though it may be, studies show that when women ask for more, they risk being perceived as too ambitious. Much like the line between sexy and sexist in This Is Spinal Tap, the line between too much ambition and not enough can be mighty wobbly. Self-advocacy within a rigged system is a tricky proposition for sure.

  Evany axiom #4—Use your fear

  Many women suffer from wanting to be liked, and I’m right there at the front of the line. I’m like a tightly folded paper note with “Do you like me?” written inside, followed by checkboxes next to Y and N (please check Y!).

  But while this fear of disappointing people—my parents, my boss, my friends, the editor of this piece, even myself—is the thing that wakes me up at night, it’s also one of the most powerfully motivating forces I know. I’ve accomplished a lot of great things out of this fear of letting people down.

  During my first six months at Facebook, I was in pure fight or flight. I worried that by negotiating for more money I’d inflated people’s expectations so much that there was no way I could avoid letting them down.

  I worried that I’d disappoint my husband, who had quit his job to be a stay-at-home dad so we could make my new crazy job with its crazy schedule work for our little family.

  I worried that I wouldn’t have an impact. Facebook is the kind of place where until you prove your worth, people don’t even listen to you. So I said yes to every project, threw elbows to get into every meeting, publicized every win. When I discovered one of my teams had been meeting without me, I walked over to the impossibly young product manager’s desk, leaned down, and said, “Dude! Why don’t you like me back!?” Startled, he just sort of half smiled in confusion. “Bad decisions are being made,” I said ominously. “You need to start including me!” I was in that next meeting.

  I combated the crushing fear-of-disappointment insomnia with unimaginable amounts of coffee and drew upon every ounce of high school drama class to passably appear calm and in control. Slllllllllowly I got a feel for the work, and my confidence started to build.

  It was the hardest job I’ve ever had, and also one of the best. It was like being enrolled in a crazily demanding PhD program, with the world’s oddest assortment of lecturers. President Obama came and spoke during my tenure at Facebook. George W. Bush and Al Gore. Oprah. Gloria Steinem, too.

  Gloria came for the annual women’s leadership day, and I ran into her in the bathroom talking to COO Sheryl about breast pumps. Sheryl was saying how she used to pump during conference calls back at Google, and every once in a while someone would ask about the noise, and she’d tell them it was a fire truck outside. “My breast pump actually used to talk to me,” I said. “The rhythmic shuffling would tell me to ‘go home, go home.’ ” Gloria laughed. Sheryl laughed. This feminist daughter of a feminist mother glowed.

  I worked hard. I helped build new features, and rebuild old ones. I was on the team that launched the Messenger app, the Groups feature, and the Facebook timeline profile. I worked to simplify Facebook’s privacy settings (hoo boy). And that was all in the first few months. When I was at Wells Fargo, my team didn’t complete anything the entire first year I was there. At Facebook, my desk was fifty feet from Mark Zuckerberg’s digs, a window-to-window terrarium space where he held his reviews. I learned firsthand that one single “that sounds reasonable” from Zuck was the highest, most golden blessing, worthy of a full round of team high fives. The sheer force of my insistence that people like me back gave me what I needed to succeed at the job.

  Evany axiom #5—Talk about the feelings

  When something feels weird or wrong or unfair, my need to speak up has always bordered on the compulsive. Luckily the tech industry’s love affair with “transparency” and “authenticity” and “saying the hard thing” has given me a natural podium for all my truth talking. And sometimes this need to speak up leads to good things.

  Every woman I know who works in tech has a story about what it’s like to be the only woman in a room full of young, hyper-driven men. They interrupt you. They repeat the thing you said that everyone ignored, and suddenly everyone thinks it’s genius. But I don’t just roll my eyes in silence, like so many women do. I roll my eyes and yell, “It sounded way better when I said it!”

  Or like the time I was hunkered down in a war room at Facebook (war rooms being where a whole team clumps together in a room and works around the clock until their project ships), and someone had lined the walls with a dozen or so of Facebook’s famous Russian constructivist motivational propaganda posters. All the posters had “PUSH” written in big red letters.

  There were about ten of us there in the room, and everyone else but me was a dude, all of them under the age of twenty-five.

  “Have any of you,” I said to the room at large, looking around at the walls, “given birth to a baby before?”

  A couple of the guys looked up from their screens, and I heard someone mutter an uncertain “Noooo . . . ?”

  “Because if you’d ever spent twenty-nine hours in labor like I did, these PUSH posters . . . they sure do bring something else to mind.”

  An uncomfortable silence settled over the room.

