Emily ChangReseñas

Really interesting at the beginning (and to a lesser extent, the end,) but the middle was full of what felt like a lot of gossip. It is definitely a problem that these men behave the way they do, but I was more interested in hearing about the forces at play that created the uneven playing field than I was in hearing about the misdeeds of particular Silicon Valley players.

It is an interesting, important topic however. Glad I read it.

I did a non-scientific survey of my two sons. My oldest has a computer science degree and now is in his second job after graduation, and working in the automotive supplier industry. My younger son is a sophomore at a nearby university and also pursuing a computer science degree.

I surveyed the two of them about gender make-up of the companies my oldest son has worked for and the classes they have taken in college. It pretty much dovetails with Emily Chang's stats in Brotopia which is pretty disheartening. My oldest son's first company, an automotive company, has a larger share of female engineers than the second company he is working for, which is an automotive supplier, but it is still not great..roughly 25% in his division. This second company has about 100 employees, of which 7 are female. 3 of the women are in HR and only 4 are engineers.

My younger son's college experience so far is that the percentage of men to women in his computer science classes is about evenly split...50/50. This is a university in mid-Michigan near the capital. My oldest son's college experience in a university in the upper peninsula of Michigan was a lot more uneven. Computer science classes at most had 15% women in attendance.

My amateur, non-scientific survey doesn't provide anyone but me with any great revelations but it does show that what Emily Chang points out in Brotopia is still happening despite efforts to rectify the gender imbalance. My younger son is currently looking for an internship for the summer...it will be interesting to see where he ends up and what the gender situation is there.

Brotopia was another eye-opening book for me. I picked it up because it was a pick of the Now Read This book club and I am glad I did..they have been consistently suggesting books around inequality, immigration, the environment, etc...all current topics that need to be discussed.

Mandatory reading for anyone who uses technology aka everyone.

This isn't new information if you've been reading the news, but Chang puts it together well. She starts with how we've built the bro stereotype of coding--that it's innate, that boys are better at it, and that we've kept women out. And from there she examines how companies either recruit or fail to recruit women, the myth of meritocracy in Silicon Valley, and the toxic culture in tech and venture capital. There are a lot of interviews with women in Silicon Valley and she does highlight when there have been successes--Google's early efforts to recruit women, for example. Bonus fun: Peter Thiel comes off even worse than usual. Good read.

Worth a read, and has a lot of interesting information from interviews, but also had a pre-existing agenda and is unsupported (and I think wrong) on a good number of points.

The biggest problem I have with this book is repeatedly conflating "generic bad Silicon Valley management" with sexism. Companies which double in size every year often have these problems. They seem worse in companies which are sitting on "money faucets" to the point where they don't have harsh competitive pressure.

The chapters on the "elite sex parties" and such were pretty LOL, and the implication that this doesn't happen in the gay part of SV as well was silly.

The most interesting part for me was more insight into just how dysfunctional Google's management and culture has been over the years, in multiple and contradictory ways.

The author is a reporter, not an entrepreneur herself, but I still think the argument for work-life balance and that startups can all be successful while letting people work as little as they want, flexibility, etc. is off the mark; while there are famous executives like Sheryl Sandberg who are able to do this in some cases, it's because of the efforts of a lot of other people without this level of flexibility. I don't think 90 hour weeks forever for everyone are the solution, but there are times and places where exceptional work is warranted.

Overall, this is a good book -- just don't accept it uncritically, particularly for anything beyond the message of "sexism in SV is a problem".

I enjoy Emily Chang's conversations and interviews on Bloomberg News. I also enjoyed her book. I'm not surprised by the harassment and sexual assaults on women by men who are CEOs, managers, entrepreneurs, investors etc. These men prey on vulnerable women who are looking for investment for their start-ups, contacts, promotions and career advice.

Chang provided a number of stories of sexual assault, discrimination and harassment. What angered me was the complete ineptitude of HR professionals and departments to investigate and resolve these assault issues. Women who make these charges are subject to ridicule and retribution. Many women do not report unwanted sexual behavior by men who are their superiors or even their equals.

