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  For example, while presenting as male, Fernandez said, she was rarely interrupted. When she started presenting as a woman, however, men suddenly began cutting her off midsentence. Fernandez was taken aback. “It ran contrary to twenty years of [my previous] life experience,” she said. Slowly but surely, she rebuilt her confidence, and soon she was back to her old self, the firebrand always ready to speak her mind; if someone cut her off, she called him on it. Confronted that way, Fernandez said, “people would double take. They are not used to a woman being like, ‘Let me finish speaking.’ I’ve had female colleagues who’ve said, ‘You speak your mind more than any woman I’ve ever met.’ What I’ve got [that most women don’t] is two decades of people saying, ‘Yeah, your opinion is worth hearing.’”

  The rest of the women in the room clearly identified with Fernandez’s description of the “little things”—the small, daily insults that build up over time. These interactions are not necessarily intentional or malicious, but they have a cumulative effect. When I used the term “mansplaining,” which had just recently entered the lexicon, every woman there seemed to instantly know what it meant, and they gave me many examples.

  One start-up engineer said that her male colleagues routinely question her programming, force her to revise it, then realize that her original version was best. When she critiques their work in the same way, her comments are routinely ignored. “It feels like everything that I do is wrong,” she said. Her feeling is backed up by research. One study found that women’s code on the open-source software community GitHub was approved more often than men’s, but only if the gender of the coder was hidden. When women were identified openly, the acceptance rate of their code went down. One former engineer at Facebook collected data showing that female engineers received 35 percent more rejections of their code than men. Facebook’s head of infrastructure told the Wall Street Journal that the discrepancy was based more on an engineer’s rank than gender, revealing another problem: the lack of women in senior engineering roles. One engineer said that working at a big tech company is “kind of like Russian roulette,” meaning that a great manager can really make women feel valued, while getting a bad manager means you’re screwed.

  The women in my living room told me that men who had positive things to say about their contributions too often expressed them in a patronizing way, saying, “Wow, that’s actually a really good idea.” They also complained that they are routinely sexualized, as when men comment on their outfit choices. These are the subtle slights that women experience daily, sometimes five to ten times per day.

  The point isn’t that any one comment or incident is going to push a woman out of tech or make her miserable at work. It’s the constant emotional labor that she has to perform, day after day, just to keep her job and do her work. Often, women will not immediately blame sexism if they feel they are being mistreated or overlooked, rather they question themselves. “Did I do something wrong? Or, was I not clear enough?” they might think. These concerns wear constantly on self-esteem. Pushing against a stereotype is emotional labor that men, white men in particular, don’t have to perform. Instead, they can use that energy to focus on being a great engineer. Women and minorities, on the other hand, start and end the day at an emotional deficit. It is this “death by a thousand cuts” phenomenon that wears women down—not because they are weak, or because they can’t keep up, but because they are doing a whole extra job.

  THE DOUBLE (AND TRIPLE) MINORITIES

  In Silicon Valley, all women are fighting an uphill battle. But what about black, Latina, and Asian women? What about trans women? What about disabled women? These people are often excluded from conversations about diversity in tech because they don’t have the same reality as white, cisgendered, able-bodied, upper-middle-class women. They are not just fighting implicit and explicit sexism, but sometimes two or three other isms as well, including racism, ageism, and classism. Just 2 to 3 percent of Google and Facebook employees, male and female, are black; 4 to 5 percent of them are Latinx, compared with a national population that’s 13 percent black and 18 percent Latinx. People of color are a small fraction of all workers in Silicon Valley, and an even smaller fraction of that fraction are women. No wonder, then, that once we turned to the subject of life as a Silicon Valley “double minority,” the discussion got very emotional.

  Leah McGowen-Hare, who has two and a half decades of experience in the industry, broached the subject first. In the late 1980s, she’d wanted to be a dancer, inspired by Irene Cara in that decade’s hit movie Fame. “My father said, ‘I’ll give you two years to be a dancer,’ and I twirled away,” said McGowen-Hare. She started college as a dance major but, ultimately, at her father’s urging, switched to engineering. She joined PeopleSoft in the late 1990s and stayed on through the company’s takeover by Oracle. If being a black female engineer is rare in Silicon Valley today, it was almost unheard of when McGowen-Hare started her career.

  “I’m sure things were said to me, things were done that I could have escalated to another level. But I was just grateful to have a job and sold myself short in some ways,” she said. “Being twenty years old and not being able to call it or name it and not wanting to blacklist myself or my career—I took it in stride and kept it going.”

  Nearly thirty years later, not much has changed for the female engineers who constitute a minority in Silicon Valley, even though women, overall, are a majority in this country. If “little things” happen to white women engineers five to ten times in a workday, women who are also members of a second minority—or a third minority in the case of Fernandez, who is also transgender—can double or triple that number.

