I’m from Colorado. I grew up in Colorado Springs.

My mom is a doctor and a single mom. How do I describe my upbringing? Colorado Springs is famous for like “Focus on the Family” and super conservative Christians. But I wasn’t exposed to any of that, I just had my mom, her medical practice, and all her doctor friends. The problem with this question is that I got poisoned as a child, so I don’t remember anything from before probably thirteen. I have forgotten most of my life actually, I found out recently my husband and I had a wedding that I don’t remember. There are pictures and everything.

Holy shit.

So my whole childhood is basically gone. My mom remembers, you can ask her if you want [laugh]. The primary answer to that question is I don’t know, because it’s gone, all that stuff is just gone. I know I have two brothers and a sister, but I don’t have a lot of anecdotal things from childhood, or even more recently, because it’s just not in my brain anymore. My memory, if you can call it that, is stored entirely in a combination of other people and various kinds of recordings.

“I got poisoned as a child, so I don’t remember anything from before probably thirteen. I have forgotten most of my life actually, I found out recently my husband and I had a wedding that I don’t remember. There are pictures and everything.”

So, if you feel comfortable, what happened?

On my tenth birthday, my family­­ so my mom and my little brother, me and then I think two friends, I don’t know, some small group of people went to a hotel that had a pool to do ten-year-old birthday things.

And the hotel was negligent on their maintenance or something, I don’t remember. There was a lawsuit, I never read the findings, I was too young. So they were negligent and carbon monoxide and chlorine gas and some other gases leaked into the pool area, and my mom and my little brother and me and both my friends were poisoned. But my mom and I got the worst effects, we were poisoned the most. So, my mom and I went from being totally normal to having traumatic brain injuries, but by poison instead of war or football or whatever.

How did those injuries manifest in the early years, and how is it continuing to?

It has changed over the years. Gotten better and worse. I get attacks of uncontrollable shaking. My body is usually in pain. I get a ton of migraines, a fuck ton actually. My proprioception, which is like, the accurate sensation of where your body is in space, and the position you’re in is 80 percent gone which means my balance and walking have good and bad days. I am basically a grab bag of neurological issues: Alice in Wonderland Syndrome to Post-­traumatic Stress Disorder. It’s hard.

I seemed to improve slowly until I was in college, but then when my brain was under stress I got a bad relapse. So I guess my junior year in college I was all way back at the bottom. I couldn’t walk, I was having migraines everyday, I shook constantly. After that I was really bad for several years and I’ve been inching my way back out of that hole ever since.

What about your mom?

My mom, you would describe her as like a stroke victim. Even though that’s not what happened, that’s a thing people understand. She basically got a migraine for 8 years straight. She is doing much better now. Still dealing but better.

Wow. So you probably don’t remember but, as a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up­­?

My mom says I wanted to be a surgeon, which I am now like, “That is the most ridiculous thing I could have ever thought of.” But, of course that’s what I wanted to do. My mom was a doctor and her medical practice was very integrated into our lives so of course I wanted to do medicine. I think my initial “I’m going to college” was pre­-med, until I figured out about chemistry. I was like, “ugh, this is horrible.” Chemistry is the worst. Or at least that’s what I like to tell myself. That I had a choice, that I opted out instead of what really happened which is that I was forced out by my disability.

Did you have any idea at that time that you’d end up in Silicon Valley tech?

No. My BFA is in Theater, Film, and Television Production, so I thought I was going to go into Theater. But I got so sick at the end of school that all of my best laid plans were totally ruined. I was supposed to go work as an assistant stage manager in Tokyo. But I was too sick, there was no way I could take that job, or any job.

So walk me through the winding road that took you to VR.

So after college I was essentially on bed­rest for four years. I shouldn’t say bed­rest. I was home­bound for four years. Walking to the bathroom made me dizzy so I crawled kinda thing. So in that time, I started watching Art21, which is this contemporary art show made by PBS. It’s so fucking good. It’s a collection of artists talking about their work and their lives and their families and it changed my life.

I was laying there on the couch at 20 thinking that this painful bullshit was what the rest of my life was going to be like, and I decided, “Fuck it I’m gonna steal ideas from these people.” So I starting copying their work. Andrea Zittel and Ann Hamilton and Vija Celmins and Kara Walker. These women became my pantheon. Oh and Janine Antoni, Janine Antoni! She’s amazing! She’s from the Bahamas and she would place a tightrope right at the horizon and then she would walk across the tightrope on video and every time she took a step the line would just touch the horizon. So good. She also hand spun this huge rope with all these video tapes and clothes and just any material donated from her friends and family. Antoni made a rope so I made a rope. Zittel crocheted so I crocheted. Hamilton talked about social concepts in cloth so I talked about computational concepts in cloth.

I copied lots of work from Art21 because there was nothing else to do. It was just not what you want to happen right after you get out of college. Like, “I’m going to get an internship, and I’ll be out every night and­­—No. You’re going to lay in bed for four years and be bored.” That was basically the start of like, “I am an artist now.” The art was my entire life at that point, I guess it still is.

When I finally made my own work it was these brightly­-colored abstract crocheted sculptures the size of, ironically, the couch I’d been stuck on. I guess the first time I really showed anything was in 2009, with the Armory Show in New York.

“I was told my thesis work wasn’t art because I made a video game. It wasn’t even a game it was an interactive environment that addressed the contemporary way that we go about knowledge formation. They couldn’t see it. It was weird because I was interested in technology. The work that I was making before, the crochet, was about reenacting computational systems. But they had never seen that either, those works were talked about as “heroic women’s work”. It drove me crazy. The professors never could see crochet as data, as captured information in the shape of a linear thread. But I still graduated, so fuck them.”

*Just* the Armory? [laughter]

Yeah me and galleries have never been much of a thing. Then I used that work, and the credential of that show to apply to grad school. I went to the California College of the Arts over on Potrero Hill. That was the first time I was really out of the house everyday by myself in years. I was 24.

Some of it was great. I found a couple professors that were awesome.

It should come as no surprise that I did not fit in well at school. I had just spent 4 years alone with the exception of my boyfriend. I didn’t know how to human and I was learning to be disabled not just at home in a bubble of my own control but at the school, in classes, on the train etc. Once again I have very few anecdotes of grad school, what with my memory but I know it was both great and really stupid. I got really tough and focused because of school. I am a much better artist now, and I found one professor who I am friends with today who is brilliant and funny and really important to me. But because I wasn’t great at interacting with the other students, so they started calling me The Borg. They were like, “But it’s endearing because we like you,” and I’m like, “No, it’s socially separating and bullying.” But they never stopped.

I was told my thesis work wasn’t art because I made a video game. It wasn’t even a game it was an interactive environment that addressed the contemporary way that we go about knowledge formation. They couldn’t see it. It was weird because I was interested in technology. The work that I was making before, the crochet, was about reenacting computational systems. But they had never seen that either, those works were talked about as “heroic women’s work”. It drove me crazy. The professors never could see crochet as data, as captured information in the shape of a linear thread. But I still graduated, so fuck them.

So what happened after that? I got my first job. I was so proud of myself. I worked as an architectural assistant making drawings and writing their blog. I worked there until she couldn’t afford to pay me anymore. Then I started working for Axis dance company and they’re in Oakland and they’re physically integrated dance company and I worked there for almost two years, man, what I thought at the time was going to be a dream job turned out to be awful. Anyway I also wrote for KQED in there, writing about net art, the internet, and video games mostly, and I was doing a lot of both digital drawing and ink on paper which both turned into making gifs and prints and comic books. It was around that time, in 2013, I started making YouTube videos too. Again copying existing work I liked from Mike Rugnetta and PBS Idea Channel. Huh, twice now PBS has been foundational to my art.

