Womb for improvement

One woman’s take on the dude-packed war rooms of Silicon Valley

Once I was in this war room at Facebook (war rooms being where a whole team would hunker down together and work around the clock until their project shipped), and someone had lined the walls with a dozen or so of Facebook’s patented Russian constructivist/Barbara Kruger-ish motivational propaganda posters. All the posters said PUSH in big red letters.

There were about 10 of us there in the room, and everyone else but me was a dude, all of them under the age of 25.

“Have any of you,” I said to the room at large, “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 even spent 29 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 laughed, “we should stop calling these ‘war rooms’ altogether and call them ‘womb rooms’ instead. It’s a way better metaphor, seeing as wombs actually produce something good. War is just about destruction and death and waste…”

Total silence. Then slowwwwwly the room settled back into its quiet concert of clicking keyboards.