WRITING THIS BOOK HAS been like going on a trek through a minefield, with fresh mines being laid as I walked. Not a month has gone by without some major revelation about discrimination or harassment in the tech industry exploding in the press (not to mention the deluge of allegations in Hollywood, beginning with Harvey Weinstein, in politics, and in the media). Most followed the same pattern: angry accusations followed first by denials and then by public mea culpas. Several powerful men in Silicon Valley, including the once-untouchable Uber CEO Travis Kalanick and the investors Justin Caldbeck, Dave McClure, Chris Sacca, Steve Jurvetson, and Shervin Pishevar subsequently resigned, were fired, or were publicly disgraced. There were moments when it seemed we had reached a turning point in how Silicon Valley would treat women, and other moments when it felt that if we had not hit rock bottom, it was only because the bottom was lower than we thought.
In response to these scandals, women rose up. At the end of 2017, the Twitter hashtag #MeToo was trending hot, with millions of women sharing their stories of abuse and sexual harassment both through tweets and on Facebook. That wellspring proved not only the size and scale of the problem but also that these social media platforms could be used to create solidarity and seek justice. “I’ve never seen anything quite like the environment where now women are much freer to speak up than perhaps they were in my professional career,” former eBay and Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman told me. “Every once in a while in history, there’s something big that happens that changes the culture and I’m hopeful that this is it.”
As we begin 2018, one thing is clear: in tech, people’s interest in, anxiety about, and desire for change have become palpable. The exclusion of women didn’t have to be the story of how we got here, and it certainly doesn’t need to be our future. Let’s take advantage of this moment.
In previous chapters, I’ve asked this question: How different might the world be if women had been included in this transformative industry from the start? In this last chapter, I want to ask a similar set of questions that look ahead: What if the tech industry, starting now, grows up and begins to create a truly diverse workforce? How would the industry make that happen? And what would be the advantages to such a fundamental shift?
Let’s imagine a world where women hold half the jobs in Silicon Valley. Where half of entrepreneurs, executives, venture capitalists, board members, and employees—including engineers—are women.
We can’t know exactly how that world would look, but some are willing to make educated guesses. “I think there would be two enormous differences,” the longtime tech investor Roger McNamee told me. “I think Silicon Valley would be wildly more profitable. I think there would be a significant reduction in the number of absolute failures. And so I think success would go up dramatically.”
McNamee’s scenario isn’t wishful thinking. Research shows that companies with more women represented in their leadership ranks make more money, and their employees, both men and women, are more innovative, diligent, and creative. Higher morale and a more successful company mean lower turnover, higher retention, and higher rates of productivity. Another way to look at this is that gender inequality is expensive, in that it leads to more unhappiness, higher turnover, lower productivity, and more money and time spent on hiring and recruiting. What’s good for women is good for men, good for companies, good for their customers, good for the products they produce, good for the economy, and good for our future.
Europe has already begun to mandate gender parity in businesses and is starting to see the value of it. Countries such as Norway and Germany have instituted quotas to get women on corporate boards, and companies in other European countries are responding to pressure to appoint more female directors, even if they are not required to do so by law. In a wide-ranging study of two million public and private companies in Europe, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) found that firms with more women in senior roles realized a “significantly higher return on assets.” On average, replacing just one man with one woman in management or on the board led to a 3 to 8 percent increase in profitability. In the tech sector specifically, the benefit was even greater. Tech companies saw a greater boost, the report suggests, because those companies “demand higher creativity and critical thinking that diversity in general may bring.”
With those results, one might wonder whether firms would do even better with leadership that was all women. The IMF found that when women occupied over 60 percent of leadership positions, results began to diminish. Having women entirely run our companies would not lead to the best returns, just as having men entirely run them does not either. It’s the workplaces with balance that appear to have the best results.
Silicon Valley has long celebrated failure, encouraging founders to aim big and fail fast, pick themselves up, and try again. In that spirit, there’s one big failure to add to the list: Silicon Valley has failed women, period, and it’s time for the industry to own it. At the current rate, with VCs celebrated for hiring their first (first!) female partners and companies ever so slowly achieving single-digit increases in the number of female engineers and managers, it will take us a generation or more to get to anywhere near fifty-fifty. That is unacceptable. Women not only represent half the population but drive 70 to 80 percent of consumer purchases. If only for the sake of profits, women should not be excluded from the process of imagining and creating new products.
There are a few founders who see the opportunity here. Everyone is looking for a competitive advantage, and some tech leaders have realized that there is an abundance of talent and valuable ideas in the populations that, for the last three decades, have been largely untapped. Looking at their new women-inclusive businesses and workplace cultures can give us some idea of the potential payoffs.
