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A recent article from Jodi Kantor, author of The Obamas, addresses the gender gap in the technology industry, claiming that instead “of narrowing gender gaps, the technology industry created new ones”. Kantor goes on to cite the 1994 graduating class at Stanford University as an example, and though Kantor has done some excellent research, the article ultimately reads like an agenda-driven piece that is more concerned with promoting ‘equality’, as it is defined in rigid and limited terms, rather than choice. There are, in any number of industries, wide gender gaps that are sometimes the result of systemic problems, and sometimes the result of individual choices. Recognizing the difference between the two is central to determining which ones are rooted in systemic problems that we can change, and which ones are simply the result of individual choices.

In her article, which focuses on Stanford’s 1994 graduating class, Kantor notes that almost “half the 1,700-person class were women”, but that “women played a support role instead of walking away with billion-dollar businesses”. Whilst this seems unfair, it is important to take a look at some case studies. Kantor notes that “plenty [of women] were adventurous and inventive, tinkerers and computer camp veterans who competed fiercely in engineering contests”. That language sounds as though the women in the class were certainly on parity terms with the men, but then Kantor notes that “one won mention in the school paper for creating a taco-eating machine.” Really? A taco-eating machine? That is innovative? Regardless of the ingenuity required to make a ‘taco-eating machine’, there is no practical application for such a device. It’s like creating a robot that solves the Rubiks Cube in less than ten seconds. Sure, it’s cool to watch, but who is going to buy this thing? What is the practical application? As far as tacos go, the fewer robots involved the better. I don’t need robots eating tacos, because there is already enough competition on this planet for food, and we don’t need to be creating robots that run on anything other than electricity. As for robots making tacos, I’m not sure we want robots entering the service industry, though that might have broader applications than the taco-eating robot.

This is not to suggest that Kantor provides no evidence of innovative women, but her stats don’t suggest that the gender gap is the result of some sort of chauvinist and/or misogynist agenda. She notes that Kamy Wicoff started “a website for female writers”, but even in this business model we can see that the innovator excluded half the world’s population from her product. There is nothing wrong with niche marketing, but one can’t fairly expect to become the next Google or Apple when they aren’t even interested in tapping into half the world’s potential market. I think Wicoff’s business model is sound and giving women a voice is empowering and central to promoting gender equality, but such businesses, one must realize, are social and not capitalist ventures. Profits are not the end goal, and so it cannot be fairly compared to other tech industries companies whose goal is to make as much money as possible. Kantor notes that “women did well in technology, working at Google or Apple” and that few “of them described experiencing the kinds of workplace abuses that have regularly cropped up among women in Silicon Valley”, but then expresses concern that “some female computer science majors had dropped out of the field, and few black or Hispanic women ever worked in technology at all”. And even when women found success, they didn’t always have the staying power of Steve Jobs. One woman, Kantor notes, landed on the cover of Fortune before leaving the company she helped to co-found. Leaving companies that one co-founded is not uncommon, especially in the tech industry. Steve Jobs, whose name is synonymous with Apple, was forced out of the company he founded at one point, only to be welcomed back some years later when the company was in dire straights. If it can happen to Steve Jobs, it can happen to anybody. But what of the women who never worked in the field? The sad truth is that the tech industry is a competitive market. Just like students who earn degrees where there are more graduates than jobs, a lot of people who graduate from a certain discipline don’t ever work in that field. A recent study from Virginia Tech states that even in its best years, less than 60% of graduating students found jobs in technology. Kantor notes that “Dozens of women stayed in safe jobs, in or out of technology, while they watched their spouses or former lab partners take on ambitious quests.” The fact that these women in question number only in the dozens among a lot as large as 1 700, indicates that this was not an epidemic. Kantor’s statement that these women chose ‘safe jobs’ suggests that this is a result of personal choices, not systemic sexism.

