Boy Kings addresses the issue of women in the corporate workplace. When the company sought to expand its operations to Palo Alto, California, the social network was not the popular social networking site it is today. Katherine Losse writes about her experience working for Facebook, and the sexist remarks and actions she observed from her male colleagues. Even on the first day at the job, she sees explicit cartoons of woman with large breasts drawn by engineers. The book is a memoir of a woman who starts at a low-level position in the customer service department at Facebook. Katherine Losse says she applied for a job at Facebook after randomly clicking a job submission link. She received a call back from Losse is an exception to the rule in Silicon Valley. In a company dominated by men and engineers, she was a woman and not an engineer. Her starting salary at Facebook was twenty dollars an hour. Losse’s job in September 2005 was to answer customer emails. Facebook at that time had about five million users. Her English degree from John Hopkins was not an asset in a corporate environment where the CEO Mark Zukeberg had written on his Facebook profile: “I don’t read.” As a reader, and as a woman, Kate felt separate in an exclusive male world that both wanted to be the new kid on the block, but also was very ambitious. An IT guy gave Kate her first email address: and she was told to memorize a Master Password that would allow her to look at any profile on Facebook. It may come as a surprise, but Facebook profiles are hardly secret to employees within the company that is why the company has often come under fire for its privacy issues with customers. The book begins on an upbeat note. It reflects the ambitions of a woman who wants to become successful in the competitive male world of Silicon Valley.
Works Cited
Losse, Katherine. The Boy Kings: A Journey into the Heart of the Social Network. New York:
Free Press, 2012. Print.
