- Thanks for being here, this is fantastic.
Really appreciate the turn out.
As you can tell this is gonna be a Q&A.
And it will be a Q&A with me at the beginning,
but you later on.
And Emily has a signed copy of her book
for the first good question.
So be thinking of those.
- [Emily] The first good one, not the first question.
- I get to decide what's good.
So Emily Chang is the everything of Bloomberg Tech,
which is a daily tech TV show.
I first met her face to face, although I've watched
the show a lot, when I did some interviews
in connection with I guess,
was it a GeekWire event in the fall?
- Yeah, mm hmm. - And pretty interesting.
Anyway, Emily, subsequent to that time,
wrote this book Brotopia, I suspect many of you
have not read it.
How many people have actually read the book?
Oh, fantastic, good.
- [Emily] Yay! Thank you!
- Great, okay, so that's the subject of today's conversation
and lemme say that I have a slide
and a talk I sometimes give where I'm talking about
increasing enrollments in computer science.
And part of what I say is that the field
is improving on its dismal reputation
for how it treats women and minorities.
And I think what this book reveals
is that either I visit a very select group of companies,
or I am completely sort of inoculated
against perceiving the things that go on, right?
So I think one of the great things about the book
is it not only talks about what the problems are
with really examples that stunned me, I have to say,
but it presents some positive examples
and it presents some potential solutions, okay.
So it's not all bad news.
It talks to us about what we can do.
- And by the way my benchmark for success
was Ed being surprised and having learned something.
Because you have one of the best computer science
professors in the country, and so,
if he thinks it's important.
- [Ed] It's important.
- It needs a book. - And it's scary.
So why don't we start there, which is what persuaded you
to write the book?
What got you going in the first place?
And obviously you spend your life with tech people.
So I guess you've heard these stories,
but why don't you tell us where this came from?
- Yeah, so, I've been anchoring Bloomberg Tech,
our show on Bloomberg Television for eight years
and I've always been concerned about the representation
of women in business and in tech specifically.
I mean the numbers are just so bad,
and they are worth repeating.
You know, women have 25% of jobs in this industry,
they account for about 7% of venture capital investors
and women led companies get just 2% of funding.
Hardly believe that that is because women
have just 2% of good ideas.
So, you know, that was always in the background,
but my first order of business was trying
to build the show and convince important people
to come on the show, and so it was kind
of politically incorrect to start asking these questions
like well, but what are you doing about hiring women?
What are you doing about promoting women?
What are you doing about funding women?
But as the show grew, I became more courageous
about you know, putting people on the spot.
And people would kind of squirm
and you know, they would give the politically correct
answer and then they would get off the set
and they'd be like (sighs dramatically).
And they'd tell you what they really thought.
And so I knew that there was so much more there.
And then at the end of 2015, I was interviewing
one particularly very prominent investor,
who, you know, they had no women in their firm
at the time, and I said, you know, what do you think
your responsibility is to hire women?
And he said, well, we're looking very hard,
but you know, not enough women are studying STEM
and by the way we're not prepared to lower our standards.
This was on television.
And so that was really the spark that lit the fire.
You know, I knew, it was almost as if for a moment,
someone had actually told me the truth.
And that there was, you know, part of the problem
is people believe that they have to lower their standards
in order to find talented women.
And there was this amazing headline in Vanity Fair
the next day that said, "Here's news to all you smart,
"talented women who wanna work in technology.
"Apparently, you don't exist."
And you know, clearly the tech industry
and these companies haven't been looking hard enough.
You know, more women are graduating from college today.
Women own 40% of businesses, this isn't
just the right thing to do,
this isn't just the fair thing to do,
this is the smart thing to do to build better businesses.
And not have blind spots in your organization.
And this is an industry that is building the future
so it should represent the world's population.
- Focusing on VC for another minute here,
there was a really interesting article by Claire Cain Miller
in the New York Times, maybe two years ago.
And it reported on some work by a couple faculty members
at Berkeley's Business School, School of Business.
And what they had done was look at all the successful
startups and I'll get the statistics slightly wrong,
a six year period in the Bay area and New York.
And do a regression analysis on the attributes
of the founders of these startups, okay.
And rather than a college dropout in a hoodie,
the typical startup founder had a masters degree
and was 35 years old.
About half in business and half in computer science.
Interesting thing was when they looked at the data,
they predicted that 20% of founders of successful
startups should have been women.
And the number was small single digit percent.
So what's happening is VCs are looking
for their stereotypical founder which probably
is their view of themselves or something like that.
- Totally, and the qualities that are seen as positive
in men are seen as negative in women.
So if you have an investor evaluating a male
and a female entrepreneur, you know, for men,
if they're young, that's considered, you know,
they have high potential for a woman if they're young,
oh, they're inexperienced.
If a man is cautious, oh that's kind of a good thing,
if a woman is cautious, that's a red flag.
And so you know, we just don't think,
we don't use words like visionary and genius
to describe women, but we use those words
to describe dozens and dozens of men.
