CHAPTER 1
JOIN THE REVOLUTION
Champions for Change
Women have been trained to speak softly and carry a lipstick.
Those days are over.
—BELLA ABZUG
Who would have guessed that on Super Bowl Sunday, America’s manliest night of the year, the issue of women in tech would get some much-needed airtime? As 111.5 million people watched the Seattle Seahawks trounce the Denver Broncos (and revisited the pleasures of Bud Light and Doritos) on February 2, 2014, a young woman’s heart raced with anticipation as she trained her eyes on the giant TV at the center of a swanky screening party in New York City.1
Debbie Sterling’s stomach flip-flopped as she waited for the commercial that would change the trajectory of her nascent toy company. It felt like a lifetime ago, but she had set out only two years earlier to upend the world’s image of engineers as a lonely bunch of boy geniuses and introduce a new kind of role model—a spunky, tool belt–wearing action figure with long, blonde, curly hair named Goldie.
It wasn’t an easy sell. Big toy companies quickly dismissed GoldieBlox, a product designed to teach girls engineering, complete with a tool kit of pulleys and shafts, as “too niche.” But that didn’t deter Debbie, who fondly remembers challenging boys to arm-wrestling contests in the second grade. She set out to prove the naysayers wrong by taking her story to Kickstarter, where she planned to raise $150,000 so she could manufacture the first run of Goldie’s Spinning Machine, a storybook and building set.
In an endearing video Debbie made her simple Kickstarter pitch while wearing jeans and a sleeveless violet top as she sat cross-legged on the floor of her apartment. Scenes showed little faces lighting up as pigtailed tots played with the one and only prototype. In the video, shot by Debbie’s husband, Beau, she told viewers they could inspire their daughters to be “more than just a princess” by helping Debbie fund the first production run. The play sets would mesh girls’ love of stories—players follow the adventures of main character Goldie and her friends—with fun design challenges featuring wheels, axles, catapults, and gears. Girls would build simple machines alongside Goldie. The message went viral. In thirty days Debbie raised more than $285,000 and was able to produce her first order of five thousand units, which quickly ballooned to forty thousand to keep up with demand. Suddenly the toy stores were calling her.
Now, fast-forward to Super Bowl Sunday. Debbie, the real-life Goldie, the curly-haired inventor with the infectious smile, was about to go prime time. She hoped the thirty-second commercial would fuel her mission to inspire girls to break into the boys’ club and start seeing themselves as tomorrow’s builders and problem solvers.
GoldieBlox had won the big-time ad—worth an estimated $4 million—in a small business contest run by Intuit, parent company of QuickBooks and TurboTax. Debbie flew her entire family and twelve team members from San Francisco to Intuit’s tricked-out fete on the top floor of Manhattan’s Gramercy Park Hotel, which featured glitzy cocktails, hors d’oeuvres passed by servers, and even a photo booth. Just being in the room was a thrill, but the waiting was killing her.
Finally, the familiar drumbeat of the 1980s rock anthem “Cum on Feel the Noize” poured out of the screen over a raucous scene of adorable little girls in princess outfits who were tearing off their glittery tiaras and running through the streets to a park, where they constructed a giant rocket out of their dolls, pink ponies, and sparkly playthings. They sang triumphantly:
Come on, ditch your toys
Girls make some noise
More than pink, pink, pink
We want to think!2
As the rocket launched toward the sun, the room exploded in cheers and applause. It was a game changer, and Debbie could feel it as the music faded away.
“We specifically did not want the commercial to be about the product. It 100 percent needed to be about the social mission that we’re on and educating parents about shining a light on the pink [toy] aisle and how limiting it can be in terms of what girls think they are capable of and getting them interested in science, engineering, and math,” she reflected when we spent the afternoon with her at Toy Fair in New York City two years later.
Mission accomplished. The commercial, and its unapologetically feminist message, touched off the first of many triumphs in 2014, a year that would galvanize disparate groups of people around the country who had long been agitating about the tiny number of women and people of color in key technical and leadership roles in Silicon Valley. That was the year the issue of women in tech started to matter to the masses. The timing was right. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In, published just eleven months earlier, was sparking urgent conversations about women, leadership, parental leave, and the pay gap. It was inevitable that the dialogue would turn to inequities in technology itself. Smartphones and digital media had become central to most American lives, and women were the primary consumers, yet they were largely absent from the teams building new technologies. As a piece in the New York Times’s Motherlode blog in March 2014 aptly pointed out, “If men could breastfeed, surely the breast pump would be as elegant as an iPhone and as quiet as a Prius by now.”3
Yet a quiet revolution was already in progress: a frenzy of entrepreneurial activity across the country was uniting female founders and technologists. By 2014 they were working under the radar to launch their own startups, build their own networks, crush male-hacker stereotypes, and inspire their younger sisters and daughters. Like Debbie, these inventors, builders, advocates, and connectors, uniting at the grassroots level, would become the foot soldiers of the front lines, disrupting the business-as-usual landscape of white guys in hoodies and V-neck sweaters and proving that a female point of view matters in tech—and can rock big returns in business and innovation. They are the geek girls rising, and you will meet them in this book.
Where Are the Women in Tech?
But first, it is important to understand why more women weren’t already making their fortunes in the digital revolution by the time GoldieBlox shined a light on the problem. And for that we have to look back at the years that preceded the Internet gold rush of the late 1990s—when the world was still on the brink of breakthroughs like personal e-mail, search, and online shopping, which would ultimately disrupt life as we knew it. By the post-recession early 1990s, when we two English majors graduated from college, Wall Street was deemed the place for young feminists fresh from undergrad or B-school to make money. Finance and management consulting were where the action was. And that’s where many women with hard-core math and analytical skills and Ivy League degrees went to prove they could go toe to toe with men. As one Wharton alum told us, “Feminism, with a capital F, stood for finance,” when she graduated in 1997. A New York Times report about Stanford’s class of 1994 described the opportunities in banking and law as “opening up to women as never before” and juxtaposed those more certain paths with the “Wild West” of the Internet, where a bright future was not necessarily a slam dunk.4
At the same time the number of women graduating with computer science degrees in the United States was declining from its peak in the 1985–86 academic year, when 37 percent of CS diplomas went to female grads.5 This, as video games and personal computers continued to be heavily marketed to guys. Movies like 1984’s Revenge of the Nerds, whose pocket protector–wearing Gilbert and Lewis decide to form their own fraternity for social outcasts and use their computer savvy to foil the jocks, immortalized the stereotype.6 The film typifies tech’s image problem, which simply turned many women off, according to Jocelyn Goldfein, who became Facebook’s first female director of engineering in 2010. Jocelyn had always stood out, the rare girl who had embraced the so-called nerd path as she devoured science fiction and spent hours playing Dungeons & Dragons with her sister while growing up in Austin, Texas. She said it was almost subversive for a woman to major in computer science when she left for college in 1993, so she wasn’t surprised when she arrived at Stanford to find few women in her CS courses, although one of her classmates was future Yahoo CEO and president Marissa Mayer. The year they graduated, 1997, 83 percent of CS degrees were awarded to men, according to the university’s School of Engineering.
