Technology’s Man Problem
By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER
Crude apps, patronizing behavior. For some, “bro” culture offers one explanation for why there are so few women working in tech.
Technology
Technology’s Man Problem
Elissa Shevinsky can pinpoint the moment when she felt that she no longer belonged.
She
was at a friend’s house last Sept. 8, watching the live stream of the
TechCrunch Disrupt hackathon on her laptop and iPhone. Entrepreneurs
were showing off their products, and two young Australian men, David
Boulton and Jethro Batts, stood behind the podium to give their presentation.
“Titstare is an app where you take photos of yourself staring at tits,”
Mr. Boulton began, as photographs of women’s chests on a cellphone
flashed on the screen behind him.
After some banter, Mr. Batts concluded, “This is the breast hack ever.”
The
crowd — overwhelmingly young, white, hoodie-wearing men — guffawed.
Something in Ms. Shevinsky’s mind clicked. If ever there was proof that
the tech industry needed more women, she thought, this was it.
Ms.
Shevinsky, 35, wasn’t the only one who was disgusted by the
presentation. Twitter lit up with outrage. She joined in, writing a blog-post manifesto: “I thought that we didn’t need more women in tech. I was wrong.”
Then things got worse. The next day, Pax Dickinson, who was her business partner in a start-up called Glimpse Labs,
as well as the chief technology officer of the news site Business
Insider, took to Twitter to defend the Titstare pair against accusations
of misogyny. “It is not misogyny to tell a sexist joke, or to fail to
take a woman seriously, or to enjoy boobies,” he wrote.
Ms.
Shevinsky felt pushed to the edge. Women who enter fields dominated by
men often feel this way. They love the work and want to fit in. But then
something happens — a slight or a major offense — and they suddenly
feel like outsiders. The question for newcomers to a field has always
been when to play along and when to push back.
Today,
even as so many barriers have fallen — whether at elite universities,
where women outnumber men, or in running for the presidency, where polls
show that fewer people think gender makes a difference — computer
engineering, the most innovative sector of the economy, remains behind.
Many women who want to be engineers encounter a field where they not
only are significantly underrepresented but also feel pushed away.
Tech
executives often fault schools, parents or society in general for
failing to encourage girls to pursue computer science. But something
else is at play in the industry: Among the women who join the field, 56
percent leave by midcareer, a startling attrition rate that is double
that for men, according to research from the Harvard Business School.
A
culprit, many people in the field say, is a sexist, alpha-male culture
that can make women and other people who don’t fit the mold feel
unwelcome, demeaned or even endangered.
“It’s a thousand tiny paper cuts,” is how Ashe Dryden,
a programmer who now consults on increasing diversity in technology,
described working in tech. “I’ve been a programmer for 13 years, and
I’ve always been one of the only women and queer people in the room.
I’ve been harassed, I’ve had people make suggestive comments to me, I’ve
had people basically dismiss my expertise. I’ve gotten rape and death
threats just for speaking out about this stuff.”
She
added: “A lot of times that makes me want to leave. But it’s hard,
because this is basically the only field that I’ve ever known. And is it
right for me to have to leave when I’m not creating the problem?”
Ms.
Shevinsky never received death threats, but she experienced her share
of come-ons and slights. A few days after Mr. Dickinson’s “It is not
misogyny” tweet, she quit Glimpse. She had been aware of earlier
cringe-making tweets in which her business partner had joked about rape
or questioned even the most basic feminist precepts. (“Women’s suffrage
and individual freedom are incompatible. How’s that for an unpopular
truth?”) Still, she admired Mr. Dickinson’s technical skills and work
ethic. Married and then 40, he was more experienced and serious about
work than many other tech types she knew, and she said he always treated
her with respect.
But after the Twitter controversy, she decided that she just couldn’t work with him anymore.
Ms.
Shevinsky’s epiphany, however, wasn’t just about Mr. Dickinson or a
couple of engineers. It was about computer-engineering culture and her
relationship with it. She had enjoyed being “one of the bros” — throwing
back whiskey and rubbing shoulders with M.I.T. graduates. And if that
sometimes meant fake-laughing as her colleagues cracked jokes about
porn, so be it.
“For
years, all I wanted to do was work and code and make software,” she
said in an interview. “That’s why I didn’t care about feminism. I just
wanted to build stuff.”
“But
Titstare showed me that was no longer a viable option,” she said. “We
had to address our culture, because something was really not working.”
Two
days after the TechCrunch show, Business Insider forced Mr. Dickinson
to resign. The Australian entrepreneurs and TechCrunch each apologized.
