Brotopia Quotes

“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. Take Stanford. Because Stanford is filled with students with top high-school GPAs and SAT scores, administrators can pat themselves on the back and say, “We only admit the best students. We’re a meritocracy.” The students are encouraged to think similarly. But is it just a coincidence that the median annual family income of a Stanford student is $167,500 while the national median is roughly one-third that? Did those high-achieving students naturally get high SAT scores, or did they benefit from their parents’ paying for tutors and sending them to private schools? Privilege accumulates as you advance in life. If the college you attend is the basis of your future employment networks, then it is impossible to say that your employment success is solely based on merit.”
― Emily Chang, Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley

“Let’s pause for a second. The man who is one of the main architects of the culture of Silicon Valley in the last twenty years thinks giving women the right to vote has harmed democracy.”
― Emily Chang, Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley

“there is another type of discrimination in the industry that exists in a subtler, more ambient form, not unlike the attitudes that led to the selection of Lena’s image and turned her into an industry icon. Women in tech are held back not only by overt sexism and sexual harassment but also by less obvious and still dangerous patterns of behavior that are difficult to pinpoint and call out. Several tech companies, including Google, Microsoft, and Twitter, have been the target of gender discrimination lawsuits, some with class action status, representing other female employees.”
― Emily Chang, Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley

“Just as computer science was erecting barriers to entry, medicine—an equally competitive and selective field—was adjusting them. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, dozens of new medical schools opened across the country, and many of the newly created spots went to women. Standardized entry exams also began to change. In 1977, the MCAT, a test for entrance into medical school, was revamped to reduce cultural and social bias. But the game changer was the implementation of Title IX, which prohibits sexual discrimination in educational programs. From then on, if a woman could score high enough on the newly revised MCATs and meet other requirements, med schools could not legally deny her entry, and women poured in. Why wasn’t the same progress being made in computer science? Professor Eric Roberts, now at Stanford, was chairing the computer science department at Wellesley when the department instituted a GPA threshold. Of that period he later wrote, “In the 1970s, students were welcomed eagerly into this new and exciting field. Around 1984, everything changed. Instead of welcoming students, departments began trying to push them away.”
― Emily Chang, Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley

“As computers gained new status and exploded in popularity, hacker conferences and computer clubs sprang up across the San Francisco Bay Area, and enrollment in computer science classes surged at universities across the country. Demand became so great that some departments began turning students away. There was an overall peak in bachelor’s degrees awarded in computer science in the mid-1980s, and a peak in the percentage of women receiving those degrees at nearly 40 percent. And then there was a steep decline in both. It wasn’t that students were inexplicably abandoning this exciting field. It was that universities couldn’t attract enough faculty to meet growing demand. They increased class size and retrained teachers—even brought in staff from other departments—but when that wasn’t enough, they started restricting admission to students based on grades. At Berkeley, only students with a 4.0 GPA were allowed to major in electrical engineering and computer science. Across the country, the number of degrees granted started to fall.”
― Emily Chang, Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley

“Popular products from the tech boom— including violent and sexist video games that a generation of children has become addicted to—are designed with little to no input from women. Apple’s first version of its highly touted health application could track your blood-alcohol level but not menstruation. Everything from plus-sized smartphones to artificial hearts have been built at a size better suited to male anatomy. Facial recognition technology works far more accurately for white men than darker-skinned women. Social media platforms are hotbeds of online hate disproportionately targeted at girls and women, not simply because some humans are downright mean, but because of how men have designed the very systems that allow this hate to propagate. The exclusion of women matters—not just to job seekers, but to all of us.”
― Emily Chang, Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley

“By lionizing the idea of meritocracy, Silicon Valley can deny that the lack of diversity is a problem.”
― Emily Chang, Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley

“Getting to fifty-fifty is incredibly complex and nuanced, requiring many detailed solutions that will take decades to fully play out. To accelerate the process, change needs to start at the top. Like Stewart Butterfield, CEOs need to make hiring and retaining women an explicit priority. In addition, here is the bare minimum of what we can do at an individual and a systemic level: First of all, people, be nice to each other. Treat one another with respect and dignity, including those of the opposite sex.That should be pretty simple. Don’t enable assholes. Stop making excuses for bad behavior, or ignoring it. CEOs must embrace and champion the need to reach a fair representation of gender within their companies, and develop a comprehensive plan to get there. Be long-term focused, not short-term. It may take three weeks to find a white man for the job, but three months to find a woman. Those three months could save three years of playing catch-up in the future. Invest in not just diversity but inclusion. Even if your company is small, everything counts. And take the time to educate your employees about why this is important. Companies need to appoint more women to their boards. And boards need to hold company leadership to account to get to fifty-fifty in their employee ranks, starting with company executives. Venture capital firms need to hire more women partners, and limited partners should pressure them to do so and, at the very least, ask them what their plans around diversity are. Investors, both men and women, need to start funding more women and diverse teams, period. LPs need to fund more women VCs, who can establish new firms with new cultural norms. Stop funding partnerships that look and act the same. Most important, stop blaming everybody else for the problem or pretending that it is too hard for us to solve. It’s time to look in the mirror. This is an industry, after all, that prides itself on disruption and revolutionary new ways of thinking. Let’s put that spirit of innovation and embrace of radical change to good use. Seeing a more inclusive workforce in Silicon Valley will encourage more girls and women studying computer science now.”
― Emily Chang, Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley