Brotopia

by Emily Chang

  Another female founder told me she once shared office space with a male entrepreneur who met friends for the Gold Club buffet weekly. It became such a normal part of his routine that he took new employees to the club for their orientation lunch, including men and women.

  What employees do on their own time is, of course, their business. But, without a doubt, attending strip clubs with colleagues during the workday is lethal to company culture. Many of the tech workers who engage in this behavior don’t seem to realize it’s problematic. One founder and investor told me he’s been to the Gold Club at least five times with his friends who also happen to be his co-founders. When I pointed out that outings like this might have influenced the start-up’s bro-ey culture, he agreed. “It was hard for us to hire women. We didn’t hire women, and we’ve tried to be very cognizant of not fucking that up anymore. I’m not a saint in this story,” the founder admitted.

  When I told LinkedIn’s co-founder Reid Hoffman about tech employees’ regular outings to “Conference Room G,” he simply said, “That is not good.” Does it matter that they are regularly visiting strip clubs (and attending sex parties) if it’s happening outside the workplace? I asked. “Yes, of course it does,” he said. “We are the habits that we create . . . You have an extra burden to make sure that’s not screwing with your workplace.”

  Visiting strip clubs becomes especially problematic when it becomes a test for who is on the team. If the woman is on a job interview, refusing to go will certainly damage her chances of getting the job. But even for women who are already part of the staff, the strip club invitation is a lose-lose proposition. They can either participate and potentially feel humiliated and awkward in front of their colleagues or decline and miss the group bonding and business conversation that will take place there. Uber engineer Ana Medina says she was issued “an open invite” to accompany her co-workers to the Gold Club, “and I never took it. Other engineers asked me to go to bondage clubs and bars, and it was one of those things that I was like, ‘What is this, an SF thing or a tech Valley thing? Or is this company so fucked up that this is what gets talked about?’”

  Of course, sometimes women aren’t invited to begin with. One female founder told me that every time she went to a conference with her team, a group of men would venture off on their own. “At some point in time, everyone would disappear and I was left. You’ll never know how much business happens in those venues,” this founder said.

  Like the high-end sex parties, the strip club scene is part of the background noise that women in Silicon Valley have to deal with. It’s a practice that often leaves women in an untenable position. There is no parallel problem for men. Work and private lives are mixed together in Silicon Valley and the new sexual adventurism inevitably informs how male dominated workforces perceive the few women in their midst. As one Bay Area sex therapist told me, “Women are seen as sexual objects, and their objectification is everywhere.”

  7

  ONE HACK DOESN’T FIT ALL: HOW TECH DISRUPTS FAMILY

  IN 2014, FACEBOOK AND Apple simultaneously decided to offer their female employees what appeared to be the ultimate life hack, all expenses paid. The companies would now cover the cost—up to $20,000—for women to freeze their eggs, literally putting their fertility on ice. At the time, Facebook’s COO, Sheryl Sandberg, told me the idea for the benefit came about when a young female employee who had recently been diagnosed with cancer confessed she would never be able to have children unless she froze her eggs before starting treatment. “I talked about it with our head of HR and said, ‘God, we should cover this,’” Sandberg told me on Bloomberg TV in 2015. “And then we looked at each other and said, ‘Why would we only cover this for women with cancer? Why wouldn’t we cover this more broadly?’” After Facebook and Apple set the example, Google jumped on board too. It wasn’t long before Intel, Spotify, and Salesforce also offered this new perk.

  On its face, this was a generous and genuine attempt to give women employees more choice, and an ingenious way to attract and retain female talent in an industry starved of women. Haven’t yet met the right partner? Or just not ready to have kids? Or maybe right now you just want to focus on your career? For any woman worried about her biological clock, here was a snooze button.