The videos started as talking head style technology and cultural criticism pieces plastered with wild editing. It was a great way to restart with video. I had experience editing short films and features from college but the show, self-titled BlinkPopShift, also leaned hard on the writing and research skills I forged at grad school and KQED. It became a way to think across tech and culture and art and science the same way I had been exploring in my masters thesis, but now everyone, not just the limited pov’s of my professors, could see the result. Simultaneously I built a whole body of work exclusively on my phone, the Still Lives series, using a combination of photogrammetry and various gif making apps.

I became super immersed in Youtube so I went to Vidcon and met Mike Rugnetta and Vi Hart and Malia Moss who all turned out to amazing friends and collaborators. A few months later I got a call from Vi asking “Hey, do you think you could build a VR camera?” And I was like, “Yeah sure, I don’t see why not. That doesn’t seem that hard.” And I was right, I mean it took months of work and cameras melting and trial and error and math but I did it.

“A few months later I got a call from Vi asking “Hey, do you think you could build a VR camera?” And I was like, “Yeah sure, I don’t see why not. That doesn’t seem that hard.” And I was right, I mean it took months of work and cameras melting and trial and error and math but I did it.”

So you just… made a VR camera?

I mean, yeah. We, along with Andrea Hawksley, the three horsemen of eleVR, have been working on various projects in VR, AR, and mixed reality every since. Vi’d hired me to work at the then Communications Design Group, Alan Kay’s Research Lab at SAP. Working for an open lab is great because with no pressure to publish traditional papers, we can write up everything on our blog for anyone to read.

I have to say I was so happy when fully spherical, auto-stitching cameras came on the market and I didn’t have to actually build them by hand with a fucking hot glue gun anymore, which was fun but also so tedious. I focus on studying how immersion works and how aesthetic techniques communicate to viewers. Recently I’ve been building the foundation of spherical cinematography so I can use that knowledge when designing immersive web systems.

What excites you about that space?

Making hybrid reality projects where linkages are no longer limited to computers and screens. When I write or make art, I like to put stuff everywhere but computers in their current conception don’t allow for creative messes. Sure, you can barf icons all over your desktop, but that’s not a creative mess. It feels heavy and in need of “organization.” Good messes feed my creativity through serendipity and flexibility. But my physical messes don’t have search for when I know exactly which bit of red paper has to go on the collage next. That divide between the physical and the digital will close, ‘cause me and my vice grip say so.

But that also means taking seriously the considerations of what the body wants. Because like, we are not fingers with eyes and ear holes. The way we do knowledge creation has a lot to do with this flappy meat thing. We completely disregard its wants and needs and its ideas about the world for what, a touch screen? This is the most embodied form of computational media that we have? Pinch and zoom and swipe and tap? Gross. There’s so much touch you can’t get in the little rectangles we carry around everywhere, it drives me crazy.

“When I write or make art, I like to put stuff everywhere but computers in their current conception don’t allow for creative messes. Sure, you can barf icons all over your desktop, but that’s not a creative mess. It feels heavy and in need of “organization.” Good messes feed my creativity through serendipity and flexibility. But my physical messes don’t have search for when I know exactly which bit of red paper has to go on the collage next. That divide between the physical and the digital will close, ‘cause me and my vice grip say so.”

What is it like straddling two worlds—art and tech—that often feel at odds with each other?

At work, I don’t feel at odds because like they specifically set up the lab for that kind of cross disciplinary flexibility. I am the most traditionally “visual art” person there, which I find funny since in grad school I was the most “tech” person, but being a weird inbetweener is kinda our thing at the lab. But when I’m out of my bubble it’s really hard because my work, and probably my personality too, is hard to parse as either or, as art or tech, as artist or researcher. A good example is that I don’t go to VR meetups any more. Everyone was too newness focused. There was no bubbling curiosity, no juicy conversation. It was just, sorry to say it but, a bunch of white dudes being boring. Ugh, tech Industry problems.

What are the biggest motivators behind your work?

I make art for two people, which people do not like to hear, but it’s true. I make sculpture for Steve Sedlmayr, my husband, who is such a fucking treasure, we’re 12 years this summer, and I make video for Vi Hart, who is one of my best friends and my boss. That’s it. The sculptural work is for him and the video work is for her. When I can make either of them tilt their head or think “What is that?” or smile or laugh or say “Yes. More please,” that’s winning.

There is definitely a subtle pressure from social media to care about a bigger audience and I do have a small audience online. Some people watch the videos online, and some people read the stuff that I publish, and that’s great but I don’t crave their opinions. For me, seeing Vi watch a video and afterward be like, “Damn!” That’s my chocolate sundae.

“I am the most traditionally “visual art” person there, which I find funny since in grad school I was the most “tech” person, but being a weird inbetweener is kinda our thing at the lab. But when I’m out of my bubble it’s really hard because my work, and probably my personality too, is hard to parse as either or, as art or tech, as artist or researcher. A good example is that I don’t go to VR meetups any more. Everyone was too newness focused. There was no bubbling curiosity, no juicy conversation. It was just, sorry to say it but, a bunch of white dudes being boring.”

I think it’s like you’ve miraculously managed to achieve something that I’m just starting to achieve—the “art of giving no fucks.”

I think it’s absolutely pivotal—or giving exactly the right fucks. You’re going to give a fuck about someone’s opinion, but just give it to exactly the right ones. My husband, he is also an artist. He makes games now but he knows a lot about sculpture and is really interested in sculpture. Making a sculpture for him is so powerful and awesome and his feedback really pushes me. Don’t give no fucks, just give the right ones.

I love it. What are your thoughts on the state of tech in 2016, both the tech that you considered tech and the tech that a lot of people consider tech?

Tech is so confusing. What even is the technology industry? Are search engines and camera manufacturers and Crispr therapies and video games really in the same industry? I feel like we use “the tech industry” the same way people used to “big business.” What is that thing I hear over and over about Uber? “Uber is a taxi company, not a tech company.” Bakers with online delivery are still bakers. Podcasters with an app are still in the business of podcasting. Tech is just a lazy over simplification of the Bay Area’s $785.5 billion economy that makes it all the more frustrating for people like me to take my work out into the world. I’m not an academic and I don’t make a product… I make art to do research.

Condensing all these different companies into a thing we call the tech industry does gives us something to blame for the city’s problems. The industry is refusing to act as proactive stewards of the place where their employees live. It seems like a lot of money’s being made and not very many taxes are ending up in city coffers. There is clear evidence that private corporate bus lines do increase evictions near their bus stops. Rents are increasing along with poverty.

“Tech is so confusing. What even is the technology industry? Are search engines and camera manufacturers and Crispr therapies and video games really in the same industry? I feel like we use “the tech industry” the same way people used to “big business.” What is that thing I hear over and over about Uber? “Uber is a taxi company, not a tech company.” Bakers with online delivery are still bakers. Podcasters with an app are still in the business of podcasting. Tech is just a lazy over simplification of the Bay Area’s $785.5 billion economy that makes it all the more frustrating for people like me to take my work out into the world.”

Homelessness is intensifying as more people are flooding into the Bay Area chasing after those sweet, sweet jobs. Did you know 70% of the homeless population in San Francisco was housed in the last year? Along with all these changes fear mongering about the collapse of San Francisco’s weirdo based culture. Most people would say that I’m being naive, that corporations have no obligation to nurture the community in which they exist, but if you don’t do that—if you don’t support the community—then all you’re doing is going to Southeast Asia and cutting down the mangrove forests and planting palm trees so that you can get palm oil. There it looks like environmental destruction, here it looks like community destruction. We have to grow out of the self centered capitalism that disregards the larger systematic effects until disaster strikes. We have to take responsibility for that because we’re not heartless idiots who just stomp around the world with our big dumb America boots. I don’t want to be that kind of America.

Man. It is kind of wild to think that big tech is actually necessary for new innovation to survive long term.

