Chang presents Google as a bizarro PayPal, flush with good intentions to hire diverse talent and give women some “real power.” She writes glowingly of Marissa Mayer, who was hired early on as Google’s first female engineer and later became chief executive of Yahoo, and Susan Wojcicki, Google’s first marketing manager and now the chief executive of YouTube. But it’s Sheryl Sandberg — formerly a Google vice president and currently Facebook’s chief operating officer — who is depicted here in especially heroic terms.

The adulation of Sandberg gets surprisingly personal. Chang describes being pregnant with her first child in 2012, doubting her “ability to succeed as a working mom,” and emailing Sandberg out of gratitude for her willingness to step into the fray. “I gasped aloud when, 30 seconds later, Sandberg’s reply hit my inbox.”

One might have hoped that this intimacy would at least generate some pointed insights or candid quotes. But Sandberg gives Chang her well-worn lines about trickle-down feminism. “Women in leadership will help create the environment for more women in leadership,” Sandberg tells her, in a sentence that sounds about as spontaneous as a TED Talk. “Women will create the institutional change we need.”

“I believe this will happen,” Chang writes. This credulity is as disappointing as it is puzzling. As her own reporting shows, Google found it hard to scale its good intentions as it grew, and last year it reported numbers comparable to the rest of the industry, with women accounting for less than a third of its work force and only 25 percent of its leadership roles. Google had regressed to the mean — and the mean, as it stands, isn’t great for women.

But as much as these numbers matter, and as telling as they are, it’s the sex in this book that will probably get the most attention. Chang recounts cases of sexual harassment and vicious online trolling. She also includes a chapter on polyamory and sex parties that’s heavy on salacious details and light on named sources. Participants tell Chang that they’re proudly disrupting tradition: “Their behavior at these high-end parties is an extension of the progressiveness and open-mindedness — the audacity, if you will — that makes founders think they can change the world.” They describe Molly tabs molded into the shape of the Snapchat logo, and food being served off the bodies of naked women.

That last detail gave me pause, if only for how trite it is. As Chang herself wonders, “If these sexual adventurers are so progressive, why do these parties seem to lean so heavily toward male heterosexual fantasies?” The party scenes she depicts are as poignant and depressing as “Revenge of the Nerds.” For all their talk of innovation, these entrepreneurs can’t throw an orgy without resorting to clichés.

“You may think you’re Steve Jobs, but really you’re Roger Ailes or Bill O’Reilly with a Bernie Sanders tattoo.” That’s one of the best quotes in “Brotopia,” and it’s from Elisabeth Sheff, a polyamory expert. Bold new world; same old patriarchy.