I ran into Dick Costolo in April 2016, ten months after he had left Twitter, and he was nearly giddy, having just hired another female engineer at his new personal fitness start-up, Chorus, the fourth company he has co-founded in two decades. From day one, Costolo focused obsessively on making sure he hired as many women as men, even if it took longer to find them. “Once you fall behind, if just two out of twenty engineers are women, it’s impossible to catch up,” Costolo told me. “Any one of these companies, the underlying disease is that it’s 90 percent men,” Costolo says. “Everything, literally everything, is reinforcing the problem.”
Jack Dorsey, who returned to Twitter as CEO when Costolo left, is also taking an innovative approach to improving the environment for women at his other company, Square. New female engineers joining the company are placed on teams that include other women rather than alone with a group of men. The hope is to engender camaraderie and networking and mitigate the “imposter syndrome” that women often experience when they are the only female in a room of male engineers. Still, with a limited number of female engineers, there is a trade-off to this strategy: some teams will remain all male. It’s an experiment, one that Dorsey believes is worth trying. In the meantime, Square has developed a strong bench of female executives. “It’s not just creating a sense of belonging that’s important,” Dorsey told me, “but also making sure women contribute to decision making.”
And then there’s the most straightforward strategy, that having women in charge will naturally attract more women. Julia Hartz, co-founder and CEO of Eventbrite, says the company’s gender balance is fifty-fifty and that this has happened organically perhaps as a result of simply having strong female role models at the top.
These founders are attempting to create products that will be used by everyone, no computer expertise required. Hiring only the stereotypical computer nerd that IBM and others were screening for in the late 1960s and early 1970s (those who “don’t like people” and “dislike activities involving close personal interaction”) would ensure disaster for these sorts of endeavors. Following James Damore’s broken logic from his Google memo and hiring mostly men because they supposedly systematize rather than empathize would be equally shortsighted. What these companies need is a tech-savvy workforce with a deep empathic understanding of people’s behaviors, interactions, and preferences. For new technologies like these to reach their potential, they simply must be created by teams with a diverse set of perspectives.
Stewart Butterfield, another multi-time entrepreneur and founder of Slack, is also proving that building a diverse, family-friendly workforce can be a key to creating a successful start-up. Butterfield had his first success when he co-founded the photo-sharing company Flickr with his then-wife, Caterina Fake. Flickr was meant to be simply a side feature for a video game Butterfield was developing, but the game financially flopped just as it became clear that photo sharing was about to become the next big thing. Yahoo swooped in, buying Flickr for north of $20 million in 2005, and Butterfield and Fake became dot-com stars. It wouldn’t last. Innovation at Flickr died under the Yahoo umbrella and Facebook and Instagram ran away with the mobile photo-sharing market.
Naturally, Butterfield started over. He built another game that failed, then, in 2012, shut the operation down, laying off all but eight people. But again, a side project of his company’s showed great promise. Butterfield’s employees had built new software to track projects and communicate with each other internally. That accidental, modern take on a chat room—now called Slack—quickly became one of the most highly valued unicorns in Silicon Valley.
Like many tech successes, Slack grew quickly—in four years expanding from twenty to over a thousand employees in five countries. But unlike most tech companies, it grew while hiring a lot of women. In 2017, Slack reported that 43.5 percent of its employees were women, including 48 percent of managers and almost 30 percent of technical employees—far better numbers than almost any tech company in Silicon Valley. Slack said of its diversity efforts in a Medium post, “We are simultaneously proud of what our people have been able to accomplish so far and determined to improve. This is a work in progress.” The real question is this: How did they do it? The answer: Butterfield and his team made a critical decision early to make diversity and inclusion an explicit priority.
I sat down with Butterfield at Slack’s SoMa headquarters in December 2016 and asked what he thought it would take to level the Silicon Valley playing field. “It’s so funny because I would have had a totally different answer to that on November 7,” he said, referring to the day before Donald Trump was elected president. “I just thought that the world was getting better, but then it turns out it’s not getting better.”
Butterfield is not shy about sharing his political views. He’s publicly backed Planned Parenthood, protested President Trump’s controversial travel ban targeting Muslims, and sent a companywide memo in 2016 urging his employees to take a pause on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. “Think about how profoundly shameful it is that there even ever had to be a ‘civil rights movement,’” Butterfield wrote.
Two years before I sat down with Butterfield, former Google engineer Erica Joy Baker was marching the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, to protest the shooting of a young black man named Michael Brown, when Butterfield tweeted at her, “Be safe.” When Baker looked at Butterfield’s Twitter page, she realized he cared about diversity almost as much as she did. “He is woke. I want to go work for him,” Baker said of her discovery. In 2015, she joined the Slack team as a senior engineer fully convinced after reading a powerful Medium post by Slack’s then-engineering chief of staff, Nolan Caudill, in which he outlined the company’s core values. These included diligence, curiosity, and empathy—a stark contrast to Uber’s original core tenets: “steppin’ on toes,” “always be hustlin’,” and “meritocracy.”
