In workplaces around the world, women are made to feel that we aren’t good enough or smart enough. Women get paid less than men do. Women of color get paid even less. We get raises and promotions more slowly than men do. We don’t get trained and mentored and sponsored for jobs as much as men do. And we get isolated from one another more than men do—so it can take women a long time to realize that the bad fit we’re feeling is not our fault but a fact of the culture.
One sign of an abusive culture is the view that members of the excluded group “don’t have what it takes.” In other words, “If we don’t have many women engineers here, it’s because women are not good engineers.” It is unimaginable to me both how flawed the logic is and how widely it’s believed. Opportunities have to be equal before you can know if abilities are equal. And opportunities for women have never been equal.
When people see the effects of poor nurture and call it nature, they discourage the training of women for key positions, and that strengthens the view that the disparity is due to biology. What makes the biology assertion so insidious is that it sabotages the development of women, and it relieves men of any responsibility for examining their motives and practices. That’s how gender bias “plants the evidence” that leads some people to see the effects of their own bias and call it biology. And that perpetuates a culture that women don’t want to join.
When Men Write the Rules
It’s frustrating to me that women are still facing hostile cultures in many fields today, and I’m especially upset that these issues are keeping women out of the tech industry. These are such exciting jobs. They’re fun. They’re innovative. They pay well. They have a growing impact on our future, and there are more of them every year. But it’s more than that. Tech is the most powerful industry in the world. It’s creating the ways we will live our lives. If women are not in tech, women will not have power.
The percentage of computing graduates who are women has plunged since I was in college. When I graduated from Duke in 1987, 35 percent of computing graduates in the United States were women. Today, it’s 19 percent. There are likely a lot of reasons for the drop. One is that when personal computers made their way into American households, they were often marketed as gaming devices for boys, so boys spent more time on them and it gave boys exposure to computers that girls didn’t get. When the computer gaming industry emerged, many developers started creating violent war games featuring automatic weapons and explosives that many women didn’t want to play, creating a closed cycle of men creating games for men.
Another likely cause is the early view of the ideal computer coder as someone with no social skills or outside interests. This view was so prevalent that some employers used the hiring process to identify candidates who showed a “disinterest in people” and disliked “activities involving close personal interaction.” That screened out many women.
Finally—and this shows the gender bias in our culture when it comes to who’s considered fit for a task—when software engineering was seen as more clerical in nature and much easier than the hardware side, managers hired and trained women to do the work. But when software programming came to be understood as less clerical and more complex, managers began to seek out men to train as computer programmers—instead of continuing to hire and train women.
As the number of men in the sector grew, fewer women went into tech. Which made it even harder to be a woman in tech. So even fewer women went into tech, and men began to dominate the field.
Fortunately, there have been some encouraging shifts. The forces that made computer science into a boys’ club are softening, and people in the industry are doing more to counter the gender bias. These changes may have begun moving the trend in the right direction.
Another challenge is the low percentage of women in venture capital, which is even lower than the percentage of women in the computer industry. Venture capital is a crucial source of funding for entrepreneurs who are just starting a business and can’t afford a bank loan. Investors give them the capital they need to grow in exchange for a stake in the business. It can make the difference between failure and huge success.
Only 2 percent of venture capital partners are women, and only 2 percent of venture capital money is going to women-founded ventures. (The amount of venture capital that goes to firms founded by African American women is 0.2 percent.) Nobody can think this makes economic sense. Women are going to have a ton of great business ideas that men are never going to think of. Unfortunately, “Who will have the most exciting business ideas?” is not the question driving the decisions.
When you’re funding start-ups, there is so little data on what works in early-stage investing that the funders give money to the people they know—guys who went to the same schools and go to the same conferences. It’s an old-boys’ club with younger boys. In 2018, Richard Kerby, an African American venture investor, polled 1,500 venture capitalists and found that 40 percent had attended Stanford or Harvard. When there is such a concentration of people from one group, one sector, one set of schools, the impulse to fund people from your own peer networks drives you toward a homogeneous set of firms. When you try to fund outside that network, the firm and the funder might both feel it’s just not a good “fit.”
That’s why I’m investing now in venture capital funds, including Aspect Ventures, that invest in women-led companies and companies formed by people of color. This isn’t charity on my part. I expect a good return, and I’m confident I’ll get one because women are going to see markets that men won’t see, and black and Latina and Asian women will see markets that white entrepreneurs won’t see. I think we’ll look back in ten years and see it was crazy that more money wasn’t flowing toward markets understood by women and people of color.
Gender and racial diversity is essential for a healthy society. When one group marginalizes others and decides on its own what will be pursued and prioritized, its decisions will reflect its values, its mindsets, and its blind spots.
