Careful readers will notice that in The Know-It-Alls I have tried hard not to use gender-neutral pronouns or mix up the “shes” and “hes” in some sort of equalized fashion. Certainly, such an effort would send a message of inclusion, and that is precisely why it would be so inappropriate for a book like this. The story of how Silicon Valley leaders came to their libertarian worldview is the story almost exclusively of men: the hackers who first mastered computers and promoted extreme individualism, as well as the venture capitalists and tech start-up leaders who brought those innovations to market. Fittingly, the political theory they promote is one that necessarily belittles the contribution of women as part of its fantasy of extreme individualism, in which adult men arrive in the world magically with no debt to anyone. We, author and reader alike, must not lose this thread of systematic exclusion even if it is intended to promote a fairer world going forward.
I am not the first to bring this argument to my writing about Silicon Valley. In her review of The Hard Thing About Hard Things, a business advice book written by Ben Horowitz, founding partner of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, Diane Brady took pains to praise Horowitz for his work in support of women’s rights, but nonetheless expressed her bafflement at phrases like “tough times separate women from girls” and other conspicuous efforts by Horowitz to treat the sexes the same in his writing. “Horowitz’s persistent use of ‘she’ comes off as social satire in a world with so few actual women,” Brady writes in Bloomberg Businessweek, a world where “‘her’ is more likely to refer to your operating system than to your business partner.”1
Not surprisingly, this call for self-reflection by the men who lead Silicon Valley was met with contempt, most notably by Marc Andreessen, Horowitz’s business partner, who wrote with typical subtlety on Twitter: “Mind-bending review of known misogynist pig @bhorowitz’s new book:-):”2 Yet surely there can be a system inherently unfair to women without each of its leaders being “known misogynist pigs.” Calling out superficial attempts at equality is a vital first step toward promoting real change in a field where there is so much self-satisfied resistance.