She pressed send. Done. Well, at least she had told them, that was something. At least they wouldn't be surprised when she didn't clock in tomorrow. But no notice period. She was just walking out. After over 6 years. The sad thing, said the voice on the wind, one of the sad things, was that a year ago, maybe more than a year ago, her old boss would never have accepted her quitting without a fight. He'd want to keep her.

 

But no one was going to contact her now to get her to change her mind. At best (or at worst, depending which part of her was doing the accounting) maybe they would contact her because they might be short-staffed tomorrow, maybe. But not because they believed she had a future at the company.

 

Her new boss didn't even realise who she was. What she had done. How much she knew. He just thought she was a legacy hire forced on him, someone that he should maybe think twice about disciplining. Maybe check upstairs first to make sure no one would get upset.

 

When had it started?

 

Three years ago, opening up to her new boyfriend? No, four years ago? Discovering that one aspect of her new role in the company? The aspect that did things to her?

 

No, earlier. Much earlier. Forever, even. Maybe this was the path she was always destined to walk, just requiring the right set of circumstances to divert her from the road she had originally planned. That part of her personality, once discovered, could not be suppressed, could only grow stronger.

 

She had gone to all girls schools, so it was only in college that she had started spending more regular time around men, and she discovered the strange sensation of being ignored "because" she was a girl, of being taken less seriously, of having things explained to her that she didn't need explaining, of being talked down to by a supposed peer.

 

Probably she was already like that before college, but with such infrequent time spent with men, she hadn't had the opportunity to observe the emergence of that pattern in her behaviour. So, in college she figured it out; "Oh, this does that to me? No! Why?"

 

Only some men treated her that way of course. She hadn't counted, but they were a minority. What she knew for sure was that some did. And she avoided those men, not out of worry for the extremely worrying way she reacted to that kind of treatment, but because she believed any woman should avoid men who treated women that way. So although she had learned this about herself back then, learning about it hadn't been important, hadn't required action, because avoiding the people responsible was already her default setting.

 

When she dated, it was men who never gave the appearance of having anything less than 100% respect for her. That was what was right and what she deserved. It had nothing to do with avoiding that sensation, which she rarely thought about.

 

Majoring in the traditionally male-dominated domain of Computer Science might have been thought of as a threat multiplier, but it was still a university, one known in the popular culture as a particularly liberal one, and a large university, with enough people that she could avoid the people she wished to avoid without isolating herself.

 

Then her masters, then a job, designing the new product around the identified gap in the market, meeting with potential customers, triangulating their needs, contributing to the build, all the time trying to remind her fellow engineers specifically what it was that the product should do, who it was for, keeping them focused on the purpose of the product. What features customers wanted, what performance, and what was superfluous.

 

And then the product was ready and she had presented it to potential customers, helping them set up the trial version, troubleshooting the various local network issues, showing them how it worked, what they needed to do, writing the tutorials, the example templates. Some tasks that could have been handed off to someone more junior, but she had wanted to do it. Ensuring the customers needs were met. It was the most rewarding part of the job.

 

And the product had been a success and the customer base was growing and the company needed to streamline customer service processes. She had submitted a proposal to her boss about what those processes should look like, and it had been accepted and she had directed its construction.

 

And then she had her pick of what roles she wanted with the new product, but she wanted to stay working with the customers, so she requested to remain with the customer support department she had helped build. So she could always have the full picture of how customers were using the product, what they needed from it, what was missing, and so she could influence future development, even if she was reducing her code contribution. Plus it was a work from home job, no more commuting!

 

Naturally, given her expertise with the product, she was in the top tier of customer support, Level 3, the person who was called when both the Level 1 and Level 2 agents couldn't succeed. Or the person that the biggest, most important clients had direct access too.

 

One of the many systems she had put in place was customer service agent key performance indicators, the KPIs. These were automatically generated and sent once a month to each agent, telling them how they performed in the last month, and how their performance compared to the mean of all other agents at their Level. At year end, there was another mail summarizing yearly performance. There were now too much agents at each of the three levels for people to be able to reverse engineer how other individual agents were doing from the mean values. They only had access to their own data, and how they were doing compared to everyone else.

 

And if the her from back then had known what this was going to do to her, she would have dismantled that system or quit or requested reassignment.

 

She would open her KPI mail at the start of the month and her mean of all KPIs – a single number summarizing everything – was ... between good and very good? And usually closer to good. Never closer to very good. And nowhere near excellent. She was above the mean of all other agents, true, but not significantly above, not a standard deviation. Surely she should be top? Or at least one of the top, just hovering around very good? No? Why?

 

No one else had her experience with the product, had worked directly on the code base, knew exactly what they were digging around in. No one else had been at the company longer. No one else had seen more issues and could resolve those issues quicker. No one else could diagnose original issues as quickly and as accurately. She was the agent every other agent came to when they couldn't resolve something. This was HER team. Everyone knew it. Even the manager understood it, being aware that she had declined the position he now held, and so he treated her as first officer.

 

Something was wrong.

