by Emily Chang
RETENTION
Of course, it’s about not just hiring women but making sure they stay. When it comes to retention, Emerson says it is equally important to build standardized review and feedback structures for employees. Slack reviews its promotion data regularly to make sure (as best it can)there are no differences in how men and women are being promoted.
The next one is a no-brainer: pay equity. Glassdoor, a company that routinely surveys national and Silicon Valley employment data, found that the overall adjusted pay gap between men and women in the United States is 5.4 percent, controlling for factors such as age, location, experience, and job title. For computer programming, however, the pay gap is more than five times bigger, at 28.3 percent. That means women computer programmers make less than seventy-two cents for every dollar a man makes (compared with ninety-five cents on the dollar that women make compared with men nationwide). And remember, tech is an industry that pays in both cash and stock. A tenth of a percentage point in equity can make a multimillion-dollar difference if the company has a big exit later.
In 2015, Slack performed a comprehensive compensation “refresh,” and salaries are now routinely monitored by an independent third party. The company is also contributing 1 percent of its equity to support programs to advance women and underrepresented minorities. But Slack admits it still has a lot of work to do, noting that the representation of women and underrepresented minorities drops at more senior levels. And Butterfield worries that as Slack gets bigger, it will become even more difficult to maintain current percentages of women and underrepresented minorities, as has happened at Google and other tech companies. And with Microsoft and Facebook encroaching on Slack’s territory as they attempt to build their own workplace collaboration tools, another test will be how the company maintains its focus on diversity and core values as it fends off competition.
This is why it is critical for Slack to retain the diverse workforce it has already created. When I asked Toth if there were any Ping-Pong tables at Slack, she rolled her eyes. “We have an ethos here: ‘Work hard and go home,’” she said. That motto is written on posters that can be seen hanging all around the office, which is generally empty by 6:30 p.m. “There is very much a sense here that if you want to play Ping-Pong, you can do that somewhere else,” Toth said. The message is that this is a place for grown-ups, and many grown-ups have families. Slack even hosts a daytime Halloween party for the children of employees, with a conference room transformed into a trick-or-treating spot boasting a chocolate fountain.
But no tech company is a diversity Eden. By the time I finished writing this book, Toth, Miley, and Baker had all left Slack. Each situation was different, and Slack points out that its turnover is a little less than the average rate for tech companies. But these were marquee hires that boosted the company’s reputation as a welcoming place for women and underrepresented minorities. The true measure of Slack’s success will be if the company can avoid the fate that befell Google.
A few months after leaving Slack, Baker told me the company still struggles with the stereotypes and misogyny that infect every tech workplace. “They definitely have challenges; there is definitely a James Damore at Slack,” Baker says, referring to the ex–Google engineer who said there were fewer women than men in tech and leadership due to biological differences.
Halfway through 2017, Baker posted an industrywide diversity and inclusion “post-mortem” on the social code–hosting site GitHub, which is popular among developers. In the report, Baker wrote, “We are approaching the 10-year anniversary of the first forays into focus on Diversity and Inclusion in the tech industry. The industry has spent over $500M on Diversity and Inclusion efforts with little to no improvements to show for it. Diversity numbers remain stagnant . . . Resolution: This failure is still in progress.”
DEBUGGING THE FAILURE
As I approached completion of this book, I was invited to moderate a town hall discussion on solutions to tech’s gender problem at Fortune’s 2017 Brainstorm Tech Conference in Aspen. The room was filled with entrepreneurs, investors, and executives looking to network and gain new insights, but as the town hall began, I noticed dozens of men sneaking out of what was sure to be an uncomfortable conversation.
The discussion was emotional and electric. In the audience was Niniane Wang, the first woman who went on the record about being sexually harassed by investor Justin Caldbeck. She took the microphone to propose a third-party organization to oversee the relationship between venture capitalists and entrepreneurs. Right now, she suggested, that third party is the media, which means allegations play out in public without careful arbitration. Nicole Farb, the Goldman Sachs banker turned entrepreneur, said she believes Silicon Valley treats women worse than Wall Street does. Her message: VCs, stop asking women entrepreneurs about their kids!
When one man in attendance said that some women weren’t doing enough to support each other, I spotted OpenTable’s CEO, Christa Quarles, getting agitated and mouthing the word “Bullshit!” When I handed her the mic, her voice erupted and her body shook. “In Silicon Valley today, there is a sisterhood of women who are supporting each other, telling each other about board opportunities, giving each other business ideas. There is a sisterhood!” Quarles declared. “Talk about sexual harassment . . . You name it, it has happened to me. And I think that what is happening now is that you’re all on notice! This stuff can’t happen anymore. It has to stop.”