And so if you're looking at a male entrepreneur
and considering funding them, there's this sort
of simple risk benefit calculation you're doing
in your head, do we like this person?
Can they execute?
Do we like the idea?
Whereas if it's a woman it's a much bigger
sort of, but does she have what it takes?
And I, you know, it makes me sad to think about,
but I do think about all of the women who never
got a chance to fund, I mean to start the next Facebook
or Google or Apple, simply because
they didn't look the part.
- I'm laughing because back in October you provoked
me to rant about Facebook.
That turned out to have been pressured,
but it was kind of out there at the time.
All right, so you know, you have some hypotheses
in your book about how we got to be this way.
What's the story?
- So this to me, the history of was really
the smoking gun and I'll never forget
when my researcher sent me a bunch of stuff
that she'd been working on and we were both like
oh my goodness, this is it.
This is what we've been looking for the whole time.
In the 1940s and 1950s women actually,
I'm sure some of you in this room know this,
women actually played a huge role
in the computing industry.
Men were very well represented and primarily represented
among hardware makers.
But women were very well represented
among software programmers.
And so they were programming computers
for the military and programming computers
for NASA, and it literally was like Hidden Figures,
but industry wide.
And then in the 60s and 70s, the tech industry
was exploding in size and was desperate
for new talent.
And so they started doing these personality tests,
and these aptitude tests to identify people
who they thought would make good programmers
and one software company in particular hired
these two psychologists who decided
that good programmers quote, don't like people.
Well, if you look for people who don't like people,
the research tells us you'll hire far more men than women.
Glad you're laughing a little bit there.
There's also no research to support this idea
that people who don't like people
are better at this job than people who do,
or that men are better at this job than women.
In fact there is a plethora of evidence
to support the idea that we need people who like people
and care about people or empathetic
to the problems of the users that they're trying
to solve to be building these products
and services for the world.
Because as I said, billions and billions
of people are using them.
But these tests were widely influential,
they were used for decades by companies
as big as IBM and they shut out
more than half the population.
And so the tech industry, in my view,
created the pipeline problem by having such
a narrow idea of who can do this job.
I'm not saying there isn't a pipeline problem.
There is.
But in 1984, women hit the high point earning
computer science degrees, they were earning 37% of degrees.
That has since plummeted to 18% where it's been flat
for the last decade.
And you see about the same trend in jobs,
the percentage of jobs held by women in the industry.
And so even though the industry was exploding
in size, the percentage of women in your seats
was getting smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller.
And now we're here today.
And you have the tech industry saying,
well it's a pipeline problem.
We can't do anything about that.
When in fact, you can't be what you can't see.
And so, at the end of the book,
I interviewed these seven young girls
who've all learned how to code.
They're so excited about doing their part
to change the world, but they read the news,
and they know that you know, Sheryl Sandberg
and Ginni Rometty are two of very few women
who have cracked the silicon ceiling
and they also know, ya know, one of them said to me,
"Well, I was reading about Uber and I heard
"that Travis was like meditating in the lactation room.
"What's that about?"
And so like, they know what's going on.
You know?
And it is just another example
that you can't be what you can't see.
And the tech industry has so much to do
to just create a better, as you said,
a better working environment.
- Yeah, we were talking before we came down here.
And something I was telling tech companies 20 years ago
was instead of giving us money to have programs
to address gender diversity, they should clean
up their employment act, in some sense create
a supportive environment because word was getting out.
In some sense, you know, my view, optimistic view,
had been this was happening.
But it's obviously spotty at best.
- Right, and all of these companies will point
to the money that they're giving to programs,
pipeline programs, but Google, for example
spends tens of millions of dollars on pipeline issues.
But they invested $30 billion in their cloud business.
Huge difference in priorities there.
- There is a pipeline problem, but to say it's a pipeline
problem is to in some sense, finesse what you yourself
could be doing about it.
- Absolutely, absolutely.
- So what, in your view, is the worst example
in your book of something that goes on?
- (laughs) Well there are plenty.
And also there are bright spots.
- Okay, you can have two.
(Emily laughing)
- Look, I do think there are some egregious examples
in the book and some of you may have heard about those.
You know, Uber was one of the biggest offenders
where some of you may have heard of Susan Fowler
who is the woman engineer who worked at Uber
and she wrote this viral memo
about her experience being sexually harassed on the job.
On her first day on the job,
her manager propositions her for sex,
over the company chat system.
So she takes screenshots of it,
brings it to HR and says look what this guy said to me.
And HR says, well, we're gonna let that slide,
because he's a high performer.
And you know, this was not necessarily an isolated case.
This is a company where, so three weeks
after she posted this, I had 12 women engineers
over at my home for dinner.
Some of them who worked at Uber.
And they were like we get invited to strip clubs
and bondage clubs like in the middle of the day.
Is that unusual?
And so, you know, for them,
- Hey, at least they're included.
(audience laughing)
- They could go out drinking in the middle of the day,
and if they came back at 3 a.m. it didn't matter,
as long as they got their work done.
And so, some of these things are just so obviously
crossing the line, but in general what these women
told me is that, they're often the only women
in the room over and over and over again.
