Silicon Valley Has Lost Its Way, the WIRED headline began. Sure, I’ll go with that. It continued, Can Skateboarding Legend Rodney Mullen Help It? And there it is: the idea that skate culture could energize a languid tech world. Is skateboarding the EpiPen the Valley needs?

No.

Please no.

Not now.

The last time skateboarding was a healthy model, the Macintosh did not exist. Skateboarding was my life. And in 1983 skate culture drove a stake through my heart.

The author practicing a nose wheelie for a freestyle competition. courtesy Kathy Sierra

Skateboarding can teach Silicon Valley what not to do, like a message from the future warning, “Here’s what happens when a domain in which women once thrived decides women aren’t worthy.” Yes, it’s complicated and yes, the sport became more extreme, but there’s a world of difference between a sport that says, There aren’t many women and one that adds … we made sure.

In the '80s, skate culture devolved from a vibrant, reasonably gender-balanced community into an aggressively narrow demographic of teen boys. If you think tech has sexism issues, skate culture makes tech feel like one big Oprah show.

In the Huck magazine piece “Being a Lady (Who Shreds)”, Tetsuhiko Endo quotes Michael Brooke, publisher of Concrete Skateboarding on the decline of women in skating:

"When sidewalk surfing hit big in the 1960s, both males and females skated," he says in the piece. "However, the late 1970s saw a mass extinction of parks and a narrowing of the industry … Once the industry decided it was going after one thing, it started checking these boxes: males—check; males under 18—check. And as it hit each check point it was reducing the population it was going to appeal to.”

Endo adds, "Additionally, a hard focus on selling soft goods to teenage boys meant that women were not simply ignored, their image was co-opted and turned from that of active participants … into passive, hypersexualised groupies.

Pat McGee doing a handstand in 1965. This photo later appeared on the cover of Life, reinforcing the role of women as skaters. Less than two decades later, female skateboarders were repositioned as groupies. Bill Eppridge/Time/Getty Images

In 1983 I left skateboarding forever. But just a few years earlier, I was a sponsored skater (team Santa Cruz) preparing for a world contest. When my knee exploded in a bad kickflip pirouette, my competition and sponsorship was over, but I worked my ass off for a year in physical therapy so I might skate again for the love of it. When my leg was finally ready, I rejoined the skate world only to find I'd phase-shifted into an alternative universe. Freestyle had vanished, and so had most of the women. The world-class footwork and flat tricks I did were now mocked mercilessly. In just a few years I went from training for a top championship to the skateboard equivalent of the Fake Geek Girl. In this world, I was not a "real" skater.

For another year or two my surfer friends and I would occasionally gather on a summer evening, loosen the trucks on our boards, and carve the lazy hills of the Altadena suburbs. But the space between sessions grew longer, and eventually I was the last remaining woman in our group.

Then I found a new love: programming.

I felt that same beautiful freedom writing code that I knew and loved from skating. Compared with what skate culture had become, everything about tech felt fresh and possible. Where skateboarding now celebrated destruction, computer culture celebrated creation.

I barely noticed when my two best boards went missing.

My Worlds Collide

Fast forward 30 years. Rodney Mullen believes skate culture has something positive to offer the tech world, and the tech world is paying attention. Rodney can help tech—and I hope tech listens—but only if we decouple Rodney from the toxic, sexist, soul-crushing culture of modern skating. Soul-crushing, that is, for women.

I’ve been a Rodney Mullen fan more than half my life. He did what I could not: he flowed with the changes from freestyle to street, not just embracing the changing culture but pushing the sport forward and inspiring younger skaters again and again and again. He is almost singlehandedly responsible for keeping the small flame of freestyle burning all these years, and for that and a million other reasons I believe skating would be in far worse shape without him.

He is everything beautiful I felt about skating long ago. Today I hear Rodney talk about the art and science of developing and practicing tricks and I think, He gets it.

But he's also clueless.

Rodney has the same big heart and cognitive biases of so many men in tech—kind, brilliant, wonderful men that cannot grasp how the community they find so accepting and open can be so … not. Rodney believes open-source and hacking culture has so much in common with skateboarding, a culture in which nobody “owns” a trick and everyone learns from and builds upon what others have done. And Rodney’s right: skating does have the bold, innovative, rule-challenging fear of the status quo that Silicon Valley seems to have lost.

But a fresh POV can never be worth lionizing a deeply sexist culture.

I believe part of why Rodney doesn’t see it is because there is no cell in his body that endorses this disturbing side of modern skate culture. (And it’s massive; we’re not talking just a few bad actors.) Rodney sees what is good and beautiful and his brain filters the rest.

