Seethe and Grin: My Life Going to Tech Events

This post is not about the overt verbal harassment, physical assault, abuse and rape that happens to women at technology events all the time. That is a post for later.

These are just the subtle things.

I am a woman who works in technology and I used to go to technology events.

As one does. There are many of them. San Francisco, 2013, something that in time we will come to know as a bubble year, before a crash will come, again, to wring out the pomp and circumstance and the worst of the hubris.

Water from a stone.

Every kind of event. The more money there is, the more events there are.

For awhile it was my job to fly around giving demos of developer tools at such events, hackathons and meetups all over the country, attending dozens in the span of a few months, many I had organized myself. Later, I would go to more conferences than I care to count, sponsored by companies I worked at, or to give talks, to make deals with partners, to talk to old customers and find new ones. Conferences and summits on anything and everything: APIs. Distributed systems. Monitoring. Gaming. Operations. Big data. Startups. Hadoop. Cloud. Telephony. Open standards. Open source.

But now I don’t go to that shit. If I am giving a talk, I will show up to give my talk, and then I will leave. If I need to go to support a friend or see them talk, I will show up for that, and then I will leave.

The thing that stands out most viscerally to my memory is the way they always look at me.

Up and down, up and down, with that familiar combination of lechery and curiosity.

At the many tech events where “few” women is more like “almost no” women, I am more a walking exhibit than an attendee. I try to find a place in the room where I can watch them all, so no one is behind me or can sneak up on me, can look at me or make gestures at me without me seeing, or can look at my computer, trying to figure out who I am and what I do.

My “otherness”, my difference, is both palpable and deeply uncomfortable. I cannot blend in or go unnoticed. It’s a strange feeling for someone who is used to being unassuming and mostly invisible in the safety of the broader world, tiny and fast-moving.

Some will ignore me entirely. Some I will catch staring at me, or trailing behind me as I go from room to room, my silent and terrifying companions, perhaps projecting onto me their hopes for a manic pixie dream girl to call their own, perhaps working up the courage to talk to me.

They never do.

They just… watch.

And follow.

Some will come up to me, over-enthusiastic to the point of confrontation: “Who are you? What do you do? Do you work in marketing? Are you here with someone?” I will tilt my shoulders away, I will curve my back towards the floor, I will shrink into my own body. They will lean in closer.

I am always much smaller than they are.

At some point, always, I will be walking around and men will ask me where the food is being served, if they can get seconds, where they can get coffee, what time the break is, where the bathrooms are, where they can get a free t-shirt. “I don’t work here,” I always say.

I am wearing my speaker badge, I am wearing my sponsor badge, I am wearing my conference badge. It’s right there, dangling in front of my body, it’s fucking huge, it’s bigger than my breasts, which they somehow never seem to miss.

“Oh, so sorry,” they say.

At first, early in my career, I try very hard to participate and to talk to the other people at the event. Over time, I speak less and less and instead smile and nod, smile and nod, more and more.

In a group, the talking itself feels less like a collaborative discourse and more like a competition, men fighting each other to dominate the writhing unruly beast of the conversation with ever-higher volume, ever-longer periods un-interrupted, ever-more violent gesturing.

This only gets worse with the addition of alcohol, which is always plentiful. Of course, as time goes on I find it increasingly difficult to quibble: I would prefer to be drunk for this also.

The goal, it seems, is to prove that you know more than anyone else in the group. This is not my default intellectual posture, nor a defensible one as I have only been working several years.

The reward for winning the conversation seems uncertain except that everyone thinks you’re an asshole but can at least admit you are not ignorant about whatever obscure aspect of computing is on the table at the moment.

Even one on one, I cannot share in nor benefit from the same sense of comfort and camaraderie that the men seem to have with each other, often immediately.

It is hard to quantify or even qualify what that diminished comfort — the unfamiliarity, the anxiety, the distance — that men in technology feel towards the women they work with does to our careers. I believe it to be both incalculable and devastating. It is difficult to share in the masculine bonding that secures their trust, the light-hearted exchange of sexist slurs and sexual innuendo, the immediate sense of knowing and security and shared context that comes from being around people like you.

I smile and nod and no one ever notices that I am not talking.

If I am attending an event with a man things are both better and worse.

If I am attending with a man, other men will not even bother to gather what must seem on the surface to be a tacit approval and silent interest in their conversation.

Instead they pretend I am not there at all.

Perhaps they think I am his secretary, his wife, his prop, his property.

After all, what is the use of talking to a woman another man already possesses, or has even tainted with companionship.

I used to go to events for companies I worked for, to give demos or talks or work the booths, little brightly-colored tents where I will be demeaned, overlooked, disrespected and objectified for up to six hours at a time.

The men come by the dozens, poorly dressed, grinning, sometimes stinking, palms open for a bit of free candy, a brochure, an oogle.

