Fiction: Signaling
By: Christine Sweeney
She pulled on her rubberized boots and zipped her raincoat, the black one with a loud interior. It was better at deflecting the droplets. She turned the old skeleton key, the one she used to lock her apartment, from the inside—a habit she’d developed living in East Coast cities where the millennials clustered for jobs to pay off their debt. Inflated wages for project managers and “IT consultants.” Deflated salaries for social workers and non-profit people. Salaries for journalists and start-uppers, low but subsidized by rich families. Over-reported crime and underreported structural racism. Lock your door. Make a loop around the block so they don’t follow you home. Who?
Now, across an ocean in the new old world, she climbed down the stairwell, more things to be chucked or shared propped on the windowsills at each landing. An off-trend pair of faux-suede boots with bald patches. A spider plant on the verge. A vegetarian cookbook, still with dairy and egg recipes—those hadn’t been seen in the market for over a year. Things cleared from closets and cabinets, fewer and fewer objects that sparked joy, and more time to purge what did not. Idle online shopping turned to idle tossing more quickly than the market analysts thought.
Today was her day out. Two days out. Five days in. Four employees in a chamber. They were called chambers, like Victorian bedrooms or judges’ quarters. The clusters with capped people for limited contact. She covered up her heavily moisturized skin and the carefully layered and color-blocked outfit she had planned out days before. There was time for styling, for self-expression. It wasn’t frivolous self-promotion, as she’d once thought, the pressure to buy and build a personal brand. It was communication. Signaling. A small outward joy. Her lightly wavy hair was frizzed, dulled, and battered by the minerals and hard water that had gotten worse. She gave in.
No clouds, a good day out. Her sunglasses looked more appropriate on a day like this, though she wore them gloom or shine. The droplets could get in your eyes, her mother told her.
How had she gotten here? She was not essential. Had a “tech solution” for “diversity and inclusion” been essential before all this? “Do you feel like you belong? Why would you work there if you didn’t?” “How do you build belonging from afar?” “What is inclusion when we isolate?” She thought of the copy she had drafted. A community can be diverse. A single person is not diverse, she explained to a programmer. “You can’t say ‘diverse individuals,’ it’s about context.” When you work alone in your home, away from other people, do you still face racism and sexism and ableism at work? (Yes.) What if you could just avoid working with people like that?
She ran down a busy street, balancing her phone for a final call of encouragement before the interview. She wore a neutral business-casual set: slim-cut slacks and blazer, a graphic tee. Hair unruly. Minimal makeup. Let her mind impress. Her backpack strap slipped off her shoulder, spotted with buttons: "Equal Pay NOW.” “Let’s make HERstory.”
“I know, I know! But we can't just give up, Theo. We can't just stay in our little academic bubble and complain.”
She paused to listen, shifting her backpack and looking at her watch. She had met Theo in graduate school. Theo, a lifelong academic. Theo, equally critical of the world and patient, a learned necessity, with people who hadn’t imagined a world beyond two pronouns. Not everyone could be a gender studies scholar.
“Babe, I’m going to be honest with you. You're delusional. Tech is evil. It’s naïve of you to think they can change. Will the world be a better place if we have more women and people of color as vulture capitalists? It's corporate feminism and it’s bullshit.”
“Yes. Corporate feminism. I know. But what's the point of research if we aren't going to apply it to the real world? We can't just dismiss everyone who doesn't read Judith Butler. It's not a crusade. It's work! Some of us have to work!”
She paused to wait to cross the street.
“It's tech, it's gender studies, it's writing, it's everything I’m looking to do, Theo. I need to get back into the real world. School is over.”
“Work is a construct. The real world is a construct.”
“You know what isn't a construct? Student loans. Look, I have to go. Call you tonight. Thanks for your support.”
She arrived at the coworking space for her interview. Well, it wasn’t a coworking space exactly—it was a social media ad agency. We Are Viral. How do we get shares? How do we get engagement? English literature and visual-arts graduates sat on sofas and tables hunched over laptops, meme-making. One of the startup’s co-founder’s husband started We Are Viral, sold it, and now used the money to fund DiVERSIO and other startups that would never be profitable. No one wanted to pay for diversity and inclusion.
She sat down on a low, red, overstuffed modernist sofa in the middle of the brightly lit open-reception area. No rooms here, just areas. No walls. She reviewed a legal pad of notes and fiddled with her pen.
The receptionist, heavily and dramatically made up like a makeup influencer, sat at a desk nearby.
“Can I get you anything while you wait? Flat white? Matcha? Kombucha?”
She looked up.
“Water? Please?”
“Sparkling?”
“Normal?”
“K. Be right back.”