PowerPoints Full of Men

Rodney Mullen’s presentations on lessons from skate culture. Rodney Mullen’s presentations on lessons from skate culture.

The Men of Tech look just like the Men of Skateboarding. The Men of Tech look just like the Men of Skateboarding.

When Rodney gives a keynote, he has PowerPoint slides full of men. Only men. Men who inspired him. Men who are “Pillars of the Community." “These guys”, he says, “are the heroes.” Then he points to another screen full of men, this time the pillars of tech. The hackers. The open source community. They have much in common, he says, these men of coding and men of skating.

He sees in skateboarding what many of us find compelling about programming: a place where outcasts can make a difference. A place where it’s not about how rich or connected you are but how hard you work and how willing you are to do what it takes. Where it’s not about who you know, but what you do.

In other words, Rodney believes skate culture is a meritocracy.

A meritocracy is exactly what I and so many others believed tech to be. “After all,” I wrote nearly a decade ago, “the compiler doesn’t care if the person writing the code is wearing a black lace bra.” I was wrong. Embarrassingly, naively wrong. Because while the compiler doesn’t care, the context in which programming exists sure as hell does. To ignore that context is the essence of privilege blindness. And it’s much worse in skateboarding than in tech.

Just over a year ago, for instance, a feature in *Thrasher *quoted influential top pro skateboarder Nyjah Huston with this gem: “The women do the downhill stuff because they think it’s like sidewalk surfing. They don’t realize how dangerous it really is … I personally believe that skateboarding is not for girls at all. Not one bit.” I was heartened by the social media response to Nyjah’s views, though his apology was even worse.

But Huston’s comments were harmless fluff next to pervasive, unapologetically sexist skate company marketing. In 2013, popular brand Enjoi faced a fierce backlash for a series of ads including a T-shirt titled “The ex-girlfriend” which pictured a crying woman with her arm in a sling and the quote, “He really does love his skateboard more than me.” Out of context, this would be no big deal, right? But it was just one more ad in a pattern of ads that included, for example, a male skater with his finger over the mouth of a female mannequin with the caption, Enoji. Where no means yes.

But Enjoi’s ads are adorable compared with those from Hubba. The company sponsors an all-male skate team, but what it lacks in female skaters it makes up for with “The Girls.” Hubba's site invites you to meet The Girls, via soft core photos and interviews like this one, with Hubba Girl Marsha:

Q: In what situations do you use your good looks to get what you want?

A: Every possible situation! And if my looks don’t get it my tits surely will.

To be clear, I’m not judging Marsha’s career choice. This is about the message these companies send about the role of women in skate culture. The dominant, visible role of women in skateboarding today has nothing to do with skating and everything to do with serving as props and playthings for male skaters.

There Is Hope

The good news is, there finally are some bright spots for women in skate culture, including a small but powerful resurgence of women skaters. And there are some badass women pushing forward in “real” skating despite tremendous odds and an environment that treats the most skillful of them as statistical anomalies at best. But you rarely see these women featured in skateboarding magazines, and when you do, the highest praise is typically, “She skates like a man!” These exceptional women will likely never have a signature model board or a fraction of the sponsorship opportunities the men have, but they are fierce and their numbers are growing.

Another hope lives in the skateboarding variants like longboarding and the newer mountainboarding—sports where women are helping define and build healthier cultures. Women are allowed in because longboarders and mountainboarders, less influenced by the dominant skate culture, aren’t seen as “real” skaters.

There is one skateboarding community Silicon Valley could learn from, a community where a staggering 40 percent of the skaters are young girls. A community where the current western model of skateboarding has been replaced by a more supportive environment embracing the freedom and joy of skating. It’s in Afghanistan.

Skater girls in Afghanistan. Skater girls in Afghanistan. Courtesy Skateistan | Hamdullah Hamdard for Skateistan

Think about that.

Then consider supporting Skateistan.

Rolling Forward

If we’re going to talk about skate culture as a positive influence, we must take lessons from the good and the bad. Especially the bad. To ignore skate culture's utter disrespect for women while celebrating it as cool and innovative is tacit acceptance of its sexism. We can do better. We must do better. We are better. And way deep down, I still hold out hope that skate culture might get better too.

In the end, my real answer to WIRED’s headline Can Skateboarding Legend Rodney Mullen Help It is yes. We can learn from Rodney Mullen. Not from skate culture, but from Rodney Mullen’s unique and beautiful take on the essence of skating. If I were to give a talk on what skating can teach tech, I, too, would have PowerPoints full of skaters that inspired me so long ago. Women like Ellen Berryman, Edie Robertson, Ellen O’Neal, Terry Brown, Desiree Von Essen, and so many more. Because if you think the male skaters are inspirational, you should get to know the women.