Oh yeah, I totally agree but also like big tech is completely dependent on Chinese money, right? Like a lot of VC money comes from China and that’s fine. I’m not saying it shouldn’t come from China but if that’s going to be true, then you also need to take into consideration the health of the system of products and money and labor is there too. The whole system should be healthy, not just any individual part of it. Why is making as much money as possible still a thing? Who in their right mind is motivated by I want to make as much money as humanly possible. Why? It’s boring. Come on. Look I was raised by a woman who taught me that holistic world views were the only path to true equality, whether that’s in a body or a society, and I hold that as a core value to this day.

“We have to grow out of the self centered capitalism that disregards the larger systematic effects until disaster strikes. We have to take responsibility for that because we’re not heartless idiots who just stomp around the world with our big dumb America boots. I don’t want to be that kind of America.”

Total side note, but maybe possibly related, I remember reading that you have received death threats for speaking your mind.

Oh yeah [chuckles] yeah, that was a problem. My team and I went to the first Oculus Connect, and there was an open panel, and it was being live streamed on the internet. And they were like, ”Anyone could come up and ask a question.” And there was 1% women at this conference and very few people of color and there were no female speakers and I was mad. So I went up and asked how they planned to prevent the clear race and gender biases of their conference and the industry as a whole from doing to VR what sexism and racism has done to video games.

And they answered it really poorly. It was so lame. But since I am female and it was live streamed that question turned into doxing, and death threats on 4chan and Reddit. We had to get our corporate security officer to intervene. It was scary. I hadn’t expected such an infantile response. I felt so naive. I’m still super naive, because I still assume that everyone wants everyone to be equal. Also, people who do death threats are so uncreative. I felt like they were just copy and pasting from Anita Sarkeesian‘s death threats.

I’m curious, are you able to give no fucks about that or­­…?

I don’t care.

That’s good.

Yeah but I have the ability not to care because of my privilege. 1. I’m white and cisgender and 2. I work for a place that can provide corporate security. Privilege means the death threats are less meaningful to me.

“The whole system should be healthy, not just any individual part of it. Why is making as much money as possible still a thing? Who in their right mind is motivated by I want to make as much money as humanly possible. Why? It’s boring. Come on.”

How do you think tech could be more accommodating right now to a more diverse set of people?

I mean hire them? I love Ta­-Nehisi Coates’s phrase “People who believe themselves to be white…” so I would say people who believe themselves to be white should maybe consider people who do not believe themselves to be white. People always complain the lack of diversity is a pipeline issue which is such blame shifting horse shit. If you think of people like crude oil who can only reach your factory via a standardized and maintained pipeline then maybe you shouldn’t be a company. Or hire people who you perceive to be less qualified. Because your perceptions of someone’s lower qualifications are based on your own biases. Go around saying that you’re biased. Be like, ”Hello. I’m white, and I have white people bias.” No one is going to think that you’re a horrible, evil person by acknowledging the fact that you’re biased. Everybody is biased, just acknowledge it, and then build systems to make sure that it doesn’t affect the population of your company. Super simple things. When you have a varied population of employees, go to them and be like, ”Hi. How are we not helping you to do your best work? Please tell me? We are trying to do better.” Be a person with feelings and failings for fuck sake.

What advice would you have for someone who wants to do meaningful work in tech, but doesn’t know where to start?

Pretend like you can accomplish the thing that you want, and write about it as though it were an inevitability. Write about how the meaningful tech that you want to make is the most important thing in your whole life. Read those writings into a camera. Publishing all of it online. Repeat. Thinking publicly and meaningfully about what it means to use a computer, what it means to use your phone, what it means to use stuff that you want to exist in the future will not only hone your ideas but attract interested bees. Write up design documents for your fake thing. Make drawing of it. Research. Don’t make a product. Go to the library. Because that’s what I do. I don’t make a product. I don’t make technology, really. I make art. I think deeply about the stuff I make and I write about it in clear ways people can connect with.

“People always complain the lack of diversity is a pipeline issue which is such blame shifting horse shit. If you think of people like crude oil who can only reach your factory via a standardized and maintained pipeline then maybe you shouldn’t be a company. Or hire people who you perceive to be less qualified. Because your perceptions of someone’s lower qualifications are based on your own biases. Go around saying that you’re biased. Be like, ‘Hello. I’m white, and I have white people bias.’ No one is going to think that you’re a horrible, evil person by acknowledging the fact that you’re biased. Everybody is biased, just acknowledge it, and then build systems to make sure that it doesn’t affect the population of your company. Super simple things. When you have a varied population of employees, go to them and be like, ‘Hi. How are we not helping you to do your best work? Please tell me? We are trying to do better.’ Be a person with feelings and failings for fuck sake.”

I come from a big, New York City, Irish-Italian Catholic family.  I have eight older brothers and sisters and 21 nieces and nephews. I’m a bit of a black sheep in my family, politically and otherwise. I come from a very practical family of doctors and lawyers and bankers, and I was this artist and the performer. Nobody knew what I was going to end up doing including myself.

Interesting.

When I was young, I changed my mind every other day about what I was going to do, what I was going to be when I grew up. I probably stressed my parents out because they are very practically-minded. When it comes to language, they said, “Take Spanish!”, and I said, “I’m going to take French!” For a while, I majored in Art History, and my Dad recently admitted to me that he thought, “Oh my God, she’s never going to get a job.” To his credit, he never said anything at the time.

“For a while, I majored in Art History, and my Dad recently admitted to me that he thought, “Oh my God, she’s never going to get a job.””

I eventually majored in theater. It’s actually some of the most useful training that I did. You acquire an extraordinary set of skills in creating live theater. It’s highly collaborative, you have to work under stressful conditions, find ways around all kinds of constraints. It also develops your ability to empathize with other people and their stories, which is an essential skill for good design.

I definitely enjoyed the humanities and art, but I also had some interest in technology and science early on. Mostly as it related to how we can help people communicate or how can we use these tools to help people do things better and improve people’s lives. Always in an extremely applied way.

My graduate program really aligned with that kind of thinking. I was initially planning to apply to the NYU film school, but when I got the catalog, they had this program in it called the Interactive Telecommunications Program. The title sounds a bit dry, but the it ended up being a life changing experience for me. This was in 1994-95 when the web was really coming into its own, a time of really interesting experimentation. The program tries to meet at the crossroads of arts, technology, and people. It’s in NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, so it’s kind of like a Media Lab run by poets. It’s really a remarkable place. Its student body was a mix of teachers, film-makers, policy makers, writers, journalist, artist and graphic designers. It continues to be an incredible advisory the experimentation. That’s where I taught myself how to build websites, then found myself in a startup, and a few acquisitions and 3 babies later, ended up moving to California to work for Google, then Youtube, and now at Facebook.

“I taught myself how to build websites, then found myself in a startup, and a few acquisitions and 3 babies later, ended up moving to California to work for Google, then Youtube, and now at Facebook.”

What was it like moving to Silicon Valley?

I should say I was born in Manhattan and then I grew up for chunks of time in New Jersey, Wisconsin, and Tennessee. So we moved around a lot, but all on the east coast. I never lived west of the Mississippi. I went to college in Boston, then studied art in France where I met my Canadian husband. I attended ITP in New York City, and then we got married we moved to Williamstown, Massachusetts in the Berkshire mountains where I was at a startup called Tripod. Then we moved to Boston when Tripod was acquired by Lycos. At that point, I was pregnant with my second baby, and the industry was in the doldrums. I decided to stay home for a while and we moved to North Carolina to be closer to family and live on a leaner budget. You see, at that point I had had three kids in four years and so was home full time for about four years in the middle of all of my different jobs.

And then I went back to work when my youngest was two. I joined the design team at Wachovia of all places, may it rest in peace. It was a great company to work for and a great re-entry for me after four years of being checked out and up to my eyeballs in diapers.

I had established a lot of strong relationships with designers at Wired Digital which also got acquired by Lycos. People like Jeff Veen and Doug Bowman. Extraordinary designers who also happened to be good people. They had gone to work for Google and next thing I knew, so was I, dragging my husband and kids with me.