  Egg freezing is just one example of how the tech industry has addressed the thorny issue of work-life balance. In fact, some tech folks are actively pushing back on the idea of “balance” as ideal, because it’s nearly impossible to achieve, instead advancing terms like work-life “blend” or “integration.” In an era when companies seem to be demanding more of their employees’ time than ever, Silicon Valley offers in return not only generous salaries and stock options but incentives and hacks to make work obsession both easier to indulge in and more enjoyable.

  At most established tech firms, free food and alcohol are givens, and they are advertised as selling points. “We take care of the details so you can focus on what’s really important. You never have to think about what’s for breakfast, lunch, and dinner,” Dropbox boasts on its website. “We’re always looking for ways to take the stress out of each day.” Facebook and Google have masseuses, doctors, dentists, even hairdressers on call at their headquarters. Ping-Pong and foosball tables are ubiquitous. Some companies offer fitness classes on-site, discounts on gym memberships, and a laundry service for your dirty gym clothes. Others encourage employees to bring their pets to work and give discounts on dog walking, pet insurance, and pet supplies.

  While some of these benefits would appeal to any employee, many skew for the young and single. So many perks, yet day care is not on the list. Few employers offer stipends for child care, and even fewer provide on-site child care. Sure, you can bring your dog to work, but you are (mostly) on your own with your baby.

  That’s because Silicon Valley companies have largely been created in the image of their mostly young, mostly male, mostly childless founders. They don’t call their offices “campuses” for nothing. Facebook employees tell me that although Sandberg has had an immeasurable effect on the company culture (Facebook’s website makes a point to emphasize it wants to help employees thrive “at all stages of life”), to a certain extent the campus will always feel a little bit like a nineteen-year-old’s dorm room. Google is slightly more mature, a hangout for single PhD candidates. With no kids waiting at home, many young, single employees just out of college are susceptible to making work life their entire life, a tendency the companies are happy to enable. Thanks to the seemingly generous perks they provide, you don’t have to leave the Google or Facebook campus except to go home and sleep (at some start-ups, I’ve heard, employees skip home altogether by keeping cots under their desks). Along with working in a creative environment with brilliant people, you get to play in the Ping-Pong tournament or enjoy a massage at lunch, grab a free beer from the company fridge, and ride the Wi-Fi-enabled company bus home. The last one leaves the Google campus in Mountain View at 10:30 p.m., which lands you in bed in your San Francisco loft by midnight. For the right person, at the right life stage, it can be heaven. But women thirty-five and up are usually not that person, and the usual perks of the job do not address the reasons so many women in that age-group decide to leave.

  TECH’S “LEAKY BUCKET”

  Women leave tech much faster than men do, and at an alarming rate. One study found women are more than twice as likely to quit tech than men. Women also leave tech jobs much faster than non-tech jobs. In 2013, researchers found that, after twelve years, 50 percent of women have left STEM jobs to work in other fields. In contrast, only 20 percent of women in other professional fields left over the course of the study, some whose careers spanned thirty years. While 80 percent of women in STEM fields say they love their jobs, 32 percent said they were likely to quit within a year. Many women cite the reasons we’ve already discussed in this book for leaving (unfairness, lack of advancement, hostile macho culture, feelings of isolation). This “
fight or flight” moment also happens to coincide with critical childbearing and child-rearing years. But how much of the “leaky bucket” problem has to do with an unfulfilling balance (or integration!) of work and life?

  In a comprehensive report, “What’s So Special About STEM?,” researchers found that family demands affect women in STEM fields far more dramatically than women in other professions, in fact that staying married and having a second child significantly increase the odds of women exiting the STEM labor force, a trend that’s exacerbated the more hours they work. Accounting for various differences in family situations, they found that women in STEM (most of those surveyed were engineers and computer “specialists”) were 807 percent more likely to leave their jobs than their peers in other fields. They are not leaving the labor force but are taking jobs in other industries, and once they leave STEM, they rarely come back. What’s disturbing, the researchers point out, is that women in STEM often make more money than women in other fields and often have more egalitarian views about gender roles at home—meaning that we might expect to see women staying in STEM jobs longer than in other roles. Instead, the reverse is true, suggesting that there are several features of these jobs that make them difficult to combine with family life and that the difficulty intensifies as women move up in the hierarchy. In a recent survey, women engineers noted work-family imbalance as one of the top reasons for leaving the industry.