Everyone has a role to play: women, men, investors, founders, executives, board directors, parents, teachers. When I asked the audience who needs to change the most, Adam Miller, the CEO of the human resources software company Cornerstone OnDemand, who also happens to be white and male, stood up. “Without a doubt, it’s the CEOs . . . We need people that are willing to demand that there’s diversity in these organizations, or it’s not going to happen,” Miller said. “At the end of the day, it has to be a directive from the top.”
I agree with Miller. Getting to fifty-fifty is incredibly complex and nuanced, requiring many detailed solutions that will take decades to fully play out. To accelerate the process, change needs to start at the top. Like Stewart Butterfield, CEOs need to make hiring and retaining women an explicit priority. In addition, here is the bare minimum of what we can do at an individual and a systemic level:
First of all, people, be nice to each other. Treat one another with respect and dignity, including those of the opposite sex.That should be pretty simple.
Don’t enable assholes. Stop making excuses for bad behavior, or ignoring it.
CEOs must embrace and champion the need to reach a fair representation of gender within their companies, and develop a comprehensive plan to get there. Be long-term focused, not short-term. It may take three weeks to find a white man for the job, but three months to find a woman. Those three months could save three years of playing catch-up in the future. Invest in not just diversity but inclusion. Even if your company is small, everything counts. And take the time to educate your employees about why this is important.
Companies need to appoint more women to their boards. And boards need to hold company leadership to account to get to fifty-fifty in their employee ranks, starting with company executives.
Venture capital firms need to hire more women partners, and limited partners should pressure them to do so and, at the very least, ask them what their plans around diversity are. Investors, both men and women, need to start funding more women and diverse teams, period.
LPs need to fund more women VCs, who can establish new firms with new cultural norms. Stop funding partnerships that look and act the same.
Most important, stop blaming everybody else for the problem or pretending that it is too hard for us to solve. It’s time to look in the mirror. This is an industry, after all, that prides itself on disruption and revolutionary new ways of thinking. Let’s put that spirit of innovation and embrace of radical change to good use.
Seeing a more inclusive workforce in Silicon Valley will encourage more girls and women studying computer science now.
“People that just merely point to the pipeline issue, they don’t get it,” Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, told me at a 2017 fundraiser for a girls’ high school. “The tech companies have a lot to do ourselves. The truth is that in aggregate we all don’t do a good job retaining either.” Diversity matters at Apple, Cook said, because without that mixture of input it would be impossible to create the most desirable products on the planet. To be clear, Apple’s diversity numbers (which include its retail store employees) are also average by Silicon Valley standards, with women representing 32 percent of employees worldwide and 23 percent of tech roles. But the company has accelerated its hiring of women over the last couple of years. Women accounted for 37 percent of new hires at Apple in 2016.
“Our best work comes out of when you have a tremendous level of diversity working on a product. Not only gender, but the artist and musician working with the engineer,” Cook said. “When you’re like us and you’re designing products for the world, don’t you want different views?”
TECH’S RISING WORKFORCE
On a Friday afternoon in the summer of 2017, I sat down with a group of teenage girls at Gott’s Roadside restaurant on the bustling Embarcadero waterfront in San Francisco. They had come into the city from high schools all over the Bay Area, and now over french fries and chicken tenders they were talking about their experiences learning how to code. All of them had worked with Girls Who Code (GWC), a nonprofit that offers after-school clubs for middle- and high-school-aged girls and immersive summer programs held at tech company offices.
Areeta Wong, sixteen, joined the coding club at San Mateo High School. “When I typed something up and it would magically appear on the screen, that realization that you can create something that works right away is amazing,” Wong said. Zaynah Shaikh, a nineteen-year-old computer science major who had recently graduated from the GWC program, added, “Seeing the program work, I think it’s pretty empowering. With code you can do so many things.” Ria Thakkar, seventeen, taught herself how to code using Khan Academy online tutorials, then helped start the GWC club at her school. “[Learning to code] was a really hard process for me, and I thought, ‘How do I make it easier for other girls to do?’”
Ashley Chu, fifteen, joined a GWC club during her sophomore year in high school and attended her first hackathon a few months later. “But the thing is, I was on an all-guys team. They had already taken AP computer science and were really into coding when I was just new, and I felt like I just didn’t belong,” Chu said.
Still, Chu finished the hackathon. “I was scared, frustrated with my code, and I wanted to quit, but we went through with it,” she says. The hackathon has not dampened her aspirations. “I am a really big dreamer, and I’ve always wanted to be an inventor,” Chu said.
Meet the next-gen potential workforce of tech. Shaikh wants to combine her programming skills with her love of sports to make a product that will encourage more young girls to try athletics. Thakkar is obsessed with airplanes and would like to build an aviation app. Chu is a Disney fanatic who would love to join the company’s Imagineering research and development arm. Julie Vu, who says she’s given up the idea of coding because of what she’s read about sexism at Uber, would like to become a recruiter at a tech company so she can help bring in more women and underrepresented minorities (or maybe she’ll just go into cosmetics). Saanvi Shreesha wants to start her own business and build all the code for it. Nory Klop-Packel wants to combine her love of spoken language with machine learning. Wong wants to organize hackathons and build education products that bring the opportunity to code to more young girls.
