Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley

by Emily Chang

The absence of women in tech has real effects. “The best technology and the best products are built by people who have really diverse perspectives,” Marissa Mayer, the former Yahoo CEO, told me. “And I do think women and men have diverse perspectives.” The unfortunate truth is that right now men’s voices dominate and we see the results. The technology that turned images like Lena’s into easily streamed pixels has

The scarcity of women in an industry that is so forcefully reshaping our culture simply cannot be allowed to stand.

“The problem was a cultural one, not necessarily a lack of women, but if there were more women, the culture might have been better. There was a certain overconfidence among the engineers. I wanted a little more process that could have protected us from mistakes, something that I think women can be more sympathetic to. I do think there can be a sort of macho all-male environment of ‘We don’t make mistakes.’” For example, Manning had to fight to get the team to use a bug-tracking system (the all-male team felt they could keep track of whatever they needed to in their heads). When they finally implemented the system, one engineer thought it would be funny to program it to play “The Hamster Dance Song” whenever it loaded. Manning found it more arrogant than humorous.

Slack can’t change who applied to college five years ago, Butterfield points out. “So, how can we have an impact?” he asks. “We can have an impact by making this a good place for people to work. If women are less likely to leave the industry because they worked at Slack, then there will be more people who survived at a higher tenure of experience and therefore a higher role and could

Examples of how technology has failed women play out every day, leaving the tech industry in danger of continuing to repeat the same wrongs. For example, Bell pointed out that the microphone I was using to record our conversation was originally optimized to pick up male voices, leading women to sound distorted. Facial recognition technology works almost perfectly for light-skinned men but has extremely high error rates for darker-skinned women. In one startling Reuters story, Amazon recruiting technology was unintentionally programmed to reject the résumés of female candidates. The AI in the company’s résumé-sorting program had “learned” from the past data that male candidates were preferable, simply because most of the résumés submitted came from men. It penalized résumés containing the word “women’s,” including those from candidates who had attended women’s colleges. Human resources executives have high hopes for AI to take bias out of the hiring process; the problem is, the AI itself is already biased.