When a company co-founder and CEO took the stage at a tech startup pitching contest in Silicon Valley recently, the last thing she had on her mind was her gender. Yet as she made her way to the stage to deliver a carefully practiced pitch for investment funding, not all the audience were applauding. Some were cat-calling.
She ignored the unwanted attention and concentrated on her pitch, but later reflected on the inappropriateness. “For these people it was just a little joke but why? It was a professional conference,” she says, declining to use her name for fear it might jeopardise future funding chances.
The incident is representative of a larger truth recognised by many women in Silicon Valley’s tech industry: sexist behaviour is alive and well. A long string of lawsuits alleging sexual harassment at tech startup companies and venture capital firms is currently making its way through the courts. And the sexist culture spills out in public, too. At last month’s annual Crunchies – the tech world’s closest thing to the Oscars – the presenter repeatedly called one woman in the audience a bitch and casually threw out a racist remark (the event’s hosts, the blog Techcrunch, apologised).
Women are extremely under-represented in the industry. Of the string of presentations made that day, only a few were made by female entrepreneurs. The founder doesn’t recall a single woman on the panel of investors judging the startups and the audience was mostly male too. The problems are linked, says Caroline Simard, research director at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University in Silicon Valley. When women are drastically under-represented it creates the conditions under which such behaviour can thrive. “Because in tech you have so few women to begin with, then that really reinforces these power dynamics between men and women,” she says. As one person tweeted as the Crunchies debacle unfolded: “#crunchies need more women and people of colour.”
Only 11% of Silicon Valley executives and on average around 20% of software developers here are women. On the Forbes list of 100 leading tech investors, only four are women. Silicon Valley firms also have fewer women at the top than large companies in other industries. Only 53% of big tech companies have a woman on their executive management team, compared with 84% for America’s biggest firms of all kinds. The earnings gap between men and women is worse in Silicon Valley, too, where men earn up to 61% more than women, compared to around 48% for the US as a whole.
Whether Silicon Valley’s sexism or under-representation of women is “worse” than the tech industry in the UK or elsewhere is hard to argue, says Judy Wajcman, a sociologist at the London School of Economics whose new book Pressed For Time gives a gender analysis of the tech sector. “It’s shocking in both places,” she says. But it matters to an even greater extent in Silicon Valley because it is the centre of one of the most powerful industries in the world. California’s tech industry sets the cultural “tone” for tech sectors elsewhere and produces the wildly successful products that are used by billions and are reshaping the future.
“You need diverse experiences to make diverse technologies,” says Wajcman. “If the people who are designing our technologies are a bunch of young white guys (because racial diversity is also under-represented) it is a very limited experience base.”
The information technology sector is the future and women, it seems, are being excluded. Apple’s move into health tracking last year provides an example, the giant’s software can track cholesterol levels and heart rate, but not the menstrual cycle. Discussions on the alienation of women in tech have risen to a national level in the US and some tech firms are trying to right the balance. Hillary Clinton, frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination, spoke about the issue at a conference for women in Silicon Valley last month. “We can literally count on one hand the number of women who have actually been able to come here and turn their dreams into billion-dollar businesses,” Clinton said. “We’re going backward in a field that is supposed to be all about moving forward.”
Activist organisations and individuals played a key role in advancing the issue during 2014 to the point where a figure like Clinton could wade in. They have spoken out – often loudly and sometimes aggressively – using the very tools created by the industry they are trying to change. The feminist media platform Model View Culture has been particularly influential. It rails against what it calls “corporate feminism” espoused by Facebook’s chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg in her book Lean In where she argues that, rather than change the status quo, women should take responsibility for their lack of progress and offers pragmatic advice on how to climb the corporate ladder.
Women in the industry now find both approaches helpful. Claire Gunter, a software sales executive, started a Lean In circle in San Francisco, which has since developed into a freestyle forum of peer support for women in tech. She speaks of following and respecting both Sandberg and Model View Culture’s controversial and bitingly critical co-founder and editor Shanley Kane. Simard, of Stanford, is hard-pressed to point to one specific group as most important, but she thinks these groups and their activism have been crucial in increasing debate.