This is an ancient problem. A few years ago I read Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari. The book covers the history of human beings, including the cognitive, agricultural, and scientific revolutions. One of the things that stayed with me was Harari’s description of the Code of Hammurabi, a set of laws that was carved into clay tablets around 1776 BC and influenced legal thinking for centuries, if not millennia.
“According to the code,” writes Harari, “people are divided into two genders and three classes: superior people, commoners and slaves. Members of each gender and class have different values. The life of a female commoner is worth thirty silver shekels and that of a slave-woman twenty silver shekels, whereas the eye of a male commoner is worth sixty silver shekels.”
One eye of a male commoner was worth twice the life of a female commoner. The code prescribed light penalties for a superior person who committed a crime against a slave, and harsh penalties for a slave who committed a crime against a superior person. A married man could have sex outside marriage, but a married woman could not.
Is there any doubt who wrote the code? It was the “superior” men. The code advanced their views and reflected their interests and sacrificed the welfare of the people they saw as beneath them. If societies are going to elevate women to equality with men—and declare that people of any race or religion have the same rights as anyone else—then we have to have men and women and every racial and religious group together writing the code.
This for me is the defining argument for diversity: Diversity is the best way to defend equality. If people from diverse groups are not making the decisions, the burdens and benefits of society will be divided unequally and unfairly—with the people writing the rules ensuring themselves a greater share of the benefits and a lesser share of the burdens of any society. If you’re not brought in, you get sold out. Your life will be worth twenty shekels. No group should have to trust another to protect their interests; all should be able to speak for themselves.
That’s why we have to
include everyone in the decisions that shape our cultures, because even the best of us are blinded by our own interests. If you care about equality, you have to embrace diversity—especially now, as people in tech are programming our computers and designing artificial intelligence. We’re at an infant stage of AI. We don’t know all the uses that will be made of it—health uses, battlefield uses, law enforcement uses, corporate uses—but the impact will be profound, and we need to make sure it’s fair. If we want a society that reflects the values of empathy, unity, and diversity, it matters who writes the code.
Joy Buolamwini is an African American computer scientist who calls herself “a poet of code.” I learned about Joy when her research exposing racial and gender bias in tech began to get coverage in the media. She was working with a social robot some years ago as an undergraduate at Georgia Tech when—in the course of playing a game of peek-a-boo—she noticed that the robot couldn’t recognize her face in certain lighting. She used her roommate’s face to complete the project and didn’t think about it again till she went to Hong Kong and visited a start-up that worked with social robots. The robot there recognized everyone’s face but hers, and hers was the only face that was black. Then she figured out that the robot was using the same facial recognition software her robot at Georgia Tech used.
“Algorithmic bias,” Joy said, “can spread bias on a massive scale.”
When Joy became a researcher at the MIT Media Lab, she tested facial recognition software from IBM, Microsoft, and the Chinese company Megvii and found that the error rate for recognizing light-skinned males was below 1 percent, while the error rate for recognizing darker-skinned females was as high as 35 percent. Joy shared her results with the companies. Microsoft and IBM said that they were already working to improve their facial analysis software. Megvii didn’t respond.
All you have to do is pause and reflect on the various meanings of the word “recognize” to shudder at the idea that the software is slow to recognize people who don’t look like the programmers. Will the software one day tell an agent, “We don’t ‘recognize’ this person; she can’t board the plane, pay with a credit card, withdraw her money, or enter the country”? Will other programs, replicating the biases of the programmers, deny people a chance to get a loan or buy a house? Will software programmed by white people disproportionately tell police to arrest black people? The prospect of this bias is horrifying, but this is just the bias we can predict. What about the program bias that we can’t predict?
“You can’t have ethical AI that’s not inclusive,” Joy said.
African American women are only 3 percent of the entire tech workforce; Hispanic women, 1 percent. Women comprise about a quarter of the tech workforce and hold just 15 percent of the technical jobs. These numbers are dangerously, shamefully low. That’s why I am so passionate about women in tech and women of color in tech. It’s not just that it’s the world’s largest industry. Or that the economy is going to add half a million computing jobs in the next decade. Or that diverse teams in tech lead to more creativity and productivity. It’s that the people in these jobs will shape the way we live, and we all need to decide that together.
I am not saying that women should be given positions in tech that they haven’t earned. I’m saying women have earned them and should be hired for them.
Just about everything I needed to know about the value of women in tech I learned from a man in tech: my dad. My dad was a strong advocate of women in math and science—not just personally for his daughters but also professionally in his career. I told you about the excitement of watching the space launches with him and my family, but just as memorable for me as a kid was meeting some of the women on my dad’s teams. After working on the Apollo space program, he worked on Skylab, Apollo-Soyuz, the Space Shuttle, and the International Space Station, and he recruited women very intentionally for each one of these programs. Whenever he was able to hire a woman mathematician or engineer, he shared his excitement at home with us. There weren’t very many women available, he told us, and his group always did better when he could get a woman on the team.
