Brotopia Read online

  Sandberg lived through something of a replay when she published her second book, Option B, written after the tragic death of her husband, Dave Goldberg. In the midst of the deepest despair, Sandberg picked herself up and went back to work in ten days. Some bloggers said it was too soon. She started dating again after about ten months. Again, everyone seemed to have an opinion.

  These writers are all entitled to their reactions (as are the many writers—and readers—who found merit in both books). Work, family, death—all of these arouse strong emotions and go to the very core of who we are as a society. And as a woman, I know how easy it is to get defensive when being judged about career and parenting choices. That said, there is something about the media’s desire to tear down Mayer and Sandberg that suggests something very broken in America. Our culture just does not understand how to deal with extraordinarily successful women. No one expects the media to treat Mayer and Sandberg with kid gloves, but the most vitriolic critiques they received were out of proportion to what these women were communicating. We just don’t do this with men.

  If we feel compelled to tear down the handful of superstar women in tech, who will want to go down that path? Who will want to be the next pregnant CEO? Who will want to share her hard-earned career advice with the rest of us?

  You could argue that Sandberg’s role at Facebook and the platform she has created with Lean In give her greater influence than almost any other woman in our world. When we spoke, she made a passionate case for more women in tech and acknowledged that when it comes to hiring and retaining women, Facebook and the industry have a long way to go. “People in tech are having a lot of impact on our culture,” she pointed out. “The next person in my role at Facebook will likely have a technical background. In addition to that, technical skills are increasingly important for women in any industry. Whether you go into retail or construction or banking or anything, technical skills have become more and more important. And I think will continue to be more important, so I think it really matters that women get technical experience and technical degrees.”

  I asked, why aren’t women advancing faster in Silicon Valley specifically? “Some women are told they can’t. Others are told they shouldn’t. Across the board, women don’t get the support they need,” Sandberg said. “Women are held back by a lot of things—including sexual discrimination and harassment. In addition, a lot of what’s hurting women now are the insidious, constant, smaller things. Every day things happen that can really quickly add up.” Maybe your boss interrupts you or gives credit for your ideas to someone else. It is difficult to complain because often the boss isn’t even aware of the behavior, Sandberg said.

  I’ve met with so many women in Silicon Valley who feel that it’s worse than that. They feel as if they are leaning in with all their might and it’s not working for them. One prominent female executive told me, “No matter how hard you lean in, you’re not going anywhere if the door is nailed shut.”

  So I asked Sandberg if she agrees that some women in the industry may find themselves in especially toxic waters. “I totally agree with that. I always did,” she replied. But waiting for the environment or attitudes to change isn’t an acceptable option for Sandberg. “Women in leadership will help create the environment for more women in leadership,” she said. It may sound like something of a catch-22, but Sandberg doubled down. “Women will create the institutional change we need.”

  I believe this will happen. How quickly depends, in part, on how the stories of women like Sandberg, Mayer, Wojcicki, and others are told and understood by the next generation. There may be cracks in the Silicon Ceiling, but it is far from shattered.

  4

  THE TIPPING POINT: WOMEN ENGINEERS SPEAK OUT

  ON FEBRUARY 19, 2017, a young engineer named Susan Fowler published a scathing blog post about sexual harassment she had experienced while working at Uber. She posted it on her personal blog, but it almost immediately went viral. Social media exploded with rage at the Uber empire, a frequent target of user animosity. The tech press and the mainstream media soon followed. Fowler stayed mostly silent. She didn’t talk to the press until seven months later, when she spoke to the New York Times, and a few days later, sat down with me to give an interview for this book.

  I met twenty-six-year-old Fowler for breakfast at a diner near her home outside San Francisco. She was seven months pregnant with her first child and still trying to come to grips with her new role as the whistle-blower of Brotopia and defender of women in technology. “It’s been really overwhelming,” Fowler told me. “I just kind of let it play out in its own way because I knew I was just showing the tip of the iceberg. There was so much more that was coming.” Fowler joined Uber in November 2015 as a site reliability engineer, or SRE, part of a team that was responsible for keeping the massive app up and running. Fowler did not have the typical Silicon Valley pedigree. The daughter of an evangelical preacher, she is the second-oldest of seven children, born and raised in Yarnell, a small town in rural Arizona. “We were very poor,” Fowler told me. The family lived in the church parsonage and her mother homeschooled the children until Fowler turned twelve. At that point, Fowler said she started working full-time in minimum-wage jobs to support the family. She was a nanny and a stable hand, among other low-wage jobs. She kept reading every night, even designing her own high school curriculum. She thought she could never catch up, but managed to get into Arizona State University on a scholarship, then transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where she studied math and physics. It was in a physics lab that she discovered coding. “They would get data from running these giant experiments and you have to write code to analyze the data and look for new particles. And I loved it. It was so wonderful, straightforward, and logical.” She debated going into academia, but instead decided to try her luck in Silicon Valley.

