Yahoo Lifestyle The Scandal Behind Silicon Valley
The party took place in April in Malibu, not far from the stretch of sand known as "Billionaire's Beach" due to the insane wealth of the locals. The young entrepreneurs behind the dating app Tinder, who usually spent the evenings burning the midnight oil bathed in the glow of their computer screens, were taking a rare night off. They had every right to be celebrating: since launching in 2012, Tinder had quickly become the darling of the tech scene, with millions of super-engaged users all around the world. In Silicon Valley, they were nothing short of rock stars. But before the evening was out Tinder's reputation would take an ugly and unanticipated turn for the worse.
Among those at the party was a young woman named Whitney Wolfe. Blonde, beautiful and just 24, she was that rarest of commodities: a female entrepreneur in a tech universe dominated by men. Her business card read "co-founder" - the only title that really matters in "The Valley". She also claims to have come up with the company name. She was attractive, sassy and sitting on a bundle of stock options - the Shangri-La of Silicon Valley seemed to be hers for the taking. From the outside she looked like a kind of geek Khaleesi.
Behind the scenes, though, the company that was promising to revolutionise romance was being rocked by Wolfe's relationship with Tinder's chief marketing officer, Justin Mateen, a ruggedly handsome 28 year old. The two had gotten together in February 2013. However, the relationship had been turbulent and they finally split up in December.
At the Malibu party, on April 6, just how poisonous things had become between them spilled out. When Wolfe arrived at the private house where the party was being held, she says Mateen was brooding. He was angry, she alleges, because he believed that she had been seeing another man. Wolfe claims that when she tried to greet Mateen, he turned on her, calling her "a whore" before telling her that she was "disgusting", "a gold-digger", and "a disease". Wolfe says somebody then spat in her face.
But it was what happened next that created news worldwide: after the party, Wolfe claims she was fired after offering to resign. She later filed a lawsuit claiming that she'd been bullied out, having suffered months of misogynistic abuse from Mateen and Sean Rad, 28, the company's CEO.
According to her lawsuit, Wolfe alleges the two men had subjected her to a sustained "barrage of horrendously sexist, racist, and otherwise inappropriate comments, emails and text messages". She said her colleagues had threatened to strip her of her title of "co-founder" because having "a girl founder made Tinder seem like a joke". Company bosses had ignored her complaints, she alleges. Her treatment, Wolfe's lawyers argue, represents "the worst of the misogynist, alpha-male stereotype too often associated with technology start-ups".
Mateen and Rad have denied wrong-doing, but the allegations have dragged a grubby little secret into the media limelight: the tech industry's deep-rooted sexism.
The digital oligarchs of California present themselves as hoodie-clad iconoclasts - boyish billionaires unbound by convention, intent on pushing society into the 22nd century, one nifty app at a time. But a string of scandals has revealed an altogether more disturbing reality - a reality where it's not uncommon for women working in "The Valley" to be faced with death threats, online trolling and assault. A reality where, in many companies, men vastly outnumber women, and where the few women who do find employment are paid just 49 cents for every dollar their male peers earn.
"Silicon Valley - they'll tell you it's a shiny, happy meritocracy. So do you want to explain to me why you see so few women here?" says one female tech worker who has just left Apple to start her own business. "You think it might have something to do with how most men [in tech] treat women like they're living in an episode of Mad Men?"
In 2011, Courtney Stanton became too scared to leave her house. For several days, the gaming sector project manager feared for her safety and was afraid to venture out. Her fears began when the then 29 year old refused to speak at an event for a web comic that jokingly referenced rape. "The fans didn't like that I didn't want to speak," she says. "I got messages from people saying they were going to come around and kill me." One harasser "called the police department to report my 'rape' for me". It was, she recounts, "really intense".
It was not the first - nor the last - time that Stanton would face threats from male geeks who objected to her voicing her opinion. Seemingly innocuous blog posts or tweets about gaming resulted in "death threats, threats to rape me in every possible imaginable way ... Dismembering me and raping me with the limb," recounts Stanton matter-of-factly. The tech scene, she says, is a "snake pit" for women, run almost exclusively "by straight white men, under the age of 40 ... They're not really adults yet."
But the abusive treatment extends far beyond the keyboard and into the real world. Just ask Valerie Aurora. The ex-software engineer quit her job in 2011 and set up The Ada Initiative, a non-profit group that supports women in the open technology sector, after a friend was groped for the third time in a single year at industry conferences. Aurora herself has been groped twice.
Earlier this year, Divya Manian, a 31-year-old engineer who has worked in the industry for a decade and is now a product manager at Adobe, was among nine women who penned an open letter, which detailed their experiences of abuse, to the tech community. "We receive rapey emails where men describe ... how we should expect to be subjugated," they wrote. "Sometimes there are angry emails that threaten us to leave the industry because 'it doesn't need anymore c**ts ruining it'. This is not what we expected, we really just want to work on what we love," said the women.