“Our industry has for decades been directed and built by a mostly homogeneous group, and has downplayed the accomplishments of others not in this group,” Caudill wrote. “We recognized our own shortcomings in this area and thus wanted to be explicit about what Slack stands for, what we are trying to build, and who we want here to help us build it. By focusing on how we build Slack first, we can hopefully improve the greater industry, in whatever measure.”
Butterfield is quick to acknowledge that white male privilege helped land him in the CEO suite in the first place. He recalls his old group of buddies from Yahoo who went on to become great successes in tech, including Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn, and Andrew Braccia, a venture capitalist at Accel who invested in Slack. “All of them are men,” Butterfield says. “It’s not a conspiracy, but it’s also not a coincidence.”
Butterfield admits that his Rolodex gives him a huge, and somewhat unfair, advantage. “It would have been the same experience if you worked at eBay in early days, Google, Facebook, or in this generation Airbnb, Pinterest, Snapchat, Slack,” he says. “I have all these amazing contacts that I can call on if I want my company acquired, or I want an investor, or if I want to do a partnership, or I want to hire someone, or whatever. And if you don’t have access to that network, it’s not impossible to be successful in tech, but it’s an order of magnitude more difficult. Not actually insurmountable, but close.” There are plenty of women entrepreneurs who deserve funding now, but it is also true that we are in a transition period where men like Butterfield with influence, connections, and access to money can help. Women who gain career momentum at Slack will go on to greater things with their own set of vital connections.
Butterfield grants that Slack’s values may sound like “hippie-dippy bullshit,” then gets serious: “We have to make money to be a successful business, but the making of the money doesn’t determine whether the whole thing was successful and worthwhile and whether I feel like my life was well spent . . . I find it totally plausible that it drives better business outcomes, but I don’t think that’s the prime reason. The real drivers were, this just seems fairer and better for the world.” Butterfield acknowledges that he, personally, is already richer than he ever dreamed of being. Does that make it easier for him to focus on the company’s values rather than on its bottom line? To him, they are the same. “For the company to make more money is a good thing because it can reinvest in all kinds of stuff. But having some belief in the mission is going to make us so much more effective in the first place.”
Slack can’t change who applied to college five years ago, Butterfield points out. “So, how can we have an impact?” he asks. “We can have an impact by making this a good place for people to work. If women are less likely to leave the industry because they worked at Slack, then there will be more people who survived at a higher tenure of experience and therefore a higher role and could go on to be a VP of engineering at Slack or at some other company in the future.”
The Slack team is engineering a system that was specifically created to foster teamwork and collaboration. It would simply be bad business not to employ a diverse team that knew something about how people of all types work together to build this product. Though Butterfield knew the kind of team he wanted, he also knew he couldn’t make it happen all by himself: “As an already successful, white, male, straight—fucking go down the list—I’m not going to have the relevant experience to determine what makes this a good workplace, so some of that is just being open but really just making it an explicit focus.”
The path to creating the workforce and corporate culture he desired wasn’t easy. In 2014, when the company was just fifty employees, almost all of them white and male, Butterfield hired the company’s first female executive, Anne Toth, who ultimately ran Slack’s people operations and recruiting. “If there was more than one woman in the bathroom, that was kind of an ‘Oh my gosh’ moment,” Toth recalls. “I knew Stewart wanted Slack to be a different kind of workplace . . . He used to say the business fundamentals are solid . . . but we cannot screw up on the people we bring into the company, we can’t screw up on the culture, we don’t have the same margins for error that we might on the business front. He was very passionate about who we are.”
Toth contacted Joelle Emerson, a former lawyer who had started a new business called Paradigm to help tech companies build their diversity and inclusion policies. I first met Emerson in March 2016, at the airy San Francisco headquarters of Airbnb, another company her team was advising. She speaks incredibly fast and with conviction. Right off the bat she said, “None of these companies are winning, and all of them are struggling” when it comes to the representation of women. By September 2017, Emerson was mildly more optimistic: “We’ve seen a handful of companies (like Pinterest, Intel, and Airbnb, for example) demonstrate progress in some areas, while stalling in others. Sustained progress takes time . . . That companies shouldn’t be congratulating themselves doesn’t mean there isn’t progress; it means we have a long way to go.”
One impediment to progress, Emerson says, is that companies have been focused more on raising awareness about unconscious bias rather than educating employees about actions they can take to combat bias. “If you focus on trying to raise awareness, you probably won’t see a ton of impact. If you train people on actions they can take, that can have an impact,” she says.
The research shows that the effects of unconscious-bias training are mixed; there’s evidence that it can wear off quickly and even backfire. Emerson says that’s reason not to get rid of the training but to improve it, in order to help employees to understand why certain changes are being made and empower them to engage with those changes. That’s why Emerson is focused on building her learnings about bias into the everyday structure and operations of companies. First and foremost, she says CEOs and VCs need to buy into the idea that diversity is important and hire a head of HR before the company grows beyond forty to fifty people.
