Move over, men
Bay Area tech reporter Sarah Lacy’s memoir-cum-manifesto starts hitting hard with its title: “A Uterus Is a Feature, Not a Bug: The Working Woman’s Guide to Overthrowing the Patriarchy.” This is a book conceived in a vision of Hillary Clinton’s America, but written in the fury of waking up in Donald Trump’s.
The core of Lacy’s book — her first memoir, after two books about Web 2.0 — is the wholehearted embrace of “having it all”: power, money, family and the strength to keep going. While many parents scale back their professional ambitions when raising young children because time is finite and so are the abilities of our bodies, Lacy sets out to refute what most consider to be common sense. In the six years chronicled in this book, Lacy starts a company (the tech news website Pando), deals with misogynist Uber executives, has two children, gets a divorce, falls in love again, is hospitalized for pneumonia, and writes this book. Lacy wants to do it all now, come hell, high water, or tech bros.
Her insight? Her accomplishments came not despite having kids, but because she had kids. They changed her, but didn’t take anything away. She became “me-plus,” determined to make her work reporting on Silicon Valley even more worthwhile. Motherhood also changed her view of human relationships. “This was how unbreakable, unconditional love is built. Taking care of people and letting people take care of you. There was nothing weak or unequal about it if it was reciprocal.”
Lacy interweaves her professional journey as an entrepreneurial journalist, her life as a mother in a dissolving marriage, and her research into the patriarchal biases that hamper women in the workplace to argue that women, especially mothers, are stronger than they even know. Her last, daring chapters propose that being a single mother is the greatest challenge to patriarchy because “it’s the ultimate expression of a woman having economic selfsufficiency without giving up children.”
The apogee of Lacy’s book is her revelation of Silicon Valley’s particular vulnerability to confirming patriarchy’s bias. “The patriarchy believes — as fact — that a good mother must be constantly available to her children and a good employee must be constantly available to her bosses. By definition, no one can do both.” The valley claims to run on data, but Lacy argues that it’s actually run by people’s guts, which really means by men’s emotions. She cites the Elephant in the Valley report that three quarters of senior women in tech have been illegally asked about their marital and family status during interviews. Her discussion of how “pattern-matching justifies bias” is a devastating critique of big data’s re-entrenchment of sexism.
Lacy inverts the calculus of the bros, and celebrates motherhood for honing women’s abilities to juggle high-pressure demands. A snowstorm of data proves how productive women are, how much harder they work than men, how much more value women founders bring their investors. She’s impatient for these wonder women to break down the door to the C-suite instead of asking for the keys.
Lacy’s personality-driven reporting developed in a news world reinterpreting New Journalism for the blogosphere. Her writing style in this book is High Internet — gabby, attention-grabbing and very certain of itself. Some scathing fellow journalists have condemned Lacy as a self-aggrandizing tech industry cheerleader. Lacy rolls with Silicon Valley’s power players and readily cops to agreeing with their free market tech-utopian bombast. I too rolled my eyes at some of Lacy’s hyperbolic self-characterizations, as when she says after it leaked that an Uber executive wanted to run opposition research on her, “Seemingly every media outlet in the world was hounding me for comment.” But I had to ask myself if the problem is actually not in Lacy calling attention to herself, but rather our expectation of humility, even (especially) in successful women.
That said, the book does wobble at several points. Lacy claims early on that the idea that having babies changes women is a patriarchal lie, but bases much of her argument on how motherhood altered her approach to life and work. There’s a good bit of dirt-dishing and inside baseball that won’t mean much to folks outside the tech media. More fundamentally, she does not address labor and class issues seriously. She quotes a woman who says she felt empowered by her family-friendly boss to leave work at 5 p.m. Unions demanded that right 150 years ago. In a tone-deaf choice in one of her chapters on single mothers, Lacy interviews only highflying professionals while citing statistics and studies about low-income women, which she tries to connect in a universal call for solidarity.
I would have loved to see Lacy extend her critique of tech’s gender bias to the larger problem of building tech companies that are supposed to “make the world a better place” but in fact do little to change power structures and contribute to income inequality. However, Lacy’s belief in the tech industry’s disruptive power is essential to this book’s purpose. First, because she places her hope in its commitment to shaking up old ways of thinking. And second, because it gives ambitious women a model for creative destruction. There’s nothing left to fix in the broken system of patriarchy; it’s time to tear it down.
Marthine Satris is an editor and a writer in Oakland whose reviews have appeared in the Rumpus and the Millions. Email: books@sfchronicle.com