Brotopia Read online

  When it comes to overt sexism, sexual harassment, and even sexual assault, the last few years have offered a stunning demonstration of men abusing their power to take advantage of women—and women coming forward to share their stories. Outside Silicon Valley, allegations of sexual improprieties imploded the careers of Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, comedians Bill Cosby and Louis C.K., television anchors Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose, and Bill O’Reilly, and media mogul Roger Ailes. Politicians were dogged by allegations as well, including Congressman John Conyers, Senator Al Franken, and Senate candidate Roy Moore, who was accused of molesting teenage girls. During the 2016 presidential election, an Access Hollywood tape revealed Donald Trump bragging about grabbing women “by the pussy.” Although Trump won the election, many women, it seems, became furious and emboldened, and 2017 turned into a watershed year, with more women coming forward daily, shining a spotlight on men who had grossly overstepped.

  In Silicon Valley, the scandals were just as serious. Dozens of women made claims of unwanted advances by high-profile men in technology, who finally had to face the consequences of their actions. Venture capitalists Justin Caldbeck, Dave McClure, and Steve Jurvetson all exited their own funds amid allegations of sexual assault, harassment, or misconduct. Many of their accusers—and victims—were female entrepreneurs. I reported the accounts of multiple women who accused Shervin Pishevar—a prominent tech investor and major Democratic party donor—of sexual harassment and assault. The head of Amazon Studios, Roy Price, resigned after being accused of sexually harassing a producer and it was revealed that two top Google executives, Andy Rubin and Amit Singhal, left the company due to inappropriate behavior. Setting all this in motion was a young engineer at Uber, Susan Fowler, who accused her manager of propositioning her for sex. Her memo, remarkably, led to a companywide investigation of Uber’s bro culture that revealed forty-seven cases of sexual harassment, resulting in the departure of twenty employees. In a dramatic climax, Uber’s investors forced out CEO Travis Kalanick.

  Many women who have been victimized have been silenced by a long tradition of settlements and nondisparagement agreements, especially in the tech industry. A few have chosen to go public with their claims, filing sexual harassment suits with varying outcomes. Then, in 2017, as reports of unwanted advances piled up, women across industries and backgrounds banded together on social media to speak up in a #MeToo campaign. In this moving outpouring, women—including prominent women in technology—shared personal stories of sexual harassment and assault. “I know that so many women in the workforce—and for me, especially in the early years—deal with unwanted advances and harassment the best we can,” Sheryl Sandberg posted on Facebook. “We know that at its core this is about power no one should have over anyone.”

  While such cases make headlines, 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 that 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, now face gender discrimination lawsuits, some with class action status, representing other female employees.

  NAVIGATING BROTOPIA

  In 2015, I interviewed billionaire venture capitalist Chris Sacca, who boasted to me about hot tub parties he holds at his home near Lake Tahoe, California, to brainstorm and bond with up-and-coming entrepreneurs. He noted how impressed he was by then Uber CEO Travis Kalanick’s endurance. “Travis can spend eight to ten hours in a hot tub. I’ve never seen a human with that kind of staying power,” Sacca said. “Normal people can’t make it that long. He can.”

  These hot tub sessions, he implied, became something of a test to determine whether the entrepreneurs he might fund could really “hang.” What he did not seem to grasp—perhaps because he suffers from the same blind spot as so many other men in the industry—was any awareness that the demographic of people who might be comfortable sharing a hot tub with a potential investor might be rather narrow.

  Katrina Lake, the CEO of Stitch Fix, heard Sacca extol his hot tub test at a conference. “As a woman, I’m sitting there thinking, ‘I don’t want to go all the way up to Tahoe and sit with this guy in a hot tub.’ At that point, I’m like 100 percent not going to get invested in by Chris Sacca,” Lake concluded. “Was he discriminating against me? No. But at the same time, I feel I don’t have all the options available to me because of the way deals are done in Silicon Valley. How many women want to get in a bikini and drink beers while pitching a business?”

  Like those hot tub parties, much of the troubling behavior that marginalizes or excludes women happens outside the office, including lavish, drug-fueled, sex-heavy parties hosted by some of Silicon Valley’s most powerful men, who cast the odds in their favor by inviting twice as many women. The attendees speak of overturning traditions like marriage and monogamy and claim to be reinventing social mores, just as they are reinventing the future within the companies they found. “We don’t discuss your religion, and under that principle what you do in your sex life becomes very different than what you do at work,” one former Google executive told me, then added forebodingly, “It becomes a very slippery slope, and we are desensitized to it. Morality has largely disappeared.”

  Judging people for their personal sex lives is not my intent. However, it is clear that this freewheeling, backslapping behavior is more difficult for women in the tech industry to navigate than it is for these very powerful and very rich men.

  VCs may mingle with entrepreneurs they could go on to fund. CEOs may cross paths with current or potential employees. Yet while men who attend can fully enjoy the benefits of doing business while socializing, women risk being objectified if they participate and shut out if they don’t. “They are pooling together their influence and power to coerce women,” one female entrepreneur told me. “It’s a game, and if you are unwilling to play the game, it can create roadblocks to getting things done.”

  THE FUTURE WE (DON’T) DESERVE

  Ten years ago, the techies who became suddenly and extravagantly wealthy were often self-conscious about flaunting their riches. It used to be that it wasn’t cool, after your IPO, to pull up to the office in a Ferrari. But staying humble and empathic to those not in your rarefied circle or zip code becomes increasingly difficult over time. It is so much easier to tell yourself that you’ve worked harder than others—or were simply smarter than they—and that you therefore deserve all the prizes.

  “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 Valley’s moral exceptionalists often use their great success to justify the fact that women have largely been excluded. Although this book focuses mainly on women, they’re not the only ones left out. Racism in tech deserves an entire book of its own. Ageism in this field is underreported, and there are unique challenges facing the LGBTQ community as well. To some in the industry, none of that matters. The right people—the smart, visionary ones—are clearly at the top of the food chain; just look at the success they’ve had, they reason. By lionizing the idea of meritocracy, Silicon Valley can deny that the lack of diversity is a problem. But this argument ignores the privilege at play for the winners and the discrimination and larger systemic factors working against everyone else. Success, by itself, is no excuse for the abuse or exclusion of large parts of the population.

  When I started writing this book, several people suggested Silicon Valley couldn’t p
ossibly harbor more gender inequity than Wall Street. When it comes to the numbers, those people are simply wrong. Women account for almost half of employees at the top U.S. banks (though banks still have work to do when it comes to promoting women into leadership positions). One Goldman Sachs banker turned entrepreneur, Nicole Farb, told me she felt far more isolated as a woman trying to raise funds in Silicon Valley than she ever did in finance. “I think the investment banks are more forward thinking than the venture funds, and that’s sad,” Farb told me. She said several venture investors asked with zero hesitation if she planned to have more kids and if she thought she could hire men. “These are the questions? I bet no guy gets asked, are you going to have kids? No guy!”

  Women are behind in other fields too, in areas as disparate as stand-up comedy, film direction, music composition, and aviation. But it is hard to argue that any of these are having a greater influence on our world than technology. The machines and devices and the programs that run on them have become a ubiquitous part of our daily lives. All that world-bending technology has been created largely by men. This technology is disrupting businesses from agriculture to manufacturing, finance, and real estate. And it’s not slowing down. We face a near-term future of autonomous cars, augmented reality, and artificial intelligence, and yet we are at risk of embedding gender bias into all of these new algorithms. “It’s bad for shareholder value,” Megan Smith, who has worked as a Google VP and chief technology officer of the United States, told me. “We want the genetic flourishing of all humanity . . . in on making these products, especially as we move to AI and data sciences.” If robots are going to run the world, or at the very least play a hugely critical role in our future, men shouldn’t be programming them alone. “We have a long way to go and we recognize it,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told me as his company pushes into a future of machine learning and mixed reality. “This conversation is . . . I believe the best thing that can happen in this industry.” The scarcity of women in an industry that is so forcefully reshaping our culture simply cannot be allowed to stand.

  And it needn’t. The impact of technology is actually just beginning. Women can still play their rightful role, if we break the cycle. That begins by acknowledging that the environment in the tech industry has become toxic for women. Like smog, that toxicity is amorphous and its sources are hard to discern. And yet some facts are clear: 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. That is a staggering inequity, one whose causes and manifestations this book aspires to dissect and expose, in the hope of helping to foster change. After all, there’s still time: the technology revolution hasn’t yet produced its best results. Once Silicon Valley becomes more inclusive, we may all receive, in the words of Marissa Mayer, the “technological future for our world that we really deserve.”

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  FROM NERD TO BRO: HOW TECH BYPASSED WOMEN

  TELLE WHITNEY STARTED COLLEGE—in 1973, at the University of Utah—without knowing what she wanted to be when she grew up. She started studying politics and theater but was so disengaged she nearly dropped out. “My stepmother, who was not my favorite person, had told me I should take this test, and I had really been avoiding it,” Whitney says, referring to an interest inventory exam that compared the test taker’s proclivities with those of workers in various fields. Frustrated, Whitney finally capitulated and took the test. To her surprise, the results suggested she might enjoy computers.

