Technically Wrong

by Sara Wachter-Boettcher

  You might assume that much of the attrition comes from women leaving to start or care for a family. Nope. Only about 20 percent of those who quit SET leave the workforce. The rest either take their technical skills to another industry (working for a nonprofit or in education, say), or move to a nontechnical position.

  People call this the “leaky bucket”: when women and underrepresented groups leave because they’re fed up with biased cultures where they can’t get ahead. No pipeline in the world can make up for a steady flow out of tech companies. Cate Huston, the mobile lead for Automattic (the company behind WordPress) and a prominent programmer, has even gone so far as to assume she’s headed in that direction herself, and says her colleagues feel the same:

  We joke about it, other women and I, what we will finally do when we leave. Become a barista. Go back to school. “Pull a disappearing act,” one friend says, leaving it to me to explain the chaos she left behind. “Not if I get there first,” I reply.27

  And so the cycle continues: tech sends out another round of press releases detailing meager increases in diversity and calling for more programs to teach middle schoolers to code, and another generation of women and people of color in tech pushes to be visible and valued in an industry that wants diversity numbers, but doesn’t want to disrupt its culture to get or keep diverse people.

  A LOSING PROPOSITION

  Now, I happen to care about all this because I care about people. I want anyone with skills and ideas to be able to enter one of the biggest, richest, most promising sectors of the economy without enduring harassment or years of unequal pay or the relentless suspicion of coworkers who think that they got their job only because of “quotas.” But I know someone’s got their fingers perched on the caps-lock key right now, ready to send me a scathing email about how tech companies aren’t charities, and demanding to know why diversity matters to “THE BOTTOM LINE.”

  I’ll probably get that email no matter what I say next, but here’s the truth: Study after study shows that diverse teams perform better.

  In a 2014 report for Scientific American, Columbia professor Katherine W. Phillips examined a broad cross section of research related to diversity and organizational performance. And over and over, she found that the simple act of interacting in a diverse group improves performance, because it “forces group members to prepare better, to anticipate alternative viewpoints and to expect that reaching consensus will take effort.” 28

  In one study that Phillips cited, published in the Journal of Personal Social Psychology, researchers asked participants to serve on a mock jury for a black defendant. Some participants were assigned to diverse juries, some to homogenous ones. Across the board, diverse groups were more careful with details than were homogenous groups, and more open to conversation. When white participants were in diverse groups rather than homogenous ones, they were more likely to cite facts (rather than opinions), and they made fewer errors, the study found. “Even before discussion, Whites in diverse groups were more lenient toward the Black defendant, demonstrating that the effects of diversity do not occur solely through information exchange.” 29

  In another study, led by Phillips and researchers from Stanford and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, undergraduate students from the University of Illinois were asked to participate in a murder-mystery exercise. Each student was assigned to a group of three, with some groups composed of two white students and one nonwhite student, and some composed of three white students. Each group member was given both a common set of information and a set of unique clues that the other members did not have. Group members needed to share all the information they collectively possessed in order to solve the puzzle. But students in all-white groups were significantly less likely to do so, and therefore performed significantly worse in the exercise. The reason is that when we work only with those similar to us, we often “think we all hold the same information and share the same perspective,” Phillips writes. “This perspective, which stopped the all-white groups from effectively processing the information, is what hinders creativity and innovation.” 30

  But does any of this affect companies’ finances? Some research indicates so. In another study that Phillips reviewed, business professors Cristian Deszö of the University of Maryland and David Ross of Columbia wanted to understand how gender representation in top firms correlated with those firms’ performance. They reviewed the size and gender composition of senior management teams across the Standard & Poor’s Composite 1500 list, and then compared that information with financial data. What they found was staggering: “Female representation in top management leads to an increase of $42 million in firm value,” they wrote.31 In addition, they found that firms with a higher “innovation intensity,” measured as the ratio of research and development expenses to assets, were more successful financially when top leadership included women.

  Meanwhile, a 2003 study of 177 national banks in the United States compared “financial performance, racial diversity and the emphasis the bank presidents put on innovation.” In that study, Phillips reports, “for innovation-focused banks, increases in racial diversity were clearly related to enhanced financial performance.” 32

  SPECIAL RULES FOR SPECIAL PEOPLE

  The tech industry knows it has a diversity problem. It knows that diverse teams perform better. It also knows it needs programmers and designers—badly enough to pay six-figure starting salaries to twenty-two-year-old computer science graduates. Why, then, aren’t things getting better, faster? How can the industry that put a powerful computer in my pocket and self-driving cars on the street not be able to figure out how to get more diverse candidates into its companies?

  Well, I’ll tell you the secret. It’s because tech doesn’t really want to—or at least, not as much as it wants something else: lack of oversight.