And so, that's isolating, that can be exhausting
and it can be very frustrating because they're
often put in this position of having to prove themselves
over and over again.
And it's kind of this emotional labor,
this entire second job that doesn't count for anything.
And so it's not these sort of more isolated, egregious
examples that are the biggest problem,
it's the systemic discrimination that works
against everyone and it means that people
can't reach their full potential.
Women can't reach their full potential,
men don't have, we all don't have the benefit
of their potential contributions.
- So you talked about these sort of screening tests
for employment that go back a long way
and are tilted.
You've got some comments about meritocracy in your book.
I have to say that to me, something that concerned
me a lot is the now in vogue quantitative assessments, okay?
And what worries me is that previously,
if you got a bad review, you could at least have
some self esteem by saying, well that guy is just biased.
Okay, I'm actually doing fine.
Now what happens is you get this quantitative assessment
that gives you a score at the end
and it's based on a set of criteria
and a set of weighting factors.
And the people who chose the criteria
and the weighting factors are the people
who succeeded under the existing system.
So, you're getting this unbiased quantitative assessment
that says you fall short.
And it's very hard to refute that even though it has
the same sorts of biases built in.
Anyway, tell us about meritocracies.
- Well, so the argument about meritocracies,
first of all in my view, a true meritocracy
is impossible to achieve,
because we all come to the plate with different
privileges and different levels of access
and the escalator of life
is moving faster for some of us
than it is for others.
And fascinating little tidbit
about just the word meritocracy,
it was coined actually in the 1950s by a British
sociologist who was using it to warn
about the future of this dystopian world
where everyone just used their education
and success to justify their success, basically.
So, you know, it was where it would be come a tool
to sort of justify the success of the winners
and the lack there of of the losers
and say well everyone's in their right place
because we're in a meritocratic system.
And it's funny, actually, 50 years later,
right before he died, he wrote an Op Ed
saying I'm so disturbed by the fact that my term
which I threw out there as a warning
has now become used by prime ministers
and presidents to talk about how wonderful
their societies are working.
And when you believe you are operating in a meritocracy,
you can actually be more anti-meritocratic.
And sorry this sounds a little jargony,
but if you think that everyone is in their right place,
you don't question.
You're blind to the discrimination and systemic factors
that are working against the people who are not succeeding.
And so Silicon Valley has always styled itself
as a meritocracy, anyone here can succeed.
And you know, the book is called Brotopia, which I know
makes a strong statement, and in my view epitomizes
this idea of Silicon Valley as a modern Utopia,
where anyone can change the world,
anyone can make their own rules, if they're a man.
But if you're a woman, it is incomparably harder.
And I use the PayPal mafia, the founders
and early employees at PayPal who had this huge exit
and then went on to found companies,
join each other's companies, fund each other's companies,
you know, it became this super influential network
that just so happened to be all men.
And they called it a meritocracy.
And there were no women involved.
And you can't tell me that's because only men
have good ideas.
And Peter Thiel was just better than all the women.
So that's how I take down meritocracy in my book.
- Got it.
So you've got this new article you wrote
suggesting that Amazon strive for 50/50 in HQ2,
wherever it will wind up.
Tell us how that's going down.
- Yeah, so you know, companies always say
it's a pipeline problem and they say they're working on it,
but it's gonna take years because they're
so un-diverse already.
Well, Amazon has this opportunity to start from scratch
with HQ2, they're gonna be creating 50,000 new jobs,
and in my view, there's no reason that Amazon
can't build a 50/50 balanced workforce from the beginning
if they are thinking about this.
If they care about this.
And represent people of color in line
with the local population.
And so what we did is we picked the,
they have 20 cities that are on the short list,
we picked the top three that map the best
for women in STEM and women in the workforce in general.
And it's been, the reaction has been very interesting,
because you know, this is a company that historically
has been very secretive.
You know, they do have some programs
and they have a page about diversity.
But you know, I had sources inside Amazon web services
meetings where you know, how many people are in this room?
What would you say like,
- Hundred, something like that.
- Hundred, okay, so they have meetings
of 200 people and five people in the room are women.
That's a typical day.
That's just a day in the life
of an Amazon web services employee.
And you know, this is a company
that is building the future.
We can't have the vast majority of people in this industry,
the people who are making decisions
being almost entirely men.
You know, I interviewed Ev Williams,
who's the co-founder of Twitter,
towards the end of the book and I asked him,
if you had had women on the early Twitter team,
do you think online harassment and trolling
would be such a problem?
And he was like, hm, no, actually I don't think so.
Like actually, we weren't thinking about these things
when we were building Twitter.
We were thinking about wonderful
and amazing things that could be done with it,
not how it could be used to send death threats
or rape threats.
And yeah, actually maybe the internet would be
a friendlier and less hostile place
if we had done so.
And so you know, what if women had had a seat
at the table 30 years ago?
Would online harassment and trolling be such a problem?
Would porn be so ubiquitous?
Would video games be so violent?
Would there be better parental controls
on things like YouTube?
