The uncomfortable truth about sexism in tech

Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer, HP’s Meg Whitman and lastminute.com co-founder Martha Lane Fox – they’re the high-flyers whose rise to the top of the technology industry suggests that we’ve finally broken free of gender discrimination. But have we? Behind those headline successes, many women in technology still find themselves isolated in an unwelcoming environment. Those who take steps to confront sexism can meet with resentment or disdain, and they may even find themselves sidelined professionally.

Certainly there are women who enjoy rewarding, well-paid work in the technology field. But some sectors remain a boys’ club, which appears to resist female involvement. The Gamergate saga proved that: what started as a debate over game-review ethics splintered into a character assassination of female developers.

Game creator Brianna Wu, for example, came under fire after mocking Gamergate for “fighting an apocalyptic future where women are 8% of programmers and not 3%”. She received a deluge of online threats, including one stating: “I’m going to rape your filthy ass until you bleed then choke you to death on your husband’s tiny Asian penis.” The message included details of Wu’s home address, which forced her to move out of her home in fear.

It’s a shameful situation in an industry that owes so much to pioneering women such as Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper, and the many female software engineers who drove coding during the 1960s. Such attacks create an environment in which technically capable women are fearful to confront sexism where it still exists.

Everyday sexism

Although efforts are underway to address some inequalities – including pay, to an extent – the IT industry remains male-dominated. According to the latest Office for National Statistics figures from August 2014, there are 723,000 male “information technology and telecommunications professionals” in the UK, compared with 124,000 women.

It’s an imbalance that’s reflected in company diversity reports. Microsoft, for example, boasts 29% female workers across its staff, but in technical positions only 17% are women. Of Google’s senior management and executive officer team, 17 are male while only three are women. Men make up 83% of Google’s engineering staff; Apple’s technical team is 80% male.

The high percentage of men in the sector doesn’t necessarily make it sexist; if fewer women go through education to get on the first rung of the ladder, an imbalance 54 56 Image: Pau-Payasita is inevitable. But the masculine skew allows casual sexism to go unchecked, exemplified by ill-advised comments from certain chief executives.

In October 2014, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella made a patronising statement (later retracted) that suggested women shouldn’t ask for pay rises. “It’s not about asking for the raise, but knowing and having faith that the system will actually give you the right raises as you go along,” he said. “And that, I think, might be one of the additional superpowers that quite frankly women who don’t ask for a raise have. Because that’s good karma.” Not that karma pays the rent – even for women with “additional superpowers”.

The laddishness that thrives in testosterone-heavy climes leads to sexist attitudes going unchallenged among otherwise professional workers. Take the presentation by a principal developer at Atlassian, which compared Apache Maven software to his girlfriend. Jonathan Doklovic fleshed out the comparison by saying that the software “looks beautiful, complains a lot, demands attention, interrupts me when I’m working and doesn’t play well with my other friends.” It’s fair to say the presenter’s joke wasn’t universally appreciated.

“Women continue to leave the industry because it’s so toxic,” said Randi Harper, a developer and engineer. “Trying to get more women to go to school for STEM [science, technology, engineering, maths] is the wrong approach; we need to attack the problem of fixing the environment to make it a place where they can stay.

“It’s so subtle that you’re often left wondering if it really happened, and when you try to talk about it, you sound like a crazy person because it’s so small – but it’s death by a thousand paper cuts. While there are definitely valid stories of women being belittled directly to their faces, even in front of co-workers, at least that’s something that you know is wrong. In my experience, it’s worse when it isn’t quite so direct.”

Of course, not all offices are the same, and there are workplaces where men and women are on a par both numerically and socially. Indeed, many of the women we spoke to said they had rarely come across gender-related problems at work.

“When you’re in the workplace, you don’t run into discrimination very much,” said programmer Pam-Marie Guzzo. “It’s more… in a broader cultural context that you see it. And that can influence young girls.”

“Every now and again, you run into those who think you’re not as intelligent as them, but I don’t think that’s a gender thing – I think it’s people being arrogant,” she added.

