The male allies, all trim, white executives, took their seats and began offering wisdom on how to manage workplace discrimination.

They’re the only kind of hardware these guys can imagine women caring about.” What would a smart bra even do? I wondered, touching the band of my dumb underwire. “Oh, you know,” she said, waving dismissively toward the stage, with its rainbow-lit scrim. What’s the wearable thing, I asked an engineer sitting in my row. Having been privy to the hiring process, I found it incredibly suspect. I had heard the pipeline argument, that there simply weren’t enough women and underrepresented minorities in STEM fields to fill open roles. At the center of the board was a square that just said Pipeline. Says feminist activism scares women away from tech. Asserts another male executive’s heart is in the right place. Says “That would never happen in my company.” Wearables. Inside each square was a different indictment: Mentions his mother. “At a Male Allies Plenary Panel, a group of women engineers circulated hundreds of handmade bingo boards among attendees. The city streaked past, the bridge cables flickering like a delay, or a glitch.” 'You're allowed to enjoy your life,' she said. Your job can be in service of the rest of your life.' She reached out to squeeze my wrist, then leaned her head against the window. Why did it feel so taboo, I asked, to approach work the way most people did, as a trade of my time and labor for money? Why did we have to pretend it was all so fun?

While perhaps not unique to tech-it may even have been endemic to a generation-the expectation was overbearing. In this respect, it was not unlike book publishing: talking about doing work for money felt like screaming the safe word.

Was that just buying into the industry's own narratives about itself? I tried to summarize the frantic, self-important work culture in Silicon Valley, how everyone was optimizing their bodies for longer lives, which would then be spent productively how it was frowned upon to acknowledge that a tech job was a transaction rather than a noble mission or a seat on a rocket ship. “Was I trying too hard to make this mean something? I asked Leah.

Uncanny valley wiener