Silicon Valley Disrupts Discrimination: Now It’s for Middle-Aged White Guys, Too

[Starry Messenger]

http://nymag.com/thecut/2014/03/tech-ageism-shows-men-what-works-like-for-women.html

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It’s been a full decade since Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook and launched a thousand breathless trend stories about the code-fluent, post-adolescent masses flocking to Silicon Valley to change the world in Adidas slip-on sandals. But this youthful uniformity, once considered a feature, has become a bug. Tech, the the New York Times confirmed this week, has a “youth problem.” Writes former Facebook staffer Kate Losse, “Silicon Valley fetishizes a particular type of engineer — young, male, awkward, unattached.” Or, as the New Republic put it, the tech industry’s “brutal ageism” means that if you don’t fit the archetype — say, you’re over 35 and only wear hoodies when you’re exercising and have a few kids and a mortgage — you have to work twice as hard to get ahead. They're stressed out and ostracized by the "culture,” worried about their wardrobe choices, wondering if they should freshen up with some subtle plastic surgery, and struggling all the while to downplay their family lives.

While I empathize, I found myself stifling a yawn as I read the Botoxed bros’ tales of woe. I’ve heard all of these stories before. It’s just that the storytellers are usually women.

If you think putting on a hoodie is rough, I wanted to tell these guys, try finding the line between workwear that’s not too sexy but also not too schoolmarmish. If you’ve reluctantly taken up gaming in order to bond with your co-workers, now you know what it was like for women who learned to golf so they could meet male clients on the course. And ask any woman who’s ever huddled in her office hooked up to a breast pump: It’s not always so easy to be casual about the fact that you’ve got kids. Or the fact that you’re different. (Most of this stuff goes doubly and triply for people of color and gay people and those with disabilities.) Welcome, men, to the world of being hyperaware of how you’re perceived, every moment of every workday.

Older men in tech are discovering the unseen work that women and people of color have done for decades. Fitting in is hard work — an additional, invisible task on the daily to-do list. “I had a really hard time getting used to the culture, the aggressive communication on pull requests and how little the men I worked with respected and valued my opinion,” Julie Horvath, a whistle-blowing former employee of the programming network GitHub, told TechCrunch. For most of recent history, we’ve made it women’s responsibility to fit in. Despite the prevalence of equal-opportunity disclaimers, actual corporate culture isn’t changing fast enough (or at all), so it’s on women to figure out how to succeed in workplaces that are not overtly sexist but still quite alienating. Think that sounds retro? In another article this week, the Times offered some time-honored advice to women: “Moving Past Gender Barriers to Negotiate a Raise.”

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[Squinch]

1. Great article!