They ask where my boss is, they ask to talk to someone who actually works there. They want to speak to someone more technical. I haven’t even introduced myself. They slide right past me, suddenly agile in their hulking masculine bodies, aimed for a male colleague and a fist bump. On the way out, they’ll turn to me and ask for a t-shirt.

Here. Here’s your fucking t-shirt you fucking misogynist pig.

Smile and nod turns to grin and seethe.

Once a man came to my booth and asked to speak to the most technical person there. We discussed distributed database architectures for twenty minutes, and after twenty minutes he leaned his face so close to me I could smell his breath, and he said,

“I am just blown away that someone that looks like you knows so much about these things.”

I want to fucking scream but I can’t because this pays the bills right?

“We don’t get paid enough,” I will laugh with my female colleagues later as I drink enough to forget the fake compliments, the sweaty hands and the way they looked at my body like I was just another part of the booth, with all the passing interest they show in the interactive displays and free stickers. Shiny. Free. Touchable.

I drink to forget that I had to smile the whole time.

Bills. Wine and bills.

Oftentimes, in the past few years, men at events will know me from the internet. And now, even though I have many less followers than most influential men in our industry, my writing gets as many or more page views than their writing, so many people know who I am, even if they pretend not to.

Later, though, once they’ve pretended not to for the entire event, which may last days, they will tweet at me. “Saw you at the conference.”

Maybe they want everyone to see that they saw me there?

Myself, I too only tweet about things after I have left.

But that’s because it doesn’t feel safe for me if people know where I am.

Some will tell me they’re surprised at how nice I am in person and they seem disappointed.

I laugh and hope to my bones I will never see them again.

They seem to have expected a performance, just for them.

Sometimes they ask me what I think about some incident, some event, some flare-up or other, and I will pretend like I really, really want to have a deep, personal heart-to-heart conversation with them about my feminist politics.

A few beers in, they will try to bait me with comments on my looks, on feminism, on women. Sometimes I catch myself saying bad things that I don’t believe and that are wrong just to deflect the discomfort and the attention.

Seethe and grin. Seethe and grin.

Make sure not to stay too long or drink too much. Make sure someone you trust always knows where you are.

It may look the same to you on the outside but I always spend too much time on the inside thinking about how I look at events.

Or really anytime I am around people who work in tech, which is all the time and I can never escape because everywhere I go there are dudebros talking about crushing code and I wish I lived on a farm instead of in this fucking morally bankrupt city.

I don’t want to be thought of as cute, pretty, hot or sexy. I often stick with baggy hoodies and sweatpants that make it hard to tell what shape my body is. Over time, this leads to a weird disconnect with it.

Something I need to hide from the world.

I struggle with makeup. I like to wear makeup but in the A/B test of my life, men will take me more seriously and listen to me more if I don’t wear it.

At the same time, it is hard to go to these things all the time looking your worst: hair up, unbrushed, no makeup, baggy clothes, tennis shoes.

When I’m giving talks, deciding how to look is most challenging. One must take care to neither appear too attractive nor too unattractive. When presenting, I tend to wear glasses and wear my hair in a bun so at least in my mind my face stands out less.

My eyesight is bad enough that wearing glasses impairs my vision which makes it more difficult to present, but seems worth it to put something between my face and the men watching me perform.

When I speak, like everyone else, I worry about if I will sound smart, if people will like the talk, if they will laugh at the jokes I put in. But more than that I worry about what men will think and say about how I look, because I’ve heard what they say about the other women.

The only thing worse than when they think you’re ugly is when they think you’re pretty.

I often wonder how I would look and dress if I didn’t have to worry about what the men in my industry thought about it.

These are some of the reasons I don’t go anymore. They are only some and there are others that are much worse.

I know deeply, and by now instinctively, that a technology event dominated by straight white men is not a place where I am safe.

It is not a place where I will be allowed to speak, where I will have dignity. I will not be treated with respect. I will be a stereotype instead of a person.

I will be a shadow of myself, slinking around and hiding, trying not to get fucked with.

I am a white, cis woman, who is able-bodied, who everyone will assume to be straight and vanilla, maybe even married.

I cannot even stomach what it must be like for women at these events without such privileges.

Of course, it’s more the just the persistent subtle sexism, the insidious misogyny, the blanket dismissals and objectification.

Mixed in with the fear, the anxiety, and the humiliation, is a profound boredom.

That boredom of being surrounded by men who all look and talk and act the same. Watching them on stage, all bravado and confidence and bullshit and salesmanship. All fist-bumping and shoulder-slapping and self-congratulation and clinking beers. Them knowing everything there is to know in the world about startups and computers and companies and the lives and thoughts of other men just like them.

I just can’t bring myself to give a fuck about these men or the things they have to say anymore.

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