A woman on the job hunt: some thoughts after a year of unemployment
I survived the 2023 tech layoffs and all I got was this lousy t-shirt!
A year ago this Friday, Meta laid me (and thousands of my peers) off during a second round we had been promised months earlier wouldn’t need to happen. Since then I’ve seen them post countless content design roles, and even chatted with third-party recruiters pitching Meta contract roles that pay far less than what I was making.
I’m an elder millennial in a creative field so this is not the first time I’ve been laid off and job searching for months. It’s not even the worst time. Thankfully, working at Meta left me in a spot where I’ve been able to stay afloat for a year and that is a huge privilege. (Thanks, vested stocks!) That privilege has allowed me time to think, as I am wont to do, about privilege in general.
The digital-content discipline’s worth for a company has lagged behind in the rapidly developing tech space, and it’s hard not to notice that:
A disproportionate percentage of content designers are women.
We make markedly less than our product design counterparts (out in the open as a fact).
We were the first on the chopping block with the recent AI boom. While the group Meta laid off was about 50% women, we did not come close to making up 50% of Meta’s total workforce.*
When I was in school, I remember reading about the various factors that contribute to the wage gap. There were the big obvious factors: the motherhood penalty, [intersectional] discrimination and implicit bias, and social factors that start wreaking havoc on our collective view of women’s abilities from birth.
One of the causes that stuck with me was that women are much more likely to take jobs below their market worth, and that men tend to stay unemployed longer because they are less willing to undersell themselves. In other words, women take what they can get because they have to for a multitude of reasons beyond their control. (Note: You could replace “women” with almost any marginalized group when it comes to having to work harder for less pay and less credit while facing discrimination and bias, but this post is already demanding a lot from your attention span so we’re sticking to gender.)
I think the “have to” is key. It’s naive to think we have any control over this systemic issue as individuals, which makes it all the more frustrating and hard to eradicate in our daily lives.
Fact A: Being undervalued follows women around, even in male-dominated industries like tech.
As women’s participation in a particular occupation rises, pay within that occupation falls (Miller 2016; Oldenziel 1999). Some researchers attribute this phenomenon to “devaluation,” in which employers ascribe a lower value to work done in female-dominated occupations and thus pay them less (Levanon, England, and Allison 2009).
Fact B: We’re not as welcome anyway, and that takes a toll.
It is important to note that the distribution of men and women across occupations is not a simple matter of unconstrained choice. Much research suggests that many women are driven out of nontraditional occupations by hostile work environments. For example, 63 percent of women working in science, engineering, and technology experience sexual harassment (Hewlett et al. 2008). Over time, 52 percent of women in science, engineering, and technology quit their jobs, half of whom end up leaving these fields altogether (Hewlett et al. 2008).
Fact C: We have to work harder to get as far, but even when we do, it’s not perceived the same.
Research on impressions of women in the workplace suggests women’s productivity might in fact be systematically underestimated (Burgess 2013). Researchers have noted that women are caught in a paradox between appearing too feminine (not qualified) and not feminine enough (lacking in social skills), which often causes their performance to be evaluated much more strictly than men’s (Burgess 2013).
Aside from being held to different (impossibly paradoxical) standards, women often get blamed for not asking for raises or more money, a tangible thing we’re all told to work on in our daily lives. Turns out, we actually do ask, but we’re penalized more and rewarded less than men.
Anecdotally, I asked for a market-rate raise after almost five years of excellent performance reviews at FreshDirect, and was pushed out of the company within weeks, officially considered a “lay off.” I asked for a sign-on bonus and more base salary when I got an offer from Meta—a simple “no” there but I tried. After asking for a director role for two years of director-level work at Freshly, they not only did not promote me, they also changed my title so they could legally “eliminate my position” in another “lay off” to avoid being sued for letting me go without cause (and with a dash of discrimination).**
There’s no one solution to the wage gap because it’s complicated and infinitely multi-factored. (Which is also the reason why many people dismiss it as a myth.) Similarly there’s no one reason I haven’t landed a job yet. But I believe the reasons I’ve faced hostile work environments in tech in noticeably similar patterns are the same reasons I haven’t found something yet. A tough part in both situations is that the more I want to address bias or call out injustice, the more I become an undesirable candidate. So I just kind of stew and feel my feelings and remind myself of all the ways in which the world is unfair that I have no control over.
That being said, there have been moments in this long year of countless interview cycles where I did a few little things that meant something big to me. They won’t change the world and definitely won’t get me employed sooner, but they’ve allowed me to maintain some sanity by demanding equity, even when I don’t get it.
I turned down a job offer that was based on knowingly undervaluing my potential personal contribution/experience.
Another long story but the way the leadership refused to budge even a cent on their compensation package (paying a junior salary for a senior position) after weeks of interviews and conversations felt…pointed. And like the outcome might have been different for an equally overqualified man.
Both times I was asked to do an unpaid writing assignment that was clearly unnecessary based on the nature of the prompts and the breadth of my portfolio, I told them that I think any writing assignment should be compensated and referred them to my website for comparable examples.
One handled it well. The other… Well, they mentioned it wouldn’t be fair or equitable for me to continue instead of just, ya know, offering compensation to me and the candidates who had already done the assignment.
I’ve knowingly attributed some of the inexplicable rejection to bias, especially as I’ve lost weight over the past 8 months and started to notice subtle changes.***
I honestly don’t care if people don’t want to hear it, and I’ll keep saying it: the hiring process is rife with implicit bias, from the application process to the offer stage. And we’re all just kind of pretending it’s not. That’s crazy-making. If I have no control over bias, I’m going to at least recognize it and not let it destroy my sense of worthiness. There are so many ways in which interviewing for jobs is like dating, and extensive dating-app data is preeeetty clear about how people’s perceptions influence attraction, pursuit, and treatment.
I’m in an incredibly privileged position in that I don’t have to “take what I can get” yet—I have a little more time to search for the right place for me, one that appreciates my work and the person I show up as in the world. I’m riding this unemployment wave like a man on a surfboard, and we all know men are innately superior at sports**** so it’ll turn out just fine. And if it doesn’t? My pseudonym isn’t “whyareyouyelling” for nothing.
I feel like there are all of these weird competing trends in tech staffing right now, like: massive layoffs but also tons of hiring but also highly qualified people not even making it into initial screenings? None of it feels like it adds up logically.
And then add to that the insane biases in tech, which companies have addressed in the most surface of ways but rarely through substantive approaches that actually positively impact marginalized people, allowing companies to say they've done something while operating just as they always have. Ugh.
I'm so proud of you for confronting all of this loudly (duh) and without compromising on your worth. The right gig at a place that values you will come along. And if it doesn't....well, I guess we're gonna have to figure out how to monetize this thing. (Imagine getting paid to write on the internet in the year of our Lord 2024???)
I really appreciate you calling out the systems in place to both keep out and push out content designers and women (and women content designers from marginalized groups, even more specifically). I always feel like that gets lost in the “lean in” and “ask for more” convos—okay, but what if, even though I do hold some privilege, it’s not enough to overcome the clear biases I’m experiencing? What if I ask for more and it doesn’t work? Or has the opposite effect, and I get penalized for it? We don’t hear those stories enough, and I fear they reduce these systemic issues into personal ones. So thank you for your honesty and your boldness! (Saying “FU, pay me” and “here’s my portfolio of writing assignments” to a writing assignment is so badass, I love it! 😂)