Amelia Greenhall, who previously co-founded Model View Culture and now runs Double Union, a feminist maker/hacker space in San Francisco, sees her role as “expanding the realm of possibility”. She recently attracted the attention of leading US national news outlets by taking to task business school professor Vivek Wadhwa, a go-to expert for the media on women in technology. He was drowning out women with better contributions to make on the issue, she says. Pressure from Greenhall and others seemed last year to lead large tech companies, spearheaded by Google, to publish diversity data, never previously publicly released, along with pledges to do better (Intel has committed $300m to improve workforce diversity). Some released data only for their total workforces, yet some companies broke the figures down by job type. For instance, the proportion of technical roles occupied by women is 15% and 20% for Facebook and Apple respectively, which is pretty typical for the sector.
In April 2014, Tracy Chou, a software engineer at Pinterest, set up a popular online repository for individuals to begin inputting their own data on the number of male and female employees by counting within their companies. Double Union’s members, meanwhile, created a campaign of tweeting tech companies calling on them to make employee demographics public. Importantly, notes Chou, it means there is now a benchmark to talk about the issues in a more meaningful way.
One widely acknowledged reason women fail to flourish in Silicon Valley is its “boys’ club” work hard/play hard culture that is unwelcoming to women. While far from universal, it seems to be the small startup companies that lack the checks and balances of a big company where some of the worst excesses of sexism and harassment have occurred. The founders of those companies – almost all men – typically hire almost exclusively through their personal networks, says Simard.
Those hostile environments mostly occur by accident, says Heidi Roizen, a partner at the investment firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, who also teaches entrepreneurship to engineers at Stanford. At an event on leadership near Google’s headquarters last month, she sketched out the typical origins of a hi-tech startup and how they can exclude women. A few male students who meet studying computer science might decide to start a company. Then, because rent is expensive, they move into an apartment together, coding and living in the same place. And who do they hire? People they know from their classes with whom they feel comfortable. “And all of a sudden you have hired 10 people and they are all males. “That is a hostile work environment for women,” says Roizen.
Doubtless, the problem is made worse by influential figures in Silicon Valley advising entrepreneurs to screen for cultural fit. A powerful venture capitalist, Peter Thiel, advised in his recent how-to guide for tech startups that they have a better chance of success “when everyone shares an understanding of the world”. Sure, notes Roizen – it is easier to hire people you know because there is less friction “[but] it is that friction which is healthy” she said.
Of course, female computer scientists exist, too, and some of them start companies. But they are fewer because there are far fewer women entering computer science degree courses in the first place. Roizen says her course on entrepreneurship for engineers at Stanford rarely gets above 20% women. “It is a pipeline problem and we have to solve it at an education level,” she says.
Yet, notes Simard, for those women to then win venture capital backing they are likely to have to overcome damaging unconscious gender bias, which men and women are both prone to because of our collective gender stereotypes and which sees women judged as less competent technologists and leaders. It leads to us all favouring one group over another even when we are not aware of it and which means women are less likely to be hired or given promotions, prime assignments – or investment cash. “Research shows that women do have to prove themselves, work themselves harder and they are evaluated to a harsher standard,” notes Simard. “Implicit bias is present absolutely and it has been demonstrated across dozens and dozens of studies.”
Roizen is a good example. In 2003, researchers chose a Harvard Business School case study of Roizen and how she was successful because of her outgoing personality and networking abilities. To test workplace perceptions, they presented the case to two groups of students but for one group her name, Heidi, was changed to Howard.
While both groups found them equally competent, Howard came across as the more appealing. Heidi was seen as “selfish” and “not the person you would like to work for”. It is this hidden unlikeability factor, Simard stresses, that means telling women they need to talk about themselves more and claim credit for their work isn’t effective: when women toot their own horns they are not liked.
Startup culture is only one culture in Silicon Valley. And as these companies get bigger the work environments do seem to get less hostile as more formal structures to manage people are introduced. “It is not uncommon when you hit about 100 employees to look to make some changes to your basic culture,” says Telle Whitney, CEO and president of the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology, a Silicon Valley-based non-profit organisation dedicated to recruiting, retaining and advancing women in technology. “The startup culture is actually pretty separate from the culture of large tech companies.”