My dad began to see the extra value of women in the 1960s and ’70s. There wasn’t much data to support him on this back then, but there is now—a ton of it, and it’s impressive. Here’s an example: A 2010 academic study on group intelligence found that the collective intelligence of a workgroup is correlated to three factors: the average social sensitivity of the group members, the group’s ability to take turns contributing, and the proportion of females in the group. Groups that included at least one woman outperformed all-male groups in collective intelligence tests, and group intelligence was more strongly correlated to gender diversity than to the IQs of the individual team members.
Gender diversity is not just good for women; it’s good for anyone who wants results.
Ask for What You Need
So how do we create a workplace culture that expands opportunities for women, promotes diversity, and doesn’t tolerate sexual harassment? There is no single answer, but I do believe it’s crucial to gather friends and colleagues and create a community with a new culture—one that respects the larger goals of the existing culture but honors different ways of getting there.
Unfortunately, the effort to create a culture that advances the interests of women faces a challenging barrier: Research suggests that women may have more self-doubt than men, that women often underestimate their abilities while many men overestimate theirs.
Journalists Katty Kay and Claire Shipman wrote a book about this called The Confidence Code. Kay explained in an interview, “Women often find action harder than men because we are more risk-averse, because the fear of failure is enormous for us. It seems to be bigger than it is for men.” In one example, they point to a review of personnel records at Hewlett Packard, which showed that women were applying for promotions only when they thought they met 100 percent of the job requirements, while men were applying when they thought they met 60 percent of them.
The tendency to underestimate our abilities, for those of us who may have it, plays a role in keeping us back, and it’s hard not to imagine that it’s a result of a male-dominated culture that seeks to marginalize women. These efforts are often indirect; they can be subtle and insidious—not attacking women directly but attacking the qualities and characteristics of women who are most likely to challenge men.
This angle seems to be supported by another line of research, one suggesting that women’s reticence comes not from a lack of confidence but from a calculation. A 2018 Atlantic article cites a study that says women with self-confidence gained influence “only when they also displayed … the motivation to benefit others.” If women showed confidence without empathy or altruism, they faced a “‘backlash effect’—social and professional sanctions for failing to conform to gender norms.” It’s fear of this backlash, according to another study, that keeps women from asserting themselves.
Women may be less assertive from a lack of confidence or out of calculation, but male-dominated cultures remain a key underlying cause for both. There is social approval for women who don’t ask for much, who show self-doubt, who don’t seek power, who won’t speak out, who aim to please.
These gender expectations have been significant for me and for many women I know because they foster qualities that lead to perfectionism—the effort to compensate for feelings of inferiority by being flawless. I should know; perfectionism has always been a weakness of mine. Brené Brown, who is a genius in stating big truths with few words, captures the motive and mindset of the perfectionist in her book Daring Greatly: “If I look perfect and do everything perfectly, I can avoid or minimize the painful feelings of shame, judgment, and blame.”
That is the game, and I am a player.
Perfectionism for me comes from the feeling that I don’t know enough. I’m not smart enough. I’m not hardworking enough. Perfectionism spikes for me if I’m going into a meeting with people who disagree with me, or if I’m giv
ing a talk to experts who know more about the topic than I do—something that happens often for me these days. When I start to feel inadequate and my perfectionism hits, one of the things I do is start gathering facts. I’m not talking about basic prep; I’m talking about obsessive fact gathering driven by the vision that there shouldn’t be anything I don’t know. And if I tell myself I shouldn’t overprepare, then another voice tells me I’m being lazy. Boom.
Ultimately, for me perfectionism means hiding who I am. It’s dressing myself up so the people I want to impress don’t come away thinking I’m not as smart or interesting as they thought. It comes from a desperate need to not disappoint others. So I overprepare. And one of the curious things I’ve discovered is that when I’m overprepared I don’t listen as well; I go ahead and say whatever I’ve prepared, whether it responds to the moment or not. I miss the opportunity to improvise or respond well to a surprise. I’m not really there. I’m not my authentic self.
I remember an event at the foundation a few years ago where I got called out on my perfectionism.
Sue Desmond-Hellmann—our super-inventive foundation CEO who’s a scientist, a medical doctor, and a creative leader who loves to push Bill and me (and herself)—put us on the spot by arranging an uncomfortable exercise for foundation leaders that would strengthen the bond between leadership and staff. I agreed to go first.
I sat down in a chair in front of a video camera (placed there so everyone in the foundation could later watch!) and was given a stack of cards facedown, which I was to turn over one by one. Each card had something that a foundation employee had said about me but didn’t want to tell me in person. My job was to read the card and respond, on camera, so everyone could see me react. The statements were bold, especially the last one. I turned over the card and it said, “You’re like Mary F@$*ing Poppins—practically perfect in every way!”
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