As for the men who found success in this graduating class, many of them opted not to take the route of the ‘safe job’. For many men, there was no payoff. Ronald Wayne, who founded Apple with Steve Jobs, eventually sold his share of the company for a paltry $8 000, opting to return to a work-for-hire job at Atari. A share that could have equalled billions became the equivalent of a new car. For a small few, the reward is substantial, but it does not come without a cost. David Sacks, who got in at PayPal at the ground level, was, as Kantor notes, “unmarried and unencumbered, and in 1999 he left politics”. Sacks gave up a ‘safe job’, but was only able to do so because had not started a family. Had he started a family, he would have likely had to stay with the ‘safe job’, but he put off his personal life in favour of his professional one. Jobs, along with partner Steve Wozniak, didn’t take the safe job: they gambled their money on Apple and it paid off in the end, but there was no guarantee that it would. Peter Thiel, one of the Stanford graduates that Kantor speaks of, helped to found PayPal with Elon Musk. For Thiel and Musk, the payoff was significant, but they also tied a lot of money up in their programs and managed to come up with innovative and useful products that revolutionized money transfers for online businesses. Their ingenuity, coupled with some high-risk ventures, resulted in large profits. These successes have nothing to do with gender and everything to do with individual choices. Framing them in a conversation of a ‘gender’ gap’, then, is grossly misleading.

Kantor does express concerns about the hiring process at PayPal, noting that in one staff picture, there is only a single female employee. She notes that “PayPal had a hard time hiring women” and cites PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, who explained to a class at Stanford that this was “because PayPal was just a bunch of nerds! They never talked to women. So how were they supposed to interact with and hire them?” What happened with PayPal is what often happens with small businesses: “You have these great friendships that were built over some period of time. Silicon Valley flows out of deep relationships that people have built. That’s the structural reality.” It is only natural that when looking for employees, you go to the people you know are qualified, especially in a start-up. Friendships are often integral to the success of start-ups, and to suggest sexism is involved when speaking of socially awkward men who relied on their homo-social friendships to build a business is misguided. These were men who had common interests and common skills. Kantor notes that “Technical skills were not strictly necessary to enter the field”, but that “they helped, and male computer science majors had outnumbered females, four to one.” If men in these fields know friends who have the qualifications, then those are the people they will bring in. When employees are asked for referrals, they will bring in people they know. If women choose not to develop those skills, or form professional bonds, then they will miss out on opportunities. This, of course, goes both ways. Kantor quotes Stanford graduate Jessica DiLullo Herrin as saying that she “never tried to sit at the boys’ table,” and when she met another women who shared skills and interests with her (she was a jewelry designer), they became fast friends and business partners, forming the company Stella & Dot. These women shared common interests and related skills, and through a homo-social bond, created a business. It is the same model we see in the creation of PayPal, and one that is common in start-ups and seldom has anything to do with sex.

The group that formed PayPal did not maintain this gender bias, as Kantor is sure to point out, demonstrating her impartial reporting. She notes that Amy Klement “and other women called Sacks an effective, relentless, generous boss” and that according to Klement, the goal of PayPal was “pure meritocracy”. In short, one was rewarded for the work they did, and gender had nothing to do with it. When PayPal was sold for 2.5 billion dollars, the group proceeded to create the “PayPal Mafia”, going on to found or buy into “seven companies that reached blockbuster scale, including YouTube, LinkedIn, Yelp and a business-messaging service called Yammer”. Even Kantor notes that “At the time of the sale, Yammer’s executive team was half female”, a pretty impressive ratio since, as Kantor also notes, only 20% of computer science majors were women. This suggests that as the company grew, so too did its diversity. Once it expanded beyond the bounds of where a few friends who studied together could manage the business, the gender gap disappeared. One can expect that with a small sample size, a start-up company may not have the kind of diversity that is expected of a large employer, but Kantor’s own reporting suggests that the women who worked with the likes of Sacks did not feel discriminated against in terms of their gender/sex, and that the company’s diversity had grown to the point where it displayed commendable parity between the number of men and women who work for them.

