I wrote this after going to a book release event for Emily Chang’s Brotopia, a book about sexism in Silicon Valley.
There’s something unusual about this evening’s tech event.
Tonight’s gathering is, to be sure, a classic San Francisco tech event. The audience is mostly professionals in their twenties and thirties, largely white, clearly educated and affluent. As I circulate through the crowd beforehand, everyone I meet works in technology. A few work in tech-related public relations, an oceanically large field in SF. This is clearly the bright young crew that codes the apps and promotes the platforms that shapes our lives.
But the gender balance is atypical. At most SF tech events, it’s usually, oh, about 70 percent men, 30 percent women – often even more skewed toward men. Tonight’s crew is majority women, perhaps 70 percent or so.
Riding the elevator up to the 24th floor, I hear this evening’s star speaker discussing, of all things, nannies. It’s a topic I’ve never once heard men mention in countless SF tech confabs.
That star is Emily Chang, anchor of the daily TV show Bloomberg Technology. She’s here to promote her book, Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys’ Club of Silicon Valley.
She shares the stage in an interview-style conversation with Leah Busque, founder and executive chairwoman of TaskRabbit, and a general partner in venture fund Fuel Capital.
To say that I can gauge how closely an audience listens to a speaker may be exaggerating my powers of observation. But it feels like tonight’s attendees are deeply attached to Chang’s words. That her discussion of sexism in the tech sector resonates as a report of their own experience.
Early on, she references two well-known figures: Susan Fowler, whose 2017 blog post about the bro-sexist culture she encountered as an engineer at Uber helped topple co-founder Travis Kalanick; and Ellen Pao, whose gender discrimination lawsuit against VC firm Kleiner Perkins (though the jury found for Kleiner) spotlighted the challenges of women in tech. Chang doesn’t provide this background, and doesn’t need to – it’s reasonable to assume the audience knows their stories.
Chang tells an anecdote that seems core to the entire book, and to the entire question of women in tech.
She recalls interviewing famed venture investor Michael Moritz, a partner at Sequoia Capital. Sequoia at that point had female investing partners in China and India, but none in the United States. Chang asked him, “What is your responsibility to hire women?”
Moritz blamed the pipeline – the relative lack of young girls pursuing STEM, which results in fewer candidates for tech positions. When Chang pressed him, Moritz said that Sequoia is completely blind to gender, race, and religion but “what we’re not prepared to do is lower our standards.”
This “lower my standards” quote seems to sum up, as Change tells it, the entrenched male-dominated tech leadership structure.
“As soon as he said that, it hit me like a ton of bricks,” she tells the audience. “Everywhere I went for the next few months, people wanted to talk about that.”
Some people didn’t see what was wrong about this, she says, while others were horrified and couldn’t believe his comments. “It’s a topic that inspires such a visceral debate…everyone thinks they know what the problem is, like, maybe women just don’t want these jobs, maybe it is a pipeline problem.”
However, pointing to the pipeline in isolation ignores longstanding cultural biases.
Chang speaks of a double standard: “A man who’s cautious, that’s a positive; a woman who’s cautious, ‘Oh, she doesn’t have what it takes.’”
This double standard far outstrips any STEM pipeline issues, playing a defining role in who gets funded. “When investors are looking at funding entrepreneurs, if it’s a male entrepreneur, they’re simply looking at the idea – can this person execute?’” In contrast, “If it’s a woman they’re like, ‘Can she do it? Is she going to have kids?’...literally every woman entrepreneur has been asked about their kids...Sometimes investors have come to believe that women aren’t willing to make the sacrifices that investors believe you need to make.”
The disparity in venture funding is well documented. According to Pitchbook, all-women teams received a tiny 2.2 percent of the $85 billion total 2017 investment by VC firms, while all-male firms hauled in 79 percent.
Providing an example of the cultural bias that creates this disparity, Chang quotes Lynn Jurich, co-founder and CEO of Sunrun.
“She took her company public three weeks after having her first child, and she brought her baby on the roadshow. As she’s walking into a roadshow meeting, one of the investors was like, ‘Who are you?’ And she was like, ‘I’m the CEO.’”