But incidents like these aren’t exceptional.
“We
see these stories, ‘Why aren’t there more women in computer science and
engineering?’ and there’s all these complicated answers like, ‘School
advisers don’t have them take math and physics,’ and it’s probably
true,” said Lauren Weinstein, a man who has spent his four-decade career in tech working mostly with other men, and is currently a consultant for Google.
“But I think there’s probably a simpler reason,” he said, “which is these guys are just jerks, and women know it.”
The
choice for people who are uncomfortable with the “bro” culture is to
try to change it or to leave — and even women who are fed up don’t
always agree on how to go about making a change. But leaving can be hard
too.
“There was only one thing I wanted to do,” Ms. Shevinsky said. “Be the C.E.O. of Glimpse.”
A Bright Beginning
When
Ms. Shevinsky was introduced to engineering culture at Williams
College, she got no hint of sexism. A political theory major, she
learned to code from a boyfriend, and she described their engineer
friends as “forward-thinking feminists.”
She
worked in product development for a number of start-ups and was a
co-founder of a dating site. She settled in New York, where she got to
know Mr. Dickinson at tech meet-ups. When she had a new business idea — a
kind of Snapchat for adults that prevents people from taking screen
shots of private pictures — she sought out his advice.
Last
spring, they decided to build the app together. At first, they
conceived it as a sexting product, but later they shifted to a service
that could be used by anyone concerned about keeping their messages safe
from prying eyes. They called it Glimpse.
By
August, Ms. Shevinsky had closed her dating site to work on Glimpse.
Mr. Dickinson, who had his full-time job at Business Insider, helped
when he could.
“I
remember thinking just that I was so lucky that Pax was going to work
with me,” Ms. Shevinsky said. “At the time I was still relatively
unknown, and he was one of the best technologists I’d met.”
Computer science wasn’t always dominated by men. “In the beginning, the word ‘computers’ meant ‘women,’ ” says Ruth Oldenziel, a professor at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands who studies history, gender and technology. Six women programmed one of the most famous computers in history — the 30-ton Eniac — for the United States Army during World War II.
But
as with many professions, Dr. Oldenziel said, once programming gained
prestige, women were pushed out. Over the decades, the share of women in
computing has continued to decline. In 2012, just 18 percent of
computer-science college graduates were women, down from 37 percent in
1985, according to the National Center for Women & Information Technology.
This
lack of women has become of greater concern in the industry for a
number of reasons. For one, the products that the tech industry creates
are shaping the future for everyone. “Women are increasingly consumers;
they’re not going to like products that don’t work for them,” said Londa Schiebinger, a Stanford professor who runs the Gendered Innovations project, which encourages engineers and scientists to consider gender when developing new products.
Perhaps
more fundamentally, there are simply more jobs than can be filled by
available talent. Some 1.2 million computing jobs will be available in
2022, yet United States universities are producing only 39 percent of
the graduates needed to fill them, the N.C.W.I.T. estimates.
Tech’s
biggest companies say that recruiting women is a priority. “If we do
that, there’s no question we’ll more than double the rate of technology
output in the world,” Larry Page, the chief executive of Google, said
last spring. Yet at Google, less than a fifth of the engineers are
women.
That’s a typical figure. Twenty percent of software developers are women, according to the Labor Department,
and fewer than 6 percent of engineers are black or Hispanic.
Comparatively, 56 percent of people in business and financial-operations
jobs are women, as are 36 percent of physicians and surgeons and
one-third of lawyers.
At
tech start-ups, often considered the most desirable places to work, the
number of women appears to be even lower. The companies generally don’t
release these numbers publicly, but an engineer at Pinterest has collected data from people at 133 start-ups and found that an average of 12 percent of the engineers are women.
Sexism
exists in many places, but start-up companies have particular qualities
that can allow problems to go unchecked. The lines between work and
social life are often blurry, because people tend to be young and to
work long hours, and the founders and first employees are often friends.
And start-ups pride themselves on a lack of bureaucracy, forgoing
big-company layers like human resources departments. They say they can
move faster that way, without becoming bogged down in protocol.
But
a result can be an anything-goes atmosphere, said Julie Ann Horvath, a
software designer and developer who publicly quit her job last month at
GitHub, the coding website, saying that
there was a culture of intimidation and disrespect of women. GitHub,
founded in 2008, hired a senior H.R. executive only in January.
“If
there is no structure, that’s actually more harmful to marginalized
people,” Ms. Horvath said in an interview while she still worked at
GitHub. “It’s just unprofessional. Tech needs to grow up in a lot of
ways.”