  Getting a job in technology, as a woman with an unconventional background, wasn’t quite so straightforward. “I got a lot of doubt in all my interviews, like, ‘Oh, you’re not a real computer science student,’” Fowler recalled. “Even now, people will say, ‘Are you a real engineer?’” After she worked at a couple of start-ups, however, a recruiter reached out to her about a job at Uber. She said the company told her the engineering team was 25 percent women. “There weren’t any women in my physics lab, or at the companies I had already worked at, and so I thought that would be amazing.” The only problem is, it wasn’t true. At one point, women accounted for less than 6 percent of her team. And things got weird almost immediately.

  On Fowler’s first official day of work (after a couple of weeks of training), her new manager made a pass at her over the internal company chat system. He was in an open relationship, he told her, and his girlfriend was having an easy time finding new partners but he wasn’t. “He was trying to stay out of trouble at work, he said, but he couldn’t help getting in trouble, because he was looking for women to have sex with,” Fowler wrote. “It was clear that he was trying to get me to have sex with him.”

  “It was just too absurd,” Fowler recalled. “You just don’t proposition your subordinate for sex, like ever, but especially not on their first day on your team.” Fowler said she took screen shots of the messages and reported the manager to the human resources department immediately. To her surprise, she was told that this was her manager’s first offense, so he wouldn’t get more than a warning. Plus, he was a “high performer,” so they didn’t want to punish him for “what was probably just an innocent mistake.”

  Fowler believed she had no choice but to transfer to another department. As she met more women engineers within the company, she realized many had stories similar to her own, some involving the very same manager who had come on to Fowler—meaning her case had most certainly not been his first offense. When she pointed this out to HR, Fowler said, the representative simply denied it. “It was such a blatant lie that there was really nothing I could do,” she wrote. Eventually, the offen
ding manager left the company, though it was unclear why.

  All of this played out, Fowler reported, against a department culture that had, at that time, devolved into a “game-of-thrones political war,” with managers openly fighting and undermining each other, leaving projects abandoned and priorities unclear. “We all lived under fear that our teams would be dissolved, there would be another re-org, and we’d have to start on yet another new project with an impossible deadline,” Fowler wrote. “It was an organization in complete, unrelenting chaos.”

  What happened to Fowler next is not simply offensive but petty and ridiculous for a company that had by then expanded to thousands of employees around the world.

  Hoping to work in a “less chaotic” department than her own, Fowler requested another transfer but was told it would not be granted due to “undocumented performance problems.” That bewildered her, because the performance reviews she had seen had been exemplary and there were other teams that wanted her. Her next review was positive, so again she tried to transfer. At that point, she was told she was still not eligible, because her performance score had been retroactively recalibrated. Fowler says HR explained that she didn’t appear to have an “upward career trajectory” and needed to prove herself as an engineer. This explanation was particularly suspect, given that Fowler was publishing an engineering book, Production-Ready Microservices: Building Standardized Systems Across an Engineering Organization, and had spoken at major tech conferences—quite impressive for a rank-and-file employee. Fowler says she went home and cried. The newly negative review would not only hurt her take-home pay but also disqualify her from continuing in an Uber-sponsored graduate computer science program at Stanford that she had been attending.

  At a later point, Fowler overheard her manager boasting that while other teams were “losing their women engineers left and right,” his team still had some. She implied that he deliberately blocked her transfer out of the department in order to make himself look good. In the meantime, the number of women in Fowler’s part of the organization was dwindling. When she confronted a director at an all-hands meeting about it, “his reply was, in a nutshell, that the women of Uber just needed to step up and be better engineers,” Fowler said.

  The rank sexism wasn’t the company’s only problem. “There was a lot of day drinking and a lot of weird shit. It was usually people that were managers or tech leads doing the inviting. They would be like, ‘Oh, everyone, let’s go get drinks’ or ‘let’s go to a strip club.’” After going out a couple of times, Fowler told me she just kept her head down and coded. “The culture was just so fucked. It just led me to want to be disconnected to the point where I’m just going to get my work done, go home, and not interact with anyone.”

  In perhaps the most ludicrous incident Fowler described, 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. “I replied and said that I was sure Uber SRE could find room in their budget to buy leather jackets for the, what, six women if it could afford to buy them for over a hundred and twenty men,” Fowler wrote. “The director replied back, saying that if we women really wanted equality, then we should realize we were getting equality by not getting the leather jackets.” After all, he continued, it would not be “equal or fair” to give women jackets that cost more than the men’s; therefore the women should look for other jackets at the same bulk-order price.

  Fowler forwarded “this absurd chain of emails to HR,” and a meeting followed. “The HR rep began . . . by asking me if I had noticed that *I* was the common theme in all of the reports I had been making, and that if I had ever considered that I might be the problem,” Fowler wrote. A week later, in a one-on-one meeting, her manager stated that she could easily be fired for making these complaints because California is an “at-will” employment state, meaning employees can be terminated at any time without cause. At that point, Fowler decided to leave—and had an offer within a week.

