Throughout her time in tech, Wiener continually falls into stereotypically gendered relationships and behaviors. Initially, she performs a caretaking role in her vaguely defined administrative position at the e-reading startup, where she is the only woman. Socializing with them one night, she experiences both chagrin and affinity at this developing relationship to her male coworkers: “I felt like a babysitter, a fifth wheel, a chaperone, a little sister, a ball and chain, a concubine. I felt indescribably lucky” (17). This dynamic repeats in Wiener’s customer support role at the analytics company, where she is the first woman on the “Solutions” team. She patiently offers solutions to the frustrated male tech workers using the startup’s product incorrectly. She compares her work to “working a pin through a snarled necklace: slow, deliberate, prone to backsliding,” while she navigates the men’s confusion apologetically and “gently as a tutor, giving them space to shift the blame back to me” (68). While her manager chides her for being too much of a “pleaser” among her colleagues, she finds the habit hard to shake, even in difficult confrontations with the CEO.

In attempting to transcend the role of the caretaker, Wiener finds only other similar stereotypes as avenues for self-expression. Female acquaintances in similarly male-dominated companies encourage Wiener to indulge the gendered dynamic and “inhabit [her] sexual power,” a strategy that doesn’t appeal to her, despite experiencing numerous uncomfortably intimate encounters with the men at her company. She stresses about becoming a “feminist killjoy,” longing to be accepted by her coworkers; she plays the killjoy anyway, speaking up against any incidents of sexism she sees, of which there are many. The experience is compounded by Wiener’s relationship to the CEO, whose paternalistic chastisement in a meeting causes her to cry twice in the bathroom, “as [she] had seen every other woman at the company do at one point or another” (133).

When she finally flees this toxic environment for mostly remote work at the open-source startup, her individual confinement to such roles relaxes, but her broadened perspective on the tech industry reveals that its gender disparities and inequities are deep and systemic. She finds more opportunities for authentic expressions of herself—attending the conference for women in tech, participating in diversity and equity initiatives led by the VP of social impact—but these individual actions don’t lead to transformation for Wiener. As the book ends, she sees herself anew through the eyes of women behind screen doors in Nevada, recognizing how for them she appears as a symbol of a “coastal corporate feminism.”

Wiener’s narration emphasizes of misogynistic language: young bloggers on social media disdainfully comparing San Francisco’s fog to a woman’s PMS; the analytics startup’s product being “So easy, your mother could use it” (67); the CEO’s hollow promise to put more women in leadership roles with no commitment to hire more women. At the same time, Wiener demonstrates, both within anecdotes and in her own narration, the ways that more serious breaches of physical boundaries are deemphasized or dismissed. When she reports an incident of a consultant coming on to her in the office, her manager equivocates, asserting, “That’s just who he is” (117). During a passage about a company retreat, Wiener discloses after the fact an incident in which a coworker groped her during a drunken cab ride home. However, she minimizes the story to a couple of sentences within the larger anecdote, noting that at work she “hadn’t mentioned it—there wasn’t anything, or anyone, to tell” (121-22). Wiener further stokes this sense of unacknowledged violence with symbolic imagery, as in the moment where she speaks to the farmer hosting the rave:

I asked what the story was with the lamb. The plan, he said, snaking a pole through the fly, was to spit-roast her the next afternoon. ‘You wrestle her to the ground and spoon her until she relaxes,’ he explained, as if he were sharing a recipe for fruit salad. ‘Then you just reach around and slit her throat’ (222-23).

The man’s easygoing confidence and emotional detachment—and his use of “she” in reference to the lamb—give the reader an abstracted impression of immense, unrecognized vulnerability, which reverberates throughout the rest of the narrative. In the book’s final sequences, Wiener passively bears witness to overtly misogynist sociopolitical events, such as the Gamergate harassment campaigns and the prospect of a Trump presidency, which threaten the safety of women and the project of feminism at a much grander scale. Ending on the eve of Trump’s victory, the book’s closing implies that tech’s outsized power and deep-rooted misogyny are perhaps insurmountable at the individual level, and in need of comprehensive systemic change.