Much depends on the culture in the workplace, company maturity, and the ratio of men to women. Anecdotally, academic campuses with a more equal gender split and a liberal culture appear less likely to be fuelled by testosterone than “brogrammer” start-ups. Large companies with mentoring programmes and more structured human resources teams are also less likely to tolerate sexism at work, and to have procedures in place to deal with complaints.

Even within larger companies, however, stories of management bullying are rife, and the attacks are often directed at women.

“It’s a bullying culture,” a former Microsoft senior director told a recent Center for Talent Innovation (CTI) study. “I think it’s because those guys were bullied in school. They don’t know any other way to act.” She highlights a meeting where a product manager was “screaming at the top of his lungs” at a woman’s feature-set ideas, yelling: “Why would you think I’d be interested in this garbage? How stupid are you?”

It was enough to make that particular woman leave the industry, although it should be noted that many men might have felt the same in similar circumstances. The long hours, high pressure and on-call nature of many tech companies is also cited as a reason for women leaving the industry.

“Of the small numbers of women who are going into the industry, more than half are leaving because of those issues,” said Lynn Anderson of The Metis Movement, which promotes women in tech. “People don’t want the strain – you get a guy that works through the night and it makes it look like other people don’t have the passion. There’s animosity if you’re not committed to being there 24/7; sometimes women can’t be.”

The workplace environment is something that contributes to worrying CTI figures that show 52% of women leave technology as an industry because they’re made to feel unwelcome and undervalued, and see their careers stagnating.

“A woman’s ideas will be shot down without even being considered, and the men who are doing this don’t even realise they’re doing so because she’s a woman,” said Harper. “If you don’t have rock-solid self-esteem, it’s going to wear you down over time. Women start to think that their ideas aren’t great, and this is going to keep them from going after promotions, from thinking that they should ask for the same amount of money as their male co-workers. Eventually, given enough time, women will just drop out entirely.”

Career speed bumps

The industry makes the right noises about wanting to hire more women – in fact, big companies are actively competing for the best female candidates from a small pool – but behind the scenes, the major players’ old worries persist.

Bosses still fear costs and disruption caused by maternity leave and childcare if they choose to hire younger women, leading some employers to come up with fairly controversial solutions that they say are designed to empower female staff.

Facebook and Apple both offer “female-friendly perks” that include covering the costs of egg freezing in a bid to delay workers having children, and Apple also covers the legal costs of adoption. The plan is to avoid disruption during their staffers’ most productive years, but what impact it will have down the line remains unknown.

In smaller companies and startups such perks are unimaginable and will probably be unaffordable; instead they may simply bin applications from women they expect might be planning a family. This is the kind of discrimination that’s easy to mask.

“I was senior management and therefore involved in the recruiting process, but HR would often ask, ‘Wouldn’t it be better to put a man in?’” said Sadie Sherran, an SEO expert involved in the hiring process at one company. “Or if people say they’re getting married or engaged, then people were thinking ‘they’ll be having children after that – better to get a man’.”

Sexual harassment

According to that 2013 CTI report, based on a global survey of almost 6,000 STEM workers, more overt sexism at work in the form of harassment is also all too common, with half of the respondents having experienced some sort of sexual harassment and a fifth “subjected to comments and catcalls when they wear a skirt or use lipstick”.

Some men in senior positions, especially in out-of-office environments such as conferences or social functions, cross the line between being friendly and sexual predation.

“I worked as management, but when I came into contact with the directors I found them very sexually aggressive towards me and another colleague,” said one of our interviewees. “There was one occasion at a conference, where one of the directors tried it on with me and another director tried it on with her. They plied us with drinks – it got to the point where a male colleague and myself had to get involved to protect her. They were pushing drugs onto her and touching her inappropriately. I had to drag her away.”

Given the serious nature of the harassment, you’d think HR would investigate, but you’d be wrong. Our interviewee believed the firm involved was more concerned with protecting its reputation and directors than resolving the claims. Being vocal about the incident achieved little, and instead she later found herself singled out and criticised for wearing provocative clothing at work in a bid to discredit her.