The girls sitting with me that day know all too well that women are grossly underrepresented and sometimes even mistreated in Silicon Valley. “I’m in some ‘Women in Tech’ Facebook groups,” said Zaynah Shaikh. “They talk about being mansplained and all sorts of things. I wish it weren’t like this.” They all wished for more female role models like Sheryl Sandberg.
Amen to that. But these girls have a very different outlook from women of older generations, and in many respects they are doing pretty well on their own. One day, while Wong was on her way into a coding club meet-up at her local library, a fifth-grade boy asked where she was going. When she replied that she was going to a meeting for Girls Who Code, the boy scoffed, “Why isn’t there a Guys Who Code?” Wong exclaimed, “The entire world is Guys Who Code!” Wong is among many young women intent on changing that.
She’ll be helped by some cultural shifts happening in the world around her. Yes, some girls are still getting the message that they got in the 1970s: computers are for boys. But at the same time, more schools are teaching computer science than ever before, and more girls are signing up. According to Code.org, in 2017, almost thirty thousand girls took the AP computer science exam compared with just over twenty-six hundred in 2007, bringing the percentage of girls taking the test up from 18 percent to 27 percent. For six years starting in 2008, the percentage of girls taking the test remained basically flat, but their share has increased every year for the last four years.
“From kindergarten all the way up through twelfth grade, interest in computer science has been exploding,” Code.org’s co-founder Hadi Partovi told me. One possible reason: rather than focusing on math, computer science courses are focusing increasingly on the opportunity to be creative, which is attracting a more diverse group of students. (Still, girls’ peers in computer science classes are still mostly boys, and their teachers are still mostly men.)
The girls also acknowledge that computer science is becoming more “cool,” even for girls. In January 2016, Seventeen magazine featured a story titled “We Love Code: Meet the Awesome Girls Who Own It.” It was not unlike the Cosmopolitan “Computer Girls” article in 1967 that touted the role women could play in this then-new profession. But the 1960s also marked the beginning of a crisis in the teaching of computer science, when students flocked to computer science departments that quickly filled to capacity. By the early 1980s, promising students were being turned away based on their GPA or prior experience in the field, which exacerbated tech’s gender imbalance. And something similar is happening now. “In my school, there are a lot of kids and not enough teachers,” says Wong, who got wait-listed for a computer science course at San Mateo High School. “Everyone’s parents want them to try it out, and we are at the height of demand.”
This foreshadows one of the great fears of the longtime Stanford computer science professor Eric Roberts: that once again schools will be unable to meet exploding demand for computer science, and students will be denied the opportunity to participate despite their interest. Roberts reports that the current excitement around computer science mirrors what the industry saw in the early 1980s, around the rise of the Macintosh and the PC. Back then, schools couldn’t accommodate the surge in interest, so they started instituting GPA requirements for computer science majors and classes got harder, so that students with prior experience (generally boys who grew up with computers in their bedrooms) might perform better. At about the same time, the number of CS degrees awarded dropped overall, and the percentages of women in the field started to fall. Roberts warns that the young faculty in computer science departments today are not aware of this historical catastrophe. “Our society cannot afford to repeat that mistake,” he writes.
“A pattern I’ve noticed is girls get into the field later in their lives,” said Shaikh. “Guys have a much more pre-developed course because they know earlier. There are not a lot of mentors to look up to, so we don’t consider it a career option. I’ve heard so many times the future is female, but how are we going to do that if we are entering so late as women?”
In class one day, Shaikh said, a male classmate made an offhand remark that he doubted the girls in the class had a genuine interest in computers. “I was wearing my Girls
Who Code shirt that day, and I was like, ‘Bro, that comment is not appreciated here.’ There are women like me that want to go into this field and not just for the money. I’m here because I want to make a change in the world,” Shaikh explained. “If we want to see change in this industry, we need to inspire the next generation.”
It’s hard not to be inspired and hopeful listening to these young women’s dreams. The girls are already knowledgeable about some of the headwinds that they will face when they open the door to Brotopia. I didn’t feel comfortable telling them about the others. They’ll find out soon enough. What they made clearer than ever was this: The next generation is coming. They expect to have rewarding careers in tech, and they dream of making a dent in the universe, just as the early founders did. When they open the door, let’s welcome them. And change the Valley—and the world—for them and for all.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I AM SO GRATEFUL to the hundreds of people who shared their stories with me. There were far too many to fit in this book, but each story helped shape the narrative and the ideas you’ve seen here. I am in awe, especially, of the many women in technology I spoke with who’ve each had careers filled with challenge and triumph. I expect and hope to see them shatter the Silicon Ceiling together.