“In the nineties the only people in computer science were the fat, nerdy people, the four-eyes. For men too. But to be a male geek was a different kind of path than to be a female one. It was an alternative path for them versus the jock or frat path, but it was still a path. The women, however, were almost breaking our own bounds to do that,” Jocelyn told us.
Jocelyn would go on to work for Diane Greene, senior vice president of Google’s enterprise business and the serial entrepreneur who co-founded VMware, the company that revolutionized how operating systems run on computers. VMware was acquired by the EMC Corporation for $635 million in 2004.7 But most people outside the Valley don’t know the story of the female computer scientist who built it. The contributions of Diane Greene, like those of many of her colleagues, had been glossed over.
“Any history that holds up seven white men as the founders of the computer revolution obscures the true collective nature of innovation,” writes Jessi Hempel in her Backchannel story, “A Women’s History of Silicon Valley,” penned in response to a 2016 Newsweek special edition issue about the “founding fathers” that highlighted only the well-known white male CEOs most people associate with tech innovation.8
Her point was that for decades, the tech world has suffered from the invisibility of its female leaders. This, too, contributed to the declining numbers of women who were going into computing and engineering when “the World Wide Web hit orbital velocity in 1993,” as Walter Isaacson describes the dawn of the web in his 2014 book, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution. He writes that a key “impetus” was the launch of Mosaic, later known as Netscape Navigator, the first Internet browser for amateurs. It came on the scene in 1994 and changed everything.9 It marked the tipping point for the personal computer’s lightning-speed migration into our kitchens and living rooms—and eventually our purses and pockets.10 The following year, 1995, was the pivotal one that saw the launch of Amazon, Craigslist, Match.com, and eBay.
Only a decade later, when Facebook was just a year old, nearly 85 percent of men and women would be accessing the Internet at home for banking, shopping, keeping up with the news, and downloading music.11 The tech-centric culture for everyday people only grew with the advent of smartphones and tablets that were sleek and easy to use, thanks to Apple visionary Steve Jobs and his obsession with making computers friendly.12
When the iPhone app store went online in 2008, Silicon Valley was still a hot spot for smart, enterprising young people, even after the burst of the dot-com bubble in 2000. Yet even though women quickly adapted to e-mail and social media, they had not flocked to the Valley in droves during the initial boom.13 And those who did didn’t stay long. Women’s representation in computing dropped from more than a third of workers in 1990 to just over a quarter of workers in 2013—the same number as in 1960, according to a report by the American Association of University Women.14 Citing hostile work environments, a lack of flexibility, lower pay than their male counterparts, and few opportunities to advance, by 2009, 56 percent of women in tech had dropped out of the industry mid-career—leaving at twice the rate of men.15 And they were not necessarily opting out to stay home and raise kids. Most engineers who left high tech did not leave the workforce but instead migrated to jobs in health care, education, and administration, according to research led by Jennifer L. Glass of the University of Texas–Austin.16 So you had a perfect storm for underrepresentation—fewer women majoring in CS and engineering, combined with high numbers of women leaving the industry, especially those who had been in key technical roles.17 The result? Few visible women in leadership during a time of incredible—and important—innovation.
Pressuring the Valley to Come Clean
In 2014, the age of Netflix, Fitbit, and Snapchat, it was downright disconcerting that so few women and people of color had a seat at the tech industry’s table, especially when women were earning more college and graduate degrees than their male counterparts. It’s not that no one was talking about it until 2014. There was some media coverage inside Silicon Valley, notably “The Men and (No) Women Facebook of Facebook Management,” a 2007 piece by veteran tech journalist Kara Swisher that appeared on the website All Things D and playfully displayed head shots of Mark Zuckerberg and his six male deputies at that time—five white and two Asian guys.18 By 2010 women increasingly were speaking up about the lack of diversity at conferences and blogging about it. In 2011 Girls Who Code and its media-savvy founder, Reshma Saujani, unleashed a national effort to encourage girls to learn computer programming. In 2012 Marissa Mayer was named CEO of Yahoo and made headlines with the announcement that she was pregnant and planning to take hardly any maternity leave. But until 2014 one critical thing was missing: actual data from some of the biggest tech companies to document the extent of the disparity. Until then, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft had resisted calls to disclose the number of women and people of color working in leadership and in technical jobs. That would change in the months ahead.
“Women in tech didn’t matter to people until tech started mattering to people,” explained Rachel Sklar, an activist and the originator of the rallying cry “Change the Ratio,” when we interviewed her in the winter of 2016. “Tech started mattering to people when, all of a sudden, tech millionaires turned into tech billionaires, and our lives really became transformed.”
When the GoldieBlox TV ad aired, the discussion of tech’s gender gap was already bubbling up at insider conferences, on college campuses, and across social media. But the mainstream movement to correct it had not yet taken off, and the women who would lead it were just beginning to mobilize.
Right across San Francisco Bay from the GoldieBlox workshop in Oakland, California, one of Debbie’s good friends was already working hard to spark a revolution of her own. Software engineer Tracy Chou had been putting together a public database of female engineers that, by springtime, would help force big tech companies like Google to acknowledge that their technical and leadership teams had few women—and even fewer minorities. Tracy says she was spurred to write a pivotal call to action, her October 2013 essay “Where Are the Numbers?,” when one day she looked around her San Francisco office at Pinterest, the digital scrapbooking site adored by crafters, home chefs, decorators, and fashionistas, and realized that only eleven of the eighty-nine engineers on her team were women—and they were building a product used mostly by women.