At
GitHub, Ms. Horvath, who was the only female developer at the company
when she started, said she once declined a romantic relationship with
one of her co-workers. Then, she said, she discovered that code she had
written had disappeared. The man, she said, had ripped it out.
“It
makes a hostile environment for me,” she said. “But I don’t want to
raise my hand and call negative attention toward myself, and become the
woman who is the problem — ‘that woman.’ In start-up culture they
protect their own tribe, so by putting my hand up, I’m saying I’m an
‘other,’ I shouldn’t be there, so for me that’s an economic threat.”
Ms.
Horvath eventually decided that it was worth the risk, and quit. She
said the people who mistreated her included a founder of the company.
Chris Wanstrath, GitHub’s chief executive and another co-founder, apologized to Ms. Horvath in a blog post and said the co-founder she complained about was put on leave and the company was investigating what happened.
At bigger companies, women say harassment may be easier to stop but that other, subtler forms of sexism persist.
Women
often take on the role of product manager, or P.M., which entails the
so-called soft skills of managing people and bridging the business and
engineering divide. Yet even though this is an essential job, it’s the purely technical people — not the businesspeople — who get the respect in the tech industry.
“In
engineering, whoever owns the code, they have the power,” said Ana
Redmond, a software engineer. When she worked as a senior engineer at a
big company, Expedia, she said she was constantly underestimated by male
colleagues and suffered because she was not willing to leave her
children to work the hours needed to “own the code.”
In
a statement, Expedia said Ms. Redmond had not raised these concerns
during her tenure. The company added that it now has programs to develop
and retain female talent; it also has a goal to double the number of
women in roles at the vice-president level and higher by 2020.
In 2011, Ms. Redmond quit to start her own company, Infinut,
that makes educational apps for children, and to teach computer science
at the University of Washington — largely, she said, to mentor female
students. “For me, what worked best was changing the context,” she said,
“not conforming to it.”
A ‘Boy-Puerile Atmosphere’
After
she quit Glimpse, Ms. Shevinsky began looking for a job outside the
start-up world. Mr. Dickinson, no longer at Business Insider, made it
his mission to persuade her to return. Glimpse had no office and little
money, so they met at TGI Friday’s and at a dive bar that served $5
beer.
The conversations started at a deadlock.
“There
was the one where Pax said, ‘I got to keep tweeting, I got to keep
tweeting,’ ” Ms. Shevinsky recalled. “I wasn’t going to come back to
Glimpse if we both weren’t going to be taking it seriously. I remember
telling Pax that his tweets were going to be very expensive for us.”
Social media, where people carefully build their public personas, often become bullhorns for offensive comments.
After
the Titstare presentation, a commenter calling himself White_N_Nerdy
wrote on Reddit, “I’m honestly trying to understand why anyone says that
females are ‘needed’ in the tech industry.” He continued: “The tech
community works fine without females, just like any other mostly male
industry. Feminists probably just want women making more money.”
Online
gathering spots for engineers, like Reddit, Hacker News and 4chan,
where people often post anonymously, can feel like hostile territory for
women.
“Many
women have come to me and said they basically have had to hide on the
Net now,” said Mr. Weinstein, who works on issues of identity and
anonymity online. “They use male names, they don’t put their real photos
up, because they are immediately targeted and harassed.”
That
sense of being targeted as a minority happens at the office, too. That
is part of the reason nearly a third of the women who leave technology
jobs move to nontechnical ones, according to the Harvard study.
“It’s
a boys’ club, and you have to try to get into it, and they’re trying as
hard as they can to prove you can’t,” said Ephrat Bitton, the director
of algorithms at FutureAdvisor, an online investment start-up that she
says has a better culture because almost half the engineers are women.
Writing
code is a high-pressure job with little room for error, as are many
jobs. But coding can be stressful in a different way, women interviewed
for this article said, because code reviews — peer reviews to spot
mistakes in software — can quickly devolve.
“Code
reviews are brutal — ‘Mine is better than yours, I see flaws in yours’ —
and they should be, for the creation of good software,” said Ellen
Ullman, a software engineer and author. “I think when you add a drop of
women into it, it just exacerbates the problem, because here’s a kind of
foreigner.”
“I’m
in no way saying that women can’t take a tough code review,” she added.
“I’m saying that no one should have to take one in a boy-puerile
atmosphere.”
Still on the Defensive
Late
last fall, Ms. Shevinsky and Mr. Dickinson flew together from a tech
conference in California back to New York. When Ms. Shevinsky awoke from
a nap, Mr. Dickinson asked her to look at a letter he had written on
his iPad about the Titstare episode and his comments on Twitter about
women.
