Powerful exposé of who Silicon Valley got so sexist despite utopian ideals

The San Francisco-based host of TV show Bloomberg Technology, Emily Chang’s Brotopia offers an important examination of why technology industry is so dominated by men – and how women are pushing back, and have gone from whispering about sexism in the Valley to yelling about it.

Chang’s journey to the memory lane and history of technology to discover why computer programming once is seen as a woman’s job, because of their fast and accurate typing skills transformed into a male-dominated industry.

She also points out that a personality test develops at Systems Development Corporation in the 1960s, which found that good programmers were defined by liking things, not people. The authors of the test William Cannon and Dallis Perry having profiled 1,378 programmers, covering only 186 women, which was used as one of the selection criteria for programming jobs at two-thirds of software companies.

James Damore, the Google employee fired last year for writing a memo that claimed women were not as biologically well suited to engineering as men. According to Chang, software engineers require the ability to work in a group and empathise with users.

Chang reveals the Silicon Valley culture to hard-charging, hard-partying start-up called Trilogy in the 1990s, who coined the brainteaser interview questions like “How many piano tuners are there in the world?”, that became famous when they were adopted by Google.

Chang is also very critical of the “Paypal Mafia” the founders of early online payments company, whose members include Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. She accuses Thiel in particular for his lack of imagination in helping more women into tech.

Included in the book is the story of Susan Fowler, the Uber engineer whose blog post about harassment eventually contributed to the departure of the company’s CEO Travis Kalanick.

Sex parties by geeks finally getting some action, or expression of the west coast open-mindedness, which is not good for women who do not want to be excluded from funding or job opportunities – but risk being shamed for their sexuality if they do take part.

Women in tech, the Silicon Valley is not a fantasyland of unicorns, virtual reality rainbows and 3D-printed lollipops where millions of dollars grow on trees.

In this powerful expose Chang looks the keyhole of the male-dominated venture capitalist’s boardrooms like Kleiner Perkins, the subject of Ellen Pao’s high profile gender discrimination lawsuit, and Sequoia, where a partner once famously and foolishly said they “ won’t lower their standards” just to hire women. She also interviews Sheryl Sandberg the Facebook COO, Susan Wojcicki, YouTube CEO and former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer who got their start at Google, where only one in five engineers is a woman.

Silicon Valley’s misogynistic and aggressive work-at-all costs culture has effectively shut women out of the greatest wealth creation in the history of the world, and it is time to break up the exclusive boy’s club.

Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boy’s Club of Silicon Valley by Emily Chang Portfolio/Penguin $28, 306 pages.