Katherine Losse, the Woman in the Facebook Frat House
At 11 a.m. on my first day at Facebook, the young, plain-looking guys in T-shirts, gazing at their screens, seemed startled—if not displeased—to see a strange new woman in the office.
The only other woman in the office—an administrative assistant—was more animated, smiling toothily as she welcomed me in. She sat in front of a large piece of graffiti art featuring a cartoonish, zaftig woman with green hair who floated above an ominous cityscape.
Much of the graffiti in the room featured stylized women bursting from small tops that tapered down to tiny waists, mimicking the proportions of female videogame characters. It seemed juvenile, but I wasn’t very bothered—it seemed like the kind of thing that suburban boys from Harvard would think was urban and cool. “We had to move the really graphic painting to the men’s bathroom because someone complained,” an engineer told me as he gave me a tour of the tiny office. He said this with the slight mocking disapproval that was my new colleagues’ default tone in response to anything that resisted their power.
I got it: If you couldn’t handle the graffiti, or the unrepentantly boyish company culture that it represented, the job wasn’t going to work out.