Along with our annual celebration of women in the technology field, we would be remiss this year if we didn't also acknowledge an obvious issue: Given the current controversy over the rash of recent high-profile sexual harassment and discrimination lawsuits against a handful of Silicon Valley's biggest firms, we've consulted some of our Agenda brain trust for perspective on what's going on here—and what can be done to address the situation and move beyond it. These conversations have helped us identify a set of thorny interrelated problems that can and should be (and in various ways, as we shall see, are being) dealt with simultaneously.
1. Prime the Pump
The single most noticeable fact about women in tech is that there aren't enough of them. "Since the 1980s," says Reshma Saujani, founder of the nonprofit organization Girls Who Code, "we saw this crazy decline, where 37 percent of computer science majors were women, while today, the number is less than 18 percent. It's interesting, because no other industry has had that decline—in fact, it's quite the opposite. There was a caricature of what a computer programmer was—a dorky boy in a basement somewhere—and girls were like, 'I don't want to do that.'"
Susan Molinari, Google's vice president for public policy, agrees: "Encouragement, career perceptions, self-perception, and academic exposure account for 95 percent of a girl's decision to pursue computer science," Molinari says. "One way Google is trying to help is by working with the entertainment industry to create more positive computer science role models on TV and in the movies."
And perceptions—and life choices—are changing. Saujani's organization helps set up extracurricular Girls Who Code clubs at schools and colleges across the country and partners with big digital-media firms to run intensive summer-immersion internship programs for these students. The group is ramping up "crazy fast," Saujani reports. "In 2012, we taught 20 girls. At the end of last year, we had taught more than 3,000. Next year, we'll teach 10,000."
How much do these numbers matter? According to Saujani, only 7,500 women earned bachelor's degrees last year in computer science nationwide, and just a few more than 4,000 girls passed the AP computer science exam. As for Girls Who Code's success rate: "One hundred percent of our girls are majoring or minoring in computer science or engineering—and 90 percent of them wanted to do something else before" getting involved, she says.
Further up the start-up food chain, change might be slower to come and harder to win—but here, too, progress seems to be underway. Jessica Livingston co-founded Silicon Valley's ultraprestigious start-up accelerator Y Combinator in 2005 and has helped more than 800 new companies get funding since, including such success stories as Reddit, Airbnb, and Dropbox. In 2005, she says, none of the start-up founders they worked with were women; until around 2011, women comprised around 4 percent of them. Then the numbers rose noticeably, and most recently, women have been in on more than 20 percent of Y Combinator-approved projects. "That is a major shift," Livingston says. "And in the past, women were never the CEOs. Now we're seeing more women up there onstage presenting at demo day and leading the fundraising." Livingston's own role is one of the most unique in Silicon Valley, because venture capital may be the toughest bastion of all for women to breach.
Libby Leffler, who started working at Facebook in 2008 and ran partnerships at the social media giant before heading to Harvard Business School this fall, points out that "only 4 percent of senior venture capitalists—the decision-makers—are women. If you take risks on start-ups and entrepreneurs all day long, you have to be able to take risks on developing more women to become senior partners, too."
2. Push the Recruiting issue
The headlines that have been generated by lawsuits in Silicon Valley have helped raise awareness about how problematic it can become to play fast and loose with hiring and internal organization. People who still try to claim with a straight face that the tech industry even approximates a meritocracy are getting laughed out of the boardroom.
Livingston offers some insights from up close into how start-ups drift toward trouble on these issues. Speaking about female start-up founders, Livingston says, "I think every single one of them would tell you that being a founder of a successful start-up is so much harder than any of the problems we face specifically as females." They're too busy just scrambling alongside their male colleagues to make it.
Livingston also points out that start-ups typically recruit early members from informal networks via friends, former classmates, even roommates. "So it's very easy to get to a 10-person company with all guys," she says. "Once you have that, is it harder to attract a strong female candidate? Probably. A lot of the start-ups we fund care a lot about starting diversity at an early stage, but you do have to be very conscious about it. The culture gets set very early on—and you're not paying attention! You're trying to get a product that works and to raise funding, and this is so last on your list."
But until something resembling a human resources policy with coherent hiring, management, and evaluation procedures is put in place, everything is handled in an informal, ad hoc way. And in that kind of environment, anyone who is perceived to be "different," someone who "might not fit in," is going to be at a disadvantage—and those who already possess ample social capital will have an arguably unfair advantage. That syndrome has surely contributed to what has become an indefensible lack of diversity in the tech industry.
3. Build a Sustainable Workplace
The go-go start-up culture is all about taking risks, giving 110 percent in sweat equity, scoring big when a business catches fire, and then leveraging the rest of your life with the well-earned proceeds. As that context gives way to large, well-established businesses, however, the workplace culture needs to evolve toward more balanced expectations. Arianna Huffington, who recently celebrated the tenth anniversary of her formidable Huffington Post empire, has become a huge advocate for humanizing the corporate atmosphere and making it more friendly for people who have families and other responsibilities outside of work—which describes the lives of a lot of impressively talented women. She advocates for the adoption of new norms such as flexible work schedules, more telecommuting, and electronically untethering employees outside of working hours. At the Huffington Post, she says, "We're about to institute an e-mail vacation policy based on the one implemented by the German company Daimler, which blocks all e-mails employees receive while on vacation, so our employees don't return to an avalanche of e-mails and all the stress that brings."
Huffington's investigation into these issues for her 2014 wellness book, Thrive, yielded some especially concerning data about how stress can take a toll on working women in particular: They have an almost 40 percent higher incidence of heart-related illness and deaths compared to women who live with less workplace stress, and a 60 percent higher risk of developing type 2 diabetes. And while these physical manifestations of occupational stress are not as highly correlated in men, there's plenty of accumulating evidence that millennial males at least aspire to achieve a balance between work and family life that was once unthinkable for the corporate warrior.
4. Change the Culture.
And that's what bringing more women and better practices into the tech world is all about: really shifting prevailing norms in such a way that this exciting and dynamic sector recruits from the full
spectrum of talent available—and distributes opportunity in equal measure. The supreme irony is that the tech world itself stands to profit above all from such change: "So many studies show that diversity in teams is really beneficial to them," says Leffler, alluding to widely reported data showing that information technology companies with women executives on board are financially more successful than their all-male competition. "I think this effect extends to race as well," she adds, "and this is the real bleeding edge, because in Silicon Valley, everybody is talking about women in tech, and men are afraid to talk about it for fear of saying the wrong thing—and everyone is afraid to talk about race for the same reason." Which of course means that we seriously need to have that talk as well.
This article originally appeared in the July 2015 print issue of ELLE.