  Luckily, the University of Utah was one of the first institutions connected to ARPANET, the first version of the internet, and had a decent computer science department. Despite the physical tedium of coding at the time—it involved punching one line of code on computer cards, then running the stack of cards through a master machine—Whitney fell in love with computers. There was only one problem: she had almost no women classmates, and the labs were populated by a most peculiar type of man.

  “They were super awkward,” Whitney recalls. “The men around me were not used to being around women.” Anytime she was nearby, Whitney says her male classmates became visibly uncomfortable, fidgeting and avoiding eye contact. If one of them tried to start a conversation, even about the weather, he often became so nervous he would abruptly stop speaking, midsentence.

  This classroom atmosphere wasn’t hostile, exactly, just weird, but it did leave Whitney feeling isolated. When she went on to get her PhD at the California Institute of Technology, she says even the male faculty struggled to interact with her. On the one hand, they seemed to take pride in having a rare female student; on the other, they didn’t know how to relate to her professionally. Often, Whitney couldn’t tell if her professors were trying to flirt with her or just didn’t know how to talk to women. “I felt the undue attention was directly correlated to the clothes I was wearing,” Whitney recalls, so she swore off dresses and instead attended class in baggy T-shirts that concealed her figure.

  Whitney remembers one particularly brilliant coder who would only take on tasks where he literally didn’t have to talk to other people. “He could sit in a room and code, but he’d always have to work with someone else who was his front person. He just had an inability to interact socially,” Whitney says. “They were the classic coders, awkward around people, work all night.”

  What Whitney couldn’t have known, back then, is that she was experiencing one of the big reasons women have found it so hard to get a foothold in tech: since the mid-1960s, the industry had been intentionally selecting for the exact traits she found so pervasive—and problematic—in her male peers.

  FROM PIONEERS TO OUTSIDERS

  By the time Whitney entered the world of computer science, our cultural stereotype of how a computer genius looks and acts had already been established. But in tech’s earliest days, programmers looked a lot different. In fact, they looked like women. In his history of the internet, The Innovators, Walter Isaacson points out that while men focused on building computer hardware in the industry’s early days, it was women who pioneered the equally important task of developing software—that is, telling the machines what to do.

  One pioneer was Grace Hopper, a mathematics PhD and rear admiral in the U.S. Navy, who in 1944 programmed the Mark I, a giant computer at Harvard University. During World War II, the Mark I helped design the atomic bombs America would drop the following year. Hopper had an uncanny ability to translate problems into mathematical equations, then communicate them to machines in a language they could process. She also took a collaborative approach to coding, sending versions to others to ask for help with improvements. Hopper invented the concept of what’s called a compiler, which would create a process for translating source code into a language that many different machines could understand, helped develop the computing language COBOL, and advanced the idea that machines should be able to work well together.

  The U.S. Army requisitioned its first computer during the war as well, and women were the first to program it. The ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) needed to “learn” to calculate the trajectory of weapons used by soldiers in the field. Six women were selected from groups of women who were already calculating trajectories manually. Back then, while women were not encouraged to become engineers, it was not so uncommon for educated women to study math. But when the ENIAC was introduced in the press in 1946, these six critical women were not mentioned or photographed. (If you saw the movie Hidden Figures, you get the idea.) In 1962, three black women working as NASA mathematicians helped calculate the flight paths that put John Glenn into orbit. A woman, Margaret Hamilton, also headed up the team that wrote the code that plotted Apollo 11’s path to the moon.

  At the time, the term “programmer” had the negative connotation of referring to women’s work. That’s because computers still involved a lot of manual, mechanical labor that was less like doing higher mathematics than like running a telephone sw
itchboard. Computers were also associated with typing, a skill mostly acquired by secretaries, almost all of whom were then female.

  By the late 1960s, however, the computer industry was growing and becoming more lucrative—so much so that Cosmopolitan’s editor in chief, Helen Gurley Brown, decided to alert her readers to the healthy, nonsecretarial salaries being offered. A 1967 article called “The Computer Girls” let it be known that “a girl ‘senior systems analyst’ gets $20,000—and up!”—equivalent to making roughly $150,000 a year today. The photo of a real-life IBM systems engineer, Ann Richardson, appeared alongside the piece. Sporting a dress, pearly earrings, and a short bouffant, she smiled broadly as she pointed to a computer screen.

  One woman quoted explained that she thought she would just be pressing buttons all day but instead discovered that “I figure out how the computer can solve a problem and then instruct the machine to do it.” 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.”