In the spirit of the open-source programming world, in which people all over the globe collaborate on public projects, Tracy, then twenty-seven, set up a basic Google form on GitHub and made a simple request to her peers for some on-the-ground reporting: Share the numbers of women you see around you on your team.
“As an engineer, and someone who’s had ‘data-driven design’ browbeaten into me by Silicon Valley, I can’t imagine trying to solve a problem where the real metrics, the ones we’re setting our goals against, are obfuscated,” Tracy wrote as she called for transparency from companies and entreated other female engineers to help.
The response was swift and damning: At Yelp someone posted that only 17 of 206 engineers were women; at Mozilla, 43 out of 500; at Dropbox, 42 out of 384, and on and on. The numbers showed that, on average, only about 18.9 percent of the people building the technology for an increasingly female audience—more than half the population—were women.19
As the data poured in during the next few months, the big guys couldn’t keep stonewalling. They were already under fire to release diversity data because Mike Swift, a tenacious former reporter for the San Jose Mercury News, kept filing Freedom of Information Act requests. The Mercury News had set out in 2008 to push fifteen of Silicon Valley’s largest tech companies to disclose the race and gender makeup of their workforces, and five of them, including Google, had waged an eighteen-month battle to prevent the numbers from getting out—successfully convincing federal regulators that its workforce is a trade secret.20
But in May 2014, under pressure from the media and civil rights organizations, including the Reverend Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow PUSH Coalition, Google finally reversed course. After the iconic civil rights leader showed up at Google’s shareholder meeting, the company revealed that only 17 percent of its technical team and only 21 percent of its leadership team were female. Google vowed to do better.21 Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, and others quickly followed suit, announcing fresh multi-million-dollar diversity initiatives: Intel, which was one of the first companies to comply with the Mercury News’s inquiry, rolled out a $300 million program to invest in entrepreneurs with diverse backgrounds, to support women in gaming, and to underwrite efforts to recruit young women into the field.22 Google committed $50 million to Made w/ Code, a video channel showcasing coding tutorials aimed at girls (the channel is best known for the dress embellished with LED lights, a collaboration of designer Zac Posen and technologist Maddy Maxey and programmed by Girls Who Code participants). And the CEO of Salesforce, Marc Benioff, publicly committed to a goal of employing an equal number of men and women within five years.23
We first met Tracy in January 2015 at Pinterest’s headquarters in San Francisco’s SOMA—South of Market Street—the hip San Francisco neighborhood that’s also home to Dropbox, Trulia, and Yelp. Pinterest, a startup begun in 2010, had just moved from Palo Alto, in the heart of Silicon Valley, to the city, in part so its growing troops of young engineers could enjoy shorter commutes as well as San Francisco’s nightlife, restaurants, and culture. But at 7 p.m. at least twenty-five people were still in the office, some eating dinner in the airy cafeteria in the shadow of a two-story floor-to-ceiling “pin board,” a totem showing the interests of the hundred million people using the photo-tagging tool to collect, share, and organize their favorite pictures of food, fashion, and home decor from across the web. It’s a towering collage of colorful magazine clippings featuring trendy shoes, purses, throw pillows, and beautiful people, including a cute male model showing off a pair of bright red shorts on a beach. Small red-and-white-striped hot air balloons dangled high above, adding to the ambiance of whimsy and charm. We took a seat, and over sparkling water Tracy opened up about what she loved about her day job and coding.
“A lot of the gratification for me is in seeing the things I can build,” she explained, referring to the combination of analytical skills and creativity that coding requires.
The daughter of two computer science PhD’s never expected to become the David to Silicon Valley’s Goliaths. Although her parents were programmers, and she grew up in the heart of Startupland, she didn’t really consider computer science as a vocation until late in her time at Stanford, where she chose to major in electrical engineering, having been intimidated in the computer science classroom. Despite her initial insecurities, Tracy would go on to become a teaching assistant for CS 107, known as the “weeder class” on campus, and she said that experience contributed to the confidence she needed to earn a master’s in computer science.
She was a painfully shy kid whose teachers commented on her report cards that she never raised her hand in class. Her parents, who had emigrated from Taiwan and ran their own startup, which they sold to Oracle when their daughter was in middle school, pushed her to be more outgoing. She was a “nerdy bookworm” who would rather read on the playground than run around at recess. At one point her mom limited her voracious appetite for books to two a day, and she got around that restriction by picking out the longest books at the library. During her freshman year of high school, she signed up for the debate team at her mother’s behest. That was a turning point.
“You’re up in front of a podium, and you’re the person who’s speaking, and you have to get good at presenting your arguments. I got used to the idea of being in front of a room,” she said of the tournaments that taught her to argue either side of a case before a panel of judges at a moment’s notice. The experience would prove seminal less than a decade later, when she became a de facto spokeswoman for diversifying the tech industry, including a high-profile appearance during 2016’s SXSW (South by Southwest), the influential music and tech festival in Austin, Texas, where President Obama was a headliner. Crucially, she could speak the language of data and metrics, which held weight with some of Silicon Valley’s inner circle.
“I’m lucky to be on the inside versus on the outside trying to beat down the doors … I know the right people to talk to. I have rapport with the people internally. I can take the position: ‘I’m right here, an engineer, one of you.’ It gives me more credibility with people who are in the positions to effect change,” she said.
That is why she has been tapped to discuss her thoughts on diversity with leaders of some of the fastest-growing startups like Slack, which produces a messaging app for teams. These new companies have to hire so quickly as they grow that they struggle to find enough programmers, period, never mind candidates from underrepresented groups. She is also a sought-after speaker for women’s groups all over the Valley. As a result we found ourselves tagging along to the San Francisco offices of Uber at lunchtime on a Friday afternoon. It was Indian food day at the company, which is known as a unicorn—in Silicon Valley lingo, one of the elite, privately held startups valued at more than a billion dollars. Twenty engineers (sixteen women, four men) were sitting around the table and picking at curry, lentils, and rice when Tracy arrived. Knowing she had just been featured in Vogue, we noted her fashion-forward look: casual but pulled together in a black polka-dot sweater, red skirt, and gold flats.24 Free meals are one of the well-known perks many tech companies provide to employees. (One person turned to us and whispered that the food is better at Facebook.) #LadyENG, the organization of women engineers at Uber, had invited Tracy to share her story and offer advice. Staffers from two other Uber locations participated by videoconference so they could ask questions too. One woman put Tracy on the spot by asking what Uber should do to improve its image so it can recruit more women. Tracy didn’t hesitate to tackle the sensitive question. “Is this a brand thing or is there actually stuff that really needs to be addressed internally?” she asked, then went on to say that Uber couldn’t fix its bad reputation in regard to diversity if it didn’t address concerns on the inside. The dialogue proved prophetic: in February 2017, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick and the company would come under fire after a female software engineer went public with appalling allegations of sexual harassment and an unresponsive HR department. Measurement, she said, is the key to change. And the way to convince the hacker culture that having more people with different skill sets is an advantage is to speak their language.