As the Insta-receptionist left, the founder walked up. Kyley Fink. Alpha female. Entrepreneur. A tech bro trapped in a blonde woman's body.
She worshipped the tech world and gauged all situations based on power dynamics: who had it, who didn’t. She wore boot-cut jeans, a black t-shirt that said THE FUTURE OF FINANCE IS FEMALE, and yellow trainers.
“Heyyyy! You! You're here for the interview?”
She stood up, awkwardly balancing her legal pad and bag in one hand. Her eyes were drawn to the text on Kyley’s shirt. Kyley looked down at it.
“I don’t buy into all that identity stuff. But I call myself a Gay Tech Founder because it gets more engagement online, you know?”
She paused, unsure if Kyley was joking. She held out a hand for a handshake, trying to match Kyley's enthusiasm while also staying professional.
“Hello! Kyley? It's nice to meet you.”
Kyley looked at her hand, smiled, and shook it.
“Right. Let's get moving. We'll find a couch somewhere to squat on.”
The pair walked briskly through the coworking space. Steps and cubbies and siderooms, hip yet unoccupied furniture and phone booths. Eerily empty, in fact, but for a corner of cubicles packed with millennials, gazes locked on laptops.
“Do you want anything? We have an amazing espresso machine, not shit like other places. I'm gonna have an espresso.”
“No, thank you, I think I have a water on the way.”
Kyley ignored her and got the receptionist's attention.
“Hey! Linds? Could you grab us two espressos? Thaaaanksss.”
“Right. So. I am the founder and CEO of DiVERSIO. Katie, the girl you’ll be replacing, said she met you at a networking event?”
Woman! The woman I’ll be replacing, she thought. Editing, always editing.
“Yes! In the gender studies department. She's wonderful.”
“Yeah. We'll be sad to see her go, but as DiVERSIO moves towards WORLD DOMINATION we know she'll be back. Just expanding the empire, you know? So, what do you know about our small but mighty operation?”
She breathed in, poised to give her memorized spiel.
“Well…”
Kyley interrupted. “DiVERSIO is the UK's global leader in diversity tech. We are owning the market. Diversity and inclusion is the next big thing. There's so much money out there in finance and tech for this shit, you know? Wait, here's my favorite meditation couch, let's pop a squat here.”
Kyley sat down. She awkwardly sat on the masculine leather couch and turned towards Kyley as the makeup influencer returned with the espressos.
“Awww, thanks. You're a star. Actually, do we have quinoa milk? Do you want quinoa milk? Could we have some quinoa milk?”
“I think so.”
“Grrreeat. And if not quinoa, I'll settle for oat. Thanks!”
“As I was saying, the market is ripe for DiVERSIO. We are a women-founded, women-owned tech company doing diversity, so we can't lose, really. It's all about shame. Calling these CEO fuckers out and getting all their D&I budgets, you know?”
“Yep. Yes. Sure. Absolutely.”
“Nothing like this has been done before. Now we need to build out our brand. DiVERSIO is domination. DiVERSIO is annihilating the people problem in finance. That's where you come in. We need someone who really gets it. Who's a words person. To really tackle what we're all about.”
“Yes. That’s exactly what I am interested in. My master’s dissertation was on experiences of sexism by self-employed millennial women in tech. I am passionate about transforming this space.”
“Right. I want a podcast. I want all the social channels. I want livestreams. I want people to know that we are owning this space.”
“OK. I really don't have very much social media experience, but I can learn.”
“I want to be a thought leader. I want all the thought leaders. Sheryl Sandberg, I want Theresa May, I want Zuckerberg, I want Ellen, I want Peter Thiel, I want—who's that founder with the blood machine?”
“Elizabeth Holmes?”
“Yes. Love her. I want her. I want all the global thought leaders to be talking about us, to us, on my podcast.”
She read this as a joke and nervously laughed.
“But what I really need is a right-hand woman. I need someone to keep me in line. I need someone to get shit done. Are you a self-starter?”
She breathed in, preparing to recite her CV.
“I have experience with project management, policy analysis, reports. I've shifted towards theoretical analysis—”
“You worked at the White House, didn't you? With Obama?”
“Well, yes. With a small cyberpolicy team. I am really driven by gender representation in these spaces.”
“Could we get Obama on the podcast? Who else do you know over there? Didn't you go to LSE—could we collab with them?”
“Uhhh…”
“This is all very exciting. You're hired. We'll have a two-week unpaid trial run. But you start Monday.”
“What?”
“Hired! You’re hired. DiVERSIO, babes. All right, I’ve got a virtual Reiki session to Zoom into. Ciao for now!”
***
Image: Eric Krull