Aside from the Stanford men, Kantor also illustrates how several women came to have great success, but seems to mitigate both this success and her own reporting with innuendo. Kantor observes the success of Gina Bianchini, who co-founded a company called Ning along with Netscape founder Marc Andreessen. Bianchini left the company shortly before Andreessen sold it. This is not an uncommon practice in business. If one partner leaves, another might sell the company. Likewise, if the company is about to be sold, one founder may not want to remain with the company. There are a number of reasons for this, the primary one being non-compete clauses. When a company buys out another and cannot retain the employees, they often include non-compete clauses in the sale. Kantor does not ask why Bianchini left, however, but instead asks what rumours were going around about it. She writes that “Some classmates whispered that she had only gotten the chance to co-found the company because” she and Andreessen “had once dated”. Who said this? What validity is there to it? What was the reason Bianchini left? How big a role did she have in founding the company? Answering any of these questions would have been far more productive than relaying unsourced gossip. Kantor also notes that Trae Vassallo, the builder of the taco-eating machine, joined Kleiner Perkins, and played “key roles in two of its most successful deals of 2014” only to be “quietly let go”. Kantor notes that there was “a sexual discrimination lawsuit filed by a female junior partner, scheduled for trial in early 2015”, which raises some serious concerns, but does not offer a reason as to why Vassallo was let go. Letting founders and partners go is part of the cut-throat corporate world. As mention, Steve Jobs, whose name is now synonymous with Apple, the company he founded, was fired from Apple before being brought back into the fold. Likewise, George Zimmer, the founder of the Men’s Wearhouse, was fired from his own company. This is not something that only happens to women in the field, but to everybody, even the most successful people in their industry. Rather than reporting on the specifics of the situation, though, Kantor relies on rumour and innuendo, turning he article into the Stanford equivalent of TMZ.

Though some of Kantor’s rhetoric suggests a disparity between men and women in the tech industry, this is done by comparing companies that are overtly dissimilar. Kantor, for instance, notes that many women in the field lacked skills related to computer science and “took posts at hardware and technology consulting firms”, while men in their graduating class “were already starting companies”. Both men and women found jobs; they simply found different jobs. And while the women had a more consistent paycheque, their earning potential was far less. Obviously, consulting firms will make less than the firm they consult for. Kantor also argues that Stella & Dot “could not rival the biggest [companies] founded by male classmates” in Jessica DiLullo Herrin’s graduating class, but a retail is very different than a tech giant. One has far more overhead and has only a one-time sale, whereas companies like PayPal have minimal overhead costs in terms of material and repeat customers that use their service on a daily basis, creatig a vast residual income. Jewelry sales will never compare with the revenue generated from PayPal and Facebook. PayPal provides an essential service for business; jewelry is an extravagance. If you compared Stella & Dot to other retailers created by Stanford’s graduating class of 1994, I’m sure there will be few, if any, that have matched the success of Stella & Dot. Likewise, none of the men in Stanford’s graduating class of 1994 have reached the status of Rachel Maddow, who is not only one of the most successful people in her field, but is easily one of the most awesomest people on the planet.

All levity aside, the biggest problem is that Kantor defines success in strictly economic terms. She notes that in 1999, Sacks had no family or children; his entire life was business at that point. It wasn’t until he was 35 years old that Sacks got married. PayPal co-founder Max Levchin likewise was not married until his mid-thirties. Elon Musk had an ugly divorce. Steve Jobs had a tragic personal life that involved his first-born daughter being raised on welfare as he denied paternity and, like Sacks and Levchin, did not marry until his mid-thirties. Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak likewise did not get married until after thirty, and was divorced before he was forty. Many of the ‘successful’ men from Silicon Valley have allowed their professional ambitions to deride their personal lives, or at the very least postpone them. Whilst the millions and billions of profits they have earned may be a testament to their professional success, the men and women who chose ‘safe jobs’ and make family and personal lives a priority likely have far more successful personal and family lives. Defining success by the total in the bank whilst not taking into account the quality of one’s personal life is a big mistake. Kantor references women taking ‘safe jobs’, but many men take ‘safe jobs’ too, and the reason is often because they are more concerned with starting a family than with starting a business. Sadly, one cannot always have both. There is no shame in choosing family over business, and for people who make this choice, success is defined in far different terms than the definition laid out by a company’s board of directors.

