Sexism in the technology industry
Sexism in the technology industry manifests in various forms—overt, subtle, and covert occupational sexism—creating a hostile and exclusionary environment for women. This not only diminishes the accessibility and profitability of the sector but also perpetuates a lack of diversity in the technology industry. Despite regional variations, women's representation in the tech field hovers between 4% and 20%, influenced by entrenched gender stereotypes, biased investment decisions, male-dominated work cultures, and a pervasive lack of awareness surrounding sexual harassment. Historical data paints a stark picture: while women earned 37.1% of U.S. computer science degrees in 1984, this figure plummeted to 17.6% by 2011 and has remained stagnant since. Silicon Valley, often lauded as the cradle of technological innovation, has been criticized for failing to address these disparities. Margaret O'Mara, a historian, notes that Silicon Valley's male-dominated oligopoly replicates traditional power structures, marginalizing women, people of color, and other minorities, ultimately reinforcing a homogenous tech culture. Moreover, systemic issues such as unequal pay, limited venture capital access, and pervasive workplace harassment contribute to the exodus of women from the industry. In response, various initiatives, like diversity-focused conferences and nonprofits, are striving to create more inclusive environments, yet the road to equity remains fraught with challenges, as demonstrated by the continued underrepresentation of women at executive levels and in technical roles across leading firms like Google and other tech giants.
Statistics
In 1970, 13.6% of U.S. computer science and information science bachelor's degrees were awarded to women. By 1984, that number rose to 37.1%. In 2011, however, this percentage hit its nadir after two and a half decades of consistent decline, with only 17.6% of undergraduate computer science degrees going to women. From 2007 to 2015, this number remained relatively similar, ranging from 17.6 to 18.2%. In 2018 and 2019, the last years with comprehensive data available from the US government, 19% and 20% of U.S. computer and information science degrees were awarded to women respectively.In May 2014, Google posted on its official blog that only 30 percent of its employees globally were women, acknowledging the diversity gap within its workforce.
In January 2015, the New York Times reported that "the largest technology companies have released reports showing that only 30% of their employees are women", with the percentage of technical employees being even lower.
A Fortune magazine review of data available for the 92 US-based venture capital firms which had raised "at least one fund of $200 million or more" between 2009 and 2014 found "only 17 had even one senior female partner", and only 4.2% of "partner level VCs" were female, highlighting gender inequity in leadership roles.
An Open Diversity Data website has been created to provide transparent access to diversity data for specific companies, aiming to promote accountability.
Only 11% of Silicon Valley executives and about 20% of software developers are women. At Google, only 18% of technical employees are women, a statistic the company has been struggling to improve. On Forbes
A 2015 survey entitled "The Elephant in the Valley" conducted a comprehensive survey of two hundred senior-level women in Silicon Valley. 84% of participants reported being told they were "too aggressive" in the office, and 66% stated that they were excluded from important events purely due to their gender. In addition, 60% of women revealed that they received unwanted sexual advances in their respective workplaces – the majority of which came from a superior. Almost 40% did not report the incidents out of fear of retaliation or potential career consequences.
The New York Times obtained a copy of Google's Salary Spreadsheet in 2014, which depicts each employee's salary and bonus information. This spreadsheet reported that at Google, women receive lower salaries than their male counterparts for five out of the six job titles listed.
Media reports
In 1997, Anita Borg, then a senior researcher at Digital Equipment Corporation openly complained that women "run into subtle sexism every day" in their professional environments. At the time only one woman, Carol Bartz of Autodesk, was a chief executive officer among the largest Silicon Valley technology companies. Furthermore, only 5.6% of the area's 1,686 major tech firms were run by women. It was even harder for female entrepreneurs trying to break into the industry. Of the $33.5 billion in venture capital invested in tech from 1991 through the second quarter of 1996, only a dismal 1.6% went to companies launched or headed by women, leaving many innovative ideas underfunded.The 2015 Crunchies award event, organized by Silicon Valley tech industry blogs, was heavily criticized for its inappropriate use of derogatory language towards women.
Multiple gender harassment and discrimination lawsuits in Silicon Valley have since received widespread media attention. One of the most widely reported was Pao v. Kleiner Perkins, a high-profile discrimination lawsuit against Kleiner Perkins by then Reddit interim CEO Ellen Pao, which went to trial in 2015. Pao's lawsuit, which alleged that Perkins indulged in discriminatory double standards and denied her the senior partner position, resulted in a controversial verdict for the defendant. Three jurors cited Pao's "increasingly negative performance reviews" as the primary reason for their decision, although others believed gender bias was involved.
On September 20, 2016, Tesla employee AJ Vandermayden filed a significant lawsuit against her company alleging sex discrimination, retaliation, and multiple other workplace violations. Vandermayden brought this lawsuit after learning her salary was substantially lower than those of the eight other employees, all male, with whom she worked most closely, despite the fact that some of them had just finished college. She was also subjected to a much harsher standard in order to receive a promotion and pay raise that many of her male colleagues had received simply for working at the company for a certain period of time, regardless of their performance.
In Silicon Valley, start-up surveillance company Verkada Inc. was accused of sexism and discrimination against female employees after a sales director used the company's facial recognition system to harass female workers by taking unauthorized photos of them.
Possible causes
Investment of grants and conscious belief in intellectual sex differences
Some scholars studying discrimination in the tech industry argue that since decision-makers in the tech industry often believe that men are inherently more technically competent than women, they think that it is economically a better investment to employ male tech personnel and to allocate higher budgets to the male staff than to the female staff. According to this model, those investments lead to more opportunities for male staff to produce high quality results, which in turn reinforces the statistical bias and is used as an argument for male technical superiority, causing a damaging self-fulfilling prophecy. These scholars argue that the main problem is not merely unconscious bias, but a conscious belief in allegedly scientific notions of sex differences, citing that the percentage of women in the highest quality tech work have decreased despite a decline in traditional and unconscious gender bias. At the same time, quotas of women at lower levels of tech have slightly improved, though supposedly scientific claims of sex differences have increased and can account for the heightened discrimination at top tech positions. While this model states that there is systematic discrimination towards women in tech, it explains it as a result of specific economical investment issues and does not presume a society-wide patriarchal structure nor even that discrimination must necessarily favor men in all other aspects of society.Gender stereotypes
Men are traditionally seen as typically more authoritative, commanding, and influential than women. In tasks that are perceived as masculine by society, women are often given less influence and are not considered reliable experts, even if they possess equivalent or superior qualifications. Only when a task is stereotyped as feminine will a woman have more influence or authority than a man. Violating gender-stereotypic norms results in social penalties, often leading to isolation or being labeled difficult to work with.Men are believed to be more self-assertive and motivated to master their environment women are believed to be more selfless and concerned with others, reinforcing occupational gender divides.
Early childhood development
According to studies of early childhood development in human children, boys preferred technical toys while girls preferred social toys. The same holds for non-human children, such as rhesus and vervet monkeys.However, critics argue that since infants interact with other humans from birth, even if only with their parents, and rapidly absorb accents and cultural norms, the concept of a pre-socialized stage has been questioned; monkeys that have been studied in primatology are often those that have lived close to human settlements and thus imitated human habits, which may not reflect purely natural behavior, and are therefore not non-socialized either. Some researchers counter that there would be no evolutionary function for a brain mechanism that starts to distinguish social phenomena from other phenomena before socialization starts. Therefore, distinctions between toys that predate socialization might not accurately predict interests later in life.
Additionally, primatologists argue that in some groups, female chimpanzees hunt and use tools as effectively as males, suggesting that there is no innate universal primate bias towards technology being male-oriented.