Technically Wrong

by Sara Wachter-Boettcher

  SLOW DOWN AND FIX STUFF

  The platforms in this chapter have much in common: they rose to power during the early 2000s, and built unique models of social connection. They also share an abdication of responsibility—a collective shrug of the shoulders at the harm they have caused, and an unwillingness to take responsibility for preventing it in the future.

  That worldview simply doesn’t match the effect their platforms have on users—and, because of those platforms’ reach, on the world at large. According to Caterina Fake, the cofounder of photo-sharing site Flickr and recommendation product Hunch, “A lot of people, when they build software, believe that they have written the code and then are done.” But, she told the podcast Note to Self, that’s a delusion. “That is where the problems begin, because that is the starting point. Without all the work that goes into creating a civilized society online, it devolves.” 52 Fake suggests that the tech industry instead needs to stop prioritizing programming over every other skill. Rather than relegate people with editorial and ethical judgment to the basement (which is literally where Facebook housed its curators), it needs a “conscious approach,” where ethics, media literacy, and historical context are taken into account.

  That’s the problem with the platforms we rely on today. It’s not just that these tech companies lack diverse staffs (though they certainly do). It’s that the founders believe so deeply in their own vision—and have been rewarded for it for so long—that they don’t realize how narrow that vision is, and how many humans it could harm. They don’t realize they need people around them with different perspectives, because they’ve never considered the limitations of their own perspectives in the first place. After all, in a world where machines can fix everything, it doesn’t matter what you break. If you’re blind to the consequences, good intentions seem good enough. And the rest of us pay the price.

  Chapter 9

  Meritocracy Now, Meritocracy Forever

  Biased algorithms. Alienating online forms. Harassment-friendly platforms. All kinds of problems plague digital products, from tiny design details to massively flawed features. But they share a common foundation: a tech culture that’s built on white, male values—while insisting it’s brilliant enough to serve all of us.

  Or, as they call it in Silicon Valley, “meritocracy.”

  It’s a term you’ll hear constantly in tech, whether in a Hacker News forum or on Twitter or in line for coffee in San Francisco. The argument is simple: the tech industry is based purely on merit, and the people who are at the top got there because they were smarter, more innovative, and more ambitious than everyone else. If a company doesn’t employ many women or people of color—well, it’s just because no good ones applied. After all, the story goes, “Silicon Valley is swimming in money” 1—so, clearly nothing’s wrong (never mind that by these criteria alone, you can justify everything from the heroin trade to chattel slavery).

  The funny thing about meritocracy is that the concept comes not from any coherent political ideology or sociological research. It comes from satire. In 1958, sociologist Michael Young wrote a book lampooning the then-stratified British education system. In it, he depicts a dystopian future where IQ testing defines citizens’ educational options and, eventually, their entire lives—dividing the country into an elite ruling class of “merited” people, and an underclass of those without merit. The public loved the word, but lost the point. Almost immediately, the term “meritocracy” was cropping up in a positive light—particularly in the United States (we’ve never been great at detecting British sarcasm).

  Young didn’t take kindly to the public’s positive adoption of his word. “I have been sadly disappointed by my 1958 book,” he wrote in the Guardian in 2001, shortly before he died. “The book was a satire meant to be a warning (which needless to say has not been heeded).” 2

  If he was frustrated then, he must be rolling in his grave now. Venture capitalists routinely fund startups run by white guys because they share the same background as a past success—not because they have more merit. According to a 2013 Reuters analysis, of eighty-eight tech companies that received “Series A” funding from one of the five top Silicon Valley venture firms between the start of 2011 and June of 2013, seventy of them—80 percent—had founders from what Reuters dubbed the “traditional Silicon Valley cohort”: people who’d already started a successful company in the past; who worked in the industry already, either in a senior role at a large tech company or at a well-connected smaller one; or who attended one of three elite colleges: MIT, Stanford, or Harvard.

  Startup success, Reuters writer Sarah McBride concluded, wasn’t actually much different from success in other elite professions. “A prestigious degree, a proven track record and personal connections to power-brokers are at least as important as a great idea,” she wrote. “Scrappy unknowns with a suitcase and a dream are the exceptions, not the rule.” 3 As Sharon Vosmek, CEO of the venture accelerator Astia, put it, “They call it pattern recognition, but in other industries they call it profiling or stereotyping.” 4 Meanwhile, women hardly get funded at all: only 10 percent of the 187 Silicon Valley startups that received Series A funding in 2016 were woman-led, up a meager 2 percent from the year before.5

  Yet much of the tech industry still clings to meritocracy like a tattered baby blanket. Sequoia Capital partner Greg McAdoo insisted, “This business is a meritocracy by and large.” 6 David Sacks, an early executive at PayPal, claimed that “if meritocracy exists anywhere on earth, it is in Silicon Valley.” 7 Until 2014, code-hosting platform GitHub even put a rug emblazoned with “United Meritocracy of GitHub” in the center of its Oval Office–replica waiting room.8 In the fall of 2016, the Atlantic sent out its annual “pulse of the technology industry” survey to influential executives, founders, and thinkers—and found that “men were three times as likely as women to say Silicon Valley is a meritocracy.” 9

  It’s not just tech that wants desperately to believe in a meritocracy, of course. American culture has always promulgated the myth of the self-made man—the Horatio Alger character who pulls himself up by his bootstraps. But the meritocracy myth is particularly pernicious in tech, because it encourages the belief that the industry doesn’t need to listen to outside voices—because the smartest people are always already in the room. This presumption quickly breeds a sort of techno-paternalism: when a group of mostly white guys from mostly the same places believes it deserves to be at the top, it’s also quick to assume that it has all the perspective it needs in order to make decisions for everyone else.