“I think oftentimes the people most resistant to a lot of diversity arguments are engineers who believe in meritocracy. One thing that works real well with engineers is talking with them about things they do normally, which is build products, instrument them, collect metrics. Maybe we should apply that same methodology to our workplace and how we function as teams,” she said as the Uber group nodded politely.
Even as Tracy was making her case on a national stage and inside some of the biggest companies, she acknowledged she had not quite shed the old feelings of being an outsider. She still acutely recalled her Facebook internship: from her desk she looked out into an office filled with fifty people and could see only one other woman. Or when she worked at Quora, where she had the awkward experience of pointing out to the (mostly male) team that some users might not appreciate seeing content around penis size showing up in their feeds, and that they might want to consider building filters. It did not go well.
“I was put in a position of having to speak on behalf of all women and how women engage with porn and R-rated content. I think the conversation unfolded poorly because there were people that were taking the ‘devil’s advocate’ angle, even if it was just obnoxious. We did end up building a safe filter, though,” she told us.
The bottom line is that being an activist isn’t easy. And it can be downright lonely. Despite her efforts, change across the industry remains slow.
“It feels [like it is] harder for me as a woman to move up in an industry whose leaders are mostly male and not people I really identify with,” she told us. “And especially when so much happens in casual or semi-professional settings, like people grabbing beers after work or playing poker. Being disconnected from that network has career consequences, like missing out on critical bonding or important information about projects coming up. And I just feel like I just don’t belong in that network.” In June 2016 Tracy left Pinterest after four and a half years and packed her bags for a new adventure in New York City, where she plunged into work on a startup of her own.
* * *
Sex and the City Meets Silicon Valley
Building a new kind of network in which women are the insiders who pass along choice professional leads and make strategic introductions while sipping skinny cappuccinos in their own comfortable clubhouse is exactly what Shelley Zalis envisioned when she came up with the idea for the Girls’ Lounge. If Carrie Bradshaw came to life as a globe-trotting, fifty-five-year-old market research guru from Beverly Hills, she would be the Birkin bag–toting, SoulCycling Zalis. The skillful connector believes deeply in the power of girlfriends and was off and running by 2014, creating her signature retreats inside male-dominated conferences like the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES). Her pop-up gathering spaces offer oases featuring white leather couches with pink throw pillows, a sparkly chandelier, and ample opportunities to trade business cards and ideas. But don’t let the pink fool you.
“There is more business done in the Girls’ Lounge than at the actual conference because it is an authentic unplugged space,” emphasized Shelley, who is passionate about transforming the legacy rules of the workplace that she says have traditionally spurred competition among ambitious women. With sponsors that include Facebook, AOL, Twitter, IBM, and NBC Universal, the Lounge has become a must-stop for female power brokers at events like SXSW and the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. It’s not unusual to find Arianna Huffington chatting about wellness with the women passing through the Lounge as she did in Davos, where in 2016, one in five attendees was female, or at CES that year where the chief technology officer of the United States, Megan Smith, narrated a private Girls’ Lounge tour of the exhibit floor as dozens of women donned audio headsets to follow along.
The ah-ha moment for the glossy entrepreneur, whose mantra is “a woman trying to be a man is a waste of a woman,” occurred after she invited four gal pals to her hotel room for a “slumber party” at CES in 2013. CES is a massive gadget fest that features scantily clothed “booth babes” who beckon attendees to try out new tech toys, and it was—needless to say—not the most comfortable place to be female. And Shelley, then the chief executive of Ipsos/OTX, the third-largest global market research firm in the world (which had acquired her company, OTX, for $80 million), dreaded being there alone.25 The day after the hangout in her hotel room, she and her influential friends gathered as many women as they could find at the conference and walked the massive convention hall together in solidarity and sisterhood.
“A woman alone can be powerful, but collectively we have impact,” Shelley said of the surprised reaction the fifty corporate women received from male attendees as they moved through the hall.
We first got to know her when she invited us to hang out in her hotel room in Cologne, Germany, the night before dmexco, a sort of mini-CES for Europe. As she sat cross-legged on her bed and contemplated what to wear to a VIP party that evening, we also learned that in the four years since she came up with the Girls’ Lounge, fifty-five of them had sprung up around the globe and reached more than seventy-five hundred corporate women. After she decided to forgo her leather jacket and slipped on studded, pointy-toed red slingbacks (she’s a shoe aficionado), she grabbed a chocolate protein bar and whisked us away in a black chauffeured Mercedes to the opening evening of dmexco. There, digital marketers from all over Europe and the United States sipped wine spritzers with mint leaves and lavender sprigs, greeting each other with air kisses under pink and blue fluorescent lights as a thumping bass played beneath the din. The next day, as we tried to keep pace with her sky-high Louboutins and her bubbly entourage of blonde assistants clad in black tees and eyelash extensions, we witnessed the Lounge in action. In one corner a chief marketing officer from a tech giant tried on vegan leather jackets in the Confidence Closet provided by the apparel line Project Gravitas. As Beyoncé’s feminist anthem “Who Run the World? (Girls)” played in the background, a mid-level web designer got her makeup touched up in preparation for new head shots snapped by the Lounge’s photographer. And on the shiny white “stoop” outside the Lounge, under a sign proclaiming CONFIDENCE IS THE NEW BEAUTIFUL, a clutch of high-level execs, including Meredith Kopit Levien, chief revenue officer for the New York Times; Laura Ipsen, Oracle’s senior vice president and general manager of cloud marketing; and Allie Kline, chief marketing officer for AOL, dropped by to join Shelley in a panel discussion about the “Shine Theory,” a philosophy New York magazine columnist Ann Friedman (and her best friend, Aminatou Sow, founder of TechLady Mafia) introduced in May 2013. It promotes the idea that when women surround themselves with successful, confident women, we are all better for it.26
“Change the game and collaborate,” Shelley told the mostly female audience listening intently to the discussion about how powerful women make the best girlfriends. “Show that collaboration is the new black.”