“I found that I was being victimised,” she said. “The company would pull me into HR on a day when I was wearing a suit and they’d say, ‘We’ve had complaints that you’re dressing inappropriately for work’. I’d look at myself and say ‘What’s inappropriate about this?’ and they’d say ‘No, it’s not today, it was another day.’ But they couldn’t tell me exactly what I was wearing that was inappropriate.

“They were pointing a finger at me and saying, ‘Yeah, you had a problem – it’s on your record – now we’re going to put things on your record that show you to be a slut.’ It was like they were doctoring my file to put them in a better light if it ever came out.”

Daring to stand up

If sexism in the workplace can be subtle, the misogynist trolling of women in the tech industry on Twitter is altogether more shameless, as trolls are willing to put a bewildering level of effort and bile into their attacks.

The anti-feminist campaigns have a modus operandi. They use Twitter to threaten their victims, then dig up the individual’s past and post it online, including highly personal information, any criminal record and private photos. They fabricate stories with doctored images and bombard the target’s employer with complaints and criticism in a bid to get them fired. This isn’t “name-calling”, it’s a concentrated campaign to ruin someone’s reputation.

Randi Harper attracted the hate mob’s wrath by helping to create a block list that stopped harassers’ tweets from reaching their targets. What she believed was a service to protect women was instead seen as a censorship tool by opponents, who then went on to drag up all the dirt from her past in an attempt to discredit her.

Even in researching this article, a campaigner tried to warn us off speaking to Harper after we’d contacted her via Twitter. Using a disposable Twitter account, he slurred Harper by branding her a neo-Nazi and posted a link to a photo of her in front of a Nazi flag. That the doctored photo included her dead sister only made the tactics more contemptible. Sadly, similar threats appear to be having an effect on women who refrain from speaking out on industry issues for fear of the fallout.

“We can’t talk about the problems without being called professional victims, martyrs – or being told that we’re just too sensitive,” said Harper. “We’re told that it’s our fault, or that we’re just imagining things. Women are afraid to tell their stories, so men think that there isn’t really a problem except with the few of us who are able to stand up and be vocal. We need to make the industry a safer place for women to speak up. The public backlash can be soul-crushing.”

Despite the career opportunities and the addressing of the pay gap that make the industry look a picture of equality, it remains a patchy work in progress. If women can’t confront the sexism that still exists in technology without fear of reprisal then the industry can’t call itself female-friendly.

Final thoughts: reprogramming preconceptions

According to women in the industry – and many bodies trying to address the gender gap – one of the root causes of gender imbalance is the low number of girls choosing to study computing and science subjects at school and university.

Stereotyping still sees girls pushed towards subjects relevant to the nurturing and creative industries, and away from science and maths. Female students make up only 15% of computerscience intakes in UK universities.

Keeping more girls interested in computing at schools and colleges could lead to more balanced working environments – but achieving that will require overturning the idea that coding and technical tasks are for boys only.

“It’s common in the media,” said programmer Pam-Marie Guzzo. “When we were growing up and films had computer scientists or nerds in school, it was always guys. There were never any female characters portrayed. As you grow up, if that’s all you see, then you assume it’s normal. You get into this mindset that it’s a boys’ club, and that’s what it’s always going to be, and what it always has been – which isn’t true at all.”

A case in point is a Barbie book that recently hit the headlines. I Can Be A Computer Engineer was pulled by publisher Mattel after it was pointed out that, contrary to the title, the book portrays women as unable to work with computers. The pink-heavy book portrayed Barbie as a clueless game designer who relied on boys to help her with coding, and to fix the computers that had become infected with a virus. Is it any wonder that girls get the impression that technical roles are for men?

“There are fewer women in STEM jobs because they are at various points given the impression that these spaces aren’t for girls,” said Casey Fiesler at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “Unfortunately, that was the message of the Barbie book.”

“To me, the most problematic line in the book was: ‘“I’m only creating the design ideas,” Barbie says, laughing. “I’ll need Steven’s and Brian’s help to turn it into a real game”.’ It reads like the idea that Barbie could be the one coding is funny – because programming is for boys and art (design) is for girls.”

In response, Fiesler has created her own “remix” of the book with a more positive message: click here to read her updated version.