  Consider the entire concept of the “tech industry.” As Anil Dash puts it, everything from subprime auto leasing (through Uber) to mayonnaise (Hampton Creek’s Just Mayo) to medical testing (the now-discredited Theranos) has been lumped under this single umbrella, and funded by Silicon Valley investors:

  Absurdly, we’re expecting lawmakers, the media and average consumers to understand these wildly different offerings . . . as part of one single, endlessly complex, industry. That’s an impossible task. . . . Perpetuating the myth of a monolithic “tech industry” overtaxes our ability to manage the changes that technology is making to society.33

  Dash concludes that, ultimately, the tech industry doesn’t really exist. It’s just in these organizations’ best interests to be seen as “tech.” Take Uber: If it were perceived as a taxi service, or an auto loan financer, it would be part of an industry with existing regulations and expectations (even if those industries have problems, which, well, yeah). But by being labeled “technology”—by being better known as an app you download to your phone, rather than a massively complex system of vehicles and drivers—Uber gets to change the conversation. Instead of discussing the ethics of hiring legions of drivers as “independent contractors” and then selling them high-interest subprime loans to finance the vehicles they need to do their jobs (while aggressively pursuing the driverless technologies that will take away all those jobs), you’re encouraged to marvel at the seamlessness of the experience as you watch a little car icon navigate the streets on its way to your location. Uber’s not a taxi company. It’s superpumped. It’s special.

  In other words, Uber’s product isn’t full of oversights. It’s not making mistakes. It just doesn’t care, and it doesn’t think it should have to. As the Verge put it, “Uber’s problems didn’t just materialize out of the blue this past January. Uber has been burning through capital, pissing off drivers, alienating riders, and generally wreaking havoc since its inception over six years ago,” they wrote. “It’s shady business—even for a business with a reputation for shadiness.” 34

  Uber may be an extreme example, but it can help us understand tech’s insular culture much more
clearly: if tech wants to be seen as special—and therefore able to operate outside the rules—then it helps to position the people working inside tech companies as special too. And the best way to ensure that happens is to build a monoculture, where insiders bond over a shared belief in their own brilliance. That’s also why you see so many ridiculous job titles floating around Silicon Valley and places like it: “rock-star” designers, “ninja” JavaScript developers, user-experience “unicorns” (yes, these are all real). Fantastical labels like these reinforce the idea that tech and design are magical: skill sets that those on the outside wouldn’t understand, and could never learn.

  The reality is a lot more mundane: design and programming are just professions—sets of skills and practices, just like any other field. Admitting that truth would make tech positions feel a lot more welcoming to diverse employees, but tech can’t tell that story to the masses. If it did, then the industry would seem normal, understandable, and accessible—and that would make everyday people more comfortable pushing back when its ideas are intrusive or unethical. So, tech has to maintain its insider-y, more-brilliant-than-thou feel—which affects who decides to enter that legendary “pipeline,” and whether they’ll stick around once they’ve arrived.

  Plus, there’s the pesky problem of how diverse teams challenge existing cultures. In all that research about the benefits of diversity, one finding sticks out: it can feel harder to work on a diverse team. “Dealing with outsiders causes friction, which feels counterproductive,” write researchers David Rock, Heidi Grant, and Jacqui Grey.35 But experiments have shown that this type of friction is actually helpful, because it leads teams to push past easy answers and think through solutions more carefully. “In fact, working on diverse teams produces better outcomes precisely because it’s harder,” they conclude. That’s a tough sell for tech companies, though. As soon as you invite in “outsiders” who question the status quo—people like Uber’s “Amy,” who ask whether the choices being made are ethical—it’s hard to skate by without scrutiny anymore. As a result, maintaining the monoculture becomes more important than improving products.

  REJECTING THE MYTH

  Not every tech company looks at the world like Uber does (thank god). Just look at messaging app Slack, a darling of the startup world with an office motto that’s refreshingly healthy: “Work hard and go home.” 36

  Meanwhile, Slack is a product people love—in a way no one expects to love business software. It’s often described as a delight to use—but it’s a delight borne of nuance and detail, not shoved-down-your-throat cuteness. And the company got there by what so few tech companies seem to bother with: considering their users as real, whole people. CEO Stewart Butterfield reportedly even asks designers to close their eyes and imagine what a person might have experienced in their life before sitting down at their desk. “Maybe they were running late and sat in gridlock for an hour. Maybe they had an argument with their spouse. Maybe they’re stressed out. The last thing they need is to struggle with a computer program that seems intent on making their day worse.” 37

  As a result, the product is more respectful than most any other messaging system: There are endless ways to customize Slack to your day, such as snoozing notifications in the evening, or turning off notifications for things you don’t care about. You can easily mute sound effects. And the little bits of copy that guide you around the interface or alert you to new features are witty, but never at your expense.

  The care extends to hiring as well. One of the first things Butterfield wants to know about when interviewing candidates for a position isn’t which programming languages they know or where their computer science degree is from. It’s whether they believe luck played a role in getting them where they are—whether they think their success is a product not just of merit and talent, but of good circumstances. His goal is simple: to build a team where people don’t assume they’re special. No rock stars, no gurus, no ninjas—just people who bring a combination of expertise, humility, and empathy.