Women in Tech, Tech in Transition
I wrote this after going to a book release event for Emily Chang’s Brotopia, a book about sexism in Silicon Valley.
There’s something unusual about this evening’s tech event.
Tonight’s gathering is, to be sure, a classic San Francisco tech event. The audience is mostly professionals in their twenties and thirties, largely white, clearly educated and affluent. As I circulate through the crowd beforehand, everyone I meet works in technology. A few work in tech-related public relations, an oceanically large field in SF. This is clearly the bright young crew that codes the apps and promotes the platforms that shapes our lives.
But the gender balance is atypical. At most SF tech events, it’s usually, oh, about 70 percent men, 30 percent women – often even more skewed toward men. Tonight’s crew is majority women, perhaps 70 percent or so.
Riding the elevator up to the 24th floor, I hear this evening’s star speaker discussing, of all things, nannies. It’s a topic I’ve never once heard men mention in countless SF tech confabs.
That star is Emily Chang, anchor of the daily TV show Bloomberg Technology. She’s here to promote her book, Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys’ Club of Silicon Valley.
She shares the stage in an interview-style conversation with Leah Busque, founder and executive chairwoman of TaskRabbit, and a general partner in venture fund Fuel Capital.
To say that I can gauge how closely an audience listens to a speaker may be exaggerating my powers of observation. But it feels like tonight’s attendees are deeply attached to Chang’s words. That her discussion of sexism in the tech sector resonates as a report of their own experience.
Early on, she references two well-known figures: Susan Fowler, whose 2017 blog post about the bro-sexist culture she encountered as an engineer at Uber helped topple co-founder Travis Kalanick; and Ellen Pao, whose gender discrimination lawsuit against VC firm Kleiner Perkins (though the jury found for Kleiner) spotlighted the challenges of women in tech. Chang doesn’t provide this background, and doesn’t need to – it’s reasonable to assume the audience knows their stories.
Chang tells an anecdote that seems core to the entire book, and to the entire question of women in tech.
She recalls interviewing famed venture investor Michael Moritz, a partner at Sequoia Capital. Sequoia at that point had female investing partners in China and India, but none in the United States. Chang asked him, “What is your responsibility to hire women?”
Moritz blamed the pipeline – the relative lack of young girls pursuing STEM, which results in fewer candidates for tech positions. When Chang pressed him, Moritz said that Sequoia is completely blind to gender, race, and religion but “what we’re not prepared to do is lower our standards.”
This “lower my standards” quote seems to sum up, as Change tells it, the entrenched male-dominated tech leadership structure.
“As soon as he said that, it hit me like a ton of bricks,” she tells the audience. “Everywhere I went for the next few months, people wanted to talk about that.”
Some people didn’t see what was wrong about this, she says, while others were horrified and couldn’t believe his comments. “It’s a topic that inspires such a visceral debate…everyone thinks they know what the problem is, like, maybe women just don’t want these jobs, maybe it is a pipeline problem.”
However, pointing to the pipeline in isolation ignores longstanding cultural biases.
Chang speaks of a double standard: “A man who’s cautious, that’s a positive; a woman who’s cautious, ‘Oh, she doesn’t have what it takes.’”
This double standard far outstrips any STEM pipeline issues, playing a defining role in who gets funded. “When investors are looking at funding entrepreneurs, if it’s a male entrepreneur, they’re simply looking at the idea – can this person execute?’” In contrast, “If it’s a woman they’re like, ‘Can she do it? Is she going to have kids?’...literally every woman entrepreneur has been asked about their kids...Sometimes investors have come to believe that women aren’t willing to make the sacrifices that investors believe you need to make.”
The disparity in venture funding is well documented. According to Pitchbook, all-women teams received a tiny 2.2 percent of the $85 billion total 2017 investment by VC firms, while all-male firms hauled in 79 percent.
Providing an example of the cultural bias that creates this disparity, Chang quotes Lynn Jurich, co-founder and CEO of Sunrun.
“She took her company public three weeks after having her first child, and she brought her baby on the roadshow. As she’s walking into a roadshow meeting, one of the investors was like, ‘Who are you?’ And she was like, ‘I’m the CEO.’”