I remember when I got the offer from Google, it was a big deal to move the family. We had a nice house. The kids were in good schools. I was close to my parents. I was agonizing over it, because I was asking my husband to quit a job he loved, which is not easy, and to move three kids. And he said, “When you get asked to pitch for the Yankees you don’t stay on the minor leagues. You must go and do this.” And that was about eight years ago. So I don’t know. I feel like it’s been an extraordinary experience because the concentration of talented, passionate people is so insanely high here. Just the level of competency and ingenuity and energy that people bring towards things is really special. And I think if I were ever to move to live some place else, I know that I would miss that.

“I remember when I got the offer from Google, it was a big deal to move the family. We had a nice house. The kids were in good schools. I was close to my parents. I was agonizing over it, because I was asking my husband to quit a job he loved, which is not easy, and to move three kids. And he said, ‘When you get asked to pitch for the Yankees you don’t stay on the minor leagues. You must go and do this.'”

For sure.

That being said, it’s also an extraordinarily work-oriented place. When I visit other places that aren’t as work-focused, I am reminded that most people don’t live their lives this way, and that there’s a certain level of sanity associated with not having everything revolve around your work. When we go back to the Berkshires in Western Massachusetts to visit friends, they don’t ask that much about Facebook, or technology, or start ups to invest in. They want to talk about art, music, go for a hike, visit a farm. I miss that sometimes.

Silicon Valley is like DC and LA. They are one industry towns, and so all of your friends are your colleagues and all of your colleagues are your friends, and even if you want to not think about work, it’s almost impossible not to. It can also be a pretty isolating place to live if you aren’t in the tech industry. There’s so much value put on tech that it almost feels that if you’re not doing that, you must not be doing something worthwhile, and that’s a shame.

So it’s a remarkable place to work. I have absolutely no regrets about being here, and I feel lucky every day to work at Facebook, a company with leaders and that I admire and respect and a mission I really believe in. AND it would be nice to have a little more balance sometimes.

“When I visit other places that aren’t as work-focused, I am reminded that most people don’t live their lives this way, and that there’s a certain level of sanity associated with not having everything revolve around your work. When we go back to the Berkshires in Western Massachusetts to visit friends, they don’t ask that much about Facebook, or technology, or start ups to invest in. They want to talk about art, music, go for a hike, visit a farm. I miss that sometimes.”

How do you think your background and life experiences have informed your work, and how you approach design at a global scale?

Well…

That’s a loaded question, I know.

Listen, I’m a well-off white person. So I feel like I need to tread carefully on saying, “My life experiences have helped me design for the entirety of humanity.” It’s a big challenge for companies like the ones that I’ve worked at to try to—with all good intentions—design for the scope and the diversity of the human population when we are so un-diverse as a workforce. That being said, there are a few things about the way I grew up that shape my perspective.

I feel like growing up in a very large family with a lot of personalities helps me to be adaptive and collaborative in a way that served me professionally. I can get along with most people. I’m just naturally inclined to figure out compromises and facilitate conversations, because that’s what you do when you have eight siblings. It’s just a basic survival tactic. Working in teams of people from different backgrounds and disciplines, these kinds of interpersonal skills are not something I take for granted, and I think I have my family to thank for a lot of that.

“Listen, I’m a well-off white person. So I feel like I need to tread carefully on saying, “My life experiences have helped me design for the entirety of humanity.” It’s a big challenge for companies like the ones that I’ve worked at to try to—with all good intentions—design for the scope and the diversity of the human population when we are so un-diverse as a workforce.”

I also really cherish my humanities and liberal arts education because I feel like it’s made me more curious and empathetic towards people with different experiences than me. I really appreciate the push towards getting more people, especially women and underrepresented minorities, into science and engineering. At the same time, I worry a bit that we are forgetting how important the humanities are to rounding out your education. Subjects like philosophy, anthropology, and psychology teach us about humans and their needs and desires. Without that training, I fear we’ll know how to build things but we may not have the compass to understand what to build and why. And that compass comes in large part through the humanities.

And obviously my training at ITP. The founder, Red Burns, was an important mentor to me. She really influenced my perspective and my philosophy on things. I don’t think I realized just how much until she passed away a few years ago. She was a total firecracker of a woman. She wasn’t that interested in the question, “What can we do with technology,” but instead asked us, “What can technology do for people?” Really putting technology in in service of people and not enslaving people to it. That’s something I really feel really passionately about.

And finally, I think that the people that you surround yourself with ultimately are the biggest influencers. My husband is a really wonderful person. Just by virtue of him, being from Canada and growing up in Quebec and just having a lot of different perspectives on things, I feel like he’s influenced my learning and development a lot over the years too. We’re celebrating our 20th wedding anniversary this year, so I’m thinking a lot about that right now. Obviously I was 12 when I got married [chuckles].

“I worry a bit that we are forgetting how important the humanities are to rounding out your education. Subjects like philosophy, anthropology, and psychology teach us about humans and their needs and desires. Without that training, I fear we’ll know how to build things but we may not have the compass to understand what to build and why.”

Obviously! As a designer, what is really exciting to you about your work? What activates you?

Something that always energies and inspires me is when I get to observe or experience the way other people live and and how those life experiences might cause them to see or value the products I build differently than I do. Years ago at Wachovia, we did a lot of research into how we could better support customers with severe visual impairments; this work was way ahead of its time. For most of us, online banking is a convenience, so we don’t have to go to the physical bank branch. But the people we met through that study couldn’t drive to a branch to take care of it themselves. For those who are blind or have seriously impaired vision, online banking is the difference between having financial independence and having to rely on someone else to do your banking for you. And the independence was crucially important to their well-being on so many levels. That made me realize something I’ve observed many times since…these technologies can mean very different things to different people depending on their context.

Most people look at Google search and think, “It’s so convenient to be able to look up whatever you want.” But, if you live in a place that doesn’t have libraries, Google in the difference between being able to educate yourself versus not. Or YouTube. Some people think of it as a place with entertaining videos, but if you live in a place that doesn’t have freedom of speech, it’s the difference between knowing what’s going on through citizen reporting or not.

I get really excited when we launch something and then get to see what people do with the things we make. When you are designing for a huge global audience, you can have a sense of what problem you are solving and try to design it in ways that will work for most people. But invariably, people will take that thing and apply it to things you never thought of. A good example is how Facebook Safety check came to being. Facebook wasn’t created as a crisis communications system, but with so many people connected on the platform, it was the natural and logical place for people to let their friends and family know they are Ok in the wake of a natural disaster or even a terrorist attack. So a team at Facebook observed this and designed not just for people but with people. I find that idea of co-designing with humanity to be really inspiring and exciting.

“When you are designing for a huge global audience, you can have a sense of what problem you are solving and try to design it in ways that will work for most people. But invariably, people will take that thing and apply it to things you never thought of. I find that idea of co-designing with humanity to be really inspiring and exciting.”

Ultimately I gravitate towards working on things that are good for the world. I know that sounds like a platitude. But I have to feel like the thing I’m working on intends to lift people up, in a very broad and democratizing way. I love breaking down the hierarchy. Whether it’s media hierarchy, or communication hierarchy, or whatever it is. I like the fact that a blind person wouldn’t have to rely on somebody to drive them to the bank. Or that a singer songwriter would be able to support themselves through YouTube videos instead of having to sign with a record label. Or that people could raise money for a cause they care about and actually move the needle on medical research like the ALS folks did on Facebook through the Ice Bucket Challenge.

Sometimes people look at what I’m working on now—digital advertising tools—and think, “Wow, you’ve gone 180 from there!” But I don’t see it that way at all. Ultimately what I’m working on now is about economic development and job creation. I think sometimes we look at the world’s problems—poverty, inequality, you name it—in very surface level ways, and what I’ve really enjoyed over past four years of working on the business side of Facebook is becoming smarter about how the world works, how society works, how the economy works and understanding that if you can help people provide for themselves, you have less war, you have less poverty, you have less terrorism, even.  