  Lo and behold, that culture also leads to a more diverse staff: women held more than 40 percent of Slack’s management positions in 2016, and more than a fourth of engineering roles too. Black people accounted for nearly 8 percent of engineers.38 In fact, it’s where Kaya Thomas, the black computer science student we met way back in Chapter 2, accepted an offer for her first postgraduation job.

  Slack’s disarming honesty and disinterest in chest thumping are antithetical to the way most of tech talks about itself. And it’s working: Slack is the fastest-growing business app ever. It tripled its daily active user base in the first half of 2016 alone, from 1 million to 3 million, and grew its total paid accounts to almost 1 million. By October of that year, paid accounts had grown by another 33 percent, to 1.25 million.39

  And no one had to sleep in their cars, or get coerced into a subprime auto loan, to do it.

  DISRUPTING TECH CULTURE

  What Slack has done is still small—just one company, just a few hundred employees. And I’m sure it’s far from perfect there. But it’s a powerful model that we should all be paying more attention to—because it upends tech’s culture of mystification and exceptionalism. It doesn’t rely on believing that programmers are the chosen ones (in fact, Butterfield, who has a master’s degree in philosophy, is known for extolling the values of the liberal arts to anyone in tech who’ll listen). It proves that there’s no reason nice people making thoughtful choices can’t produce tech products that are successful and profitable.

  It proves that we can, in fact, expect more.

  Pair Slack’s story with Uber’s bout of PR crises. If you ask me, Uber’s bad press is just the first wave of a coming tide against tech companies. This backlash can’t come fast enough. Because the tech industry prides itself on talking about the industries it disrupts. Taxis, groceries, you name it. But it seems to forget that a synonym for “disruption” is “instability.” And instability is what’s coming, in the form of artificial intelligence eating millions more jobs. After all, “if you are driving for Uber, your employer’s plan is to automate your job.” 40

  But generic antitech backlash isn’t going to save us from impending disruption—unless we’re willing to put down our phones and stop web-enabling all our appliances. The only real way to hold tech accountable, and to rid it of its worst excesses, is to demand that it become accessible to everyday people—both in the way it designs its products, and in who can thrive in its offices. Because as long as tech is allowed to operate as a zero-sum game—a place where anything goes, as long as it leads to a big IPO and an eventual multibillion-dollar sale—companies like Uber will exist.

  Conversely, the more we remind tech companies that real people use their products—the more we demand to be taken seriously, and push to be represented fairly within their systems—the more chance we have that they’ll see their role for what it really is: one that profoundly affects lives, livelihoods, and communities. One that comes with responsibility, not just endless “hockey-stick growth” (the term startups love to use whenever numbers suddenly shoot up exponentially) and a big payout.

  Today’s tech culture still expects the world to fetishize it: to treat it like an exotic, enthralling beast. Why wouldn’t it? That’s what most press has done for the past two decades. “Founders and their publicists would have you believe that this is a world of pioneers and utopians, cowboy coders and hero programmers,” proclaimed tech-industry worker by day and freelance journalist by night Anna Wiener in the Atlantic. But that kind of coverage—“buzzy and breathless” blog posts, puff pieces “zeroing in on the trappings, trends, and celebrities of the tech scene”—doesn’t cut it anymore, because it exempts the industry’s elite “from the scrutiny that their economic and political power should invite.” 41

  That’s where we all come in. We don’t have to respond to tech with a bat of the eyelashes and a look of wonder. We can be more critical, and less complacent. Because tech culture isn’t something that
belongs just to the engineers and venture capitalists. It’s ours too.

  Chapter 10

  Technically Dangerous

  I’m writing this book at a weird moment in America—weird enough that I spent a lot of time wondering whether I should bother writing at all. Who cares about tech in the face of deportations, propaganda, the threat of a second Cold War? Shouldn’t I be in the street protesting?

  More than once, that’s what I did: I threw down my draft, picked up a marker, and headed for the subway with a homemade sign. “The injustices are just too big to worry about all of tech’s petty problems right now,” I would think as I marched through the streets. But the more often I found myself out there, looking around at my chanting neighbors—immigrants, women, black people, trans people, sick people, and so many more who are already marginalized or made invisible in our society—the more I knew: alienating and biased technology doesn’t matter less during this time of political upheaval. It matters all the more.

  I don’t know what the United States will look like by the time you read this book, and in fact I’m anxious it will look even bleaker than I can yet imagine. But whatever happens, it will still be profoundly impacted by technology. And that technology will still, by and large, be designed by people who don’t look like most of this country.

  The narrower those people’s perspectives are—the more they design and code for people like themselves, and shrug off any responsibility for the outcome—the more easily inequality, insensitivity, and hate can thrive. That harms users on an individual level: the trans woman who feels alienated by binary gender selectors, the multiracial person who feels erased when they have to choose to express one part of their identity over another, the parent cruelly triggered while grieving the death of their child. But it’s not just a problem of digital microaggressions, of slights and snubs that remind people that they don’t belong or that their experiences don’t matter. It’s also the way they reinforce biases and embolden bad behavior in the rest of the population. Culture doesn’t just inform technology and design. Technology and design also, increasingly, inform culture.