How Silicon Valley Came to Be a Land of ‘Bros’
SAN FRANCISCO — Emily Chang caused a mini earthquake in Silicon Valley last month when Vanity Fair published an excerpt from her new book, “Brotopia.”
With a headline that promised to bring us inside Silicon Valley’s “secretive, orgiastic dark side,” Ms. Chang laid out how drug-fueled sex parties were happening behind the scenes at the homes of wealthy tech executives and investors. One party she described was later tied to the home of Steve Jurvetson, a venture capitalist who left his firm last year amid an investigation into his behavior with women.
In “Brotopia,” which hits book stores on Feb. 6, the secret sex parties are just a symptom of a much deeper problem that Silicon Valley’s tech industry has with its treatment of women. Ms. Chang’s examination of that issue coincides with the #MeToo moment and the broader debate about gender equality that it has sparked.
Ms. Chang, 37, who anchors a Bloomberg TV tech show, recently discussed the roots of Silicon Valley’s gender imbalance and the predominance of tech industry bros — you know, those cocky young men who swagger about. Edited excerpts follow.
Pui-Wing Tam How did Silicon Valley become the land of the bros?
Emily Chang It didn’t have to be this way and it wasn’t always this way, importantly. Women played vital roles in the computing industry from the very beginning. Just think “Hidden Figures,” but industrywide.
What happened in the 1960s and 1970s was that the industry was exploding and was starved for talent. There just weren’t enough people to do the jobs in computing. So they hired these two psychologists, William Cannon and Dallis Perry, to come up with a personality test to screen for good programmers.