  Tied up in this meritocracy myth is also the assumption that technical skills are the most difficult to learn—and that if people study something else, it’s because they couldn’t hack programming. As a result, the system prizes technical abilities—and systematically devalues the people who bring the very skills to the table that could strengthen products, both ethically and commercially: people with the humanities and social science training needed to consider historical and cultural context, identify unconscious bias, and be more empathetic to the needs of users.

  We need that kind of perspective now more than ever. Tech has become both a driving force in the economy and a mediator of almost every experience you can imagine. And, more and more, those experiences aren’t driven solely by human choices, but by decisions made by machines. This means the biases and blind spots that tech perpetuates aren’t just worming their way into individual hearts and minds, but literally becoming embedded in infrastructures that humans can’t easily see, much less critically assess or fix. Because, as we saw in Chapter 7, once an algorithm learns that women are homemakers, or that black people are criminals, the bias sticks around—long after we realize it’s there.

  So let’s look more closely at how clinging to meritocracy myths can turn a tech company toxic, why doing so keeps the industry from becoming more representative, and what happens when an organization decides to do things differently.

  THE MERITOCRACY MELTDOWN<
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  On a fall day in 2015, Susan Fowler showed up for her first day of work as a site reliability engineer at Uber. She was thrilled: her department was new, her coworkers were smart, and she was told she could join any project she wanted. She spent a couple weeks in training, and then joined an engineering team that focused on her area of expertise.

  Her first day on the team, everything changed: her direct manager propositioned her for sex over chat. She reported the incident to human resources immediately, with screenshots of the conversation.

  Then things got worse. HR reps told her that her manager, a “top performer,” had never been accused before, so they weren’t comfortable punishing him with anything more than a warning. She could either stay on his team—the team where her expertise was most valuable—or find a new one in the organization to switch to. But if she stayed, they warned, her manager would probably give her a bad review, and there was nothing they could do about it. Upper management didn’t help: they told her they didn’t want to ruin his career.

  Fowler felt she had no choice. She found another team. Pretty soon, she also found other women engineers who told her they’d been harassed by the same manager and been told the same story: that he was a high performer, that it was his first time being accused, and that they would talk to him. Meeting after meeting with HR and management went nowhere.

  For the next year, Fowler was in hell: she was subjected to sexist comments; threatened that she should not communicate with other women staff members about her experiences; and told that, despite her stellar performance reviews, she had “undocumented performance problems” that prevented her from changing teams. By the end of 2016, she’d had enough. She quit, leaving for the online payment company Stripe instead.

  One Sunday the following February, she decided to tell her story. She published a painstakingly detailed, 3,000-word post to her personal blog outlining precisely what had happened.10 The internet went wild. That same day, CEO Travis Kalanick released a statement calling Fowler’s experience “abhorrent and against everything Uber stands for and believes in,” 11 and claiming this was the first he’d heard of the problem. By Monday, he’d hired former attorney general Eric Holder’s law firm to investigate sexual harassment at the company, and he said that investor Arianna Huffington and others would be reviewing findings shortly.12 Within days, two more stories of sexual harassment and humiliation at Uber had been published, and countless others confirmed that the company culture was as they described it: aggressive, degrading, and chaotic. In the middle of the mess, a new hire—Amit Singhal, Uber’s vice president of engineering—resigned, after reports surfaced that he’d been pushed out of Google a year before because of sexual harassment allegations.13

  It wasn’t the first PR disaster, or the last, to send the ride-hailing company into a tailspin in the first months of 2017. Just weeks earlier, Bloomberg had published a feature story on Uber drivers who couldn’t afford housing and spent most nights sleeping in their cars.14 In late January, Kalanick had gotten heat for joining President Trump’s advisory council. Then, the company sent cars to JFK airport, where NYC taxi drivers were boycotting in protest of Trump’s executive order barring legal immigrants of seven countries from entering the United States. Critics saw the move as profiteering, and started a campaign: #deleteuber.15 Within days, more than 200,000 people had done just that.16 Soon after, Kalanick resigned from Trump’s council.

  Then, just nine days after Fowler’s story was published, a leaked dashboard video of Kalanick arguing with an Uber driver went viral. In the video, Kalanick gets in the car with two women and makes small talk. One mentions that she’s heard it’s been a hard year at Uber. “I make sure every year is a hard year,” he tells her. “That’s kind of how I roll.” Before leaving, he mentions to the driver that changes to the “black car” system are coming. The driver says he knows and is concerned that Uber is dropping rates for drivers. Pretty soon, Kalanick is screaming at the man. “Bullshit! Bullshit!” he yells. “You know what, some people don’t like to take responsibility for their own shit. They blame everything in their life on somebody else.” 17 It wasn’t a good look.