Facial recognition technology is already
a little bit sexist and a little bit racist
and doesn't recognize women and people of color
as easily as it does white men.
And so, in my view, you know, we've never shied away
from hard problems, right?
That's what the tech industry does.
They tackle hard problems.
So if you can get us to Mars
and you can build self driving cars,
you can hire more women and pay them fairly,
and fund their ideas.
(audience applauding)
Yes, thank you.
- So give us some good examples.
- Give us some hope? - Give us some hope.
- So, you know when you were talking
about the technical screening,
the last chapter of the book
is really focused on solutions.
And you know, I do think that change needs
to come from the top.
And we need CEOs and top investors
to make this a number one priority.
There's a whole chapter on Google
about how Google's founders made this a priority
in the early days, they hired these incredible women,
they built this incredible business.
And then they lost focus and they lost sight of it.
And now, you know their numbers are average,
just like everyone else's.
When you look at Slack, which is obviously
a much younger company--
- Can I make a comment there? - Yeah.
- Google also had some highly placed women
who succeeded by acting like men, okay?
And that's a problem.
- Well, okay, and that's another conversation.
I can't tell you how many times people said to me,
as I was writing the book, well, you're gonna write
about mean girls, right?
And mean women bosses?
And you know what?
Sheryl Sandberg did this amazing article
in the New York Times about how women,
when they think there's only room for one,
are more competitive with each other.
So if there's only one woman on the board,
they're less likely to help other women.
If there's only one woman on the executive team,
they're less likely to help other women.
But if there's three, they're like oh, actually,
it's not this dog eat dog world.
Maybe I should be helping my comrades.
And unfortunately, we just don't have enough examples
of women in leadership in general.
And so I know you're talking about,
I'm sure you're talking about Marissa Mayer in particular.
(audience laughing)
But what the problem is, we don't have enough
examples of Marissa Mayers, you know?
Like we don't, there are so many different styles
of leadership and we see that in so many different
kinds of men, but we don't see that in women.
And so we look at the one way she succeeded
and think, oh that must be the way to succeed
for a woman is to act like a man.
But that's just only one small example.
And if we had more women in leadership roles,
we would see so many different ways to lead.
And so you know, I decided that I didn't wanna be,
I don't wanna be guilty of stereotyping even further.
There's amazing research that shows that women
and men are far more similar than they are different.
And any, just as ambitious, just as willing to take risks.
And the differences that you see
are a result of socialization.
And so, we've heard the examples of you know, in a meeting,
so for example a lot of these tech companies
are really aggressive, super confrontational,
it's like this debate culture.
And all the good ideas are supposed to rise to the top.
Well, actually, women,
when they act like that are unlikable.
For cultural reasons.
And so they find that if they act that way,
it doesn't necessarily work in their favor.
And so there are all of these social and cultural forces
that are working against women
that in my view would be soft
if we just had more women at the table.
Like if you have a dinner table,
and you have 10 men around it,
you swap out one man for a woman,
the conversation will change like a little bit.
But if it's half and half, it's a completely
different conversation and that's what needs to happen
to have a real culture change.
And then maybe we'd be able to see,
well, okay, is that really the only way to succeed
if you're a woman?
Are all of the women CEOs succeeding
because they're acting like men or not?
- We were on a positive thread.
- Oh yes! - I torpedoed it.
So let's get back to that.
I'm sorry.
- Look, there are some, many good examples,
and actually I should mention that some
of the best examples are companies that are run by women.
And so if you look at The Runway or Stitchfix or Eventbrite
you've got women CEOs and you've
got a gender balanced work force.
So just having a diverse group of people at the top
of an organization, they attract other people
who are also diverse and who care about these things.
At Slack, Stewart Butterfield, the CEO
has made this like his mission.
And he tweets about it, he talks to everyone
in the organization about it, they know.
And if your boss wants you to do something
like generally you do it.
And so some of the things that they've done,
they've diversified their recruiting teams,
they've got recruiters of every size, slice, color,
they are sourcing from under represented schools,
HBCUs, different geographical regions,
schools in the south, sourcing across a range of ages.
I mean the tech industry also has an age-ism problem.
And I think it's under reported.
You know, but Slack very much know.
They don't have ping pong tables,
they're not like trying to be a college dorm fantasy land.
Their motto is work hard and go home.
(audience laughing)
And so you know, it's about sustaining people
over the course of their lives.
Some of the most surprising research that I found
is that hiring is one thing,
but it's retention and progression that is,
equally if not more important.
And so women are twice as likely to quit tech as men.
And they're not going home to take care
of their families, they're taking jobs in other fields.
They're 800% more likely to leave jobs in tech
than they are to leave jobs in other fields.
And you know, they sight all the same reasons
like hostile environment, work-life balance.
And these are things that men want too.
You know, the things that are good for women
are also good for men.
They're good for people.
And so that's something that I think,
if companies sort of realized well hey,
this is good for everyone.
That maybe it would be more motivation.
And Slack has actually proven that they can beat
not only the industry average, they can beat
the pipeline problem, just by being a good place to work.