  Women leave tech at every stage of the game, but the exodus of women in their thirties is particularly unfortunate given that those are prime years in the tech world. You are old enough to have some serious experience but still considered young enough to be connected to the latest industry trends. (Ageism is yet another bias in tech.) This is a period where people in established firms move into positions of real influence. Research by the Founder Institute shows that for an entrepreneur being older correlates to a higher chance of success, up to age forty, after which age has no effect. Though we have romanticized the cult of the young founder, stories like Mark Zuckerberg’s are the exception and not the rule.

  The stereotype of computer engineers working sixty to eighty hours a week is no myth, and many still believe that for a Silicon Valley tech firm to be successful, programmers must put in superhuman hours. This belief is as baked into Silicon Valley as the stereotype of the boy genius. But now is the time to disrupt that belief, just as tech has disrupted so much of everyone else’s life and culture.

  The herculean efforts of the Macintosh team prior to the product’s January 1984 release are still an industry legend. That team’s core group of a few dozen programmers were mostly in their twenties and thirties, and few had families or children. A special garment was made up to commemorate their efforts (perhaps the first appearance of the now-ubiquitous gray hoodie), and on its back was emblazoned “90 Hrs / Wk and Loving It.”

  Such superhuman performance is not replicated every day in Silicon Valley, but it remains an industry ideal. Take the all-night hackathon, in which developers “hack” together new projects and prototypes. Facebook has held at least fifty since its founding, including one on the night before its 2012 IPO. Day to day, however, employees are expected to show their dedication in more quotidian ways, such as taking meals at the office, being connected to their devices after hours, and responding to messages (via Slack, the hot intra-office messaging app) late into the evening. Not to mention that Silicon Valley history abounds with tales of CEOs counting cars in the parking lot after 6:00 p.m. and yelling at staff for not coming in on Sundays.

  These sorts of attitudes and expectations have given rise to the dude army and to campuses that look like college-dorm fantasylands instead of professional and inclusive workplaces for grown-ups.

  For many years, Uber served employees a free catered meal, but not until 8:15 p.m. Executives insisted there was no expectation that employees work that late, but even so, whether employees stayed for dinner because they wanted to, had to, felt they should, or simply ended up hanging around, they were still getting out of work well into the evening and long after their kids, if they had found the time to have any, would be asleep.

  The fancy perks, of course, are mostly at the big companies. At the thousands of small start-ups just trying to get off the ground, the work hours can be even more brutal, with few extras to speak of except maybe a refrigerator stocked with coconut water, Red Bull, and beer. There’s a general nonchalance about retention policies to keep employees engaged over time and a general urgency to get the maximum amount out of every employee now. After all, pulling off that next product launch, or hitting that next milestone, could make the difference between getting the next round of funding or shutting down.

  And tech employees may very well leave, no matter how the boss treats them. According to the job search company Indeed, software engineers in San Francisco have the shortest job tenure (just over two years) of software engineers in any metropolitan area, in part because of what Indeed refers to as an “especially ambitious workforce” and a massive supply of opportunity, with new technologies and companies exploding onto the Valley scene every day. Jobs are “gigs,” and short stints are common.

  Between the tech workforce’s penchant for switching jobs and the short life span of many tech businesses, Silicon Valley has not been incentivized to focus on the adult life span of its employees. It makes sense for them to provide the brightest and shiniest perks to help get employees in the door. But why invest in creating work-life balance for the long term if your workers are going to move on soon anyway? It’s against that long-standing background that the egg-freezing perk has made its appearance.

