Tech companies haven’t gotten past sexism 1.0

A vibrator is seen on Friday, Oct. 17, 2014 in San Francisco, Calif. This was one of the items included in the basket given to Chronicle reporter Kristen V. Brown. A vibrator is seen on Friday, Oct. 17, 2014 in San Francisco, Calif. This was one of the items included in the basket given to Chronicle reporter Kristen V. Brown. Photo: Russell Yip / The Chronicle Photo: Russell Yip / The Chronicle Image 1 of / 4 Caption Close Tech companies haven’t gotten past sexism 1.0 1 / 4 Back to Gallery

Tech startups often ply journalists with swag, a never-ending bounty of logo T-shirts and mouse pads, gizmos and gadgets.

A vibrator, though, was a first.

A few weeks ago, a startup founder showed up in the lobby of The Chronicle after hours. He told me I hadn’t responded to his e-mails. And he wanted to get my attention.

He delivered his pitch, along with a wicker basket filled with sexually suggestive gifts: the sex toy, a tube of K-Y Jelly, raw oysters and Tequila.

It definitely got my attention. But it didn’t seem like his choice of swag had anything to do with his company, Need, a question-and-answer app where users anonymously ask each other for advice on everything from babysitters to boyfriends.

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I wondered whether the point of the gift had more to do with my gender than his company. It seemed as though Blake Francis, the founder, was addressing me as a woman, but not a journalist. What’s more, the vibrator seemed to say that my sexuality was for some reason on display.

For women in tech, it often feels that way — whether it’s Uber portraying its female drivers as “hot chicks” to sell rides or Tinder forcing a co-founder from the company because of her dating history. It’s a sign of progress that such occurrences, once kept quiet, now make headlines. But the frequency of those stories is alarming.

Misogyny is a tech industry institution that has yet to be disrupted.

I e-mailed Francis and asked him to explain his thinking.

At first he was defensive. He said he was sorry I felt uncomfortable with his choice of swag, but also appeared genuinely surprised at my discomfort. He didn’t want to offend me, but also didn’t understand why I would be offended in the first place. Francis didn’t seem to grasp that sex — or a woman’s sexuality — isn’t a topic appropriate for a professional setting.

Industry problem

Incidents like this underscore the deeply troubling ideas about gender and sex that persist in the tech industry.

In recent months, as many technology companies have released reports demonstrating a distressing lack of gender and racial diversity in the workforce, the industry has turned its focus en masse to the problem of the “pipeline,” pouring money and energy into programs to get more women (as well as minorities) interested in computing.

“There are problems with the curriculum and inclusion in how coding is taught,” Megan Smith, former VP of Google X and the nation’s newly appointed chief technology officer, told me a few months back, when Google launched a program to inspire more girls to pursue tech. “We’re learning to change how we teach.”

Young women are often discouraged from studying computer science — no doubt a factor in why women are so poorly represented in tech jobs.

But incidents like the one I encountered present a much more urgent issue. I rarely meet a woman in tech who does not have a similar story to share, be it of the venture capitalist who hit on her, the co-worker who makes too many sexual jokes or the boss who doesn’t invite the women on the team to big meetings.

Sometimes the sexism is overt, but more often it seems unintentional — the byproduct of an industry where subtle sexism is so entrenched in the culture that it is unrecognized as sexism in the first place.

At last year’s TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, a pair of hackathon participants presented an app they created called Titstare. It was, to use their own eloquent description, “an app where you take photos of yourself, staring at tits.” It was a joke that sexualized women against their will. More than that, it was a joke inappropriate at a business conference, or any professional setting.

The backlash was so severe that Disrupt this year included in its conference program an antiharassment policy that forbade “overly sexualized” comments and “sexualized images.” That this needed to be spelled out is alarming on its own.

Too often, fed-up women decide to just leave tech altogether.

“It’s not just about getting women in the pipeline. It’s about keeping them,” said Laura Sherbin, director of research at the Center for Talent Innovation, a nonprofit think tank that studies workplace diversity.

Why women leave

Sherbin’s research for the Harvard Business Review found that over time more than half the women who go to work in science, engineering and technology choose to leave their fields. Frequently, macho work environments and sexist behavior plays a major part. From Sherbin’s perspective, there’s not much point in trying to attract more women if the industry can’t hang on to the ones it has.

At a performance review Sherbin sat in on at one tech company, a female employee was given a poor review after her bosses described her as “difficult” for being bullish on her own ideas. A male colleague displaying the same traits was called inspirational and given a glowing assessment.

At an engineering firm she consulted with, Sherbin said, women would perform what they called a “whistle check” before going to work — making sure they were wearing nothing that might attract unwanted male attention. In her 2008 report on women’s attrition rates, 63 percent of women said that they had experienced sexual harassment.

“Women in tech are purposefully dressing in more masculine ways. They are reticent to join women’s networks. They have spent so much of their career trying to distract from the fact that they are a woman. They are just desperate to blend in,” Sherbin told me.

Kieran Snyder, a Seattle tech CEO and linguist recently compiled stories from 716 women who left the tech industry. Nearly 200 said a discriminatory work environment was the main reason. Nearly 90 percent of the 716 said they had no plans to return.

A 26-year-old game developer at a publicly traded tech company that I recently spoke with said that when she started her job, she was shocked by the amount of sexual attention she received from colleagues and company leaders. One asked if she would have sex with him and his wife. Others would say things like “if I wasn’t married I would totally do you.” Another asked detailed questions about her sex life. Once, at an after-hours work event at a bar, a co-worker put his hand up her skirt.

It often made work an uncomfortable and confusing place. And it took her years to realize she had a right to say something about it.

“I had a hard time filtering out what’s sexist, what’s flirting, what’s taking it too far,” she said. “Now I’m like, OK, this is so wrong.”

In May, a group of nine women posted a feminist manifesto of sorts for the tech industry, detailing experiences with much of the same behavior — groping, creepy e-mails, being maligned as the “token woman” and asked “'if you write any code.”

“We’ve grown cynical of companies creating corporate programs and paying lip service to focusing on women’s issues in the tech industry without understanding the underlying reality,” they wrote.

Unusual choices

When I first questioned Francis about why he chose to send me oysters, Tequila and a vibrator, he responded that they were all products recommended on Need. Attached to each item was a tag featuring a screenshot of the app with the conversation in which the product in question was mentioned. Francis said that he had sent the same swag to other male and female journalists.

But people in the Need community have also recommended solar phone chargers and stores for buying high-quality letter paper, as well as doled out advice for first date spots in Berkeley. I pointed these things out to Francis and he recanted a bit. He told me the company just picked items they thought would “stand out.”

“In retrospect we did not use good judgment,” he said.

Retrospect, unfortunately, is usually too late.