So they have 44% women across the company.
Women are 48% of managers.
And I believe women in technical roles is something
like 35%, which is still not where it needs to be,
but it's a lot better than the rest.
- Questions from you folks?
I've got more, but let's hear from you.
Larry.
- [Larry] Do you have thoughts about other industries?
Biotech, engineering, et cetera, same or different?
- Similar.
You know, computer science in particular
has the worst, I believe, dearth of women.
And actually engineering and biotech index
even better than computer science,
but other STEM fields definitely have similar problems.
But it is computer science that has the worst of it.
And you probably know far better than I do
what's happening in the education system and why that is.
- But I wonder for example, there are a set of work
environment issues in the computing industry, right?
That are not yet solved, and I wonder if those exist
in other industries.
- Sexism and sexual harassment exist everywhere.
So this is not a problem that's unique to Silicon Valley.
But, I can't tell you how many times people said to me,
Ugh, Silicon Valley can't possibly
be worse than Wall Street.
Well, in fact it is.
So Wall Street is actually, if you look at the top banks,
it's 50/50, they have a lot of work to do
when it comes to women in leadership positions.
What I think, and by the way, I started writing this book
before Trump was elected, before MeToo, before all of this.
And you know, what I think makes Silicon Valley
different is this belief that we're changing the world.
And that we're kind of better than everybody else.
And in a way that's been like an impediment to admitting
that Silicon Valley is also a part of the problem.
And so much wealth and so much power has been accrued
in such a short span of time.
And we're talking about more money,
more power, more responsibility
than Wall Street, than Hollywood.
And that's led to a sense of arrogance
and entitlement that I think is part of the problem.
And a sense of moral exceptionalism
that divorces you from reality.
- I just spent 18 months on a National Academy
study committee of sexual harassment in academia.
And I'm not allowed to talk about the report
until it appears in June, but it's through review now.
But, I have to say that's just staggering.
Things are no better in academia than anywhere else.
And you know, the data on under reporting,
for example is stunning.
You know, when you ask someone if they've experienced
harassment they say no,
and when you say well, have you experienced
any of the following specific things,
all of which satisfy the legal definition of harassment,
they say yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
Okay, so just through bad survey methodology
there's a tremendous under reporting
independent of the reluctance to bring things up
the HR hierarchy for fear of blow back.
- And look, I do think the public pressure
and the conversation we've been having
has really made a difference.
So, Uber, just today announced that they're ending
forced arbitration, which means that employees
and passengers who have a sexual harassment
or assault complaint, don't have to settle those claims
in private, they can do so publicly.
And that is a huge step forward.
We'll see what happens, but it is,
it definitely would not have happened
if Susan Fowler didn't do what she did.
- So here's my pet theory which you will immediately rebut.
Okay?
I believe that while Seattle, based on almost no evidence,
that while Seattle has a long distance to go,
it's not as bad as Silicon Valley.
And I base this on a set of companies around here
and their leadership.
I look at Microsoft with Brad Smith as President.
I look at Zillow and Redfin which have really
very principled leadership.
I look at the fact that to muck out the stables
at Uber they brought Czar Dara down from Seattle, okay?
So I don't know if this is true or not,
but it's my sort of regional contentedness
and self promotion version of this.
Not to deny the need to do much better
here than we're doing.
- It's nice that you feel that way.
(audience laughing)
I'm happy to rebut, happy to rebut.
So, you're not the first person who's raised this with me.
This is my second time coming to Seattle
since publishing the book and I spoke at Microsoft
and Amazon and Redfin, I'm speaking at Zillow.
And you know, I've been really encouraged
by the fact that these companies are inviting me
to come in and talk about this.
'Cause they could easily say,
look, your book is called Brotopia,
no thank you very much.
- Do execs talk to you at those companies?
- They do, yeah.
- They spend time with you, okay.
- Yes.
And you know, employees are coming up to the microphone
and they're fired up and they're asking questions,
what can we do?
But, if you look at the actual numbers,
Seattle is no better than Silicon Valley,
in fact, it's a little worse.
And I said women led companies get 2% of funding,
well in Seattle they get 1% of funding,
so I'm sorry. - There ya go.
- I'm sorry, I'm sorry to break that news to you.
But look you know, there is, - All right, we're done.
- Good momentum. - Have a cookie
on your way, (audience laughing)
- And you know, I don't know if any of you
have been following, but Amazon just this week,
they got a share holder proposal
to require Amazon's board to interview a diverse
slate of candidates when they're looking
for new directors, it's called the Rooney Rule.
Some of you may have heard of it.
And Amazon's board immediately rejected this proposal.
And there was a revolt inside the company.
And just yesterday Amazon said, okay, we'll do it.
And so, you know, these things matter.
It's not gonna happen over night, but the conversation
that we're having and the public pressure,
it can really make a difference.
- More questions.
Up here.
Let's take a woman's question.
We'll alternate.
- [Audience Member] What role do you think legislation
and nonprofits such as universities play,
especially when we're talking about like pay equity?