  • • •

  AT START-UPS, THE APPROACH to pregnancy and maternity benefits is fairly primitive. You’re unlikely to encounter a thoughtfully planned parental leave policy, and your eggs will remain unfrozen unless you shell out the money yourself. Most founders don’t realize they even need a parental leave policy until the first employee gets pregnant.

  At the biggest tech companies, however, the situation couldn’t be more different. Egg freezing isn’t the only benefit large tech firms offer their employees. Sperm banking, extensive IVF treatments, and cord-blood banking for newborns are often included, as is support for adoption and surrogacy. Sheryl Sandberg famously asked Sergey Brin to create closer-to-the-door “pregnancy parking” at Google for expectant mothers, then brought the idea with her over to Facebook. (I happily pulled in to one such spot when I interviewed her for this book while eight months pregnant.) Tech companies generally also provide generous vacation and family leave policies. When Google increased its paid maternity leave from twelve to eighteen weeks, Susan Wojcicki told the Wall Street Journal that retention of new moms improved by a full 50 percent. Facebook offers four months of parental leave for both moms and dads, and Mark Zuckerberg has signaled that it’s okay to use it by famously taking two months of leave for each of his two children. Companies such as Netflix and LinkedIn even offer unlimited vacation time.

  Silicon Valley’s nature is to look for groundbreaking, innovative solutions, and it all looks great on paper. While high-tech pregnancy perks may make these companies look good, there’s substantial evidence that trendy perks like egg and sperm freezing are not solving the problem at hand. Getting pregnant is just the beginning of parenting after all. What workers want, particularly women, is a culture that is friendly to working parenthood over the decades that the commitment demands.

  WORKING LONG, HARD, AND SMART

  In 1997, in a letter to his shareholders, Jeff Bezos succinctly expressed a core belief about what it takes to succeed in tech when he wrote, “You can work long, hard or smart, but at Amazon.com you can’t choose two out of three.”

  This belief—that for companies to be successful, tech employees must work long, hard, and smart every single day—is one reason it’s so hard for women who become mothers. While dads are getting better about pitching in on child care, the major
ity still falls to moms. Added to that, men don’t breast-feed (or pump) and are not burdened with the medical condition commonly known as pregnancy.

  In 2017, twenty years after Bezos’s “long, hard or smart” comment, Blake Robbins, a tech worker turned VC, tweetstormed, “When I first got into tech, I thought it was ‘cool’ to work on the weekends or holidays. I quickly realized that’s a recipe for disaster . . . Not hanging with friends . . . because you’re working isn’t ‘cool.’ Burning out isn’t ‘cool’ . . . Your competition isn’t beating you because they are working more hours than you, it’s because they are working smarter.”

  Not surprisingly, he encountered resistance. The PayPal Mafia member and venture capitalist Keith Rabois tersely tweeted in response, “Totally false.” Then elaborated in his next tweet: “Read a bio of Elon. Or about Amazon. Or about the first 4 years of FB. Or PayPal.”

  The Twitter tiff resurfaced an essay written by Palantir’s director, Shyam Sankar, in 2015 titled “The Case Against Work-Life Balance.” Sankar argued that the time to invest those long hours at work is when you’re young, because the pace of learning slows as we age, and that having a purpose for the sacrifice makes it acceptable. He urges young engineers to be skeptical of jobs advertising both high stimulation and maximum comfort.

  “Provided there’s a purpose, sprinting at an unsustainable rate is an act of tremendous optimism,” he wrote. “We’ve been told over and over to choose life over work in order to achieve balance. I’m urging you, especially at the dawn of your career, to instead choose life over balance and make the work so meaningful that you wouldn’t want it to exist as a distinct concept. This is how you ensure that your future remains yours.”

  Sankar makes an eloquent case. I agree that less balance can be worth it, for a while, if you feel you are doing something truly worthwhile (as I have done while juggling three kids and a full-time job in order to write this book). I disagree that this can work over an extended period of time. As much as overnight success makes a great Silicon Valley story, nothing here actually happens overnight (except for those hackathons), and it takes most companies many years to realize their full potential.