The fact of the matter is that gender gaps are a naturally occurring phenomenon, and nobody bats an eye when it goes the other way. There is a huge gender gap in nursing in favour of women and men who enter that field have to endure significant ridicule for their chosen profession. Likewise, there is a drastic gender gap in primary education as men have been scared out of the field for fear of being labelled pedophiles. This is a result of what is deemed acceptable cultural stereotyping. One Australian airline, for instance, won’t let men sit unaccompanied with children based on this stereotype. One father taking his infant on a plane faced bizarre treatment. Another was branded a ‘pervert’ for photographing his own children at a park. These stereotypes have had far more tragic outcomes as the day-care sex-abuse hysteria of the 1980’s extended beyond workplace harassment and saw men in the field get wrongfully accused and imprisoned for crimes they didn’t commit based on stereotypes rooted in sexism. In the face of such vicious stereotyping, many men who are interested in education do not view positions in primary education as an option. This gender gap is far more rooted in sexism than is any gender gap present in the tech industry, but at the same time, this his culturally systemic, not professionally systemic, as there are no policies that exclude men from being hired in primary education. This is not meant to distract from the conversation Kantor has opened, but merely meant to add a broader context to it and acknowledge that gender gaps in certain industries are a matter of choice, not of systemic exclusion.

A recent article from Tech Report notes that women make up 26% of the Tech workforce, but only make up 18% of the student body enrolled in computer sciences. It seems, then, that the women who are interested are doing much better at securing jobs than their male counterparts, so what is the problem? At one point in the piece, Kantor quotes Biachnini, who notes that “The Internet was supposed to be the great equalizer”, before asking “why hasn’t our generation of women moved the needle?” If by ‘the needle’, Biachini means closing the gender gap in certain industries, the answer is largely because women have chosen not to. Feminism is not about enforcing parity in every industry; it is about giving women the choice to enter whatever field of work they desire. The internet has given a voice to women, and women have found agency through the internet. Because of the internet, ‘rape culture’ is a common term in the vernacular, and when women are oppressed, there is far more coverage than there ever had been in the centuries leading up to the internet. The internet has served as an equalizer in many respects. Why, then, are there gender gaps in the tech industry? Is it systemic? To a degree, I would agree that yes it is, but this is true on a culturally systemic level, not so much a systemic industry issue. As the “Inspire Her Mind” campaign from Verizon observes, men and women have a tendency to discourage their children from activities that they don’t think suit the sex of their child, and this shapes their children’s interests. It is true that we need to do more in encouraging children, regardless of sex, to indulge in the things that interest them. That aside, there are certainly serious issues related to workplace sexual harassment in the tech industry, as was demonstrated effectively by Adria Richards among others, but what of the gender gap? Perhaps a better question is why we don’t address the far more overt gender gaps that exist in the transportation industry. Or the mining industry. Or the tool and die industry. There are any number of industries that host a far more drastic gender gap than the tech industry, so why aren’t we first addressing these more drastic gender gaps? The answer is obvious: women, by and large, choose not to enter these other industries, with an underwhelming number of exceptions. If one can accept that the underwhelming number of female miners, truck drivers and machinists is the result of women’s personal choices, then why is there a question as to why women are underrepresented in the tech industry? The questions that Kantor asks are important in terms of raising awareness of gender issues, but the answers are far simpler than one might imagine. It reminds me of a recent study done on Wikipedia that stated only 13% of Wikipedia contributors were female. Why are women not better represented on Wikipedia? Since anybody can sign up for an account and add a contribution, the only answer to this is a simple one: because they not interested in contributing. Why, then, aren’t women better represented in the tech industry? In most instances, the answer is the same: because their collective interests lie elsewhere.

If you enjoyed this post, be sure to get updates on my latest ramblings on Twitter @MarthaLQueen, and get updates on all posts from Literary Ramblings by following @LiteraryRambler. Be sure to ‘like’, share and leave constructive comments below to enhance the conversation. And be sure to read Jodi Kantor’s article on the tech industry’s gender gap, and check out her new book: The Obamas.