It’s a sentiment that binds the online network Rachel Sklar curated when she first shot off an e-mail to nineteen girlfriends in the spring of 2010. She was pissed off. New York magazine had run an April cover story about the social media startups that were making their home in Manhattan’s Silicon Alley, and of the fifty-three people pictured in the layout, only six were women. In one photo a man’s foot obscured a woman’s face. Rachel, a corporate-lawyer-turned-journalist and now a frequent guest on TV shows, had been covering the media for the Huffington Post and later, Mediaite, and she was fed up with seeing that women were not getting the attention they deserved, especially in the booming tech world.
“It was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” she explained. And it was the spark that would unite a loosely connected group of acquaintances in New York’s new startup scene into a sort of secret handshake society dedicated to elevating the profiles of female founders, software engineers, and other smart, ambitious women in their circles. April 2014 presented a prime opportunity to flex their muscle.
The Wall Street Journal had just announced an all-male, mostly white lineup of speakers for its marquee tech and new media conference, WSJDLive, when it suddenly faced swift and angry pushback. The editors were caught off guard as #changetheratio exploded on Twitter:
Good GOD @newscorp @WSJ @WSJD 17 male speakers, 0 women ‘Where The Digital World Connects’?! In this day & age? ow.ly/vRqMP
Seriously, how did @newscorp @WSJ @WSJD look at this & not go, ‘What’s wrong with this picture?’ ow.ly/vRsBI
Leading the charge was the group, now known as TheLi.st, that had been handpicked by Rachel. Its members broadcast across social media the battle cry “Change the Ratio,” the phrase she coined when she sent that fateful e-mail and began a new career as an advocate for women in technology. In response to the torrent of negative feedback, the Journal’s public relations team quickly backpedaled, saying it would announce more speakers.
Rachel gave us the reasons for TheLi.st’s immediate reaction when all-male lineups or male-dominated events come to the group’s attention: “Visibility begets access. There is visibility [from] being highlighted as an expert, as a person of value, as a person who is a contributor, as someone who is special and is accomplished. Then access is being in the room where it happens, being able to connect with people who are able to give you an opportunity.” As she spoke, she casually nursed her eleven-month-old daughter, Ruby. On that windy March day we’d caught her with an hour to kill before little Ruby’s visit to the pediatrician for a case of the sniffles. So we ducked into CitiBabes, a hip play space with an indoor jungle gym in SoHo.
“Visibility begets access begets opportunity,” Rachel continued without missing a beat as a tired toddler across the room dissolved into a tantrum. “When you see it that way, you see how, very clearly, a system defaulted to highlighting and rewarding white men is a self-perpetuating nightmare for women.”
In its bid to break up the system TheLi.st remains exclusive. To become a member of its underground e-mail chain, you have to be nominated by someone in the group or know Rachel or someone who knows Rachel and can vouch for you. TheLi.st has become a sorority of several hundred women and evolved into a for-profit venture after Rachel teamed up with her longtime writing colleague, Glynnis MacNicol. Members pay annual dues of $750, and they are increasingly getting together offline for fun meet-ups like whiskey tastings, baby showers, and outings to Broadway. As in the beginning, Rachel plays matchmaker, finessing for hard-core technologists and startup founders important introductions to a mix of Hollywood producers, CEOs, fashion magazine editors, New York Times writers, venture capitalists, TV personalities, and philanthropists.
“It’s all about shortening the distance from A to B,” she explained—in other words, opening doors that might not have opened without a connection, like Listers helping one another score an invite to after-parties for the White House Correspondents’ Dinner or SXSW or to attend the right dinner at the right time to gain a warm introduction to the right investor.
What TheLi.st is all about is plain and simple, according to British-born Cindy Gallop, a longtime member, irreverent champion of gender equality, and founder of two tech startups, including her #sextech venture, MakeLoveNotPorn.tv. “TheLi.st,” she said, “makes shit happen for women.”
It is not your typical professional networking group. Sure, job opportunities are posted daily, with an offer to pitch a “Sister Lister” for prestigious positions, and the women discuss how to negotiate consulting fees, how to respond to an off-color remark by a male colleague, how to deliver a kick-ass TED talk, and which investors might be good prospects. But at the same time, Listers take comfort in confiding in each other (in long, detailed e-mails) about troubles with their kids or deciding not to have kids or coping with breast cancer or the death of a parent. Everything is strictly off the record. It’s a “place” where you can both find a solid referral for a new gynecologist and solicit front-end software developer candidates for your new startup in a single day—sometimes within minutes, given the number of members who respond with lightning speed to the flurry of conversations all day long.
“When you’re a stakeholder in the success of your friend, it’s good for you, so if you’re two junior people and you really help each other rise, then, suddenly you’re two mid-level people and you’re rising together,” Rachel said. “You’re pulling each other up. You’re pushing each other from behind. It’s useful. If you can do it alone, fine, [more] power to you, but it’s a lot easier to do it with help.”
* * *
Tech Feminism Takes Off
As 2014 wore on, TheLi.st and its strategic use of social media to call out sexism, along with the growing media coverage of the women in tech meme, continued to air topics typically reserved for discussion by tech insiders. Terms like brogrammer (frat boy meets computer geek), booth babe, and Gamergate (the scandal that came to light in summer 2014 about the harassment and physical threatening of female game designers by misogynistic gamers) seeped into the national consciousness. In May 2014 President Obama hosted the first White House Science Fair highlighting women and girls in STEM, and in his opening remarks he called out the depressing statistics.