Silicon Valley behavior towards women is no different than the slimy behavior and comments exhibited in many Hollywood casting couches, Wall Street boardrooms or in the White House Oval Office.

Read this and weep!

Here we thought the Mad Men culture was a thing of the past. Emily Chang comes along to show us that it is going strong in the tech industry.

I don't think I would have finished this book if it weren't for book club. But, it was very well done and covered a lot of ground. It's weird to read about these events as someone who's lived in Silicon Valley and heard the news as it's broken, and there's even a chapter about Google that mentions the Google Memo (which I heard about internally before it leaked to the media). But when I talk to my parents about these issues I'm reminded that most people aren't following everything so closely from outside the techie bubble! So I actually think it's a better book for people who want to know what it's like to be a woman in Silicon Valley, rather than people who live it every day.

I don't agree with Emily Chang about everything, and I'm sure some things got cut for brevity that would have added more nuance. I think there's a lot more to be said about race and more ways for companies to improve the culture (that aren't just "hire Sheryl Sandberg"), for example. I'm impressed with how optimistic she is, and I hope things keep getting better!

I remember sitting down in my first classroom at the University of Massachusetts Amherst on an August day almost a decade ago. I was in orientation for the Engineering Department. Something felt very wrong. Sure, the room was weird; the desks with chairs attached and the fluorescent lighting. But that wasn't it. And then I realized—I was surrounded by almost exclusively men. In my class of more than fifty students there were only two women! I'd never been in an environment like this before, and I found it extremely uncomfortable. I dropped out of UMass after my freshman year, and who knows if more women in my engineering program might have convinced me to stay longer.

As an adolescent in the Pioneer Valley, or the Happy Valley, as some call it locally, I was steeped in feminist values. I also have always had a perverse fascination with Silicon Valley, dipping my toes in now and again. So when I heard about an upcoming book called “Brotopia,” I got it on pre-order.

I’m not familiar with the author, Emily Chang, although apparently she’s famous, running a show on Bloomberg about the tech industry. A veteran journalist, this is her first book.

You may have heard about this book as the “sex parties” text. Although there is a chapter on events that might be described as such, it was well hidden in the second half, and was just part of a much more sweeping narrative on misogyny in the high-tech industry.

Chang begins by informing us that women in tech reached a pinnacle in 1984 at 40% (not far from half). It’s now down to 25%, although that ratio is even worse when you look at VC (7%) and founder funding (2%). She discussed the ways in which privilege play out in gender. One example she explores is the theory of meritocracy. The term was modernized as a piece of satire, to be ironically adopted by an oblivious Silicon Valley. Meritocratic systems rely on a “level-playing-field,” and women are on anything but these days. Obviously, people like Peter Thiel didn’t get to the top just because they’re better than all the women...

Regardless of Chang’s personal relationship with the subject, she has chosen to relentlessly pursue the rhetoric of financial efficiency and the profit motive to justify her stance. Maybe this is becoming somewhat of a trend in Silicon Valley, the capitalist enclave that it is, after Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In.” Whenever we’re left wondering, “but why would gender equality be preferable?” Chang comes back to her refrain: “because your company will be more profitable.” Chang may believe that there might be non-financial motives that might justify gender equality, but the closest you’ll find to them in this text are her explorations of meritocracy. It’s indicative of just how bad things have gotten in Silicon Valley, that humanistic values have lost their appeal.

The book discusses a lot of topics that aren’t inherently bad or hurtful—for example, romantic relationships between colleagues. What do Capitol Hill, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley all have in common? Inequality of wealth and power. Why is it inappropriate for a venture capitalist to have a relationship with one of his entrepreneurs; because of the power imbalance. Chang explores this subject, but doesn’t step back to critique our systems of capitalism and colonialism that make inequalities of wealth and power (and the abuses therein) inevitable.

We might continue to see horrific episodes in these environments until they become more egalitarian—not just across the gender spectrum, but also across the spectrum of wealth and power.

This book is a must-read for anyone in tech today, and anyone interested in the #metoo movement.