Brotopia

Brotopia motivates you to be fairer in the workplace as an employee or employer by revealing the sad sexist state of Silicon Valley.

If I asked you to think of the typical software engineer, what would say they look like? You probably think of a geeky guy that doesn’t have great people skills but is a wiz when it comes to numbers, right? Interestingly, this stereotype only exists because of some misinformation back in the early days of the tech industry.

At the beginning of the 20th century, typing and operating a switchboard were clerical duties done by women. When it came to all computer needs, including programming, females were the ones to do it. After all, this was “women’s work.”

But there’s a lot to be said for their contributions to society because of these duties. Women programmed the US Army’s first computer in WWII. Some helped with the coding that contributed to the creation of the atomic bombs that the US dropped on Japan in 1945.

And of course, there is the story of the three Hidden Figures without whom John Glenn’s first orbit around the Earth wouldn’t have been possible.

But this all began to come crashing down in the late 1960s. A software company hired a couple of psychologists to try and identify the traits of the best computer programmers.

Their sample size of only 1,378 interviewees contained only 186 women. This resulted in them identifying good programmers having traits like antisocial behavior. Because men were more likely to have this disorder, it quickly became common for companies to hire men as programmers instead of women.

This book dives into the disgusting practice that some Silicon Valley companies have of using strip clubs as meeting rooms. It’s pretty obvious that women executives wouldn’t feel welcome in these circumstances, right? Some have even reported having interviews in these lewd places! I won’t go into more detail on that but I just wanted to mention it because it made me sick. Women deserve more respect than that. But the sad truth is, this unfairness is only the tip of the iceberg of mistreatment in the tech industry. Usually, when a woman is successful in this business, people consider it chance. But when a man does something great it’s “because of his abilities.” Women are often thought to be less qualified than men, too. One example of this is that women get quality control checked for their work more often than men. Ironically, one study found that if the quality assurance checker doesn’t know the coder’s gender they’ll approve women’s work more often than men’s! Oh, and if you’re a startup with only men leaders then you’re more likely…