Business

Women engineers trace tech gender gap to childhood

admin Contributor
Font Size:

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Silicon Valley companies portray themselves as inventors of the future, but they’re afflicted by a longstanding problem.

From board rooms to “brogrammers,” men still dominate many corners of the tech industry, where the pantheon of famous founders — from Hewlett and Packard to Jobs to Zuckerberg — is still a boys’ bastion.

The gender-imbalance issue came to the forefront again recently when a partner at the country’s most prominent venture capital firm filed a sexual harassment lawsuit alleging a former colleague retaliated against her for years after she cut off a brief relationship with him. The firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, has denied the allegations.

Whatever the merits of the claim, the suit again has put a spotlight on the tech industry’s gender gap.

To Jocelyn Goldfein, a director of engineering at Facebook, the math is stark.

Less than 20 percent of the bachelor’s degrees in computer science go to women, according to federal statistics. By comparison, nearly 60 percent of all bachelor’s degrees are awarded to graduating females.

The company wants to hire top engineers, but the talent pool in the U.S. is growing thin, she said. Goldfein said she doesn’t look to hire female engineers specifically, just the best people. But she said she’d have a lot more to choose from if women entered computer science at a rate anywhere near the average for all fields.

She blames the lack of role models both in popular culture and in day-to-day life as a key reason for the disparity.

“The reason there aren’t more women computer scientists is because there aren’t more women computer scientists,” she said.

Women in other professions such as medicine and law have become fixtures on television and in movies in recent decades, while portrayals of programmers still tend to follow the hacker stereotype of the lone guy sitting in his basement, she said.

Unless their parents are engineers, girls also aren’t likely to encounter coders in their own lives the same way they would, for example, a doctor or a teacher.

“We don’t really have that same kind of interaction with software engineers as we go about our daily lives,” Goldfein said.

Facebook itself has come under criticism over the lack of diversity on its board of directors, which is composed of seven white men, though the majority of its users are women. At the same time, the company’s chief operating officer, former U.S. Treasury Department official Sheryl Sandberg, has become the most prominent female executive in Silicon Valley.

Goldfein said women engineers are also behind many of Facebook’s signature features, including the news feed and the photo viewer. She hopes the site itself can serve as a tool to draw more girls and young women into computer science.

“If they realize that when I click on a photo and it pops up, that was made by a woman, think how powerful that would be,” Goldfein said.

At gatherings across Silicon Valley, especially those where engineers cluster, lines extend far out the men’s room door, while the ladies’ room has little wait.

“Sometimes it can be hard,” said Serena Yeung, 23, a recent Stanford graduate who worked as a software engineer at a Silicon Valley startup before returning for graduate school. Just walking into the classroom is one of the biggest hurdles for women thinking of entering the field, she said. “You go in and you’re the only girl in it.”

For Yeung, having parents who were both engineers spared her the sense that computers weren’t for girls.

She got her first job as a programmer at Mountain View-based Rockmelt Inc., which makes a Web browser with built-in social media features. She started working there even before she graduated with her degree in electrical engineering, another coding-intensive field where men heavily outnumber women.

Rockmelt CEO Eric Vishria says the competition to hire qualified women software engineers has heated up as companies see that they need diverse perspectives to build products that attract the widest audience. He said startups that don’t hire women early in their existence risk creating a male-dominated culture that will put off potential female hires.

“It becomes a death spiral, it becomes self-fulfilling,” Vishria said. “You have 15 guys in a room, that’s your company, and it becomes harder and harder to hire your first woman.”

Yeung said a recent experience at a Stanford Society of Women Engineers event for elementary school students showed her that intervention needs to come early to steer girls toward tech. She said girls who had just come from a computer science workshop complained they didn’t like it because the boys asked all the questions.

Steeped in video game culture and barraged by positive male tech industry role models, boys tend to dominate conversations around computing early on, leaving girls feeling shut out, said Yeung.

As for her own childhood, Yeung said that as she got older, her commitment to computing carried a social cost as female friends drifted toward other interests.

“It’s harder to spend time with them. It’s harder to do things with them,” she said. “I think you feel kind of a conflicting pull between friends and career interests. That can be hard.”

PREMIUM ARTICLE: Subscribe To Keep Reading

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign Up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
BENEFITS READERS PASS PATRIOTS FOUNDERS
Daily and Breaking Newsletters
Daily Caller Shows
Ad Free Experience
Exclusive Articles
Custom Newsletters
Editor Daily Rundown
Behind The Scenes Coverage
Award Winning Documentaries
Patriot War Room
Patriot Live Chat
Exclusive Events
Gold Membership Card
Tucker Mug

What does Founders Club include?

Tucker Mug and Membership Card
Founders

Readers,

Instead of sucking up to the political and corporate powers that dominate America, The Daily Caller is fighting for you — our readers. We humbly ask you to consider joining us in this fight.

Now that millions of readers are rejecting the increasingly biased and even corrupt corporate media and joining us daily, there are powerful forces lined up to stop us: the old guard of the news media hopes to marginalize us; the big corporate ad agencies want to deprive us of revenue and put us out of business; senators threaten to have our reporters arrested for asking simple questions; the big tech platforms want to limit our ability to communicate with you; and the political party establishments feel threatened by our independence.

We don't complain -- we can't stand complainers -- but we do call it how we see it. We have a fight on our hands, and it's intense. We need your help to smash through the big tech, big media and big government blockade.

We're the insurgent outsiders for a reason: our deep-dive investigations hold the powerful to account. Our original videos undermine their narratives on a daily basis. Even our insistence on having fun infuriates them -- because we won’t bend the knee to political correctness.

One reason we stand apart is because we are not afraid to say we love America. We love her with every fiber of our being, and we think she's worth saving from today’s craziness.

Help us save her.

A second reason we stand out is the sheer number of honest responsible reporters we have helped train. We have trained so many solid reporters that they now hold prominent positions at publications across the political spectrum. Hear a rare reasonable voice at a place like CNN? There’s a good chance they were trained at Daily Caller. Same goes for the numerous Daily Caller alumni dominating the news coverage at outlets such as Fox News, Newsmax, Daily Wire and many others.

Simply put, America needs solid reporters fighting to tell the truth or we will never have honest elections or a fair system. We are working tirelessly to make that happen and we are making a difference.

Since 2010, The Daily Caller has grown immensely. We're in the halls of Congress. We're in the Oval Office. And we're in up to 20 million homes every single month. That's 20 million Americans like you who are impossible to ignore.

We can overcome the forces lined up against all of us. This is an important mission but we can’t do it unless you — the everyday Americans forgotten by the establishment — have our back.

Please consider becoming a Daily Caller Patriot today, and help us keep doing work that holds politicians, corporations and other leaders accountable. Help us thumb our noses at political correctness. Help us train a new generation of news reporters who will actually tell the truth. And help us remind Americans everywhere that there are millions of us who remain clear-eyed about our country's greatness.

In return for membership, Daily Caller Patriots will be able to read The Daily Caller without any of the ads that we have long used to support our mission. We know the ads drive you crazy. They drive us crazy too. But we need revenue to keep the fight going. If you join us, we will cut out the ads for you and put every Lincoln-headed cent we earn into amplifying our voice, training even more solid reporters, and giving you the ad-free experience and lightning fast website you deserve.

Patriots will also be eligible for Patriots Only content, newsletters, chats and live events with our reporters and editors. It's simple: welcome us into your lives, and we'll welcome you into ours.

We can save America together.

Become a Daily Caller Patriot today.

Signature

Neil Patel