I definitely have a bit of an activist in me. I hate injustice and I hate unfairness and so I think I’ve been on this, I don’t know, 20 year voyage just trying to figure out how can design be a part of the solution. Because I feel like design is still only being applied to a very small percentage of the problems that it can solve. That’s what I’m doing more recently in my writing; just trying to encourage more designers to look past the obvious flashy thing they can be working on and think, “What could I change if I applied myself to software for the government,” or “How can design get involved in making the criminal justice more equitable and humane?” These are all design problems. They may be less sexy, behind the scenes. It’s not necessarily going to get you a big splashy article in the technology magazine, but who cares?

“I definitely have a bit of an activist in me. I hate injustice and I hate unfairness and so I think I’ve been on this, I don’t know, 20 year voyage just trying to figure out how can design be a part of the solution. Because I feel like design is still only being applied to a very small percentage of the problems that it solve.”

When did you start writing about your work?

I’ve always enjoyed writing and storytelling. As a leader, one of the most important skills is to be able to craft a narrative, a vision for what you want your team to aspire to, that captures their imagination. So in some form or another, I’ve been writing and storytelling my whole career, though I didn’t as publish my writing as much until more recently. The big driver of that was fairly practical.  We faced a big challenge a few years back attracting people to work on the business side of Facebook. It wasn’t visible to people. They knew the consumer-facing Facebook products, and that’s what most people coming in wanted to work on. I get that. And if it was visible to them, many were like, “Mmm, I don’t really want to work on ads.”

Making the work visible to people, helping them understand the impact, both on Facebook as a business and on society as a whole, how we can help improve the experience that people have at work day to day, as well as grow economies and create jobs…those were the big things that I focused on in terms of writing. About business design, and the way designers can have impact on a whole host of important issues.

Occasionally I’ll just get mad about something and write about it. A few months ago, I published an article about my uterus [chuckles]. I don’t know if you saw that.

Oh yeah [laughter]. We’re going to get to that in a minute.

I have 100 ideas of things that I’d like to write about. It frustrating to me that I haven’t succeeded in more consistently making time for it because I feel like it’s something that I’m good at, it’s something that I enjoy, and I feel a connection to people when I do it. But it’s always about capturing the time. You know how that is. I’m sure that’s how you feel about photography and other things.

“I was so frustrated and fed up on behalf of women in this industry who are trying to position themselves as equals and sometimes deserving to be seen as superior to some men in the industry, and just constantly having to pay this tax that men don’t have to pay around having talking about their personal lives. Or having it being positioned as, ‘Wow, you did all this in spite of being a mother!’ It’s just constantly minimizing their professional contributions. I don’t have any problem with anyone talking about their families and their role as a parent. But it should be on their terms, and they should never feel obligated to do it, in a context where they were asked to talk about their professional accomplishments. That’s my beef. And if you are going to ask those kinds of questions like, ‘How do you do it all?’, then ask the men too.”

Yeah, this project will very much be a snapshot of tech culture in 2016.

I’m a maker. I got into management a long time ago and realized that in the corporate context, the biggest value that I could provide is that I’m really good at building teams. So I had to let go of a lot of the hands-on contribution in the interest of making space for other people to do it. But I still have the urge, the urge to produce things, to find an outlet for that, to connect with what other people that are making and to be inspired by that. So I find different ways—you know, we have the Facebook Analog Research Lab where we print beautiful posters. I love just seeing what they’re making, and I get so excited about communication design that’s going on at Facebook. I think it’s really magical.

And then personally I do all kinds of things. I knit a lot, and I like to draw, and so writing – in addition to doing it because I think it’s really helpful to my work – is just a creative outlet for me. I never thought of myself as a writer until more recently, which is kind of interesting. I’ve always thought  of myself as a visual person or a performer, but I’ve surprised myself with how much gratification I get from writing.

Let’s talk about your uterus [laughter].

Everybody else is, why not? When I published that piece, I said to my husband something like, “At some point, I will regret making my uterus a topic of public conversation. I don’t know when it’s going to happen, but…”

You’ve written about the bias that you’ve seen on stage or at conferences. You also touched on, as you got older, you became more cognizant of bias in tech in general. Can you expand on that?

Yeah. It’s interesting, often I’ll take weeks, even months to write a complex piece about design. But with the piece about women in tech, I wrote the bulk of that in about 45 minutes at a Starbucks. I was so frustrated and fed up on behalf of women in this industry who are trying to position themselves as equals and sometimes deserving to be seen as superior to some men in the industry, and just constantly having to pay this tax that men don’t have to pay around having talking about their personal lives. Or having it being positioned as, “Wow, you did all this in spite of being a mother!” It’s just constantly minimizing their professional contributions.

I don’t have any problem with anyone talking about their families and their role as a parent. But it should be on their terms, and they should never feel obligated to do it, in a context where they were asked to talk about their professional accomplishments. That’s my beef. And if you are going to ask those kinds of questions like, “How do you do it all?”, then ask the men too.

When I published the article on Medium, I wasn’t surprised to hear from a lot of women who said it really resonated with them.  But it was really interesting to hear from many men, too, who were like, “You know what? I’m really pissed because I realized nobody ever asks me about my family. I think it’s because they think I don’t care as much about my family as my wife does.” The whole thing is dehumanizing to everyone. It’s like, “Women, all you are is a group of people who help make families, and then also could work. Men, you are people who work, and maybe you have a family.” It’s all based on really unfortunate stereotypes and doesn’t allow people to define themselves and how they want to be seen.

I also noticed in your writing that you gave people books for Christmas and I did the same thing.

Oh really?

Yes. I gave all my best friends like 10 books that affected me deeply in 2015, because last year was a year of reading self-help books and being a hermit. You also mentioned that you’re not like a huge books person. What was it about those books that impacted you so much?

Well, it’s interesting. I’ll tell you something that hardly anybody knows because I’m still processing it myself. I just got diagnosed with dyslexia a month ago [chuckles].

For real?

[laughter] My daughter has dyslexia, and when we were going through the process of getting her assessed they interviewed me and my husband. And after they interviewed me they were like, ‘’You probably have some undiagnosed issues.’’ I’ve always been a very slow reader, and I struggle to keep up with a lot of written information. I reverse things all the time and have a terrible sense of direction. There are a lot of things that in hindsight make a lot more sense. And so when they said that to me I was like, ‘’Hmm, that’s interesting.’’ I thought, ‘’I think I’m just going to get assessed, too, just to find out.’’ So I went through a formal assessment with the clinical psychologist, and boom, here I am.  

It’s kind of a wild thing to find this out a lot later than kids like my daughter discovered it. But I think you’re much better off finding that out today then when I was a kid. I don’t think people really understood it then. I think they may have thought that it was correlated with intelligence, which it isn’t at all. Maybe you get put in special ed when you didn’t need to, you just needed time accommodation. You know what I mean? I just think there’s a lot less stigma attached to it today. I see my daughter going through that. She’s like, “Yeah, it’s fine. I’m not embarrassed about it. I have a bunch of friends who are dyslexic [chuckles].” It’s like no big deal.

“If you survey successful, CEOs, there’s a disproportionate percentage of them that have dyslexia, or some kind of learning challenge. This makes sense because for those people, everything’s harder. They’re just naturally inclined to be tenacious and have grit, and to work through problems, and to recover from failure, because that’s how it is when you are a dyslexic in a world awash with written information. That whole notion of going beyond what you were born with is really appealing to me. It’s such an optimistic way of looking at human opportunity.”