“Fewer than three in ten workers in science and engineering are women. That means we’ve got half the field—or half our team—we’re not even putting on the field. We’ve got to change those numbers,” he declared after recognizing the all-girl team of middle school students in the audience that day from Los Fresnos, Texas; they had designed an app to help a visually impaired classmate.27
A few months later the president would go on to make history by naming the nation’s first female chief technology officer. Megan Smith, a former vice president of Google X, the company’s secret research-and-development arm, would eventually help steward the president’s $4 billion initiative, 2016’s Computer Science for All, to make CS education a priority for all public school children. By late 2013 Smith had already spent two years working from within Google to attract more women to its huge annual software developers’ conference, Google I/O. Before she left for Washington, Smith handed those reins to her colleague Natalie Villalobos, who would take the initiative, known as Women Techmakers, to the next level: increasing the female presence at I/O from 8 percent to 23 percent by 2016 and evolving the program into an open, outward-facing year-round effort to rally not just technical women but women working in all areas of tech through summits from Sao Paulo to Tokyo to Lagos to Chicago. By 2014 Natalie, a free-spirited fairy godmother of sorts who stands out in white vintage cat’s-eye glasses and likes to brainstorm over Japanese green tea, was going full force to connect software developers to startup founders, and startup founders to corporate and civic leaders, online and off.
When we caught up with her in June 2016, Natalie was en route to the White House’s United State of Women Summit where she met with Smith, whom she still refers to as her mentor, and then she was off to New York and Boston. She described her dream job by saying, “Women are fire starters, especially women in the technology industry, and [my job is,] ‘How can I add fuel to that fire?’ That’s how I’m approaching my work: identifying and supporting and empowering these women to do whatever it is that they love, whatever it is that they want to do, and [asking,] ‘How can I help them?’
“As women start to understand about this opportunity, how can we help them? How can we catapult them to achieve whatever it is that they would like to achieve in this industry by lowering the barriers to entry, by granting greater access? Because it’s going to take this combined multi-level, global effort to really see a change.”
Like Women Techmakers, other key groups, including Girl Develop It and Women Who Code, emerged to support women in tech by the fall of 2014. That September, Disrupt, the premier tech conference and startup competition sponsored by TechCrunch, finally acknowledged tech has a sexism problem and unveiled new anti-harassment policies.28 (This was a year after the “Titstare” debacle, in which an app for the explicit purpose of ogling women was presented during its hackathon.) Later in the fall, Apple and Facebook rolled out egg-freezing coverage as part of their benefits packages for female employees, igniting new discussions about where motherhood fits into the hack-’til-you-drop culture.29
And then, just before Thanksgiving, came the furor about “computer scientist Barbie,” a new character in a picture book published by Mattel. The pink pages featured blonde bombshell Barbie as a web designer who doesn’t know how to fix a bug in her code without the help of her male colleagues. It incensed computer programmers and non-programmers alike. Casey Fiesler, then a Georgia Tech doctoral candidate who was writing her human-centered-computing dissertation on memes, was so fired up that she decided to rewrite the story so that Barbie is helping the men on her team and posted it on her little-known blog. The next morning she learned Barbie, Remixed! had gone viral, along with another digital parody of the book, Feminist Hacker Barbie.30 Casey’s website, which she said probably had all of eight hundred hits when she put it up, suddenly had 800,000 hits, and the remix was being shared tens of thousands of times on Facebook and Twitter. She had tapped into women’s anger and frustration at sexist stereotyping and found herself featured in Cosmo and invited to read her reimagined Barbie book to schoolchildren around the country. Mattel would go on to win over its critics when it released Game Developer Barbie two years later with much fanfare for her realistic outfit and her ability to write kickass code on her own.
Tech’s Toxic Culture on Trial
The momentum of the tech feminism movement surged into 2015 and reached a fever pitch as a plaintiff named Ellen Pao took the stand to accuse her former employer, the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), of passing her over for promotions and ultimately firing her because she was a woman who had made complaints to her bosses about sexual harassment. With millions of dollars and the reputation of Silicon Valley’s oldest and most venerable firm hanging in the balance, the case had all the makings of an Emmy Award–winning TV legal drama à la The Good Wife.
As the case played out over five weeks, tech reporters and journalists from national newspapers breathlessly covered the juicy trial. Within minutes of the jury’s finding for the firm, the hashtag #thankyouEllenPao zoomed up Twitter’s trending list at lightning speed. Google searches for “Ellen Pao” spiked. The blogosphere rippled with commentary on the case and predictions of its long-term impact on the insular world of startups and how they raise cash. Even Anita Hill called the Pao suit a watershed moment. For the first time the people at the epicenter of the innovation economy were forced to publicly reckon with a system that had evolved into one dominated by white men. It exposed the rarified world of the access, money, and machismo that fuel an exclusive club of entrepreneurs peddling their big ideas to potential kingmakers, who in many cases look just like themselves and share the same networks and pedigrees. Pao was a junior partner and had argued she was an outsider, excluded from ski trips, a dinner at Al Gore’s condo in San Francisco’s St. Regis Hotel, and other all-male outings, where her colleagues got advance information about deals and plum assignments. Although the jury rejected her claims, she had touched a nerve and put a face on a movement that had been simmering all along. In 2016 Ellen Pao teamed up with Tracy Chou and other high-profile diversity advocates to start Project Include, an initiative to support startups and venture capital firms in changing their culture and helping them measure their progress.
Trae Vassallo, who was Pao’s colleague at Kleiner during the years targeted in the suit, was the first person to testify against the firm. As soon as the verdict was handed up, Trae felt its impact.
“I got this overwhelming response from all my friends, from tons of women I’ve never met before, who reached out and said, ‘Thank you for talking, and, by the way, here’s my story,’” said Trae, one of the few women to become a general partner at KPCB, when only 8.5 percent of all venture capitalists in the United States at the time were women.31 Trae testified during the trial that she had been propositioned by the same married male partner with whom Pao had had an affair and who, Pao claimed, had retaliated against her after the romance ended. On the stand Trae also recounted the humiliation of being asked to take notes in meetings and being given a seat at the back of the room when she and Pao were the only women of their rank sitting among male junior associates.32
About a year after the case ended and a few months after her friend Pao decided to drop her appeal, Trae told us: “What floored me was, here I had gone through this very lonely, very horrible experience and then had to talk publicly about it. Then, to realize that I wasn’t alone. There were actually tons of people who had gone through things similar, even way worse. It was an interesting catharsis in knowing that. Then I proceeded to get really angry once I was, like, ‘Wait a second. From my ballpark figure here, more than half of women have had similar experiences.’”