  “You know,” I mused, “we should stop calling these ‘war rooms’ altogether and call them ‘womb rooms’ instead. It’s a better metaphor, seeing as wombs actually produce something good. War is just about destruction and death and waste . . .”

  One by one, they turned back to their keyboards, and the room returned to its quiet concert
of clicking. I didn’t get the feeling they were with me in my crusade to shoot down our warring words and breath new life into our company’s go-to metaphors.

  But you never could tell. I haven’t worked at Facebook in more than three years now, but a friend who’s still there recently sent me a photo of a sign on the door of a war room. Someone had crossed out the war and changed it to womb.

  Evany axiom #6—Be your own imaginary friend

  Every six months during my last ten years working at three different companies, I’ve been forced to come up with a new set of career goals for myself and then assess my progress against them. It’s part of the job. Any promotion or raise I get depends on checking off these boxes. Of course with my goal-setting hang-ups, each time goal season comes around, it fills me with the kind of dread usually reserved for confronting unresolved childhood issues. (Huh!)

  The only way I get through it is by treating the whole process like a creative writing exercise, using the prompt, “Imagine a woman like me, at this advanced stage of her career, working as she does in the high-pressure world of tech: What kind of goals might such an accomplished person set for herself? How has she triumphed in the past? What evidence can you produce of how her wisdom and experience have paid off? If you were to shout this fine woman’s story from the mountaintops, what would you say?” And then I proceed to type together a rousing tale of the many ambitious plans and accomplishments of this amazing woman named Evany Thomas. And the feedback from all my many bosses has been closer to the yay end of the spectrum than the nay, so I guess my imaginary version of myself does indeed get the job done!

  Evany axiom #7—Follow the good people

  The first job I ever had was when I was sixteen, and I worked at the tiny one-screen town movie theater in Sausalito, California. Any kid who has worked in a movie theater will tell you, it’s the best job in the world. Free movies, all the popcorn you could cram into your popcorn hole, and endless hours of downtime to sit and chat with other people who love to sit and chat.

  My high school friends and I all worked at the theater together. For three dollars and fifteen cents an hour, we sat around in our flammable orange-and-brown polyester uniforms, quoting our favorite movies, playing drinking straws like flutes, and dreaming up elaborate ways to get a fake ID. (“First we find the county records office, then we request a copy of the birth certificate for some dead baby born before 1965, then we take it to the DMV and use it to take the driver’s test!”) I loved that job so much. I’d even go in on nights I wasn’t working.

  For me, it’s always been about the people I work with. When I went to college, I asked around until I found the school’s best teachers, then I signed up for every class they taught. It didn’t really matter much what they were teaching because a great teacher can make any topic interesting. And in the years since, I’ve tried to use that same tactic to find jobs. I seek out funny people, smart people, people I admire and who can teach me things and who bring out the best in me. And once I find good people, I follow them wherever they go. It’s like finding a good vein of cookie dough in a pint of ice cream: You just keep mining it until it runs out.

  That’s how I got my job at Pinterest: Some of the people I loved working with at Facebook peeled off to start up Pinterest, and I followed closely behind to see where this new lesson could take us.

  Evany axiom #8—Steer your story

  As a wise Facebook boss once told me, it helps if you think about yourself as the protagonist in your own life. The narratives we tell about ourselves are powerful things. We get to decide what stories we tell, and whether we’re starring in a comedy or a drama.

  And I decided: I want mine to be a comedy. No matter how many stresses and sadnesses circumstance serves up, there’s always something absurd to be found mixed in with the shittiness. And that ability to see the other side—the funny in the sadness—gives everything added dimension, and makes each experience feel more worthwhile.

  Even if I’m crying in the bathroom at the office, an ultimate work low, there’s still something certifiably comedic to be found in it.

  Sometimes when the conflicting lava-hot passions of the people I work with boil to the surface, or the frustrations of last-second course corrections mount, or the long hours start to add up, the urge to rage-fatigue cry sweeps over me. So I scuttle off to the bathroom to weep in peace without freaking out my coworkers, or confusing them into thinking I’m unstable. It always leaves me feeling calmer and ready to head back into the fray and be productive again.

  The moment itself—quietly boohooing in the tableau of free tampons, toothbrushes, and mouthwash, the automatic flusher blasting off beneath me every time I reach for more tissue—is its own little slice of sadlariousness to add to my story.

