I was born a girl. Female. My parents raised me in pink. I even wear rose-colored glasses to pretend I can’t see anything that is unpleasant or unjust or unsavory so I can remain “sweet” like a girl. I was the girly girl in the family obsessed with Barbie, while my sister was the “tomboy.” But at a certain point we switched places. She ended up doing more girly things like getting married and bearing children while I stayed single, traveled like Jack Kerouac and worked at tech startups starting in the late 1990s…
So, I have to say – this “Google Manifesto” is confusing to me. I didn’t mean to NOT do things that were more “biologically” suited to my gender – believe me. I tried. But my energy just kept going more into career than the roles biologically prescribed to me. I absolutely LOVE holding a cooing baby, but I will eventually give the baby back to mami cuz I would rather be talking code, copying and pasting code, translating code.
The curiosity started in journalism school. I liked how code looks visually. I liked the brackets <>. And the slash marks </a>. I liked the if-then statements. And because I am a writer, I loved using code as metaphor – “How many lines of code are you doing in a week???”
At my first “dot-com” job, I was hired to write, but because I had a natural talent and interest in code, I became an HTML producer. I loved searching and replacing Word code with HTML code so much that I dreamed about it. At night, I would run “scripts” that would search for my boyfriend’s snoring and replace them with “blanks.”
At my second “dot-com” job, I was hired to write, but because I had an insatiable need to see “under the hood” of our web pages, I learned how PHP was becoming the “new language” and ended up working with the programmer on new sections of the growing Latino.com website. As a Latina and a girl, the only reason I got this chance was because the CEO of the company was also Latina and a girl. If the CEO were a white guy, he would have looked at me with his white guy gaze, otherwise known as “the elevator.” Start at the lips, down to the boobs and around to the ass. My brain and my interests and the rest of my insides were not factored into his assessments of me and what I could achieve because of his “biological urges” toward my kind.
At my third “dot-com” job, called “Web 2.0” at this point, my white guy bosses treated me and all the other women in the office in this sexualized way. It was the place I invented “The Boob Tube.” I figured if I loaded my PowerPoint presentations into an iPhone that I could attach to my chest, the white guys would be able to pay attention and see that there was a brain and a heart being carried by my female machinery. It was also at this time that I accidentally dated a man who did graphic design for a porn website. Accidental because he wasn’t doing that job when we first got together. As he spent 8 hours a day airbrushing asses for DVD covers, I realized he was also shaping and perpetuating his and a whole generation of men’s view of women. I tried to recall my censorship class with Chuck Stone at UNC-Chapel Hill: porn was protected free speech. And yet, every time that free speech was exercised, it perpetuated ideas that would prevent me from being able to do my job in a predominately male-oriented sector.
We broke up shortly thereafter AND I stopped working with men entirely at my next two jobs. I segregated myself and was able to grow as a woman of color in tech as a result. Did I stop struggling completely? No. I still had insecurities that no one would take me seriously because I don’t look like the “tech guy.” But at least I was making money that allowed me to pay my rent. Because this is the issue it comes down to, right? Money and the ability to support oneself and family. This manifesto’s assertion that women are biologically incapable of negotiating for themselves is completely ridiculous. I’m sure when he goes to the strip club, he gets his pants negotiated off by a female asserting her prescribed power. It’s in the environments that have specifically stripped us of power that we have more trouble negotiating, dipshit. Is it a coincidence that my new struggle is convincing the film world I am the “director?” My “costume” suggests I am best suited for the one in front of the camera, not behind it.
As I read the Google Manifesto, there is a part of me that agrees – yes, women are built to love, to bear children, to connect, to be empathetic. We are interested in people, in babies, breastfeeding, the future of humanity, our men, our earth. We are highly sensitive and can sense when the guy sitting next to us in the open concept co-working space needs a hug, even if there is code to be written. Imagine more of that behavior at all companies, not just tech companies like Google…
It is for these reasons there has never been a better time for The Femmebots to get their own animated web series. These are the issues we want to insert into the 21st century dialogue about work, technology, gender, politics and free speech.