I have a strong suspicion that the people who have benefited
from the current structures are not particularly willing
to change unless there is a demand.
The demand you just mentioned is one, but you know,
I personally don't see anyone clamoring to say
that like 50% of the money that's spent
on salaries at this tech company should be spent
on female salaries, right?
Like, - I like that idea though.
- [Audience Member] I know right?
Can you imagine?
- Right, and by the way the pay gap in Silicon Valley
is five times the national average.
So for an industry that loves data,
just look at your own data.
And to me this is like the easiest thing to solve, right?
You're very wealthy companies.
- Right, but who's measuring the promotion gap
which I think is the less told story, okay?
Because women,
- Well, and but the pay can also lead to,
like if you wanna stay in the workforce at all, right?
It's a direct, it's directly correlated
to how valued you feel.
- Right, but you can imagine that women
in particular roles, the easiest thing to do
is to pay women in equivalent roles the same as men,
which of course, nobody does, okay?
Or few people do.
But even if they do, you can imagine that women
stay in those roles twice as long because they
are slower to be promoted.
- Right, and certainly pay is
not the only thing that matters,
but it is one thing that matters that is easily
to your point, easily measured.
You know, I get asked about quotas all the time.
I actually think quotas,
are very interesting idea especially from a university
perspective, and I know that they are some legal issues.
But you know, we have to understand that men
and women are, boys and girls are coming to the table
with different levels of experience
and facing all of these cultural issues
that happen at sort of every stage of life.
That said, I think you guys are doing amazing work
just supporting women through the field
and getting them to graduate with computer science degrees
and I believe you guys are indexing far better
than universities across the country.
And that's so important, but you have one of the woke
professors in the country running your department.
So, you know, I'm actually curious
what you think about, what you think about quotas
and regulation of this
and whether you think that could have an impact.
- It could, there are legal issues.
And I think this, you know, back to the Amazon board,
I think the data is pretty compelling
that if under represented groups are considered
as part of the pool, they get selected
in sort of, in proportion.
- [Emily] Right.
- Again, I've seen this in the National Academies
for example, as when there was an incentive
for nominating women, women got elected.
Because they are highly qualified, it's just guys
don't think of them. - Right.
And I do think you know, in any interview process,
you should be, you shouldn't even start the process
until you have qualified female candidates
and qualified candidates of color.
There's a venture capital firm called Upfront Ventures
that's doing something really interesting.
When they give an entrepreneur a term sheet,
they basically have tech's very of the inclusion rider
that Frances McDormand talked about at the Oscars,
where you're committing to building a diverse team,
you're committing to interviewing a diverse slate
of candidates for every single position.
And one of these entrepreneurs came up to me
and said, well, we're really small,
we're only six people, but two of them are women,
and two of them are under represented minorities,
so it's actually working.
And so, that's the power.
The power of rules.
- Got it, who else?
Yeah.
- [Audience Member] How much of this disparity
do you think is attributed to lack of soft skills?
And also for an add, what do you think we could do
in college level education to facilitate
the development of these soft skills that can possibly
break down the barriers?
- So I do think that empathy in general
is under represented.
And I'm sure some of you heard about James Damore
who at Google wrote a viral memo in which he argued
that men are biologically more suited to programming
than women, which in fact is the same argument
that was made by those psychologists 50 years ago
and it's a completely mistaken assumption.
And he sited all of these researchers
who disagree with how he used the data.
There is no evidence to support the idea
that men are better at this job than women.
But there's many many arguments
to be made in favor of having a diverse group of people
who have all kinds of skills, soft and hard,
whatever you wanna call them, making these products
that are being used by billions and billions of people.
If you don't have a diverse group of people
making these products, you will have blind spots.
You will miss things.
Your products won't be as good as they could be, period.
- So you made a really important point,
which is that we try to support women,
we pay much less attention to bringing men along,
okay, and I think that's a really important point.
Now having a reasonable representation of women
probably helps the community as a whole
develop the sorts of skills you're talking about,
but we could do better on that side for sure.
Way in the back.
- [Audience Member] Since you had your cameo
on Silicon Valley, I was wondering about your impression
on specifically that type of show kind of being broadcast
to a lot of people who might be watching it
and thinking this is what tech is like.
- So, I know that Silicon Valley has been knocked
for it's portrayal or lack there of of women.
I think they are conscious of that,
and we've seen women better represented
in successive seasons.
That said, in my view, Silicon Valley is art imitating life.
It is not life imitating art.
You know, this problem existed decades before
Silicon Valley the show was made
and I think their responsibility is to entertain
and get people to watch their show.
It's not to change the representation of gender
in the tech industry, that's the tech industry's problem.
- [Audience Member] In your book you questioned
whether harassment would be as present on platforms
such as Twitter and Reddit if more women were involved.
Would you say that privacy concerns around companies
like Facebook would be as bad if they didn't have
those blind spots, by hiring
more women (speaks quietly) people?
- So that's a really interesting question.
So, and that was one of the most, one of,
just sort of an interesting nugget that I uncovered.