  What makes Fowler’s rendition of her Uber experience even more compelling is that she is not entirely negative. She closes her post by talking about how proud she is of her team. “We loved our work, we loved the engineering challenges, we loved making this crazy Uber machine work,” she wrote. The reader can’t write her off as a complainer who could never be happy. In the aftermath of the blog post, Fowler claimed that a “smear campaign” had been launched against her that aimed to dig up dirt on her by contacting the people she knew. Uber denied being behind any such campaign.

  Fowler’s post put Uber once again at the epicenter of public backlash. A couple of weeks earlier, a wave of users had deleted the app over perceptions that then CEO Travis Kalanick was aligned with newly elected President Trump. And before that, Kalanick had caught flack for making a joke in response to a question about his own “skyrocketing desirability” in GQ magazine, saying, “Yeah, we call that Boob-er,” referring to “women on demand.” But the worst for the Uber CEO was yet to come.

  Over the next few weeks, my colleagues at Bloomberg released video of Kalanick getting into an unflattering argument with an Uber driver. Recode revealed that Uber’s new head of engineering, Amit Singhal, had left Google after being accused of sexual harassment. A story broke in The Information about several Uber executives, including Kalanick and his then girlfriend, visiting an escort-karaoke bar in Seoul. That evening in 2014, four male executives reportedly picked female escorts out of a lineup. Uber found itself at the center of a firestorm, accused of creating a hard-charging culture of sexism and male entitlement.

  Fowler’s story and the ensuing tsunami of bad press struck a nerve in the Valley. As if on cue, a few weeks later, the Atlantic published a cover story titled “Why Is Silicon Valley So Awful to Women?”

  BREAKING BREAD WITH WOMEN ENGINEERS

  As it happened, the Atlantic revealed its cover story the same evening I had invited a dozen women engineers to my house to discuss this very question. With the Fowler story on everyone’s mind, I knew there would be no lack of opinions.

  The women made small talk in my entryway until Postmates arrived at the door with our dinner on demand. We each filled a plate and squeezed into a circle on my living room floor. The group was diverse in terms of age, sexual identity, race, and career background. In attendance were current and former employees of Uber, Google, Apple, and Facebook as well as various start-ups. Some were graduates of schools such as Stanford and Harvard, others had gone to less elite schools, and at least one had not finished college. Upstairs, my husband had finally managed to soothe our screaming newborn—a distraction that a couple of mothers in the group sympathized with—and the room quieted.

  My first question got straight to the point: “What do you think of Susan Fowler?”

  After a few moments of silence, and a little encouragement from me, the women began to weigh in.

  “It’s frustrating to hear so many people say, ‘Wow, this is so shocking,’” began Tracy Chou, a former Pinterest engineer who had moved on to work on her own start-up. “It’s like, we’ve been telling you this for a long time. And it’s not isolated to Uber. Travis embodies a lot of the things that are easy to hate, so it makes Uber a target, but I don’t think the things that came out of Susan’s post were that unique.”

  Fowler’s story had been pretty horrifying. She had, after all, been propositioned for sex on her first official day at the job and had received no support from the HR department. Yet the group expressed immediate and unanimous agreement with Chou’s assessment. Lydia Fernandez, an Uber software engineer, piped up forcefully from my couch: “The only people I know who were shocked were men.”

  The crowd groaned in agreement. Ana
Medina, an engineer who also worked at Uber, said, “It’s easy to question, do I even belong here? Because so much crap happens day by day.” Medina had worked on the SRE team with Fowler at Uber and backed up the legitimacy of her story.

  Leah McGowen-Hare, an executive at Salesforce, likened the shock she heard from men in response to Susan Fowler’s post to the horror expressed by white liberals after the 2016 U.S. presidential election. “Hearing people’s reaction to Susan and all the men, like, ‘Oh my God, it’s happening!’ was sort of like when Trump won the election and white people were like, ‘Oh my God, racism is still alive.’ Big surprise! Nothing shocks me. I’ve been through it as a woman. I’ve been through it as an African American.”

  If Fowler’s post had contained nothing very surprising, I asked, then why had it gone viral? Chou suggested that Fowler’s story had had such an effect because it was impossible to brush off—not because her claims were so shocking, but because she was the perfect victim. “She is a white woman who . . . has the technical credibility of releasing a book and had all the proper documentation [of her harassment],” Chou said.

  A young Google engineer, Lea Coligado, agreed. “She is in a good position [to defend herself]. If she were a woman of color, it would have been a lot harder for her story to come out. The angry black or angry Hispanic woman trope would have come out.”

  Though they were fully cognizant of Fowler’s various advantages as a poster child, none of the women suggested that Fowler didn’t deserve support or credit for coming forward. As the evening continued, and every one of the twelve women in my living room shared a story, or several, about the abuse and discrimination she had suffered or witnessed, what became clear was that the decision about whether to come foward was usually a very difficult one. While Fowler might have been the perfect victim, most people are not, and the stakes in such a decision are gut wrenchingly high. Is refusing to stay silent about unwanted sexual advances worth risking your reputation, your career advancement, your livelihood? In the harassment stories these women told me, what one woman called the “little things” often felt too small to report, but they happened constantly and added up quickly. The big things were often embarrassing and scary, and people found it hard to come forward when there was little promise of a positive resolution at the end.