 

There were now too much customers that they would know her by name, or that she would know their representatives by name. Every interaction was a new interaction with a new person. No established relationships. She had declined to be a main point of contact for one of the big customers which would have allowed a relationship to develop. But it would require less time for other clients, less time surveying the overall landscape that the product existed in, which she wished to be master of. And also it would involve travel or commuting to the client office, if they demanded it.

 

So, most of her interactions with customers were anonymous, without the benefit of an established relationship. Could that be hurting her numbers? Well, maybe, but those agents with big clients and established relationships dealt with less issues, so some of their KPIs would be hurt by that. So, maybe that wasn't it? But what could it be?

 

And then one day while working on some improvements to the KPI system, she had seen the numbers for the other agents. It hadn't been her intent to scrutinise the other agents performance. But she was inside the database and some numbers caught her eye. And she immediately understood.

 

There were a dozen male agents at Level 3. She was one of only three female agents. On the screen, the numbers for the other two female agents had stood out. Hard not to miss. They were two of the worst performing agents, in purely KPI terms. But that's not right? They are good! Maybe not the best, but absolutely not the worst! They're both better than ... she scanned the screen ... him? How is he that much higher?

 

She knew some people expected less of women, or would not trust her expertise. Surely, that couldn't be it? Is the effect that pronounced? In this job where the very best thing to happen to a customer would be to have their email or call assigned to her, ensuring the speediest resolution? And she thought about previous times where customers had seemed unhappy or untrusting of her, and re-evaluating those occasions now, ... was that the reason?

 

She felt funny. She went for lunch. She occupied her mind with other thoughts that day. But she would have to return to "the" thought at some point, at the latest, at the start of next month.

 

She experimented. The next few times she noticed a customer seem to be impatient or to be curt or to not be paying attention to what she was saying, she suggested if they would like her to "promote" their issue to a more "experienced" agent. A lie, there was nowhere to promote their issue to, she was the most experienced agent. But they always immediately accepted and seemed happy about the offer. And in these cases she always asked one of the male agents, always a different man, of different levels of competence, to take the issue. And she always told that male agent exactly what she believed the problem to be, but something else has come up, can you take this off my hands please? And later she would ask him how it went, and he would say, yes, easy, you were completely right about the problem, the customer was happy. Happy I could help.

 

And each time the experiment concluded, she felt funny. No, I don't like this.

 

And she told her boss what she had learned, that sometimes customers rejected help from female agents, and he said he knew, it was a recognised problem, one he hadn't been surprised to see here. It was OK. He accounted for the effect in his staff performance evaluations. He wasn't judging her or any of the other women in the team just by the numbers. There were some things that the numbers hid.

 

And with his social science background, he showed her other patterns in her numbers that she hadn't noticed before, how when you went beyond the summary KPI number, you could see the particular KPIs she was most underperforming on were the ones which would be harmed if the customer wasn't giving the agent a fair chance. It was a recognised signal of sexism or racism or homophobia or transphobia. Not enough evidence that you could say any one customer was guilty of these things, because maybe that customer was having a bad day and that was going to be how they treated everyone that day, but enough evidence that you could say that within a society these effects existed.

 

And for the first time she had really felt it in her bones how sometimes she would have to work harder than a man just because she was a woman, not because she was incapable, but because others so firmly believed her to be incapable, that they would not give her the opportunity to disprove them. She felt funny again.

 

In college, these feelings never festered in her. She'd just avoid the person involved. But now, how could she avoid it? Quit her job? She loved her job! This job was the perfect job for her. She was uniquely experienced, qualified and talented for it. No, she would not go.

 

And the next month, the email came again. She opened it, and looked at her figures, lower than they should have been. She stared at them for a few minutes. No longer questioning why they were down there. Just thinking about the fact that they were down there. She closed her laptop and went outside for a walk. She came back, worked for an hour, then looked at the email again. She went to bed. For half an hour. Then she returned to work.

 

And the next month she did it again. And the next month she experimented with the vibrator she never used. And the next month she stayed at her desk touching herself as she looked at the email. And as an added treat she reread the email chain she had had with a particularly impatient customer, allowing her imagination to dissect it. But it wasn't enough, so she got the vibrator and used it at her desk, legs up on the table in front of her, either side of the screen, various work paraphernalia moved out of the way to give her space. A cup with pens got knocked over, she'd clean it up when she was finished.

 

And the next month she touched herself as she compiled all of the monthly KPIs she had received so far into a local, lightweight timeseries database, and she built a dashboard with her various KPIs, and the team mean KPIs and with time-series graphs, and yes, the change hadn't been observable before, but she appeared to have been trending down.

 

Why? Was there an explanation. The effect of societal sexism should be a constant. Was there a reason her numbers might go down? She thought about it some more. When she first started working as an agent, some of the customers had still been known her by name, or at least she was known to the customers staff by name. But the customer base had grown. And now, none of her customer interactions were backed up by her reputation. She had become more anonymous, and the effect of a latent sexism that a man might have for a woman, a sexism that he might not even be aware of, had become more dominant. That was her theory.