I'm a patent attorney. I'm also an alumna of Dartmouth College. I
got a flyer for an alumnae networking event about jobs in "tech." I
signed up. It wasn't expensive. I hoped I might meet potential clients at this
event.
It was held at the offices of twitter in NYC. I had no clue that twitter had offices in
NYC. My imagination was having a bit of
trouble even grasping the concept of twitter having offices at all. I’m so used to thinking of them as a website,
but, of course, behind websites there are physical people in physical places:
reality check.
There was very nice food there. They have wine on tap. I never saw that anywhere before. By contrast, I had to go to another room to get water.
I also had some nice conversations.
Other aspects of the event were disappointing.
First, the speakers all had non tech jobs in the tech industry.
Two of them -- a minority -- had some tech education, but that wasn't their
current work. The others didn't even have a tech background. Some of these
women had impressive management titles, which was nice, but they weren’t doing
research or development.
Second, the attendees were predominantly young and childless.
This gave rise to a lot of thoughts on my part.
One thread of thinking had to do with the absence of actual tech people – and
hence the absence of anyone who needed a patent.
There was a representative of Dartmouth there. She pointed out brightly that more women had
graduated from the Thayer School of Engineering than men. Really? Why weren’t they at this
conference? Curious.
On the one hand, I thought the conference tended to confirm the
general prejudice that women just don’t go into tech, not really. These women might say they are in “tech,” but
they’re not tech people.
On the other hand, I remember going to a Princeton Reunion with
my ex husband many years before and sitting at a table with a bunch of men who had
had tech majors and none of them had a tech job any more.
The powers that be declaim loudly that there is a shortage of
people with scientific and engineering education in this country, but, in fact,
people with this type of education tend to lose out in the work place. Managers and sales people are paid more and
have more job security. That’s not very
attractive for intelligent and ambitious people.
Another thread in my thoughts was the focus of discussion. This focus was getting a job
and then getting promoted. There were definitely some interesting remarks
there, about getting a job through loose connections and how women don't ask
for promotions, but men do. But there was no mention of the fact that the
speakers did not actually have tech jobs.
It's true that I was never the sort of person that asks for
promotions. It's probably true that men ask for them more. I suppose that's a high-risk
strategy, because if your boss really doesn't like you that could precipitate
them firing you, but if the boss does like you, it might prod them to dole out
that promotion or raise sooner.
Of course, this young woman who asked for and got promotions was
also exceptionally beautiful and charming, which might have had a lot to do
with the success of her promotion seeking endeavor. If she had been ugly and socially awkward,
things might have gone differently – or, as in my case, if she were older. It seems to me that we live in a society
where older women are just thrown away.
Somehow, though, I just don’t want to be in that rat race, trying
to become CEO of a tech company. It
doesn’t call me. I wonder how this young
woman would feel if she had children.
Having children gives one a different perspective. Neurologists have shown that a woman’s brain
undergoes substantial physiological changes as a result of pregnancy and
rearing children. Areas relating to
nurturing grow, presumably at the expense of other.
There is a saying that at some point you stop living for yourself
and start living for your children.
I remember being at Dartmouth and seeing people my age wandering
around the campus reminiscing and wondering “Don’t they have a life?” What I didn’t know was how, after your kids
are grown, it’s disorienting. You stop
and wonder, “Gee, what was I doing before?”
You go back through previous decisions.
You wonder what might have been different if you had gone in a different
direction.
The whole rat race thing just didn’t appeal – maybe it never
did. Maybe it didn’t even when I was at
Dartmouth, though perhaps more so than now.
Granted the wolf isn’t at the door here, but then it isn’t the wolf at
the door that makes you seek to be a CEO.
You seek to be a CEO because of some other drive.
Then again that’s what men claim, when they look at women’s lower
incomes, that women make a lifestyle choice not to go into top jobs.
Maybe.
Though I still think that women’s work is just not valued. Traditional women’s jobs, like administrative
support, are not truly any less valuable than those of management. It’s just
that managers have bigger egos and more aggressive personalities, so they think
they deserve more – a lot more.
And maybe men somehow feel that if women are like that they are
making advances in society … that whole concept that if women are junior men
then perhaps they can be paid more nearly like men. But that seems like a fundamentally
anti-feminist concept to me.
Then again Dartmouth has a lot of motivation to encourage people
to seek very high paying jobs, because it makes it easier for them to keep
hiking tuition. It seems to me that
tuition has been going up at at least twice the rate of inflation ever since I
graduated.
OK, I see myself starting to write a book here. More later.
