The Boy Kings

engineer who behaved alternately dismissively and aggressively toward female product managers, but the situation had been handled ineffectively. “I was told by an engineering director to go in and talk to the guy and try to resolve the situation myself, but when I did that, the engineer somehow twisted things around and called me a bad feminist, as if to distract from the conversation at hand, and the conversation didn’t go anywhere. It was pretty unpleasant,” I said.
    “Offense as defense, I get it,” Sheryl commented.
    “Yeah, exactly,” I concurred. Sheryl is cool, I thought, she gets it.
    “Well, thanks for talking to me, I really appreciate it,” Sheryl said, winding up our conversation.
    That was the last time I met privately with Sheryl, and I thought that if her conversations had gone similarly with other female employees then her arrival was definitely going to be a boon for women at the company. I didn’t hear back immediately about any of the issues I had raised with her, until she stopped briefly by my desk one day a few months later and in the low, succinct office voice that she mastered, said, “I just want to know that the situations you told me about have both been handled.” I had heard nothing about it. “You see, I’m so good that I make things happen and no one even knows about them,” she smiled.
    It was then that I noticed that the director who propositioned employees had been subtly demoted and the aggressive engineer had been transitioned to another team. Both men, of course, continued to work at the company, so in some sense I wasn’t sure what exactly would be different. However, the fact that that there had been some action, after years of guys getting away with whatever behavior they wanted, was comfort enough.
    Sheryl’s housecleaning sweep through the department was the last transformation of our workplace that most of us saw from her, as far as our day-to-day work was concerned. Mark continued to conduct the All Hands meetings and serve as the voice and visionary of the company, which was his due, of course. However, women I talked to were disappointed that Sheryl and her voice had quickly receded to the background, leaving Mark and his vision of a brash, move fast/break things culture to define the company.
    Aside from the initial excitement and activity surrounding Sheryl’s arrival, as 2008 drew to a close, the office was crowded with more and more guys, in desks packed increasingly close together, but there were still very few women. Facebook had started to resemble, more than ever, a fully fledged fraternity. Sam even said so to me as he was telling me about some tournament—whether chess or ripstiking or gaming—the guys on our floor had held the night before. He liked the fraternity aspect of Facebook, to my initial surprise but, as I thought about it, I began to see why. These were the brothers he and all the boys never had, the popular techno frat that didn’t exist at Harvard or Stanford. The engineers had been together so long that they knew each other inside and out, like frat boys in their senior year. They playedgames of chess all day on the kitchen tables, and didn’t look up when I watched, as if they didn’t see me, because they didn’t; like any woman on the sidelines of a varsity match, I was not in the game. They raced ripstiks around the floor all day and night, keeping charts on the whiteboards of who won.
    Their venture into a world of pure competition was here now, charted by points and what Facebook would soon call credits, a form of virtual Facebook currency that began to be tested internally as a way for Facebook users to reward each other for posting entertaining things. Winning battles for status was no longer the precocious activity of young hackers, but a codified way of life. And, just like in a real fraternity, there was an obvious hierarchy, as well as rituals, which in this case involved chess games and the occasional limo club night instead of football and pub nights. Facebook had made being a nerdy programmer cool and normal, at least within the confines of the valley.
    I stopped paying attention to the social dynamics at work, since, like all frats, everything and everyone in it looked the same from the outside. I was a sorority of one, and it was getting lonely. Any hint of a new, creative, coed society that I had felt in the beginning, composed of gays and straights and men (or boys) and women, had become stratified and