I’m still processing what that means for me. But generally, I’m excited because I’m just a big believer in self-awareness and self-knowledge. If that’s true of my brain, I want to know it so that I can figure out how can I work more effectively. Just the recognition that I’m probably working X percent harder than I need to, and maybe there’s technology and tools that can help me have to work less hard at things is hopeful and liberating. I think I’ve believed in some contexts that I wasn’t as smart as the people around me, but the reality is that the mechanics of my brain were just slowing me down. I think we should all be interested in understanding how our minds work and how we can harness technology to work better.

When the psychologist asked me, “Margaret, what’s your relationship to reading?” I said, “I love stories.” She’s like, “That’s not the same thing. How do you feel about reading?” I said, “I love audiobooks.” I asked my mother one time what I used to do when I was a kid and she said, “You spent hours in your room, listening to those books that had the records that went along with them.” So interesting. Kids are amazing. They just figure out sometimes what they need even if adult don’t recognize that there’s an issue. Because one of the classic recommendation for people with dyslexia is to listen to audio versions while you’re reading the same written material. I guess I figure that out when I was three.

Anyway, I have hundreds and hundreds of books. I love stories and narrative so much, and yet reading a book just really takes me forever. If it’s not unbelievably engaging, I just don’t get through it. Which is frustrating because I’m an incredibly curious person and there’s 1,001 things I want to learn about. But I’ve found other ways to learn and grow. I don’t need to feel bad about it anymore. The reason this relates to the piece that I wrote about growth and vulnerability is two-fold; and this is so interesting in hindsight.

One is that Carol Dweck talks a lot about people with learning challenges in her book Mindset, because if you survey successful, CEOs, there’s a disproportionate percentage of them that have dyslexia, or some kind of learning challenge. This makes sense because for those people, everything’s harder. They’re just naturally inclined to be tenacious and have grit, and to work through problems, and to recover from failure, because that’s how it is when you are a dyslexic in a world awash with written information. That whole notion of going beyond what you were born with is really appealing to me. It’s such an optimistic way of looking at human opportunity.

The hardest thing sometimes is for people to get over their fear of failure, whether it’s professionally or personally. They pull punches all the time. They don’t take the risk, because they’re afraid of failing, and they miss all of the learning comes from failure. Mindset is a book that’s really been influential to me as a person, as a manager and a colleague, and as a parent, quite frankly. I really try to drive this into my kids, like, “Do your best and don’t worry about failing. I don’t actually care what classes you take, or what you study. But, don’t shy away from something because it’s hard.

And then, Brene Brown — who doesn’t love Brene Brown.

That was one of the books I gave to my friends this year.

Have you listened to any of her audio books? Her voice, her accent is just amazing. And she is so funny. But I think that book has been really influential for me, and just her teachings in general. And by the way, not coincidentally, both of those I listened as audio books. I never read the physical book [chuckle].

Funny, I think one of the things that I realized about myself, and I don’t know why this is, is that I am in a lot of ways unconcerned with admitting to my weaknesses. Sometimes it perplexes me about why people are afraid to do that. It’s absurd to think that we are all great at everything. Like its just an absurd notion, and I always tend to feel like if you own your bad PR, nobody can say anything about you that you haven’t already said about yourself. It’s very liberating.

What advice would you give to kind of young puppies starting out that you wish that you’d known in the beginning?

Take risks, especially when you’re young. You can fall down, but you won’t fall down that far because you’re already close to the ground.

[laughter]

It always makes me sad when people in early career play it too safe. I believe you can take smart risks through your entire career and most of the good things in my life have come from going with my instinct with no guarantees of success. Just figure out what’s the opportunity that’s going to challenge you and help you grow the most and not worry about the short term outcome. Because what you’re doing is you’re just building your toolkit, building your confidence, building the scenarios where you can be effective.

“It always makes me sad when people in early career play it too safe. I believe you can take smart risks through your entire career and most of the good things in my life have come from going with my instinct with no guarantees of success. Just figure out what’s the opportunity that’s going to challenge you and help you grow the most and not worry about the short term outcome. Because what you’re doing is you’re just building your toolkit, building your confidence, building the scenarios where you can be effective.”

I grew up in the Bay Area. I was born in Berkeley and lived here up until the end of high school. Growing up, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to study science or do something more artsy. I had an undiagnosed learning disability, and I struggled with some of my academic classes, but did better in theater, art, and music. Once I was diagnosed with a learning disability, and able to get accommodations, I started doing much better in my academic classes. My AP Physics teacher my senior year of high school encouraged me to pursue physics in college, and that was the first time a teacher had ever said to me: you have a talent, you should do this.

So my freshman year of college, I took an intro theater class and an intro physics class, and I said to myself, whichever one I do better at, that’s the universe telling me what I should major in. I got such a good grade in my physics that I didn’t need to take the final exam. And I got the worst grade of my college career in the theater class, which wasn’t that bad but… I thought, okay this is the universe telling me that I should study physics. I ended up majoring in physics and continued doing it all the way through my PhD.

I’m curious to know what it was like being a lady in astrophysics PhD academia.

There have been a lot of articles about being a woman in academic science in the press recently. I participated in a Twitter hashtag (#astroSH) that got press coverage. The hashtag was motivated by some of the high-profile cases of sexual harassment in academia.

It was challenging being in a male-dominated field. Physics is 85% male. There are many ways you are made to feel different. There are hard interactions with male colleagues. I tweeted about a bunch of different things that happened to me over the years that were hard. For instance a guy walking by my lab, and I was wearing dish gloves because I was washing some parts of my experiment, and he said, “That’s what women are good for, doing dishes in the kitchen.” And men repeatedly told me that I got to where I was because there was some quota that needed to be filled and they needed to have a certain number of women in a program. Men would frame interest in me as being about my research, but then once I was in a situation where I’m alone with them, it switches to being a date. It’s hard when you are constantly reminded of your gender, or made to feel really uncomfortable and sad about the fact that you thought something was professional attention but it was actually about your gender.

“Men repeatedly told me that I got to where I was because there was some quota that needed to be filled and they needed to have a certain number of women in a program.”

What was it like transitioning into tech and what was the impetus for that?

When I graduated from my PhD., I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. I applied for a lot of different jobs. I applied for teaching positions, research positions, and I applied for jobs in industry. In the end of my search, I had a bunch of different opportunities. What attracted me to tech in particular that it felt like a good way to apply my technical skills but in a way that was more down to earth.

A lot of my astrophysics research work was very obscure and theoretical. It was hard for me to feel motivated when there were maybe ten people in the world who really understood what I did. Tech is also a more casual industry than finance or consulting. I felt like it would feel more culturally similar to academia. I’m from the Bay Area and there’s a lot of tech jobs here. It meant that I didn’t have to move. I did my PhD at Berkeley so I was back here again. Ultimately I thought “Well, let me try this out. It means I get to stay here, it means I get to try this new thing. If I really hate it I’ll re-apply for academic jobs again in a year.” But immediately, I enjoyed the work so much and realized this is a much better fit for me, in terms of the day-to-day, than academia.

What are the most exciting things to you about your work? What really activates you?

I’m a data scientist, and essentially what I do is work with a lot of different people within my company to help them make decisions and decide what action they should take, based on what’s going on with the data. I help my company understand how customers are behaving, where there are inefficiencies, where we’re losing people, or where we are most successful. It’s really fun, because I’m constantly working on different areas and different focuses. Sometimes I’ll be working with the marketing team. Sometimes I’ll be working with our technical team. Sometimes I’ll be working with product. I have a very broad scope.

People come to me with open-ended questions, and I get to define how we might get to an answer and ultimately help them make the decision they need to make. It’s a really creative process. I have a lot of freedom of how I’m going to approach the problems. Then it’s also very technical. There’s usually a lot of math and programming and visualizing data. Then there is also a communication piece, where I’m taking this complex set of data and trying to explain it to people who maybe aren’t as technical, and help them understand what the data means, and how they might take those insights and translate them into some action. It uses a whole bunch of different skills.