A few months later, while on a power hike with her friend Hillary Mickell, a tech executive and entrepreneur, Trae realized what she wanted to do. They were doing their usual loop up a winding trail through the grasslands and forest overlooking the Portola Valley, not far from Stanford’s Palo Alto campus, where she had once been a shy eighteen-year-old mechanical engineering student far from her home in a tiny farming town called Fairmont, Minnesota. Although she had been shy, Trae had always gone her own way. She credits her fierce independence to her mother and to growing up in a rural community where being intellectual was not particularly cool. Because of her early interests in computer programming and machines, she never felt like she fit in. Her mother told her not to care about what anyone else thought.
“She really helped give me that backbone and the confidence to go, ‘Okay, well, I’m just going to be true to myself, I’m going to do what I love, and I’m not going to worry what other people think,’” said Trae, who has three children and finds herself having similar conversations with her fifteen-year-old math-whiz daughter, an aspiring entrepreneur.
As Trae and Hillary climbed the path, hearts pumping, Trae said she wanted to do a survey, and they started talking about what it would show. Soon after, Trae teamed up with another friend, Ellen Levy, and some Stanford students to conduct the research. Then they approached Michele Madanksy, a former Yahoo executive, about joining the team to analyze the survey results from more than two hundred Silicon Valley women with ten or more years of professional experience.
Their survey, “Elephant in the Valley,” was released in January 2016 and recounts anecdotes that friends and strangers in the tech world had been sharing with Trae. Sixty percent of the women queried said that they had experienced unwanted sexual advances; 88 percent faced unconscious bias, such as male colleagues who posed questions only to their male peers, men who would not make eye contact with female colleagues, or men who asked women to do lower-level tasks that the men did not ask male colleagues to do. Seventy-five percent of the women reported that job interviewers had asked them about family life, marital status, and children.33 We first connected with Trae shortly after the survey came out, and she told us in a telephone conversation she thought that, despite the negative picture the survey painted, women might actually be empowered by knowing that if they had suffered a professional setback, it wasn’t necessarily because of a personal failing but a much larger, seemingly intransigent, societal problem. One of the biggest barriers to discussing the problems faced by women in the Valley is that women who suffer discrimination fear retaliation and are concerned that speaking out will be detrimental to their careers. Furthermore, many cannot talk about it because they are legally bound to silence by non-disparagement clauses in their employment contracts. In many other cases, she said, complaints are arbitrated and therefore never make it to court and remain hidden.
She said that after twenty years in the industry, she knew that not everyone would applaud the stand she was taking: “I think the data helped to provide people with the information that we are not where we want to be as a society. I think a lot of people didn’t realize how backward we maybe were on some of these fronts. Part of it is if you are going to improve something, you have to measure it. The data alone doesn’t solve any problems, but our hope in getting it out there was to educate more folks and inspire more people to do something about it or to pay attention.
“There are going to be people who look at that and go, ‘Why is she doing that?’ I’m doing it because I care about it. I think it’s valuable, and I don’t care what other people think.”
The Sisterhood Stands Up
The Pao case, the sensational coverage of it, and an explosive Newsweek exposé that ran before the trial, “What Silicon Valley Thinks of Women,” were what spurred another Valley veteran to end her silence on the issue of sexism in tech. The Newsweek cover story featured a saucy illustration of a woman in red heels with a cursor lifting up her skirt.34 For years Sukhinder Singh Cassidy had felt more comfortable keeping her opinions about gender to herself. Her laser focus was on building her businesses. In her fast-paced, no-nonsense style, the Tanzanian-born executive confided to us that even as her longtime friend Sheryl Sandberg exhorted women to lean in, and after Anne-Marie Slaughter countered in the Atlantic that women can’t have it all at the same time, Sukhinder had no desire to add to the noise. An accomplished corporate insider and founder of two startups, she felt she could have more impact on the discussion of women in tech if she just kept her head down, worked hard, and delivered.
“If I deliver, if I build a unicorn, that will do more for women in tech than anything I could possibly say,” she said.
But when the airing of Silicon Valley’s dirty laundry started leading the evening news, Sukhinder, then forty-four, decided it was time to take a stand and tell another side of the story. After all, she’d had a ringside seat: she is a serial entrepreneur and investor who once ran global divisions at Amazon and Google and serves on the boards of TripAdvisor and Ericsson and formerly advised Twitter and J.Crew. The story she would tell was about empowerment, about the new generation of badass female tech entrepreneurs who were rising to the top in San Francisco and New York. She was mentoring some of them, including Katrina Lake, founder and CEO of the personal styling subscription service Stitch Fix. Sukhinder’s story was about the sisterhood among women in tech.
“There’s so much more good about it [being a woman in tech] than bad. Of course, I’ve had my own incidents, but over the course of my career, is that the defining characteristic? No way,” she said. That personal history was her impetus to start #ChoosePossiblity in May 2015, a company and campaign to demonstrate that women, while small in numbers, are innovating, starting and running important new companies.
Her efforts started with publishing an open letter. She got the idea to write it after she talked to Keval Desai, a former colleague of hers at Google. Keval, a partner specializing in information technology at InterWest Partners, a venture capital firm, had invested in Sukhinder’s latest startup, Joyus, an online video shopping hub where you can buy everything from trendy moto jackets to three-day smoothie cleanses to age-defying hand cream and get beauty and lifestyle tips in one shot. At the time half of Keval’s portfolio at InterWest was made up of women-led companies, and Sukhinder said he was downright angry that the coverage of sexism in the Valley seemed to be overshadowing the success of these businesses. He sent a note to all the female CEOs of companies in his portfolio at InterWest and entreated them to talk publicly about their triumphs. “Without your voice, women won’t come to Silicon Valley,” he said he told them. Sukhinder responded right away.
