Lady Business: Women’s work or tech talent? And the terrifying financials of having children

Hello and welcome to Lady Business, a weekly newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the thirty-fourth issue, published July 12, 2018.
 

Women’s Work

What makes a job a “tech” job? Is it a computer science or software engineering degree, or a job where that’s your core function? Coding experience? Getting hired at Twitter or Google or Facebook? Getting hired at one of those companies in “technical” roles?

If it’s the latter, bad news, ladies: Women have 17 percent of “technical” jobs at Twitter, 19 percent at Facebook and a whopping 21 percent at Google. (No wonder James Damore started panicking!) All of which get so much worse – low-single-digit percentages worse – for Latinx and Black employees.

But are these really what count as the only tech jobs today, as tech eats the world? Tech celebrities are not, generally, doing “technical” things and they haven’t for a long time. Jeff Bezos is buying everything in sight, Mark Zuckerberg is hiding out in Sun Valley, and Elon Musk is siccing his Twitter fanboys on women reporters who write critically about his companies. Which is about as technical as Donald Trump.

Meanwhile, the definition of “tech” has expanded hugely, given how much technology has evolved and infected almost every white-collar job. I, a woman with an international politics degree and no software-engineering training, regularly do online editing, web design and, occasionally, minor coding and debugging of publishing-software programs. And I have one of the lower tech-interaction-jobs at my company.

Which is not to devalue the technical expertise of software engineers, developers, or anyone doing much more sophisticated coding work! But it is to question: Are these still the only important jobs in tech? Do they alone deserve a mythic level of industry prestige, and pay, and hiring wars for talent?

It’s a question raised by a recent study about “digital labor,” and the pink-collar tech jobs going to the women who dominate the growing field of social media. Brooke Erin Duffy, an assistant professor of communication at Cornell University, and Becca Schwartz, a researcher at Oxford, analyzed job ads for social-media roles, and concluded:
 

We can also witness this proto-profession’s devaluation by comparing the field to social media work of a very different ilk, namely, the development and coding of Silicon Valley social networks. Despite the fact that the work of the latter (similarly) takes place behind-the-screen, these professionals—overwhelmingly White and male—are impressively valued by their employers: remunerated with a hefty base salary, top-notch benefits, and perks galore. Of course, they are profoundly valorized in popular culture, too. But inside these tech companies, not unlike the media and culture industries, female employees shoulder the burden of labor for communication and branding in ways that, as one former Facebook employee notes, is not valued in “the visible ways that afford women prestige” (Grant, 2013). And therein lies the rub: while the rise of social media work has opened up new opportunities for workers with tech savvy, this new occupational category has done little to redress systematic inequalities in the tech sector. Instead, the rise of social media employment has transplanted “women’s work” into the digital economy, largely through jobs that remain marginalized at the periphery.

 
“I’m not technical,” several startup founders have said to me recently, in passing, in the process of describing how they’ve raised or sold tens of millions of dollars at their tech companies. Silicon Valley still clings to the myth of the pale, poorly-socialized man buried in his computer screen -- but to be a successful tech founder today, you don’t really need to be technical. You need to be a smart businessperson, and you need to hire good engineers, but you don’t need to -- and, frankly, probably shouldn’t -- spend your time coding. You need to hire the modern economic version of the factory workers, who will make your widgets.
 
And you need to rethink how your company values everyone else who makes a different kind of widget, or who markets the widget (probably on social media!) and sells the widget and makes sure your company isn’t violating any sort of human-resources rules while making and selling the widgets. Those are the traditionally pink-collar jobs, the ones with lower pay and less prestige and, not coincidentally, the ones more likely to go to women.
 
Which brings us back to…
 

Parenting and the Pay Gap

 
Something that I mentioned in passing in a previous newsletter: Women get financially punished for being better-educated. According to a recent Inc. infographic I edited, men with a bachelor’s degree make an average hourly wage of $37.39. That’s more than the average for women with a bachelor’s degree ($27.83) – but it’s also more than what women with a more advanced degree make on average ($36.13):
 

More women than men go to college and grad school, and they take out larger student loans--landing them with more than $800 billion worth of the nation's $1.3 trillion in student debt, according to the American Association of University Women. But less-educated men still outearn women with advanced degrees.

 
I was thinking about this statistic this week as I read this review of Alissa Quart’s Squeezed: Why Our Families Can’t Afford America; read till the review’s end for a brutal illustration of the book’s point. And as I read this related, excellent newsletter essay from Buzzfeed’s Anne Helen Petersen about student debt, pay, and why women are “choosing” to have fewer children.
 
(The short answer is: Because we can’t bloody afford the childcare, and at the point in our lives when we can start to afford it, we’re repaying more student debt than any previous generation, and oh yes, even though we’re pretty well educated, we’re paid worse than men with lower levels of education.)
 
Petersen’s essay is also a good reminder that what looks like professional success -- having a PhD and a prominent Buzzfeed writing job and 56,000 Twitter followers and a happiness-generating personal life --doesn’t always translate to financial wealth, even if you “work like a fucking demon.” She writes:

I've only recently achieved a point of relative security with my job in journalism, something that was very much not guaranteed. I'm also now making enough to be able to make large enough monthly payments on my $100,000 in student loans, incurred through my one year of an unfunded MA and fully "funded" PhD (aka not funded enough to actually live, or dedicate yourself wholly enough to even entertain the idea of a tenure-track job, which I still didn't receive) so as to actually start paying down the principle, rather than just the interest.
 
… I love this life, and I do not begrudge it. But I am also keenly aware of the ways in which it would be compromised if I had a child -- to the point that I would not be as valuable to my current company, or as employable to future companies if I lost my job. 

Lady Bits

--I spent part of my July 4 break reading Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life, which I don’t know if I can recommend? It feels weird to say that I enjoyed it, given how much the novel revels in a preposterous pileup of tragedy, but it was tremendously readable. (Really, no fictional child needs three separate eras of sexual abuse to grow up into a traumatized and broken adult. I’m pretty sure one would be quite sufficient!)

--Speaking of stories about trauma, Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette special on Netflix deserves all of the praise it’s received and more. I particularly appreciated how she expresses her rage through art history. Pablo Picasso, “womanizer” of underage girls, has been long overdue for Gadsby’s eloquent flaying, especially in this post-#MeToo era of “But what about The Great Man’s Art?”
 
Thank you for reading, commenting, and subscribing to this newsletter! Please tell your friends to sign up here, let me know what you think about this week's issue, and what else you'd like to see me write about: maria.aspan@gmail.com