  “For many years, I’ve been sitting on the sidelines, navigating through, watching it, doing my due diligence to make a powerful impact and change,” McGowen-Hare said. Yet the number of black men and women in technology is still close to zero, and McGowen-Hare said even her most progressive colleagues don’t understand how big a problem that is. “The day after the 2016 election, I come into work, I’m hurt, I’m distraught. All the women are crying and can’t get themselves together in meetings, crying, eyes welling up.” That reminded her of the previous summer, when three young black men had been shot by police in one week. At that time, McGowen-Hare didn’t feel she could display her feelings openly the way the women upset by the election were now doing. “I had to go into a bathroom stall because I couldn’t keep it together and everyone else acted like nothing was happening,” McGowen-Hare recalled. “The level of empathy for the black community wasn’t there. The white women could just show their emotions in the workplace in a way that I don’t feel like I could.”

  McGowen-Hare said she applauds the recent surge in discussion about gender bias in Silicon Valley, but she feels something is missing: “As a woman, I’m thrilled. But as an African American, I’m put out. I’m not feeling it. If you don’t address racial diversity, you’re going to end up with fifty women and fifty men, 100 percent white.” McGowen-Hare said she tries to focus on the positive. “I want girls to see me and say, ‘She’s there so I can be there.’ I want to represent opportunity, not limitation.”

  Across the room, Shola Oyedele agreed that the way diversity is being defined is one-dimensional. “I’ve been in spaces with women who only want to talk about gender bias but not racial bias and won’t stick up for me in the workplace,” Oyedele said. The child of Nigerian immigrants, she grew up in a mostly black neighborhood in Maryland before attending Stanford University. “When I went to college, which was predominantly white, I had a lot of trouble in school, and it took me a long time to figure out what it was. Until then, I hadn’t really realized that I was black and what that really meant,” Oyedele said. “I’m from an immigrant family, so most of what I learned about race and slavery came from school. Because of the way I look, I have to take on a history that’s not completely my own,” she added. “There’s so much resistance to women and minorities in tech. For
me to get the same recognition as my peers, I have to do a great job and show why I’m worth being here. Being just as good isn’t enough; you have to be exceptional.”

  Part of being exceptional is that sometimes behavior that’s standard for the group is contraindicated for you. “I personally think that I should have never been drinking with my co-workers. I think it’s a line that should never be blurred if you’re a minority or double minority, because you’re going to get treated different,” said Ana Medina, who is Latina. “Most of these people are going to be white males. I think you get looked down on. They think it’s a power thing: you’re supposed to stay there and make sure they have a good time, and they are allowed to say whatever they want to you. Those power dynamics just come out when alcohol or drugs are involved.”

  Medina said that even though she had a prestigious job at Uber, one of the most highly valued companies in Silicon Valley, she still often “felt like shit . . . The fact that you constantly need to prove yourself everywhere you go because you’re a minority—it’s tiring. People keep questioning my technical capabilities, even as I continue to stack more jobs on my résumé.”

  As the women talked, I realized that Vanessa Farias had been mostly silent. Farias, also Latina, had been an emergency services coordinator before she enrolled in a mid-career coding class that was part of an apprentice program at Adobe, where she then became an engineer. Her voice broke as she started talking for the first time, and she paused to gather herself as her eyes welled up.

  “I actually like my job, but on the hard days I ask, why am I even here? Am I worthy of it?” she began. “Ultimately, I want to pave the way for others. My father was a janitor his whole life. For me to bitch about a bad day . . . ?” Her voice trailed off. Farias drives an hour and a half to San Francisco every weekday, often leaving as early as 4:45 a.m. to beat the traffic. But once she’s in the office, she questions whether her colleagues actually notice her. “When I see someone who’s Hispanic or black, I know they see me,” she said. “I don’t feel like anyone else really sees me sometimes. If this is a movement, it’s moving way too slow.”

  In Silicon Valley, if you’re not a white man, your identity is a ball and chain, from which you cannot escape. White women in tech have one kind of burden. Latina women have another. Black women, yet another. Asians are generally well represented in the field but underrepresented in leadership, adding another wrinkle to the story. Tracy Chou once wrote this about the “uncomfortable state of being Asian” in tech: “It’s not as ‘good’ as being White, but it’s certainly ‘better’ than being Black or Latin@, and it’s good enough that we don’t complain about the erasure of our individual identities and work ethic and personal successes, we don’t complain about the bamboo ceiling, we stay quiet on issues of race.”

  And aside from race, there are so many other facets of one’s identity that can leave women feeling even more isolated. “Not only am I a double minority,” said Medina, “the fact that I dropped out of school, forget it. It’s even worse.” Medina never completed her college degree but networked heavily via Twitter to find her way into the tech crowd.

  Simply hiring more white women isn’t going to solve Silicon Valley’s diversity problem. If this industry is supposed to represent the future, there must be room for talented people who are not young, straight, white, well educated, childless, and male.

  BRILLIANT JERKS

  In the weeks following the dinner, the post-Fowler pressure on Uber to moderate its hard-charging, masculine culture didn’t let up, nor did the press scrutiny. Kalanick apologized over and over again as the negative stories stacked up. Following the publication of Fowler’s sexual harassment claims, the company launched what it promised would be two sweeping investigations into both individual allegations and the company’s overall culture, and Uber hired former U.S. attorney general Eric Holder to lead the effort. Kalanick said in a statement that what Fowler described was “abhorrent and against everything that Uber stands for and believes in.”