“It
was a lapse in judgment and I’m entirely responsible for that,” he
wrote. “I sincerely and unreservedly apologize to anyone I offended.”
For
both of them, the letter was the turning point. “The biggest thing was
Pax realizing he was a public figure and the responsibilities that came
with that,” Ms. Shevinsky said. “He wrote the apology letter, and it was
very genuine and moving and impactful for me.”
Mr. Dickinson sent his letter to VentureBeat, a tech blog, for publication.
Ms.
Shevinsky returned to Glimpse in December. But first Mr. Dickinson had
to make some promises. Ms. Shevinsky would be the chief executive and
the public face of the company. She would have to sign off on what he
said on social media and in press interviews — as she did when he was
interviewed for this article. And the company would add a second mission
statement supporting women in tech, including through hiring.
“I
have come to realize there are problems with sexism in technology
through all this,” Mr. Dickinson wrote in an interview over email.
Nonetheless,
he wasn’t retreating from his public tweets. Rather, he said, the media
had portrayed him in a way that didn’t capture his full personality.
“I
am not just my tweets, and I never was,” he wrote in the email
interview. “The caricature that’s been painted of me isn’t accurate. I
realized after all this that many of my tweets came off meanspirited in a
way I never intended, hence my apology.”
At
Glimpse, Ms. Shevinsky’s title is “ladyboss” — which she likes because,
she said, it embraces the idea of women being in charge. Three of the
six people who work at the company are women, as are two of the three
board members. The pair raised a small amount of money, mostly from New
York angel investors, and introduced the Glimpse app at the South by Southwest conference in Austin in March.
But
the debate isn’t over. In fact, Ms. Shevinsky now finds herself in
another argument. This time, however, she’s on the defensive with other
women.
A
prominent feminist in tech told her that she was doing a disservice to
women by accepting Mr. Dickinson’s apology and working with him again.
The conversation, Ms. Shevinsky said, was “hateful.”
Ms.
Shevinsky says that she judges Mr. Dickinson “on his actions, how he is
with other people in the company and with me,” and said that there was
no contradiction in both working with Mr. Dickinson and supporting
feminism in tech.
“I
care very, very much about women in tech, and I believe the best thing I
can do is change the face of what it looks like and be one of the first
women to build a billion-dollar social networking company,” she said
with entrepreneurial brio.
There
are strong differences of opinion, even among women in tech, about how
to make the culture more welcoming. Many people at tech companies say
it’s important to hire women as engineers at the founding of a company
and include women in management and in all job interviews.
In
this vein, there are women-only hacker spaces and programs to increase
the number of women and minorities who appear at tech conferences. Ms.
Horvath started a program called Passion Projects, at which a technical woman presents her work each month. Amelia Greenhall and Shanley Kane, technologists and writers, started Model View Culture, a publication about technology, culture and diversity, in which Ms. Kane recently wrote about how myths of tech culture work to “exclude and marginalize minorities.”
But some women argue that these kinds of initiatives are unhelpful.
“My
general issue with the coverage of women in tech is that women in the
technology press are talked about in the context of being women, and men
are talked about in the context of being in technology,” said a
technical woman who would speak only on condition of anonymity because
she did not want to be part of an article about women in tech.
“I’m also very good at my job, and as a technologist, I want to be recognized for that and not because I have breasts.”
Lea Verou, an incoming Ph.D. candidate in electrical engineering and computer science at M.I.T., wrote in a much read essay
that women-only conferences and hackathons “cultivate the notion that
women are these weak beings who find their male colleagues too
intimidating.”
“As a woman,” she wrote, “I find it insulting and patronizing to be viewed that way.”
Another
camp discourages emphasizing complaints about sexism. Rather, they try
to focus on positive stories, to encourage women to enter the industry.
“I’ve
been doing this 10 years, and myself and everyone I’ve spoken to who’s a
female developer has had an amazing experience in the developer
community,” said Sara Chipps, chief technology officer of the Flatiron School, a coding school in New York, and a co-founder of Girl Develop It, a nonprofit group to help women become software developers.
“People
should say something if something bad happens, but I also want people
to know that doesn’t have to be the case,” she said.
For
Ms. Shevinsky, the solution was returning to tech and trying to change
the culture from the inside. And part of the reason she decided to work
with Mr. Dickinson again, she said, was that both believe in another
type of diversity: the diversity of thought.
“It’s very dangerous for us as a community,” she said, “to say we will only work with people who share our beliefs.”
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