Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley

by Emily Chang

Thus began a half century’s worth of buck-passing in which powerful men in the tech industry defended or ignored the exclusion of women on the grounds that they were already excluded.

All this despite research that shows women-led companies outperform their peers.

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.”

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.

Cosmopolitan even interviewed Grace Hopper, who compared programming to planning a dinner, something she said women are expert at because of their patience and attention to detail. “Women are ‘naturals’ at computer programming,” Hopper declared matter-of-factly. Cosmo backed her up, declaring this “a whole new kind of work for women . . . Telling the miracle machines what to do and how to do it . . . and if it doesn’t sound like woman’s work—well, it just is.”

Professor Eric Roberts, now at Stanford, was chairing the computer science department at Wellesley when the department instituted a GPA threshold.

was then that computer science became not only nerdy but also elitist, operating on an impossible catch-22: the only way to be a programmer was to already be a programmer.

Other researchers have found that women won’t apply for jobs unless they meet 100 percent of the qualifications, while men will apply as long as they have 60 percent of the boxes checked.

researchers like Geoff Trickey have speculated that the financial crash of 2008 might have been significantly different had women played a more prominent role in high finance. “Risk-taking is desirable and required in the workplace, but we need a balance to avoid it spiraling out of control,” Trickey wrote. “If you’re not recruiting people of all risk types, you’re missing out on a fundamental self-controlling mechanism. It’s a bloody good formula for survival.”

Silicon Valley recruiters say, “It’s a pipeline problem,” meaning that there are not enough women graduating from college with the necessary technical skills. If they had more qualified women to choose from, hiring managers will tell you, they would hire more of them. And many of them mean it. Missing from this explanation is that the tech industry itself created the pipeline, which is very narrow and built on fanciful assumptions about what it takes to participate. Also missing is any acknowledgment that from its earliest days the industry has self-selected for men: first, antisocial nerds, then, decades later, self-confident and risk-taking bros.

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.

After complimenting her on the positives, Sandberg said, “I noticed you said ‘um’ a lot. Were you aware of it?” Scott was not, but she shrugged off the comment. “I can tell I’m not really getting through to you,” Sandberg then said. “When you say ‘um,’ it makes you sound stupid, and you won’t succeed at Google if people think you’re stupid.”

The child of Nigerian immigrants, she grew up in a mostly black neighborhood in Maryland before attending Stanford University.

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“There’s so much resistance to women and minorities in tech. For me to get the same recognition as my peers, I have to do a great job and show why I’m worth being here. Being just as good isn’t enough; you have to be exceptional.”

As for Aileen Lee, she now hosts an annual gathering of powerful women at her home, where the husbands and partners of the guests don suits and pass out the drinks.

“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 go on to be a VP of engineering at Slack or at some other company in the future.”

You can buy diverse talent or you can grow it…

‘Work hard and go home,’”

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