Silicon Valley: The postgender meritocratic paradise that isn't

Silicon Valley once represented an exciting opportunity for freethinkers and entrepreneurs to break down the old gender and racial barriers that appeared immovable in traditional business and finance. Up until the 1960’s, the field of computer programming had been predominately female. In fact, the earliest “computers” were not machines at all, but rather women whose research and calculations were indispensable to many of the most significant scientific discoveries of the eighteenth century. Ada Lovelace, daughter of Lord and Lady Byron, holds the distinction of being the world’s first computer programmer, and her writings influenced the creation of the first electronic computer decades later.

However, if anything, the tech boom has created new gender gaps. Today, men have largely appropriated the modern tech industry and, to that extent, the future.  Last December, New York Times correspondent Jodi Kantor traced the careers of the men and women of the 1994 Stanford class. Stanford University is generally considered to be the most powerful and influential Silicon Valley incubator, and the class of 1994 graduated at the birth of the Internet age.

Interviewee Gina Bianchini, former-CEO of Ning (an online social network platform), spoke to Kantor about how her generation perceived the Internet as “the great equalizer.” Nevertheless, as Kamy Wicoff, another Stanford alum and founder of www.shewrites.com, notes:

We were sitting on an oil boom, and the fact is that the women played a support role instead of walking away with billion-dollar businesses.

The lack of diversity in Silicon Valley isn’t limited to its upper echelon, or even to just its technical positions. In June 2014, Facebook disclosed the ethnic and gender makeup of its employees: Women occupy only 15 percent of Facebook’s technical positions, 23 percent of senior management, and 47 percent of the non-technical positions. Similarly, only 6 percent of Facebook’s technical employees, and 13 percent of their non-technical employees, are both non-white and non-Asian. These numbers are generally consistent with similar disclosures by Yahoo!, Google, and LinkedIn.

So what happened? One factor may be that the self-perpetuating association between modern technology and the male “nerd” has given rise to discrimination. UC Hastings released a report in January 2015 that found that 100 percent of women of color in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and math) have experienced gender bias. Details about the report were summarized on the blog last week.

Men were – and continue to be – hired over women, and whites over non-whites, in the amorphous name of “culture fit.” Often, these hiring biases were simply shrugged off. In 2012, a co-founder and former-CTO of PayPal provided some insight into this mentality to the 2012 Stanford Startup class. He said:

The truth is that PayPal had trouble hiring women because PayPal was just a bunch of nerds! They never talked to women. So how were they supposed to interact with and hire them?

Sadly, but perhaps unsurprisingly, a recent National Student Clearinghouse report reveals that the proportion of women pursuing degrees in STEM fields has actually declined in the past ten years (Discussed recently here). And this is despite the increased lip service paid to encouraging young women into STEM fields, as well as the uptick in women studying biology or medicine. Whereas women received 23 percent of computer science bachelor’s degrees in 2004, they received only 18 percent in 2014. In addition, women with STEM jobs are dropping out earlier in their careers, despite earning 33 percent more than women in non-STEM jobs, and “enjoying” a smaller income gap relative to their male colleagues. This is attributed to the pressures of traditional gender roles and stigmas, as was as the lack of adequate family initiatives in many Silicon Valley companies. They perceive an opportunity to gain a place in their company’s leadership, but don’t want to sacrifice everything to get it.

So what can we do about this? Following Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s demoralizing “good karma”-comments at the 2014 Grace Hopper Celebration, Salon.com’s Sarah Gray noted that:

A lot of advice is thrown at women to be considered equals in the workplace — lean in, speak up, be confident, demand raises and promotions, don’t dress “slutty” — which in itself is problematic because it places the onus on women to correct the culturally entrenched male dominance in workplaces.

It’s clear that more needs to be done on the part of tech companies to bridge the gender gap in Silicon Valley. But -- without letting institutions off the hook -- it is also clear that companies often need to be compelled to make significant changes to their organizational cultures. With the declining number of women studying STEM fields, and the “exodus” of female thirty-somethings from STEM careers, it’s uncertain where this pressure is going to come from in the future.

Increasingly, exasperated female entrepreneurs and startup-founders in Silicon Valley have turned to women-only venture funds, or have started so-called “gender-gated funds.” This type of self-segregation has helped many women raise seed money outside of the older capital venture fund community, but has done less to facilitate larger, structural changes in the industry that challenge institutionalized discrimination.