Hello. I am Femmebot 7.0.
In 1995, I was 20. I was in my third year of college, learning how to code and fact-check. I was a journalism major with an exciting future of online storytelling. Almost every day, I spent hours in the air conditioned computer labs playing with code, surfing Netscape, and Telnet chatting with college students in other countries. I’d already studied abroad for one semester in London and I was hungry for more opportunities to travel and meet new people.
By 1999, I was working in a women’s tech incubator in San Francisco. I was the one Latina who was interested in the code behind the scenes that the white boys in the corner were crafting and manipulating. My female Latina boss saw my potential and gave me a new title and pay raise. This experience lasted until 2001, when everyone my age in San Francisco (at least that I knew), was getting laid off by a tech company.
By 2009, I had experienced this cycle in tech a second time — but in Miami. I was again, the one Latina who was interested in the code behind the scenes that the white boys in the corner were crafting and manipulating. My cis-male heterosexual boss saw my potential and gave me a budget to hire freelancers. I managed to increase traffic and subscribers to his platform for matching angel investors and entrepreneurs, but within a year, he was pulling the plug after screwing the assistant, getting mixed up in some kind of porn ring with his wife, and burning through the startup runway. Thank God, I found my angel investor Hazel Henderson from that experience. She saved me over the next few years by hiring me to revamp her website and attend/write about conferences all over the world. It was through her platform that I found the think tanks in DC that eventually hired me to revamp their websites.
By 2015, my new, gay, white male boss in New York walked over to my desk in our open-plan office, on my second day as a multimedia web and video manager, and told me I should open all my emails everyday. Deadpan, I looked up at him and said: “I am a professional with two decades of experience. I know how to manage my email.” He backed off after that, but he consequently lost his nerve to be direct with me.
“You have a quiet intensity,” he told me during a check-in. “You remind me of my mother.”
Ugh. Yeah. That’s a sentence we all want to hear from our boss.
It’s 2025 now. Ten whole years after that demeaning experience which turned out to be some kind of karmic narrative we were playing out that eventually devolved into me in full emo meltdown at the HR table and him in total confusion over my desire — no, my request — for a different supervisor, one who could talk to me directly, with care, acceptance, respect, camaraderie — basically like a human deserves. But I didn’t get what I wanted (or deserved) 10 years ago, even though I was 40 years old, a full-grown adult “Tech Guy.” Por que? Even though I am the “Tech Guy” in my mind, I don’t “present as the Tech Guy” in other people’s experience of the “Tech Guy.” Entiendes? No? Ok, let’s go to a metaphor:
My good friend Genevieve always says: “I don’t present as Mexican or Latina but my mother is from Mexico.”
This always made me laugh because my friend was acknowledging people’s stereotypes before they could be confused by her face. We all have an idea of “Latina” and “Mexican” in our brains, thanks to our families, our friends, and most importantly — our images, which have told all of us, collectively that Mexicans are brown and wear sombreros; likewise, the “Tech Guy” is skinny, white, sometimes Asian or Eastern European, although in Orlando he can also be Latino; he wears glasses unless he’s a black hat hacker who hangs with crypto bros, in that case he smells like too much cologne and carries several keys in his belt for the server room, the desk drawer with all the passwords (written and scribbled on a piece of paper), and his locker that contains a backup laptop (just in case).
So imagine the confusion of a CEO of a company who is having trouble with his computer. He un-plugs it and re-plugs it after booting and re-booting it with no success before resorting to calling the “Tech Guy.” As the CEO of a company, this is a man who prides himself in solving problems, so it’s always a little blow to the EGO when he resorts to calling the “Tech Guy.” Now that you’re in the shoes of this CEO, you can fully imagine his horror when a woman with a JLo body, big hoops, and a skirt walks in. He wonders if he accidentally speed-dialed the local madam for his weekly happy ending massage. But no. She leans over his desk, has the nerve to smell like Aveda products, types faster than any coked-up secretary in the 80s, and fixes all his tech problems with the kind of grace and efficiency that would shame the “Tech Guy” before her. On top of that, she’s got this soothing yoga voice that calms him down when he’s internally panicking over the loss of a very important presentation for a very important client.
Who does this broad think she is?
The CEO’s brain has separate compartments for mistress and wife, but there is no compartment that fits both “sexy” and “techie,” so his brain explodes, and he finds himself losing sleep at night, wondering whether or not she’s real, that maybe she’s just a robot built by the real “Tech Guy.” He finds himself crushing on her, wanting to understand how a girl that looks like her wouldn’t be a Super Model instead of the “Tech Guy.” I mean, how stupid is she? Isn’t there more money in modeling? She makes him — no FORCES him — to stare. Every day he is at work, trying to get work done, for the love of Jesus, but he feels simultaneously aroused and inadequate and vulnerable around her because she walks around with too much confidence in her high heels, like she owns the place. So he does his best, with his CEO mindfuck games, to chip through her hard exterior:
“Do you really know what you’re doing?”
And that’s all it takes.
She falls apart.
PAUSE
Isolating trigger: “Do you really know what you’re doing?”
Welcome back to the Latinas in Tech TV show! I’m Dr. Nutmeg, and tonight we’re listening to Femmebot 7.0’s “Memoirs” in order to understand why this CEO was able to detonate the unconscious BOMB in her operating system. After three decades of experience how can this Femmebot coded with “Latina” algorithms fall apart so easily? Latinas are known for resilience, creativity, and chanclas, right?
It just so happens that the TIMING of this CEO’s trigger is the reason. Thirty years ago, Femmebot 7.0 NEVER felt like she didn’t know what she was doing — at least when it came to work.
She was open.
She was excited.
She was fresh.
She was young and unburdened by the opinions of others.
She was nurtured by older women who also worked as the “Tech Guy.” She still talks to these women. They all share the same experiences. And yet, society hasn’t caught up with them. Men at Sunday afternoon birthday parties in the state of Florida will still doubt that you are a capable human being that has been working with technology for more than 30 years. It’s fucking exhausting.
Burnout code activates…
She gets tired. She wants to quit. But then she sees that the Latinas in Tech conference in San Francisco is coming up. She’s like - hmm. I’ll go there and get re-charged by other Latinas like me who work with technology. But when she gets there,
Men out-number women on the first panel she sees…
A guy explains how machine learning works at the AI Academy booth.
The final speaker is a man, further reminding her of reality: “Oh. Right. It’s the time of year when we all pretend Latinas can be the “Tech Guy,” when we play out our Barbie fantasies that ‘we can be anything’ even though real life laughs at us with a disclaimer that men do not want to compete with us, they only want to fuck us, and if they’re gay, they’re playing out their mommy issues? Those theories don’t sound accurate, so she looks in the mirror and sings along with Taylor Swift, “It’s me, hi, I’m the problem it’s me,” so she goes to Dr. Nutmeg, Tech Therapist and asks, “Can you eradicate this bug that’s holding me back?”
She can no longer remain in this delusional state that she can fight for her daughters, even though her mother and her mother were fighting the same fight and yet….the CEO can’t see anything but what he has always seen: Tits & Ass.
At the ripe age of 49, after almost 30 years of being the Tech Guy and never making more than $76,000 per year or building anything truly innovative, she realizes the sysyphian existence she has led, and wonders if feminism will ever deliver its promise of true equality.
The answer is no.
Not as long as men willfully refuse to catch up.
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