Have you heard about the Google memo? Have you heard nothing but "Google memo" all week? James Damore, an engineer at Google, wrote a memo suggesting that maybe there weren't so many women at Google because women are less interested in sitting around and staring at code all day. The internet erupted. James Damore is no longer working at Google.
As a woman working in the brotastic atmosphere of IT, I ultimately came to a conclusion similar to his. So I sympathize with him. Let me explain.
Until the age of 26, I was employed as a technology consultant by a small firm that served the financial industry. I built servers and workstations, mostly for banks, and in a happy foreshadowing of my future writing for Bloomberg View, I installed some of the first PC-based Bloomberg terminals for a Japanese firm's office in New York.
Finance back then was heavily male, as it is now. And technology, the same. At the intersection of the two, well, I can count on one hand all the women I worked with directly during almost four years of consulting. It was very male-centric. I heard about client outings, involving strippers, to which I was obviously not invited. And the sexual harassment (entirely from clients, not colleagues) could be spectacular.
Which has nothing to do with why I left. At the time, it never occurred to me that being a female in this bro ecosystem might impinge my ultimate career prospects. Nor did I miss having women in the room. I liked working with the bros just fine. And the sexual harassment, while annoying, was just that: annoying. I cannot recall that it ever affected my work, nor that I lost any sleep over it.
No, the reason I left is that I came into work one Monday and joined the guys at our work table, and one of them said: "What did you do this weekend?"
I was in the throes of a brief, doomed romance. I had attended a concert that Saturday night. I answered the question with an account of both. The guys stared blankly. Then silence. Then one said, "I built a fiber-channel network in my basement," and our co-workers fell all over themselves asking him to describe every step in loving detail.
At that moment I realized that fundamentally, these are not my people. I liked the work. But I was never going to like it enough to blow a weekend doing more of it for free. Which meant that I was never going to be as good at that job as the guys around me.