So Sheryl Sandberg joined Facebook in 2008
and at the time, Mark Zuckerberg in those early years
was really obsessed with openness and Twitter,
Twitter was taking off, owning real time news,
owning international and he was like,
what's happening?
Maybe people wanna share more than we thought they would.
And he was really focused on pushing people
to share more.
And they had this feature location tagging,
where you could tag someone in a location,
but you couldn't untag yourself.
So like, I could say, hey I'm hanging out
with Mark Zuckerberg in Las Vegas.
And he couldn't say, um, no, I'm in Palo Alto,
what are you talking about?
Which is a perfect use case.
Like well, people should have the freedom
to untag themselves if they don't wanna be tagged.
And this issue became like a knock down, drag out
situation within Facebook and you had people
like Zuckerberg on one side,
and people like Sheryl Sandberg on the other side,
saying like look, well, let's think about a woman
who was tagged in a situation, a compromising situation
or a compromising photo that she wouldn't wanna be in.
This just doesn't make sense.
And so ultimately it did not come to be,
but it is a perfect example of how having a diversity
of people at the table, they had different opinions
and they came to a decision that in my view
is better for all users.
And what's interesting about Zuck and Sheryl
is that he made as much space for her
in their partnership as she did for him.
Clearly it's not perfect.
But I do think that her leadership has been really really
important, not just because she's a woman,
but because she has a different perspective.
She's older, she's had different experiences
and so you know, it's not only our gender
that makes us different.
But we all have, and I talk a little bit about race
in the book and we talk about age,
and we talk about maybe you didn't graduate from college.
We all have different parts of our identity
that in a way are like a ball and chain.
They're something that we can't escape from.
And so being a woman is one thing, being a woman
of color thing is another thing.
Being a woman of color who's gay is another thing.
And so, you can double or if you're
talking about double and triple minorities,
you can sort of double and triple just how hard it is
to be in this industry if you have more of these
parts of your identities that can make things
more complicated in industry where most people are
male and white.
And so, my Facebook example is not to say
that Facebook is perfect, but here's an example
of how having a diversity of genders in this case,
led to an outcome that I believe was better
for users in the long run.
- By the way harassment is very much dependent
on race, and a set of other factors, okay,
so looking at harassment through the lens of women
is too coarse a grain to understand the phenomenon.
- Well, and you know, men experience online harassment too,
but women actually experience the most extreme forms
of it, and they're more likely to be harassed
simply because they are women.
So simply because of their gender.
- Yeah, what I was saying was in the work place,
African American women for example experience
different forms and greater forms of harassment
than Caucasian women.
- And Ellen Pao actually makes the argument
that it's not having just women at the top
of these companies, but women of color
that will make an even bigger difference.
- Right, right, right.
Linda you had a question.
- [Linda] Yeah, I've been appointed to a sexual
harassment complaint committee for the upcoming
national conference in my field.
And there's been a document about what harassment
consists of to put forth to the members.
And a member of the executive committee
has asked what exactly are we gonna do
if there's a complaint?
And I'm wondering, what do companies do, if anything,
and what do conference committees do if there's
a complaint about sexual harassment?
- Well, first of all there needs to be a process.
And these processes need to be decided and written down.
So that when there is a complaint you're not
sort of reacting to just the complaint,
you're following the process that's been put in place.
And part of the problem is so many of these companies,
A, they're too young, they haven't thought
about these things, and venture capital firms
they're too small, they also haven't thought
about these things.
They just didn't have policies.
And so one of the most,
one of the recent sort of campaigns in VC
has been called hashtag movingforward,
which is just pushing venture capital firms
and startups to make their harassment
and discrimination policies public.
Which sounds pretty straight forward,
but actually they don't have them in the first place.
So they've been forced to actually write them down.
And then publicize them.
Which is a really good exercise.
I mean, I just think we can't, we have to deal
with these things before they happen.
Otherwise you have an emotional reaction
which won't necessarily be the right reaction.
Or the reaction that you would have
if you followed a sort of standard procedure.
- There are fields that are ahead of yours
in that they've been doing this for several years.
You can probably find processes on the web
that you could scoop up.
Way in the back, somewhere over here.
- [Audience Member] Just wanted to ask about your
perspective on tokenization and unrecognized division
of labor, this is (words obscured by coughing)
in the sense that my colleagues who are women,
who are people of color are asked to serve on committees,
be the face of representation of diversity,
women who mentor other women on their path to success.
And after they've done all this labor,
they look around and all of the men have been writing
grants and starting their businesses and so on then.
They haven't had time, needed time to do all these things.
What do you think about (speaks quietly)
- The same thing has happened at Google
where you know, women were supposed,
part of, one of the solutions was to get
women in every single interview process.
And then they weren't doing the work.
And when it came time to promotion,
they were like, they didn't have anything to show
for it, because they were always interviewing.
And so I definitely think that's a problem.
And we need men to be part of these committees too,
because as you said, we need to do this together.
You know, this can't be a conversation
that women and under represented minorities
are having with themselves.
