Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley

by Emily Chang

women have been systematically excluded from the greatest wealth creation in the history of the world and denied a voice in the rapid remolding of our global culture.

In his history of the internet, The Innovators, Walter Isaacson points out that while men focused on building computer hardware in the industry’s early days, it was women who pioneered the equally important task of developing software—that is, telling the machines what to do.

More fundamentally, meritocracy is impossible to achieve, because, as Young says, a meritocracy is always based on an imperfect definition of merit and often narrowly defined to favor training, connections, and education primarily available to the wealthy.

Uber ordered leather jackets for all the men on the engineering team but not for the women. When Fowler complained to the head of her section, he emailed her, saying that because there were so many men, Uber could get a discount. But he couldn’t get a bulk discount on the women’s jackets, because they needed so few of them, so they could not justify placing an order for Uber’s female engineers.

Simply hiring more white women isn’t going to solve Silicon Valley’s diversity problem. If this industry is supposed to represent the future, there must be room for talented people who are not young, straight, white, well educated, childless, and male.