People are usually super grateful. Everyday people come to me with their problems, if can help them solve them, they’re really excited by that, and so it’s a very satisfying job. It’s not customer-facing. My clients are internal, and I like that a lot because the people who I help, are the people that I interact with every day. So I feel very valued within my company.

The work is always changing. I never do the same thing twice. One day I’ll be doing something for our CTO, then the next I’ll be working on something for our PR team. So, I’m constantly learning, constantly having to think of new ways to approach problems. It’s not boring or repetitive at all, which is really fun.

“Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the areas where I have privilege. I’m white, and so I don’t really understand what it’s like to be a person of color. How can I understand that experience more and advocate more for people of color in my community?”

When did you turn your attention to feminism and inclusion?

It’s been a long-standing interest of mine. When I was diagnosed with a learning disability in high school I became very interested in advocacy for people with disabilities, and I founded a group at Occidental College (where I went for undergrad) for students with disabilities. Our goals were to create awareness in our communities about what having a disability means, what it entails, and how everyone can be supportive in various learning environments. We also educated people with disabilities on how to advocate for themselves, and communicate their needs to others. Being part of that group was really great. It helped me think about not only my own disability, but other types of disabilities. There were people in that group that had physical disabilities, or mental health issues. It very much broadened my perspective and helped me understand the way that these disabilities impact people’s lives.

In graduate school, I ran a women’s group for physics, astronomy, and planetary science students. We focused a lot on the gender issues is those departments, most of which had less than 20% women in them. I started learning about things like unconscious bias, imposter syndrome, the wage gap, stereotype threat, and the leaky pipeline within STEM.

When I graduated from Cal, I was asked to be on the Committee for the Status of Women in Astronomy (CWSA), which is part of the American Astronomical Society, (astronomy’s big professional society). As a member of the CSWA, I started writing for their blog and and eventually became the editor-in-chief. Then I started talking about these issues and engaging with them with the entire astronomy community. When you write about things on the internet, especially feminism [chuckles], you get a lot of pushback. Having (mostly online) conversations with people who don’t necessarily believe the things that you’re talking about, or don’t think that there’s still discrimination this day and age, well it has really helped me tune my debating skills. It has also helped me to take an intersectional approach to feminism, and not just think about women’s issues but the intersection of race, gender, sexual orientation, ability, class, religion and try to understand how all these identities interplay with each other.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the areas where I have privilege. I’m white, and so I don’t really understand what it’s like to be a person of color. How can I understand that experience more and advocate more for people of color in my community?

“My disability affects my reading and writing. I have something similar to dyslexia. The way that I frame it is that the neural paths in my brain that connect and decode the words I see and assign meaning to them are really jumbled. So, for me, it takes a really long time to interpret written words or to express my thoughts in written words. I read at about the twentieth percentile in terms of speed. My intelligence is much higher than that, so there’s this mismatch in how I perform when doing timed reading tasks versus the level that my intelligence says I should be able to perform.”

What is it like being in tech with a learning disability? Does it affect you at all now? I’m also curious to know, in your work in the community, what issues you’ve seen with other folks with disabilities in Silicon Valley.

Having a learning disability hasn’t been something that has affected me as strongly in the working world, because I’m not often in scenarios where I’m being tested or asked to complete some task with a very fast timeline.

My disability affects my reading and writing. I have something similar to dyslexia. The way that I frame it is that the neural paths in my brain that connect and decode the words I see and assign meaning to them are really jumbled. So, for me, it takes a really long time to interpret written words or to express my thoughts in written words. I read at about the twentieth percentile in terms of speed. My intelligence is much higher than that, so there’s this mismatch in how I perform when doing timed reading tasks versus the level that my intelligence says I should be able to perform.

I have figured out a lot of work-arounds for that. Like if I have to read something, I always have my computer read it to me, because I can comprehend things I hear instantaneously, but reading involves me going back a few times before I can understand it as well. And similarly, when I write, usually the first draft has tons of grammatical errors and mixed up words. But if I have my computer speak it to me then I can easily fix those things. Now I just know if I have to read something or write something, it’s going to entail this extra process.

In the working world, it’s not that often that you’re handed something and have to read it in front of someone while they watch you, so people don’t really notice that it takes me longer to read and write. But it is something that I have talked to with my managers about and just said, “Hey, this is something that I struggle with. If there is ever a scenario where I’m going to need to perform something or need to read something kind of in the moment, it would be better for me to have it ahead of time. When there is a really important report that I’m going to have to get out, it would be great if you could look it over, because this is a thing I struggle with.” People have been really understanding and I think I’ve gotten better with my own work-a-rounds such that it doesn’t impact me as much as it did when I was in school.

In terms of general disability issues in the working world, there are certain accommodations that are required by the American disabilities act like having accessible bathrooms or having accommodations for people who struggle with mental heath issues.

Unfortunately, there doesn’t tend to be a lot of conversations about disabilities at a company wide level. Most people don’t even understand the scope of how disabilities affect people’s work. For instance there is somebody at my work who has fibromyalgia, and that means that sometimes he can’t physically be at work because he’s in a lot of pain.

Luckily our work is such that we can do a lot of it remotely and so he’s able to work that out with his manager. If he wakes up and he’s having a really bad day, then he’ll work from home. Yet that involves having to disclose this status to his manager, and some managers are more understanding than others. So one thing that I try to do (in conjunction with HR) at places I work is to increase understanding as a company about how disabilities affect people and the ways that they can be accommodating that aren’t going to negatively impact the performance of the company. I think there is a general concern: “Oh well, if I hire someone with a disability, that person is going to be less productive, or less valuable to the company.” Just helping people understand that is not the case, as long as you’re willing to be flexible and give accommodations which allow people to perform at their best.

“I think there is a general concern: ‘Oh well, if I hire someone with a disability, that person is going to be less productive, or less valuable to the company.’ Just helping people understand that is not the case, as long as you’re willing to be flexible and give accommodations which allow people to perform at their best.”

How have you observed the cultures of academia and tech? How are they similar, how are they different?

Both are places that have very intelligent, passionate, quirky people who are trying to do something that no one’s ever done before. People who are pushing the boundaries of what’s out there. In both places there is a lot of competition and other people attempting to you, or do the same thing.

I would say that one thing that has been very different about being in industry (versus academia) is that there are not as strong power dynamics. In academia, you have these tenured professors who are famous, and they can pretty much make or break your career. You’re very dependent, especially when you’re a student or a postdoc, on these people to write papers with you, giving you access to their grants, giving you access to their experiments, and their telescopes. If there’s some situation of abuse going on or you’re having a personality conflict with someone, it’s harder to survive that in the same way as you can in industry. In industry, especially in the tech industry, as a data scientist or a software engineer, I’m in high demand. If a company is not the right fit for you, or you clash with someone, then you can easily find something else, so there’s not as much pressure to make a situation work.

Because of these hierarchies of power in academia it’s a little bit trickier. One bad relationship with someone could mean you have to leave academia, or switch research areas entirely. I think there are also more protections in place at businesses. Ultimately HR wants to make sure that nobody sues each other, and so they try to proactively deal with any conflicts. Whereas in academia, if a student is having a problem, often the university is incentivized to just get rid of the student or hide. They aren’t incentivized to protect the student. Ultimately (right now at least) there is a lot more jobs available in tech versus academia. When I was applying for postdocs, I’d be lucky if I got one or two postdocs in the entire country. If those didn’t work out, then there wasn’t that many options for me. Whereas once you’re in the tech industry, you are constantly being approached by recruiters to join the next new hot startup, so you feel like, “Okay, I have a lot of options and I’m not stuck anywhere. I don’t have to put up with a bad situation.”
In general, has your life improved as a woman since you go into tech? It sounds like it.

