Women in Tech and Empathy Work (opens in new tab)

I work at a small startup of five people and the emotional labor role is taken care of by a man and the pay is lower than that of the developers (three of us). The reason the pay is lower has nothing to do with the fact that he is performing emotional labor and has everything to do with supply/demand and scaling of emotional labor.

The truth is that there are very few emotional labor jobs in tech and programmers try hard to keep it that way because 90% of costs are people-related, and the number of people qualified from emotional labor and interested in those jobs is high. This is the exact opposite of the situation with developer jobs where the demand for talent is sky-high and the supply of truly capable developers is low.

The other problem with emotional labor is that it doesn't scale. An employee only has so much time in a day to handle emotional labor tasks. It can't really be automatized. Once the emotional laborers you have are at the limits of the emotional labor they are doing, you need to add more emotional laborers. This means that the money allocated for emotional labor gets distributed among more and more people until developers figure out how to automate any work of the emotional laborers so headcount doesn't balloon.

The issues raised here are perhaps invisible to the average male programmer, but they are important. Scaling a site isn't just about keeping the site up, it's about communicating with users, receiving and processing feedback, and being emotionally aware regarding product and workplace dynamics. Often women tech workers do this work at a vastly less rewarded rate than men working at the same startup.

It's amazing how often the default is to push women over into the 'caretaker role' when coing should really always be about solving human problems.

>I‘ve written here before about the ongoing puzzle of improving the ratio of women to men in the tech sector.

That's nice, but when are we going to address the real barriers faced by women? Women are vastly outnumbered by men in many sectors, including workplace injuries and fatalities, acute and chronic homelessness, suicides, mental illness including schizophrenia, violent crime victimization, recruitment into gangs and child armies at a young age, legal genital mutilation, false imprisonment, unfair estrangement from children, involuntary celibacy, and a host of other exciting fields. When are we going to stop pussyfooting around and demand a better ratio of women to men in the really important sectors? If we work together, I know we can do it.