Hail the rise of the “hackathon queen”: a title I’ve come up with for a woman who codes, is a self-described computer-science nerd, and exlusively hangs out with men because women are too dramatic and just don’t get her.
These women are perhaps best described in a single phrase: “I’m not like other girls.”
My first encounter with one such queen was when I was living in New York and visiting a female friend in San Francisco over the weekend. We met up with a friend from Caltech who brought along a gaggle of his old undergrad buddies, unsurprisingly all men, as well as one female co-worker who had gone to Columbia, Sarah. We decided to have late-night beers in Dolores Park and get to know each other a little more.
While the men talked about their careers and their college days, Sarah was elusive and unfriendly. She made sure to distance herself from my friend and me. When I’d attempt to make conversation, she’d divert the topics away from us to those we weren’t familiar with, like a work project or a software engineer hire she’d interviewed.
She had studied computer science, worked all day with men, and generally found that women were, overall, “too annoying.”
When I tried to talk to her, Sarah would physically turn away from me. She would sometimes pull the men away from chatting with us to talk about some urgent issue she was having. After an hour, she succeeded in persuading them to help her with a new idea she wanted to pursue and just had to begin that evening. So they left to do just that.
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My friend and I felt a bit awkward but shrugged our shoulders and went out to dinner.
When I spoke with some of the men later, I asked if Sarah was dating one of them or felt threatened. One said he’d known her for years and that she just “preferred to hang out with the guys.” She had studied computer science, worked all day with men, and generally found that women were, overall, “too annoying.”
At first, I chalked this up to just one weird encounter. I thought that perhaps more women in Silicon Valley were a bit introverted or felt uncomfortable with new people who were not in their existing social circles. It was just a singular experience, after all. But after I moved to the Bay Area in 2018, that changed. These encounters occurred more and more.
A Christmas party in SOMA in 2019 stands out, where there were only two women at the party: a woman named Janet and me. A group of friends and I were all having a lively debate, and I noticed Janet would often roll her eyes whenever I would talk. I worried that I sounded stupid or was appearing unfriendly, so I made an effort to ask about her life, her job, and really anything that I could find to pique her interests.
Janet was giving me monosyllabic answers. When I told her that I was a product manager, she responded that she hated working with the product manager at her company, who she felt took all the credit for engineering work. I figured I’d rubbed her the wrong way somehow, but I wasn’t sure how.
I later overheard her telling her boyfriend that she thought that I was desperately interested in him. He told her that he knew I had been dating someone for years. Her response? “Well, that doesn’t mean that she’s not interested in you, too.”
When I asked our mutual friend if I had done something to offend Janet, he replied simply that she was very closed off to other women, “She went to MIT and works in tech. What do you expect?”
The tech sector breeds female hostility.
I wasn’t sure if I should feel angry or indignant. As the two sole women at this gathering, we should have shared a bond or, at the very least, not hated the other person without even knowing them. I didn’t give any signals I was interested in her boyfriend, and he knew my partner.
Most technology companies have a low percentage of female employees, especially in engineering and product. Only about 26% of computing jobs are held by women. As a result, women in these fields spend most of their day sitting next to men, in meetings with men, and working with men.
Interactions with women can be limited to talking to your office manager, communications person, or HR rep, which are roles women more frequently occupy in tech. These positions tend to earn less than those in engineering and product, and as a result, there is a hierarchy where women and women’s work are inherently undervalued. The median man in Silicon Valley makes about 61% more than the median woman does.
These are some of the ways the tech sector breeds female hostility.
For hackathon queens, they pride themselves on making it in a field dominated by men. And they should be proud. But the problem comes when they take on the hostility aimed toward women despite being a woman themselves. It seems the idea of having their male co-workers, boyfriends, or male friends “taken away” can feel threatening.
I label the hackathon queen not as a way to critique all women in tech but to document the product of a toxic environment and chronic undervaluing of women.
Because women are scarcer in Silicon Valley, we can be seen as a commodity, and male attention can be seen as a type of currency.The idea that a woman needs to compete with and put down other women for this currency is a side effect of how men, in fact, decide the court of public opinion even when women may have more power on the dating scene.
I should note that I’m generalizing about some women when, in fact, most women in technology actively support and encourage other women through mentorship or career advocacy. Women in technology have made significant strides with organizations like Women Who Code, Anita B, and Tech Ladies that specifically address employment and wage gaps.
My most brilliant mentors and closest friends are women in Silicon Valley who encouraged me to pursue my career in product. So I label the hackathon queen not as a way to critique all women in tech but to document the product of a toxic environment and chronic undervaluing of women.
The idea that women may rest their value and security upon this attention demonstrates how tech culture has provided an unfair and hostile definition of what makes a person important and relevant.
At a time when our nation is confronting its problems with diversity, tech companies continue to foster a male-dominated culture. Perhaps if more companies invested in hiring and promoting women and in valuing the roles women traditionally occupy in these companies, negative perceptions toward us would change, and the hackathon queen would cease to exist.