Life is still far from easy for women in large companies. They are twice as likely to drop out as men in the middle of their career, notes Whitney. The get fed up of being perceived as less technically competent and don’t see their workplaces as true meritocracies, notes a 2009 Anita Borg report, Climbing the Technical Ladder. They become exhausting places for existing women to stay, sums up Greenhall. Growing awareness of these problems means that pro-women organisations in Silicon Valley are growing in stature and number. One of the oldest, the Anita Borg Institute, with an annual budget of about $6m – over 65% of which comes from the industry – works with large tech companies to help them hire more women and add unconscious bias training to recruiting and promotion processes. Its annual Grace Hopper conference attracts 8,000-plus and provides an important recruiting ground for tech companies.
Smaller non-profits such as Women Who Code and Black Girls Code work on trying to bring girls and women into programming. Late last year, in response to comments made by the Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella, encouraging women to “trust the system” rather than ask for a raise (which he was later forced to retract), non-profit Girls in Tech – which connects and supports female entrepreneurs and technologists – launched the “#raisetech” campaign to provide education to women on how to best ask for a raise and get companies to institute structures to help encourage conversations. “[Nadella’s] comments were so out of line, we had to respond,” says Adriana Gascoigne, its CEO.
There are also for-profit companies. Media company Women 2.0 provides tips relevant to female-led startups and holds popular monthly meet-ups. In a restaurant in Silicon Valley a reception for female CEOs selected to participate in Women’s Startup Lab, an accelerator programme to help them navigate a hostile environment, is in full swing. “Our position is, let’s get a jet-pack on you and get you out there,” says founder Ari Horie.
But perhaps the fastest rising organisation is the Ada Initiative, a small feminist non-profit. “We are not about recruiting more women into a broken system. We are about making the system better for women and everyone in it,” says Valerie Aurora, its executive director and co-founder (she is also a co-founder of Double Union). Among its initiatives it runs workshops for men who would like to support women in their workplaces and outside. Others include training to help women overcome feelings of being frauds despite performing well in their fields – the so-called imposter syndrome. And it has developed wording for anti-harassment policies that tech conferences can adopt (many hundreds have done so, including Techcrunch). “At first, people said, ‘You are going to scare off women by suggesting that bad things happen at conferences’,” says Aurora. “It turns out [the policies] make women feel more confident and interested in going to them.”
The Anita Borg Institute plans to expand its programmes to startups to help them hire more women. To achieve culture change, though, may also take external pressure, believes Aurora. “We need more venture capitalists willing to take a stand and say what they need [at these companies] are competent adults who work reasonable hours and don’t harass women.” Wajcman of the LSE stresses better work/life balance policies. This includes not always being available on email and better recognition of vacations and weekends. “What happened to our discussion about more leisure time?” she asks, adding that the provision of child day care onsite would make a huge difference.
Confronting unconscious bias at the team-level is also particularly pressing, says Simard. For example being constantly interrupted in team meetings if you are a woman. And maybe it really is time for men to step up to the plate. Simard notes that giving well-intentioned men tools to help will be crucial. A new area for the Anita Borg Institute will be offering training for men, says Whitney.
Roizen pointed out a few things where men could be more mindful of how their usual way of doing things can be exclusionary. Her suggestions: don’t continue the conversation in the men’s room; don’t create bonding events exclusively around male pursuits; and don’t presume that because women are different they are worse at the job. There is no magic bullet for culture change, says Simard. You have to look at every single point, it can be discouraging and it takes time – a mindset which Silicon Valley is not always used to.
Roizen stressed the importance of talking honestly about what the industry is like for women, which means airing the bad as well as the good (she shared her own experiences of Silicon Valley men behaving inappropriately on her blog last year). “If we don’t share our stories then people can go on and be oblivious to the fact that when you are a woman executive, technologist or entrepreneur you have an extra thing [unwanted attention from men in positions of power] to overcome,” she said.
A pitching expo at the Plug and Play Tech Centre, an incubator in Silicon Valley, was where the co-founder got cat-called. The company said it wasn’t aware of the incident, would be keen to disallow any such behaviour and is looking into adopting an anti-harassment policy.
Sometimes, you just have to celebrate. It is a week to the day from the Crunchies and Women 2.0 is holding a glitzy awards night, its first. On stage, Shaherose Charania, its founder and CEO, welcomes the 400-strong audience of mostly women. As the night unfolds, they honour “founders to watch”, “trailblazers who have set examples” and “game-changing tech talent” from their ranks. They include Adi Tatarko, co-founder of the Houzz home design website worth $2.3bn, Roizen herself, and Megan Smith, the US chief technology officer. “People need to see that there are people that look like them doing this,” Charania says.
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