  The story took on more meaning when my coworkers and I went to a “team-building offsite” at a bar. And because it was Facebook, home to some of the most competitive people on earth, the day was set up as a battle—who can mix the best drink and name it the best name? When my team mixed up a ruinously sweet vodka-­citrus-syrup thing, I suggested we call it “Crying in the Bathroom.” All the dudes on our team just turned and looked at me, confused, all “I don’t get it” and “What does that even mean?” They had no idea. And there was something sad about that, all those men missing out on such a great way to siphon stress.

  Months later, I shared the story with Sheryl, also a self-confessed work crier. I told her about mixing drinks, and how my “Crying in the Bathroom” suggestion boggled all the men on the team, so completely unaware were they of the phenomenon, or the need for it. “What can we do to get more of these poor guys crying in the bathroom?” I asked her. “I think they could really benefit from blowing off the steam.”

  This is how I’ve gotten to where I am today: seeking out humor, truth, and good people in the daily act of working. I still can’t say with absolute clarity that I want to be an Olympic astronaut gymnast, or even a COO, but what I want—interesting problems, inspiring people, chances to steer old conversations in new directions—is happening all around me, all the time.

  Sheryl laughed. “I’m going to use that story,” she said. And I thought, And I’m going to use this story about how you used MY story in this here comedy of life I’m starring in.

  Let the credits roll.

  Astronauts

  NADIA P. MANZOOR

  I was five years old when I revealed my biggest aspiration to my father, Abbu. I wanted to become an astronaut. I remember his forehead creasing, him slowly folding his newspaper to look at me. “Women can’t be astronauts,” he said with a thick Pakistani accent. “Beta, who will cook? Who will clean? Who will feed your husband if you are floating about in space?”

  I looked at my mother, Ammi, for support. She stood in front of the stove, blue-checkered apron tied around her slim waist, laughing as she stirred one of her famous pots of biryani. “Parvez, your roti has gotten cold! Uff, now you will be late for office! Take my hot roti, I will eat cold one.” With one hand she cooked; with the other she served, and if she’d had a third hand, it would have sat supportively on Abbu’s shoulder at all times.

  Ammi was the embodiment of female sacrifice. Someone who had left her education at nineteen, walked away from her love of painting, put aside her athletic aspirations, and put on an apron. She cooked and she cleaned, and she found joy in the accomplishments of her family. I was meant to walk in the footsteps of my mother. Space travel aside, my only worthy ambition was in becoming a bride.

  When I was seven, we flew to Pakistan to attend my uncle’s wedding. Abbu felt it was important for me to see my destiny in the flesh, for me to experience what a woman who maintained beauty could look forward to. I remember seeing the bride for the first time, seated on a golden throne, surrounded by draped, white silk. She was decked out like a Christmas tree on crack, a goddess. Long red fingernails, and lips that shimmered like a fish, but her eyes remained glued to the floor. “Abbu, why won’t she look at us?”r />
  Abbu explained that she was a modest bride, her eyes meant only for her husband. “Nadia, one day this will be you. On a stage, everybody looking at you!” I stared at her, feeling a mixture of awe and boredom, for reasons that I didn’t yet understand. Here she was, the most desired object in the room, hundreds of guests leering at my uncle’s prized possession, and throughout it all she had nothing to say. I wanted her to speak to me and tell me what it was like to be a real-life “princess,” but she remained silent, her long eyelashes fluttering. Like my mother, her voice had been stifled for that of a larger cultural purpose, to maintain the traditional notion of “woman.”

  Since the only goal I was supposed to realize was marriage, the skill set encouraged by my father was maintaining the size of my ass. He was often snatching pieces of fried pakoras away from me, and plopping them into his own mouth. “No one wants to marry a potato!” he would say. Even though by the age of ten, I could entertain my family for hours with dramatized storytelling and impersonations of most of my relatives, Abbu never focused on any of my actual abilities.

  My twin brother Khurram, however, was being raised for world domination. While he memorized all the capitals of the world, reciting his multiplication tables backward, and shouting out political terms in Mandarin, I was learning how to ration my daily food allowance. If I became too round and too fat, I would be sucked into the black hole where oversized female fruit went to rot. All I had to do was stay thin and trim like a carrot, tamed and predictable like a parrot, and I too could occupy that bridal throne, be on that most coveted stage.

  Although I understood my traditional future as inevitable, it made me want to eat my own tongue. I hated helping Ammi in the kitchen, dicing tomatoes and cucumbers for the raita. I didn’t know how to cook a delicately seasoned curry; I just knew how to scoff one down, and burp silently afterward. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life preparing food for men. I wanted to play the “guess the capitals” game with Abbu, learn foreign gibberish, and run wildly outside on the football pitch with my friends, possibly topless. I wanted to live.