“I told him, ‘You are right. No one is telling this story. Nobody ever speaks up. I’ll do it,’” Sukhinder said and promptly started working her Rolodex. She reached out to almost one hundred female CEOs and founders, including Care.com’s Sheila Marcelo, Gilt’s Alexandra Wilkis Wilson, and Alison Pincus of One Kings Lane, to ask them to sign a public letter pronouncing that the story of women in tech is more than tales of unwanted sexual advances and males’ micro-aggressions. And, of course, since this was Silicon Valley, the land of analytics, she wanted the message to be backed up by data about female founders, so Sukhinder commissioned a survey to go along with the text. It was published on Recode, the well-read tech news site, under the headline “Tech Women #ChoosePossibility,” along with stats that made the case: even in the face of gender bias, female entrepreneurs were succeeding.
It proclaimed:
The women on this list founded heavyweights such as Lynda.com, Nextdoor, Houzz, VMware, ASK Group and Mozilla; growth stage stars like Stitch Fix, Slideshare, Indiegogo, LearnVest and StyleSeat; and earlier-stage startups like Lumoid, Heartwork, Other Machine Company and Trendalytics. On this list alone, we were able to identify 13 IPOs and another 54 exits through M&A [mergers and acquisitions]. The average amount of capital raised per company is approximately $34 million (for a subset of 167 companies on which data was available).35
Boom. Sukhinder suddenly found herself in a swirl of media attention, an in-demand speaker, and, for the first time ever, responding to a barrage of tweets and personal messages on social media—something that, as a busy mother of three, she admits she had never really made time for. She relayed the story when we met for an hour at Joyus’s San Francisco headquarters, where she greeted us dressed in electric blue–dyed denim, suede peep-toed booties, and a fitted khaki blazer.
With the letter out and conversations buzzing, she craved more impact than simply expressing a point of view. The woman whose first boss in tech said that her hard-charging style “scared the secretaries” wanted to do something that would force change from the top down. And, not surprisingly, she already had an idea about how to do it.
She’d been thinking about a follow-up project since the summer of 2014, when she had a private conversation with a friend, a respected leader in venture funding and former colleague who was picking her brain about how to get more women into technology. Sukhinder said she proposed a big idea on the spot. She told her friend point-blank that it’s not enough to focus on the pipeline—the code word for getting more women to earn computer science and engineering degrees and to take entry-level jobs in the industry. She wanted to force a culture shift in the boardroom that could influence the way companies were run. So she asked him: What if he, and all the venture capital partners across the Valley, decided collectively to put at least one woman on the board of every private company in their portfolio? He thought it was a good idea, but after a year it hadn’t gone anywhere. So Sukhinder decided to do it on her own by creating a new private network that would introduce qualified, outstanding female candidates endorsed by their peers to venture capitalists and CEOs as prospective members of their boards of directors. Venture capitalism firms would pay to use the service to search for candidates. Members of the network could nominate new women to be listed. By May 2016 more than 1,200 women with endorsements from 650 executives had profiles in the database, and theBoardlist had placed three women as directors.
“I want to make what feels hard easy. I don’t want there to be an excuse that there weren’t enough qualified women. We need to make sure that the hurdle is taken away. The way boards get built is, I know you, you know me,” she explained.
And because Sukhinder was one of the few women who had been a fixture in the Valley since the early days of consumer Internet, she was intimately aware of the tendency for insiders to recruit from the same well. She knew the network inside and out. She was part of it. They had all grown up together. She arrived in the Bay Area in 1997 after formative stints in media at BSkyB in London and in banking at Merrill Lynch in New York. Then she went to work for a tech startup and unexpectedly fell into what evolved, over almost two decades, into an exclusive sorority.
“You know, we all sort of lived together, even Sheryl [Sandberg] and I. The first time she came into Yodlee [the first company Sukhinder co-founded], she was looking for a role, and then the next time I saw her, I was going to Google to interview and she was there,” Sukhinder said. “We grew up together in a generation. The universe of companies in which to get trained was small. There was Google and there was Amazon. Think about it: Were there even a hundred companies valued at over a billion dollars? No way.” She smiled at the enormity of how much had changed.
This tiny cohort of women she met during that time emerged as a tight-knit group of corporate leaders, startup founders, and investors who socialized together, dishing about each other’s romantic interests and hiking through the hills around the exclusive enclaves north and south of San Francisco, where they eventually settled with their young families. She says it was like going to college with the same people you’d gone to grade school with. There’s history. And, as they married, had their kids at the same time (in many cases later in life), and dealt with sticky issues, such as negotiating child care and finances with their spouses, they looked to each other for advice and support.
“You’ve had your children together. You’ve seen people at their best and their worst. You’ve come into power together. It’s just an in-bred network,” said Sukhinder, who often spends weekends baking with her children to recharge and reconnect with them.
Now she sees a new generation of young women getting ready to make their mark as tomorrow’s tech leaders, and she feels the sisterhood she relied on is paying it forward. One way her cohort can help boost the up-and-comers is with the Boardlist.
“What I see happening is a whole new level of sisterhood. Now I feel like I sit between these two groups of sisterhood, which is awesome—the women I grew up with and all these founders who are much younger than me.” She noted the flurry of invitations she receives for women-focused dinners, panels, and pitches, adding, “There are so many these days, it’s hard to keep up.”
Nor is the momentum limited to the west coast. You can feel the solidarity in New York City, where a vibrant startup scene has been under way since 2010. Tech companies founded by women in the city grew tenfold between 2003 and 2014 and raised $3 billion in capital, according to a study by Endeavor.36
“I think the changes we’ve seen in the last two to five years around women in tech have been profound,” said Deborah Jackson, a Goldman Sachs veteran and co-founder of Plum Alley Investments, a firm that invests in women-led tech startups. “Women are supporting other women. Women are connecting through social media. Women are beginning to be outspoken [about the movement to recruit and retain more women in tech].”
Just like the pink-clad kindergarteners raging through the streets in the GoldieBlox commercial, today women are rising up and unapologetically claiming a seat at the tech industry’s table in a way they never had before. The enthusiasm to break into the boys’ club coincides with a new generation of enterprising women who, like the founder of GoldieBlox, are going for it on their own—building companies from the ground up, transforming society with their ideas and inventions, leaning on and lifting each other up along the way. And as we were writing this book in the summer of 2016, the historic presidential nomination of the nation’s first female candidate loomed large. When Hillary Clinton told little girls who stayed up late to watch the Democratic National Convention on television that “they could be next,” this sisterhood seemed unstoppable. If the last women’s movement was about equality, this one is about equity.
Copyright © 2017 by Heather Cabot and Samantha Walravens