The Silicon Valley Housewives
How a group of accomplished women are facing domestic ennui in Northern California
By Flávia Stefani / Illustration: Thiago Tomé*
I would say Anne is the prettiest of the tech wives. But it doesn’t make a difference to her. The most important thing to Anne is her career. She works in a cutting-edge medical device company, while also studying at Stanford in hopes of becoming a neurosurgeon. That’s after earning two degrees. Ambition runs in the family. Anne’s father is a leading U.S. cancer surgeon. At 28, Anne is also the youngest of the group. The rest of us are about the same age — between 30 and 33 years old — and have the same occupation: ex-something.
Denise is a former public relations officer at Slate. Julie ran a mid-size company. I am a former advertising copywriter. We are as different as apples and oranges, but we have the same role as thousands of other women in Northern California: our husbands work in Silicon Valley tech companies. And none of us has steady employment.
The “middle-class Silicon Valley housewives” — as I secretly refer to the four of us — met in New York at the few Apple events that admitted spouses or plus-ones. These events were rare in my experience: holiday parties and once in a blue moon a small birthday party.
Any other get-togethers were restricted to employees. Last week, my husband Fabio, who now works for Twitter, learned printing by letterpress. He then spent two hours touring the pubs of San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood, which is famous for foreign cuisine — or, as they call it, ethnic food — and the high number of homeless people. A few months ago, he volunteered at one of the oldest soup kitchens of San Francisco. He spent the day chopping carrots, celery and potatoes. In the late afternoon, he met with his colleagues at a pub to eat and drink on the company’s bill. No significant others were invited. These were team building events.
Activities — or, as they are called, outings — happen every other month and are too diverse to categorize: bourbon brunches, museum visits, archery and ceramics lessons and exotic food-tastings. These are all fun things to do, but each employee must attend sans family.
My interest in corporate policies is too small to investigate whether the exclusion of spouses is about cost or encouraging staff socialization. These kinds of events didn’t happen at the advertising agencies where I’ve worked. But the message here is clear: Family and work can only mix at the holiday party. The rest of the time, you belong to us.
There’s no guarantee that the intersection of family and work will occur at these holiday parties. I remember seeing Gaby, the wife of my husband’s boss Richard, at the Christmas get-together in 2013. She spent the night drinking in a corner while Richard told jokes to subordinates on the other side of the room.
Aside from corporate activities that alienate, or, in more PR-friendly terms, enrich the personal life and artistic sense of half the couple, there is a more subtle element distancing Silicon Valley couples: the secret.
As a tech employee progresses in his career, he gets access to confidential information on the launch of products and services — information that he is required by law not to share with anyone else. I cannot say if other families follow this rule to the letter, but in my house it works like this: My husband can’t discuss certain matters with me. Take the work he’s done in the last six months. Fabio can’t tell me anything about the new tool he’s spent hundreds of hours perfecting. Fabio’s work — the reason we moved to California — keeps creeping in between us. The secrecy is so intense I can’t even visit his office. I sent him flowers the other day, but I’ll never know they how they look on his desk because I’ve never seen his desk.
This secrecy isn’t exclusive to tech companies — I imagine that lawyers, celebrities, government staff, big pharmaceutical executives and owners of television networks, among others, must also ensure confidentiality.
The expression “married to the job” makes perfect sense in Silicon Valley. From extracurricular activities to sensitive information, the best and largest part of my husband’s time goes to his employer- earlier Apple, now Twitter.
When Apple’s mobile advertising platform iAds moved its whole design team from New York to Silicon Valley two years ago, we — the Brooklyn tech wives — became part of a larger group, the Northern California tech wives. The difference is that now, in addition to being unemployed and having geek husbands who work in tech, we have another thing in common. We left behind the exciting life we had in New York.
Julie and Denise have more reason to miss the city. They were born and raised there, and they both have family in Manhattan. But I’ve certainly struggled more with the change. I had been living in New York for almost five years when I met my husband. New York is not the norm for me as it is for them. I have worked in other cities and in other countries. Waking up in New York every day when I could wake up anywhere else in the world was a conscious choice, and that made me happy. The motivation for continuing in a job that couldn’t take me anywhere was that it allowed me to live in the city of my dreams.
I had never wanted anything more than to grow old in New York City. The idea of heading west at 28 to accompany my husband was, therefore, not exactly welcome. It was the first time I spoke of divorce. It wasn’t the last.
The life of a Californian tech wife who says she works at home is not actual work. Her job is to fill the time with any activity that helps relieve the frustration from the marriage. Yoga. Crossfit. Philosophy classes. Meditation workshops. You read twice as many books and magazines as you would if you had a job. That’s in part because there’s more time to read, and partly so people think, “She may be at home all day, but at least she’s keeping up with things.”
You spend more time on the Internet than can be healthy for a human being. You convert your home into a Pinterest board. You call the neighborhood dogs by name. You wonder if having a child would help bring more meaning to what you do. Or rather, what you don’t do — you can’t even tell the difference anymore.
You miss the woman who worked 14 hours a day, who paid the rent herself, the single girl who didn’t sacrifice anything for anyone. At some point in the transition from New York copywriter to Valley housewife, she fell asleep.
What will wake her is not a magic kiss or a Prince Charming, but a letter from the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services.
I can’t work in Silicon Valley or in any other American city until my green card goes through. Twitter’s immigration lawyers hope I’ll have it this year, but I’ve been in exile for so long that I sometimes think my reality will never change. When will I be able to return to work? Will anyone want to hire me after all these years? These are questions that only time can answer.
If I could go back to work, it wouldn’t be at a tech company. I’m a writer. Joining a geek squad or becoming the CEO of Apple, Google or Twitter has never been my dream. But it is the dream of a lot of girls I know. Some dare to even put this wish into words.
Sarah, 29, has been a designer at Twitter since its 2006 founding. At her initiative, the company’s entire design and research department met for an hour to discuss the issue of female leadership a few months ago.
“I am happy that I can raise these issues there,” she told me over lunch one day. “Some companies here in the Valley instruct employees not to bring up certain issues because they can be uncomfortable.”
If my biggest challenge right now is the green card, the challenge for women like Sarah is somewhat harder: they need to force their way into an environment that clearly does not treat them as equals. From the Gold Rush to last year’s Twitter IPO, California — in all its natural beauty — is still a valley (or desert) hostile to women in the tech industry.
I met with Julie in a square at the center of town. We talked over coffee until the bus carrying Google employees — Julie’s husband Dave among them — arrived. They had plans to go to a ballet performance at City Hall. I jokingly asked what Julie did to achieve this miracle, as it’s no secret that Dave hates ballet.
“I gave up my life to be here with him,” she said, blowing on her coffee. “He can spend two hours with me watching ballet.”
* Flavia Stefani is a Brazilian writer and co-founder of the literary magazine Confeitaria. She likes to question everything and devour books. She now lives in San Francisco, after having passed through São Paulo, New York and London.
Thiago Thomé (aka Liquidpig) lived for years in San Francisco and is a graduate of California College of Arts. He now lives in São Paulo and works as a designer, illustrator and art editor.
Translated by Natasha Madov, edited by Leila Roos and Anugya Chitransh
