There’s been plenty of talk about the lack of women in tech, and plenty of examples to illustrate exactly why women may not be all that keen on Silicon Valley.
Women make up just 30% of the tech industry according to LinkedIn, and with examples like this and this and this it’s not hard to see why women are choosing to steer clear of the industry.
And here’s a few more examples from the past few weeks.
TechWeek, a four year old technology conference in Chicago, took a notably sexist turn when distributing fliers to promote its 1st Annual Black Tie Rave, using a decidedly sexist imagery as a promotional tool.
It’s good to see that a number of people in the tech community swiftly and publicly called out the event, with some taking to social media to express their distaste, while others withdrew their partnership from the event.
For its part, TechWeek issued an apology and said they will be holding a roundtable next month to discuss how they can find a more positive and inclusive way to communicate.
Though the furore over the flyers might seem out of proportion on the surface, these sexist (and although sometimes subtle) depictions of women add even more ammunition to the idea that there is a pervasive cultural problem in the tech industry. Incidents such as this do little to alleviate the tech industry’s reputation as a testosterone-fuelled ‘bro’ community, and does little to lessen the disturbing sexism that permeates the male-dominated industry, or make it an inclusive place for women to want to work.
Last week a number of explicit emails sent by Evan Spiegel, CEO of SnapChat, during his undergrad college days, unfortunately (for Spiegel) didn’t self-combust as easily as the photos from his messaging service. Instead they were making the rounds on social media after being published on Silicon Valley gossip site ValleyWag.
Evans has since apologised and said he was “mortified” and “ashamed” by the messages from his frat boy days being revealed.
“I have no excuse,” he told TechCrunch. “I’m sorry I wrote them at the time and I was [a] jerk to have written them. They in no way reflect who I am today or my views towards women.”
Also last week, the co-founder of online annotation website RapGenius, Mahbbod Moghadam, was forced to resign from the board of directors of his company after publishing his disgusting thoughts on Elliot Rodger’s misogynistic manifesto, with lines such as “MY GUESS: his sister is smokin hot.”
And then there’s this example from yesterday:
Atlassian, the Australian software company behind software products including Jura, Confluence and HipChat is currently hosting a two-day tech conference in Berlin. And according to Business Insider, this happened when one developer took to the stage:
“[Jonathan] Doklovic was making a presentation called, ‘A P2 Plugin and a SaaS Platform Walk into a Bar …’ In the presentation, he threw up a slide about Maven, a plugin execution framework supported by Atlassian that developers can use to add software components to their existing applications.
“In the slide, Doklovic compared Maven to his girlfriend, saying that although she looks beautiful she ‘complains a lot, demands my attention, interrupts me when I’m working’ and ‘doesn’t play well with my other friends.’ “
Atlassian’s official twitter account called Doklovic’s slide “BS” and said they were “taking immediate action”.
@kimhorne It isn't at all. This is BS. And not reflective of our company values. We're taking immediate action.
— atlassian (@atlassian) June 4, 2014
We’re not sure what that immediate action entails, but we certainly hope that action will extend to boosting the number of women on their leadership team — according to its website, of the eleven people on the Atlassian leadership team, just one is a woman, while there are no women on its board.
And while Google last week took small steps to acknowledge the dearth of women in the company, for the first time publicly revealing its lack of diversity, with women accounting for just over 30% of its workforce, they’ve not explained the steps they will take to actually correct these figures.
If the tech community genuinely wants to make amends and encourage more women to get involved in the industry, just acknowledging the problem and apologising for it isn’t going to cut it.
Like Doklovic said, women complain a lot, and will continue to do so, until these ‘bros’ clean up their act.