For the most part it’s been night and day better. One start-up where I worked, I was the first woman on the engineering team and for about six months until we hired the second woman. They were amazing. I never felt like my gender had anything to do with why I was hired. I always felt like, “You were hired because you’re the most talented person that we interviewed, and we think you rock.” That was really, really great. But simultaneously they were very careful to make sure that I felt comfortable and not have it be this like bro-grammer environment. There were many times when they checked-in with me, saying, “Hey, was that okay? Do you feel uncomfortable?” They really were thoughtful about making sure that it was a good environment for me, and that was amazing.

In general, I’ve just always felt like being a woman on the technical teams has, if anything, helped me. The men have been extra supportive, I guess, because they recognize that I am one of a few women and they want to make sure that I feel okay and comfortable, and so I have felt that people have gone a little bit above and beyond to try to make me feel supported.

I have had some interesting experiences with companies where the general culture at the company has been a bit bro-y, and so while my direct team has been really supportive for the most part, I’ve had to deal with general company culture that was pretty hostile for women.

One company I was at we had this policy that you should lock your computer when you leave it unattended for security reasons. And as kind of a joke / punishment, if you ever came across a computer that was unlocked, then you could send a message to the all-company chat channel from that person’s account. These messages were usually funny or silly. So my first day at this job, I forgot to lock my computer because, you know, it was my first day, and I was still figuring it out… and someone not only posted on the all-company channel from my account. “It’s my first day and I’m already drunk. Oops.” which was kind of embarrassing, but then also sent a private message to a senior member of my group saying, “It’s only my first day. but I already want you.”

And he knew right away that it wasn’t me, but his response was, “Keep it in your pants, Kirkpatrick.” And ultimately, it was just a very weird, charged interaction to have with a teammate on your first day at a new job. And so my response was, “Okay, I guess this is what it’s going to be like here.”

And another thing that happened at that company was that in my first couple weeks I was being trained to interview people for the data team. My first phone interview that I was conducting by myself, I was in a conference room and facing towards a glass wall outwards to the rest of the company. One of my coworkers was trying to mess with me during the interview, to make me laugh, or whatever. At first, he walks by and he’s being a little silly, like walking funny. I was not responding because I was trying to focus on this interview. So he just kept escalating and escalating, and it got to the point where he was pretending to masturbate and ejaculate on the glass wall, and was pushing people up against the glass and humping them.

I came out of the interview, and said, “When I am interviewing someone, that’s me being a representative of our company to an outside person. What are you trying to do by making me distracted or feel weird during this interview? That’s really not okay. Not only is it unprofessional and disrespectful to this other person, it also makes our company look bad to this outside party.” He said, “Oh, lighten up. Come on.” I said, “I don’t want to see you pretend to masturbate. But this is not just about you and me, this is affecting someone else and my ability to judge this other person.” I got really mad.

“At first, he walks by and he’s being a little silly, like walking funny. I was not responding because I was trying to focus on this interview. So he just kept escalating and escalating, and it got to the point where he was pretending to masturbate and ejaculate on the glass wall, and was pushing people up against the glass and humping them.”

I’m curious to know what it’s like being a local and watching this whole ecosystem change over time. What are your feelings about being a local in the tech community?

I definitely have a lot of weird feelings about being one of those techies that a lot of local people are resentful of because of the ways that the tech industry is gentrifying San Francisco, raising the cost of everything and all of these inequities between how much tech people make and other people in the community make. I work in mid market, so I work right near the Tenderloin. And it makes me feel very uncomfortable going from Civic Centre/Bart Station where there are people living in the BART station, sleeping in puddles of their own urine. People who are incredibly sick – physically sick – and clearly need medical attention. I walk from there into this fancy building where there’s free food and alcohol, and we have all these amazing perks. The dichotomy of it is so striking.

And especially because I went into graduate school thinking I was going to be an educator, and so I never anticipated making the salaries that we make in the tech industry… It’s way more than I ever anticipated having. Way more than my family had when we were growing up. It’s uncomfortable for me to know, “I am the one percent” of the US that we’re all talking about, like I’m the people that the protesters of the Google buses are protesting.

“We’re not serving those populations. We’re just pushing them away, hiding them. That’s very uncomfortable for me. There’s a lot of decadence and extravagance in the tech industry that I don’t feel is deserved, and I feel weird taking part of.”

On the other hand, when I was growing up, you wouldn’t go to the Tenderloin. You just don’t go there, period. You wouldn’t ever go to certain areas of Oakland. And now it’s ok to walk around those neighborhoods, and you don’t have to constantly worry about safety. It’s nice to see these neighborhoods becoming less violent, but at the same time, poor people are being pushed out.

We’re not serving those populations. We’re just pushing them away, hiding them. That’s very uncomfortable for me. There’s a lot of decadence and extravagance in the tech industry that I don’t feel is deserved, and I feel weird taking part of. For instance, I once went to a holiday party, and it was like a scene out of a movie. Every hour new entertainment came out. We would have acrobats doing aerial performances, or people on stilts, or a marching band. It must have been a $200,000 party. It was open bar and there was a tattoo artist doing temporary tattoos and a photo-booth. I just kept thinking, “This is so over the top. Why are we spending ten grand on acrobats when we’re not even a profitable company.”

While I understand in order to retain talent, you need to keep your employees happy, I don’t know. I’m uncomfortable with a lot of the decadence and extravagance, especially for companies that are being funded by investor capital and are not profitable. I guess the bottom line is, I don’t know how I feel being part of it. I’m so grateful for my job and I’m so grateful that I am well-paid, but there’s something messed up about the fact that there are people who are so wealthy next to people who are so poor. We don’t have the services in SF to help the homeless people, yet we’re spending all this money on the app “Yo.”

“While I understand in order to retain talent, you need to keep your employees happy, I don’t know. I’m uncomfortable with a lot of the decadence and extravagance, especially for companies that are being funded by investor capital and are not profitable. I guess the bottom line is, I don’t know how I feel being part of it. I’m so grateful for my job and I’m so grateful that I am well-paid, but there’s something messed up about the fact that there are people who are so wealthy next to people who are so poor. We don’t have the services in SF to help the homeless people, yet we’re spending all this money on the app ‘Yo.”

My last question for you would be, as a local, as a woman, as someone with a disability, someone from your background, how would like to see tech do better, or how do you think tech can do better, in general?

In general, I would like the tech industry to focus more on things that are sustainable — not just because we have a million users and they’re going to see ads, and ad companies are going to pay for it — but actually fulfill a need where there is a clear way to monetize. I just think that there is this different set of standards for tech companies than there are for brick and mortar companies, and I don’t know why. I’ve intentionally chosen companies where it is clear how they are going to make money, and I think that they are addressing a need that is not being addressed in another way. So I would like more of a focus on that.

And then if we’re going to be bringing tech companies and putting them into poor communities, we need to to be also supporting the community, and finding a way to lift up those communities, so that we’re not just this negative impact that is causing gentrification and housing prices to go up, and increasing traffic, but also a good force within the community. I would like that to be more of the ethos of what we see ourselves trying to do in the Bay area, in San Francisco, and in Oakland, as companies are starting to move to Oakland. I don’t know the best way to do that, but I’d be happy with taking a pay decrease, or having less extravagant parties, and having more of that money go towards supporting our communities. We don’t need to have this dichotomy where everyone in the tech industry is driving Teslas but walking over homeless people on the way to work. I would like that to be more a part of our belief system as an industry.

“If we’re going to be bringing tech companies and putting them into poor communities, we need to to be also supporting the community, and finding a way to lift up those communities, so that we’re not just this negative impact that is causing gentrification and housing prices to go up, and increasing traffic, but also a good force within the community. I would like that to be more of the ethos of what we see ourselves trying to do in the Bay area, in San Francisco, and in Oakland, as companies are starting to move to Oakland. I don’t know the best way to do that, but I’d be happy with taking a pay decrease, or having less extravagant parties, and having more of that money go towards supporting our communities. We don’t need to have this dichotomy where everyone in the tech industry is driving Teslas but walking over homeless people on the way to work.”