While once the image of Silicon Valley's 20-and 30-something stars was of endearing social misfits chugging Red Bull, look a little closer and a picture starts to emerge of a disturbing, booze-fuelled, frat-boy culture which, at times, verges on the criminal.
Aurora says she knows of "multiple people who have been raped at conferences ... I could easily come up with a dozen people I know personally." Recently, a Google engineer, Justin Chan, 28, was charged with rape in New York.
While such cases are at the extreme end of the harassment that women working in Silicon Valley face, many claim that a lewd brand of "brogrammer" chauvinism underpins tech industry culture.
At Def Con, a key conference for software security programmers, for example, an event called "Hacker Jeopardy" sees strippers remove items of clothing when the contestants answer questions correctly. In May of this year, a mountain of sleazy, misogynistic emails written by Evan Spiegel, the 23-year- old chief executive of the smartphone app Snapchat, hit the web. Dating from his college years at the ultra-prestigious Stanford University, they refer to women as "bitches", and include lines such as "fuck bitches get leid [sic]" and "hope at least six girls sucked your dicks last night". He has subsequently apologised and admitted to being "a jerk".
There are dozens of similar examples - from invites to conferences depicting young women in their underwear to the prestigious tech event where two young programmers took to the stage to present "Titstare", an app that took photos of men staring at women's chests. The hoodie-wearing young men in the audience chortled along. The attendee who had brought along her nine-year-old daughter, hoping to get her interested in entrepreneurship, didn't think it was so funny.
What sets tech apart from other testosterone-fuelled industries is how "blatant" the chauvinism is, says Stanton. She remembers arriving for her first day at one company only to find that the only other woman who worked there had just been fired. It was, explains Stanton, a case of "the one in, one out policy". Earlier this year, The Guardian newspaper reported that managers in "The Valley" have what they refer to as "the Dave Rule" - you should only have as many women in your company as men named Dave. "When you have a company full of men, the women are more likely to be laid off first," says Manian.
Stanton believes that a juvenile, boys' club culture affects even the most mundane aspects of the job. Like the time she worked as the only female at a start-up with 20 male engineers. They wouldn't provide a separate female bathroom. "They just couldn't see the need," she says.
Then there's the fact that companies in the embryonic stage often don't have procedures in place for dealing with complaints, so misbehaviour goes unchecked. Aurora says not having a director of human resources is something start-ups brag about.
But inexperience doesn't fully explain the medieval attitudes of Silicon Valley. You also have to look further up the food chain and follow the money. Nine out of 10 tech venture capitalists - that is, the people who invest in new start-up companies - are male. Sheri Atwood, the founder of SupportPay, recently told Wired magazine how when she was seeking funding, one investor questioned her blonde hair because brunettes "are taken more seriously". Another told her to "hire a young guy in a hoodie".
All of this means Silicon Valley, a community that wants to reshape the world, faces a big problem in its own backyard. Companies like Google, which has pledged $50 million to encourage more women to study computer science, insist it's taking sexism seriously. But many others say that while male executives are keen to say the right things, they are disparaging in private. What's really needed, many feel, is a fundamental reboot of attitudes.
Julie Larson-Green, 52, is a senior Microsoft executive. When she was named to head the company's Xbox division, she met with a torrent of abuse - she was called a "MILF" and "just a figurehead". Male gamers suggested she'd bring out games "dedicated to baking and knitting". Larson-Green brushes off the abuse as coming from a lunatic fringe, but she desperately wants more women in tech. She suggests that the earliest contact children have with computers plays a role. "My daughter told me that computers were for boys," she says. "I asked her why she thought that, and she said all the games are for boys."
Aurora argues the way women are treated in tech says something worrying about our broader culture. "Silicon Valley is sort of an extreme microcosm. These young people starting the companies have been raised to believe that sexism is over and we don't need to do anything about it. There is this attitude 'we finished it, we have the right to have an abortion now'. But it's not done. The fight against sexism is never over, it's always pushing back."
So what does all this mean for women outside of Silicon Valley? One concern is that great ideas might not be getting funding if they are dreamt up by females. Women now outnumber men in undergraduate admissions at America's top universities. Women also buy more technological devices, such as tablets and smartphones, and are more likely to engage in digital activities such as uploading photos or downloading music. Yet so few of the people creating the software are women.
Meanwhile, the Whitney Wolfe lawsuit is heading for a Los Angeles courtroom. Her ex-lover Mateen has been suspended from his job. But Tinder's parent company, the media giant IAC, refutes her accusations of sexism.
There's nothing yet to suggest a swift legal resolution, nor any real hint that "The Valley" is making progress in tackling its sexism bug. But it's an issue whose effects will be felt far beyond Silicon Valley. If more girls don't start coding, Silicon Valley's products won't reflect their points of view, warns Susan Wojcicki, 46, CEO of YouTube - and "we'll miss out on the opportunity for women to shape the world around us".
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