Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley

by Emily Chang

“When you use a picture like that for so long, it’s not a person anymore; it’s just pixels,” Seideman told the Atlantic in 2016, unwittingly highlighting the problem Needell and others were trying to point out. The dehumanization of women through digitized and overly sexualized images that could fly across computer networks was the danger.

Besides, no one could have been offended, he told me, because there were no women in the classroom at the time.

“The best technology and the best products are built by people who have really diverse perspectives,” Marissa Mayer,

“Absolutely, wealth can change people,” one former Google executive told me. “It disconnects you from average people. It’s a big, big problem. You assume your experiences are everyone’s experiences, and with wealth that becomes dangerous.

Moral exceptionalism is disgusting, and Silicon Valley has tons of it, and it stems from a lack of empathy. You assume the people who don’t see the world as you do are uneducated or stupid.”

The idea that these men just happened to be personally connected to the most talented people available is simply ridiculous.

The members of the PayPal Mafia explicitly believed, and some still do, that hiring an ideologically diverse group of people early would slow the company down, when all they wanted to do was move faster.