2The Technical Writer
Silicon Valley, as you might expect, is crawling with software engineers. But writing code is only one of many jobs that make the industry run. Plenty of other white-collar labor is needed—and many of the people performing it are women.
These are the so-called nontechnical roles, and it’s where Silicon Valley’s stark gender divide grows even starker. Google is nearly 70 percent men; Facebook, 63 percent; Apple, 67 percent. When it comes to the “technical” part of the workforce, however, the numbers get even worse: 77 percent men at all three companies. This imbalance partly accounts for the industry’s gender pay gap, because people who are seen as less technical tend to be valued less. But what does “technical” even mean? Is a customer support associate who patiently helps customers debug their code really not technical?
We spoke to a technical writer about what it’s like to be a woman in tech perceived to be less technical, despite having the word “technical” in her title. She spoke about navigating the industry’s gender politics, why she almost left as a result, and how she found a way to stay.How did you get into tech?
In college, I wanted to be an editor. I wanted to find the next big writer and nurture their career. When I graduated, I quickly realized that wasn’t going to happen. Entry-level jobs in publishing are difficult to find, especially if you’re not in New York.
So I started looking around for a job. I’d been working the night shift at a factory to cover my student loan payments while I was finishing school. But I needed better-paying work. Eventually I ended up applying for an entry-level technical writing job, having taken a couple of technical writing courses at college.Had you considered the possibility of becoming a technical writer when you were in college?
No, I never saw myself going into technical writing. It was just the first job that I got. I took it because I needed to pay rent.Tell us about that first job.
It was a financial software company, so it was a cross between tech and finance. Both are highly masculine industries that tend to have problems with women. So, as a young woman coming right out of college, I dealt with a lot of inappropriate comments.
In my interview, they had asked me some weird questions, like, “How would you react if someone was throwing paper balls at you all day?” It turns out the two men interviewing me asked that because they knew the team lead was extremely unprofessional, especially with young women. He wasn’t sexually harassing them. But he didn’t treat them as equals. They wanted to make sure that I would be able to stand up to him.
He definitely had problems. I remember going out to lunch with him and another person and he started rating the women that walked past us on a one-to-ten scale. I remember not saying anything because I didn’t know what to say.So this person was your boss?
Yeah. He was the one who divided up the tasks. And he gave me a lot to do—very soon after I arrived, I ended up with the lion’s share of the work. I was on a team of three technical writers. The other two were men, and I probably had three times as much work as they did, although I was being paid significantly less.What did you do?
Well, eventually our team lead left. That made things better. I moved under a different manager, and during our first performance review he took me aside and said, “I know that you do most of the work and that you’re underpaid.” And then he gave me a 40 percent raise.Wow.
Yeah. It totally changed my career. I stayed there for about five years.You said that you had taken a couple of technical writing classes in college, but presumably you also learned a lot in that first job. What did you learn? What is technical writing?
I usually compare it to IKEA. When you buy something from IKEA, the only way you know how to put it together is by looking at the instruction manual. It’s the glue that holds everything together.
There are the people who build a product—engineers, designers, and so on. Then there are the people who explain how to use the product. That’s us.Could you give us an example?
My first company made financial trading software. And we needed to explain to our customers what the requirements were for installing that software and getting it to run properly.
When I got there, we had a thirty-two-page document explaining all this. It was unusable. Customers were very confused about what they needed to do. So I turned it into a two-pager. That was my first moment of realizing, “Oh, technical writing really is necessary. I can provide real value.”How well do engineers and executives understand that value?
It’s highly dependent on the kind of engineer or executive you’re working with. The stereotypical dynamic is that you’re not valued. They don’t really understand what you’re doing in the room. They talk over you or talk down to you because writing is seen as a soft skill. We’re seen as humanities people. Even though technical writers are some of the only people who actually have “technical” in their role name, we’re not seen as technical. People assume we don’t know what we’re talking about.Presumably, this is also a highly gendered dynamic.
A lot of technical writers are women. At my current job, my whole team is women. And all women in tech deal with the perception that we’re nontechnical. Which means we are paid less. You see this particularly with equity. In tech, your equity generally depends on how technical you are perceived to be.With technical writing in particular, perhaps some