  Employees didn’t necessarily blame “TK,” as they affectionately called him, for all of the company’s culture problems. “I think to a certain extent he wasn’t aware of what was going on because he was so focused on getting more VC money,” one employee told me. “He just trusted other people to run it . . . and all of a sudden we have a fire that is just burning. At some point, it translated to a lot of assholeyness.” The culture wasn’t necessarily malicious, this person said, but several people didn’t intervene in bad situations when they could have: “I think there is a small number of people acting really poorly and a lot of people with bystander syndrome, a lot of people seeing it happen and not doing anything.” Employees felt optimistic that TK had publicly taken responsibility, but they wanted to see him take action. (I’ve heard some people say that if Travis Kalanick wasn’t “an asshole,” Uber never would have soared to a $70 billion valuation. But nobody stops to think that if he were less of “an asshole,” the company might be worth twice as much.)

  Others pointed to the executives Kalanick chose to surround himself with, including Amit Singhal, the former Google executive who left the search engine amid sexual harassment allegations; Ed Baker, who resigned in the midst of reports he’d been seen making out with another employee at a work event; and Emil Michael, who accompanied Kalanick to that escort-karaoke bar in Seoul. Though Kalanick had once promised to “grow up” (after video was leaked of him getting into a petty argument with an Uber driver), his immaturity could not be blamed on his age. In 2016, he turned forty.

  Tasked with assisting Holder’s investigation, Uber board member Arianna Huffington publicly announced the company would stop hiring “brilliant jerks.” Uber’s newly appointed head of HR, Liane Hornsey, told the New York Times, “What has driven Uber to immense success—its aggression, the hard-charging attitude—has toppled over . . . And it needs to be shaved back.” The company was saying all the right things, but for some employees it was too late.

  After Fowler’s post made the rounds, Uber employees grew increasingly incensed and started collecting digital paper trails and lodging their own complaints with HR and Kalanick himself. Previously, many hadn’t reported questionable incidents, because they felt the HR department was “broken,” as one employee put it, and nothing would change. Ana Medina wrote Kalanick a lengthy missive describing what she found to be a “sexist and toxic work environment” at Uber in which women got passed up for promotions, sexual comments were overlooked, and bad managers were tolerated. Medina was especially angry because she knew something about the Fowler case that hadn’t been included in the blog post: that several Uber employees had gone to HR on Fowler’s behalf to complain about the manager who originally made a pass at her but he still held on to his job. “That guy was a major creep. It took forever to get him fired,” Medina tells me. “We were aware of it and extra people went to HR for her and shit didn’t happen.”

  As the weeks passed, Medina grew increasingly frustrated that the investigation seemed to be moving so slowly and opaquely while employees scrambled to cover up anything that might incriminate them. She emailed Kalanick asking for a one-on-one meeting, to which she says he responded, “Sorry, I’m already meeting with other fearless women”—a reply that left Medina, who had spent a great deal of time helping to recruit other female and Latinx engineers for Uber, feeling as if she had been used and taken for granted. “I was just like, ‘What the fuck,’ I was only asking for fifteen minutes,” Medina says. Later, however, she was invited to a listening session with a few dozen female engineers and the CEO in April, nearly two months after Fowler’s original post.

  Kalanick showed up late and ended up taking the seat next to Medina. He bowed his head and nodded as the women spoke. When it was her turn, Medina says she turned in her seat and confronted Kalanick directly. “I said, ‘This is the shit that has happened. People who were involved in the claims from Susan’s post, they are still
at the company. Why aren’t we suspending them? Why aren’t we hearing more from the investigation?’” Kalanick acknowledged a need for greater transparency. Then Medina got personal. She told Kalanick, “The only way I haven’t burnt out the last few months is going home and getting stoned every day.” She says he responded, “Oh, Ana, I’ve never smoked weed. Maybe you should smoke me out for the first time.” Medina was shocked. “I’m telling the CEO, ‘Hey, I’m doing drugs so I can survive working here,’ and that’s what he says?”

  What she was trying to tell Kalanick was that her Uber experience had plunged her into a very dark mental state. She often felt nauseated and unable to eat, and she was throwing up every other day. She couldn’t make time to see the right doctors, because she was working so hard. “I was on edge. I was hating my life. I was suicidal on and off,” Medina reveals. “I had come up with an entire suicide plan, and I was okay with doing it. A lot of it was, I don’t matter, no matter how hard I try, who I talk to, nothing’s going to change.”

  During the first week of June 2017, Medina took a medical leave of absence and bought a one-way ticket to Minnesota to visit a friend. As her plane was landing, she received an email that the release of the results of Uber’s sexual harassment investigation had been postponed. To Medina, it felt like another broken promise. “That took me into a really bad spiral. I felt more suicidal and extra pissed off. I was like, I can’t believe this is happening.” That evening, she checked herself into the emergency room at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, where she was hospitalized for ten days. “One of the things I kept on saying was ‘I don’t feel human. I have no sense of emotion. No passion to do anything or create.’ I just felt blank and empty.” Medina was diagnosed with severe depression and anxiety. “Coming to terms with that, it took a while,” she says.