  Kalanick’s public apology was swift. The very next day, he said he was “ashamed” of his behavior. “I must fundamentally change as a leader and grow up,” he wrote.18

  This wasn’t a one-off event for Kalanick, but rather par for the awful course. He had once told GQ that Uber’s success got him women on demand, quipping, “We call that Boob-er.” 19 When a woman reported being strangled by her driver, Kalanick blamed the media for making Uber “somehow liable for these incidents that aren’t even real in the first place.” 20

  So, what allows a forty-year-old man to avoid “growing up” for so long, even while commanding a company that was, as of this writing, last valuated at $68 billion? It’s our friend the “meritocracy,” of course.

  At Uber, meritocracy isn’t just an informal belief, but is actually enshrined in its fourteen core values—standards the company expects everyone on staff to live by: “meritocracy and toe-stepping,” it reads, alongside such visionary statements as “always be hustlin’” and “superpumped.” 21 (Don’t worry, no one really knows what they mean.)

  The problem is that Uber’s idea of meritocracy—a workplace where the best idea wins, and people are encouraged to clamber over one another to have their name on it—tends to fall back on a really narrow concept of “best.” Take the harassment charges levied by “Amy,” a self-proclaimed “Uber survivor” who published her experiences in an anonymous post on Medium just after Fowler went public (and whose story Uber said would be forwarded to Holder’s investigation team as well). Among her list of harrowing events—which included high-ranking men talking about her ass and colleagues nicknaming an Asian team member “slanty-eyed Joe”—was this gem: A senior male colleague proposed an idea to block a driver’s payment if a customer complained. “I told them that it was unethical to block a driver’s payments without researching the complaint to make sure it was the driver’s fault,” she wrote, noting that many drivers live in countries where they do not own their cars and hand over their wages to another party. Blocking payments could leave them without income. “There is no place for ethics in this business sweetheart. We are not a charity,” she recalls the senior manager responding. When she persisted, he covered the microphone on their conference call line, grabbed her hand, and told her to “stop being a whiny little bitch.” 22

  Stories like these are why I laugh whenever someone mentions improving the “pipeline” of diverse students graduating with tech industry-ready skills: Why? So we can get more women and people of color into a field that’s going to chew them up and spit them out, all while telling them to smile more or making their ethnicity the butt of jokes? So we can tell more of them to speak up in meetings—while never acknowledging the fact that speaking up is often what leads them to be seen as “abrasive” or “difficult”?

  PIPELINE TO NOWHERE

  Of course, the tech industry does have pipeline problems: colleges are graduating relatively few women with computer science degrees, and even fewer black and Hispanic students. For example, the most recent numbers from the National Science Foundation (NSF), from 2014, reported that just 18 percent of computer science bachelor’s degrees went to women.23

  What’s interesting about these NSF numbers, though, is that comparing stats over time reveals that women are actually earning fewer degrees in computer science, not more. Originally, programming was often categorized as “women’s work,” lumped in with administrative skills like typing and dictation (in fact, during World War II, the word “computers” was often applied not to machines, but to the women who used them to compute data). As more colleges started offering computer science degrees, in the 1960s, women flocked to the programs: 11 percent of computer science majors in 1967 were women. By 1984, that number had grown to 37 percent. Starting in 1985, that percentage fell every single year—until, in 2007, it leveled
out at the 18 percent figure we saw through 2014.

  That shift coincides perfectly with the rise of the personal computer—which was marketed almost exclusively to men and boys.24 We heard endless stories about Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Paul Allen—garage tinkerers, boy geniuses, geeks. Software companies, and soon after, internet companies, all showcased men at the helm, backed by a sea of techies who looked just like them.

  And along the way, women stopped studying computer science, even as more of them were attending college than ever before.

  I can’t pretend to know the precise reasons for this shift, but if people can’t imagine themselves working in a field, then they won’t study it. And it’s hard to imagine yourself fitting into a profession where you can’t see anyone who looks like you.

  That’s why it’s critical that tech companies not just recruit diverse staff, but also work their asses off to keep them. Because unless tech can showcase all kinds of people thriving in its culture, women and underrepresented groups will continue to major in something else—something they can imagine fitting into. In other words, blame the pipeline all you want, but diverse people won’t close their eyes and jump in until they know it’ll be a safe place for them when they get to the other side. No matter how many black girls you send to code camp.

  Today, though, tech companies struggle mightily to retain the women and underrepresented minorities they do manage to hire. In a 2008 study that included thousands of women working in the private sector in science, engineering, and technology (SET, which, I should note, includes a range of fields broader than just web and software development), researchers found that more than half the women quit their jobs, “driven out by hostile work environments and extreme job pressures.” 25 Another found that nearly one-third of women in SET positions felt stalled in their careers—and for black women, that number shot up to almost half.26