Sunday Read: Asian American author opens door to Silicon Valley's 'bro' culture

SCREEN CAPTURE / C-SPAN

Author Emily Chang spoke last week at the Commonwealth Club-Silicon Valley.

SILICON VALLEY's image of innovation, risk-taking and billionaire-making has a darker side of drugs, sex and misogyny that's fueled by a frat-boy culture, according to a new book by Emily Chang.

“About once a month, on a Friday or Saturday night, the Silicon Valley Technorati gather for a drug-heavy, sex-heavy party,” Chang writes in Vanity Fair. 

In her just-released book, Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys’ Club of Silicon Valley, Chang says for women in tech, Silicon Valley is not a fantasyland of unicorns, virtual reality rainbows, and 3D-printed lollipops, where millions of dollars grow on trees. It’s a “Brotopia,” where men hold all the cards and make all the rules. Vastly outnumbered, women face toxic workplaces rife with discrimination and sexual harassment, where investors take meetings in hot tubs and network at sex parties.

In this powerful exposé, Chang, a Bloomberg TV journalist, reveals how Silicon Valley got so sexist despite its utopian ideals, why bro culture endures despite decades of companies claiming the moral high ground (Don’t Be Evil! Connect the World!) – and how women are finally starting to speak out and fight back.

Asian and Asian/American men and women are in the middle of it all as enablers, perpetrators and victims.

In an excerpt, Chang tells the story of one company, Cooliris, where the young Indian American CEO, gave the entire staff copies of the KamaSutra, an illustrated guide to sexual positions. The CEO would often joke, “Thank God we don’t have an HR team,” a phrase that other employees at the company took up and repeated. 

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Tracy Chou, a software engineer recalled her experience as in intern at Google. “I was hit on every other day,” Chou said. “One person, eleven years my senior, that I had to work on a project with asked me, ‘Do you want to go watch a movie in the conference room? We’ll close the doors, turn out the lights, and pull the blinds.’” He even made her a T-shirt with his name on it and left it on her desk.

Chou later wrote a essay in Medium demanding he tech firms to reveal their statistics on the gender breakdown of their employees. With her employer’s permission, Chou revealed the percentage of Pinterest’s engineers who were women (12 percent at that time), putting the pressure on other tech companies to keep the ball rolling. Like Fowler’s post, Chou’s essay became the talk of the Valley. It took some time, but most of the major tech companies ponied up. In 2014, Apple, Google, and Facebook revealed their diversity data, and, unsurprisingly, the picture was dismal. Not only were women outnumbered, but in the most critical and most senior positions they were grossly outnumbered. 

Drawing on her deep network of Silicon Valley insiders, Chang opens the boardroom doors of male-dominated venture capital firms like Kleiner Perkins, the subject of Ellen Pao’s high-profile gender discrimination lawsuit, and Sequoia, where a partner once famously said they “won’t lower their standards” just to hire women. 

Chou and Pao would later join forces with other women to found Project Include, a group dedicated to advocating for gender equality in the tech industry.

RELATED: The Google 'manifesto' and the fratboy culture of Silicon Valley

Chang opens the boardroom doors of male-dominated venture capital firms like Kleiner Perkins, the subject of Ellen Pao’s high-profile gender discrimination lawsuit, and Sequoia, where a partner once famously said they “won’t lower their standards” just to hire women. 

The Atlantic article drew strong criticism when it came out. But no one denied these sex parties were happening. According to Chang, while the women involved in the debauchery are willing participants, there’s a clear power imbalance in play.

"We all know how much work bleeds into personal life in this industry. I’ve talked with female Uber engineers who were routinely invited to strip clubs and bondage clubs in the middle of the day. As I recount in the book, I went to the famous San Francisco strip club Gold Club and it was packed with tech workers eating lunch," she recounts in an interview 

"What we’re talking about is bad behavior that’s not just tolerated but that’s been normalized.

Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys’ Club of Silicon Valley by Emily Chang was published on February 6, 2018 by Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group.
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