Patron saint of women in tech

Packing for California was, for the 
most part, easy. If I couldn’t wear it 
in 100-degree heat or to my big tech 
internship, it went into storage. With 
near mechanical precision, I divided 
my wardrobe into “leave” and “take” 
piles. 
But there was one item that 
stumped me. Six months ago, my 
friend sent me a tweet with a picture 
of a t-shirt that read “Disgraced 
founder 
of 
Theranos 
Elizabeth 
Holmes” — a shirt I now hold in 
question. I bought it on a whim in the 
middle of class after realizing I had 
saved my credit card information to 
Etsy. I thought it was ironic, perhaps 
something to differentiate me from 
my peers. “I’m not like other people 
in tech,” the shirt would say. “I 
can critique Holmes and start-up 
culture.”
Elizabeth 
Holmes, 
with 
her 
faux deep voice, signature black 
turtleneck 
and 
inexplicable 
charisma, was an enigma even before 
her crimes were discovered. She’s 
the subject of best-selling books, 
award winning journalism and even 
a Hulu miniseries. At the age of 19, 
Holmes dropped out of Stanford to 
start what would become Theranos, a 

biotechnology company that claimed 
it could perform a suite of tests 
with just one drop of blood. Later, 
an investigation into the company 
revealed the blood testing technology 
didn’t actually work — but not before 
Holmes had raised over $700 billion 

in venture capital and defrauded 
countless investors including former 
Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, 
future Trump Secretary of Defense 
Jim Mattis, the DeVos family, an 
ex-Wells Fargo chairman and two 
former U.S. senators.
In a highly publicized trial, 
Holmes was found guilty on January 
3 of three counts of wire fraud 
and one count of intent to commit 
wire fraud. As former Theranos 
patients expressed outrage at the 
jury’s failure to find Holmes guilty 
of defrauding patients, a squad of 
internet cheerleaders rooted for 
their favorite “femme fatale.” Some 
fans even took it upon themselves to 
wait outside the courthouse, eager to 
catch a glimpse of their hero. 
She raised millions of dollars on 
lies. She built a multi-billion dollar 
company on impossible claims and 
shoddy science. She hurt innocent 
patients. 
She’s 
a 
girlboss, 
the 
embodiment of women in tech. 
Commentators describe Holmes’s 
deception and fall from grace as being 
spectacular, even exceptional. It 
certainly is — Holmes fooled some of 
the brightest minds in tech, medicine 
and finance and obtained a net worth 
of over $4.5 billion before losing 
it all. But there’s also something 
about it that’s very reminiscent. If 
you look closely, it’s part of a story 

we’ve seen before. Holmes is women 
in tech programs taken to their 
natural conclusion. She is the most 
extreme embodiment of a culture 
that pushes women to emulate toxic, 
male-dominated hacker culture and 
pursue arbitrary markers of success 

without meaningfully challenging — 
or, to use a favorite term of the tech 
industry, disrupting — the status quo. 
***
Initially, I set the Elizabeth 
Holmes T-shirt into the “maybe pile,” 
along with a collection of skirts that 
were probably too short to wear to 
my corporate internship, sweatshirts 
that were probably too warm for the 
California heat and shoes that were 
probably too impractical to walk 
to the train station in. But it didn’t 
feel like it belonged there — there 
was nothing functionally wrong 
with sporting “disgraced founder 
of Theranos Elizabeth Holmes” in 
the office. Rather, it clashed with 
the ethos of Silicon Valley. I saw 
the T-shirt as ironic, as tongue-in-
cheek. I knew I’d very well encounter 
a number of former Theranos 
employees in the Bay Area, but my 
real hesitation was that I doubted 
that they would see the humor in 
it; I doubted that they would also 
consider Holmes a toxic girlboss icon. 
The girlbossification of Elizabeth 
Holmes, I think, can best be 
attributed to how depraved and 
bereft 
of 
meaning 
Theranos’s 
downfall felt. Holmes came out of the 
court case relatively unscathed and 
the questionable business practices 
she engaged in still run abound in 
the start-up world. It’s so absurd 
that it demands parody. Turning 
Theranos and Holmes into a joke, 
into a cultural moment, is the easiest 
way to acknowledge her rise and 
fall without really reckoning with 
the factors that produced it. And 
Holmes’s adoring, pseudo-ironic fans 
certainly deliver. 
At the same time that we were 
collectively 
rebranding 
Holmes, 
we began using the same terms to 
describe women in tech initiatives. 
Organizations 
like 
GirlTechBoss 
emerged, 
predicting 
women’s 
imminent takeover of big tech and 
praising the cult of the “female 
founder” — a Holmes-like figure who 
embodies the role of the brilliant, 
male, visionary founder with a 
feminine twist. It all feels reminiscent 
of early 2000s consumer feminism, a 
perverse interpretation of women’s 
empowerment that focuses on catchy 
slogans and commodifiable T-shirts.

S T A T E M E N T

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
 4—Wednesday, June 8, 2022 

If you were to walk into a grade 
school library, there’s a good 
chance that you would find a shelf 
devoted to Judy Blume. Blume, a 
prolific author best known for her 

children’s books from the 1970s, 
is a champion of addressing taboo 
aspects of adolescence. Books like 
“Blubber”, “Forever…” and “Then 
Again, Maybe I Won’t” have long 
opened a door for young readers 
to learn more about puberty, 
bullying, sexuality and more.
Although I, like many of her 
fans, have only read a handful of 
her books, it did not take much to 
become a fan. Blume’s bestselling 
— and arguably most famous — 
book, “Are You There God? It’s 
Me, Margaret,” is the main source 
of my fondness for her. I first read 
“Are You There God?...” when 
I was around Margaret’s age; I 
found the story of a pre-teen girl 
who was contemplating many of 
the same things that I was (friends, 
bras, periods, religion) extremely 
comforting. Her style and earnest 
honesty are so distinctive that I 
have enjoyed each of her books 
that I have picked up, regardless of 
my age.
Blume’s refusal to shy away 
from taboo topics has made her 
simultaneously 
beloved 
and 
maligned. Her books have been 
consistently 
challenged 
since 
the 1980s, when the election of 
Ronald Reagan spurred a wave 

of widespread book censorship, 
one much like the recent wave 
of bannings this past year. Some 
consider her books too graphic 
because of their depictions of 
sex, menstruation, birth control, 
masturbation, etc. — so much so 
that, at times, Blume has had to 
travel with a bodyguard to her 

events in response to numerous 
hate-mail warnings. 
Yet the things that made her 
so unpopular with conservative 
parents and lawmakers over the 
years are what make her so adored 
by fans: her frank, unflinching 
discussion of topics that children 
were concerned about, but that 
they struggled to get information 
about on their own.
In 
an 
interview 
with 
The 
Michigan Daily, Jo Angela Oehrli, 
a learning and children’s literature 
librarian 
who 
manages 
the 
Children’s Literature Collection at 
Hatcher Graduate Library, spoke 
more about banned children’s 
books and Blume’s presence on 
those 
frequently 
challenged 
lists. She talked about the ways 
that books act as reflections of a 
child’s 
experience, 
referencing 
an essay by Rudine Sims Bishop 
that refers to the way that books 
can be “mirrors” or “windows” 
— 
reflections 
of 
one’s 
own 
experiences that help children 
put their emotions into words, or 
views into a person’s perspective 
that is completely different from 
their own.

HALEY JOHNSON
Statement Columnist

Read more at michigandaily.com
Read more at michigandaily.com

Design by Jennie Vang

 KARI ANDERSON
Statement Correspondent 

Design by Abby Schreck

Are you there, Judy?