And speaking of tokenization, I think another problem
is you'll often see, you know you'll see some
of these venture capital firms, which have hired
their first women in 40 years.
They're like okay, we're done.
Well, obviously one is not enough, because we're talking
about a real culture change that is necessary.
That said, you know, I do think that it is incumbent
on everyone to participate.
And so I wouldn't be comfortable just saying,
me as a woman saying, no I'm not gonna help,
because I don't wanna be tokenized.
You know, there is this sort of
balance that needs to be struck of playing the rules
of the game and changing the rules of the game as we go.
You can't just run in and say,
I'm just gonna do everything differently,
that's not necessarily gonna be well received.
But you can play the game that's on the field
and change the rules of the game as you go.
So that the game and the playing field becomes more level.
- Okay, there's time for one or two more questions.
Emily needs to be out of the door
at five to five or she's gonna miss her next appointment.
Here please.
- [Audience Member] Yes, to what extent do you think
you can have a change in Silicon Valley
of this change of the rules of the game as you said?
Of this impolite treatment of women and minorities
until we have change in the leadership of our government
that is also, seems to have very much of these same
symptoms of impolite treatment of women and minorities.
- Absolutely, yeah.
I mean as I said, this is a cultural issue
and it's certainly not limited to Silicon Valley.
You know, what I would say is that these companies
have a choice.
You know?
All of these companies have a choice
about how they run themselves.
And you know there was some conflicting opinions
about James Damore who was ultimately fired at Google.
And people were concerned that that was tromping
on freedom of speech, but you,
speech is not free if other people are being silenced.
Right?
And so all of these organizations have a right
to decide the rules and the cultures,
the rules that they want to implement
and the culture that they want to create.
Regardless of who is president.
And regardless of unfortunately how some people
in this country might treat women, which I think
is tragic, but they have an opportunity
to do something different and to lead on these issues.
And so I think that the conversation that we're having
is incredibly important.
You know, I for example, someone told me
she gave my book to her CEO and he read it
and like within two weeks had scheduled a trip
to visit 30 different cities, to visit their headquarters,
sorry, to visit their offices in 30 different cities
around the world and talk about this.
And that she was getting more funding for girls in STEM,
more funding for diversity initiatives at the company.
And those are things that, I mean that means so much to me.
Like if that's just happening
on one company, that's success.
But really, success is gonna be when we don't
have to talk about this anymore.
When a woman engineer or a woman CEO is normal.
And a woman directing Hollywood movies
and running for president or being president is normal.
And I hope that happens in my lifetime.
- One more.
Yeah please.
- [Audience Member] What's the best way
to deal with tokenism?
A few years ago when I applied for an internship,
someone from that company, not on that team
I was applying for, but someone from that same company
had told me that I needed to put in my resume somewhere
something that would indicate that I as black
otherwise I wasn't gonna get the internship.
Which was not something I wanted to hear.
So what's like the best way to deal with tokenism,
'cause when I start interviewing, I realize,
I'm like ooh, I am a token here.
- So, look, in my view,
so I had a similar experience in my first job
after graduating from college.
I got into this super amazing program
for aspiring news producers and reporters.
And I found out that it was a diversity program.
And it was like a dagger,
I was like oh, that's why I'm here.
Like it was like a dagger to the heart.
That said, now looking back, A, I'm really glad
I had that opportunity, and B, I would celebrate
your uniqueness and exploit it.
Because you have so much to offer, why not?
Like why not?
That said, you know, you can only do as much
as you feel comfortable, and I think we all should
be choosing places to work
and choosing environments to be in where we feel supported
and we feel like we can learn
and we feel like we can really be ourselves.
'Cause you don't wanna be anywhere where you can't
be yourself, it's just not worth it.
And there are so many companies out there
that are desperate to find talented people
who don't look like them where you can really
make a difference.
And maybe you don't, maybe you are more isolated
in the beginning, but you attract more people
who look like you, and that makes a real
culture change somewhere.
And you know, as I've said, we have to do this together.
And I think we all need to listen to each other more.
And we need to ask, how are you doing?
These are things that we just don't ask enough.
We just do.
And so, I'm excited to be able to start
this conversation and for you to continue this conversation
when you leave this room, and help us all get
to a better place.
- Great way to wind up.
Before we thank Emily, let's see, first of all,
it's on Amazon.
(audience laughing)
It is a really educational book,
and it has its uplifting parts as well
as its shocking parts.
Did you here have, young woman in the glasses
looking down, do you have a copy of the book?
- [Audience Member] Not yet.
- Okay, you do now, you asked the,
- All right!
- All the questions were good, but,
- Two, I've got one for both of you.
You and you. - Great okay,
- Wait can you guys, I wanna take a picture
of you with Ed and tweet it,
can you guys not move?
- A selfie, hang on.
- Wait, here, here.
Here, this is fine, I'll take it of you.
Here, just, - Okay.
- We can do a selfie too.
Yay!
Wait wave, say hi.
Oh my goodness you guys are so cute.
Thank you.
(audience laughing) Thank you.
- Emily thank you.
- All right, thank you.
(audience applauding)
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