With Emerson’s guidance and Toth’s execution, Slack started by having employees discuss and articulate the company’s values including, most importantly, empathy. And the company started collecting diversity data on its employees.
Restructuring the company’s interview process was another key component of Emerson’s formula. “When interviews aren’t structured, they tend to be about as predictive as a coin toss,” Emerson says. “It’s only by articulating what you’re looking for and assessing for that consistently that we can have any objective evaluation of candidates.”
The company also ended “whiteboard coding interviews,” a standard practice at many Silicon Valley companies that involves a candidate writing code on a whiteboard in front of a panel of interviewers. “When the candidate is asked to do something they don’t normally do and do it in front of someone judging them, it introduces a performance dynamic that can be alienating,” Slack’s infrastructure engineering head, Julia Grace, wrote in a Medium post.
Companies also need to focus on how prospective employees are finding them in the first place. Employee referrals can be one of the most insidious drivers of sameness in company hiring; that is, men are most likely to refer other men. Emerson recommends asking employees explicitly to refer diverse candidates. “Just by thinking harder and being intentional about it,” she says, companies can change surprisingly quickly. Pinterest, another client of Emerson’s, has seen significant increases in its percentage of women and minority candidates simply by asking employees directly to refer women and underrepresented minorities.
“Stewart has said things I’ve never heard from a CEO, like ‘Can you refer people who look like you to me? I get white guys all the time. You can make a difference.’ These are things more people need to say,” says former director of engineering Leslie Miley, who is African American.
In fact, whenever Butterfield tweeted about hiring diverse candidates, Toth says the company saw ridiculous spikes in inbound interest.
Slack also diversified its recruiting team. “We have a recruiter who’s sixty, we have a Latina woman, two African American women, an African American man, an Asian man, several Caucasian women, and I can’t even count the number of LGBT folks,” Toth told me. These recruiters were given explicit instructions to source underrepresented candidates from a broader swath of schools (including often overlooked schools such as historically black colleges and those in the South) for every new role at every level of the organization. “We were also looking for candidates who might be older, midcareer, or reentering the workforce from different geographical areas, where typical tech companies weren’t looking,” Toth said. Recruiting “captains” were designated for various groups, including women, “Earthtones” (referring to people of color), LGBTQ, and veterans, to promote better understanding and support of those specific candidates.
Job postings were reworded. According to Emerson, male-biased terms such as “rock star” and “ninja” are no-no’s, along with words such as “brilliant” that convey the belief that intelligence, talents, and abilities are innate, rather than traits that can be developed. Research shows that job descriptions that contain such language get fewer applications overall and fewer from women. Slack also removed explicit requirements like number of years of experience and specific degrees necessary, in the hope that candidates wouldn’t opt out prematurely.
Today, Slack’s job postings clearly articulate the company’s focus on diversity, stating, “We believe everyone deserves to work in a welcoming, respectful, and empathetic culture. We live by our values and hire accordingly . . . Ensuring a diverse and inclusive workplace where we learn from each other is core to Slack’s values. We welcome people of different backgrounds, experiences, abilities and perspectives. We are an equal opportunity employer and a fun place to work. Come do the best work of your life here at Slack.”
A big bonus of even a little success at diverse hiring is this: once you get more women and underrepresented minorities in the door, more want to join. “The next hire is easier. There’s an increasing return dynamic there,” Butterfield says. “Now that we have this reputation . . . it feeds on itself.”
There is an important myth to dispel. Some people think hiring for diversity is illegal. “They’d be wrong,” says Emerson flatly. “Generally, what you can’t do . . . is, you can’t say, ‘Here are two equally qualified candidates, and I’m going to hire you just because you’re a woman.’ But you can engage in efforts to counterbalance the candidates you’re seeing. I would say you have an obligation to do that; not only is it legal, but you should have to.”
Which brings me to a point the PayPal Mafia member Keith Rabois raised early in this book: he told me that it’s important to hire people who agree with your “first principles”—for example, whether to focus on growth or profitability and, more broadly, the company’s mission and how to pursue it. I’d agree. If your mission is to encourage people to share more online, you shouldn’t hire someone who believes people don’t really want to make their private lives public, or you’ll spend a lot of time arguing, time you don’t have to waste when you’re trying to build a company. But those who believe in your mission and how to execute it aren’t limited to people who look and act like you. To combat this tendency, you must first be explicit about what your first principles are. And then, for all of the reasons we discussed, go out of your way to find people who agree with your first principles and who don’t look like you. Because if you don’t build a diverse team when you start, as you scale, it will be incomparably harder to do so.
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.”
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:
“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?”
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.