Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley

$17.71
by Emily Chang

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Instant National Bestseller A PBS NewsHour- New York Times Book Club Pick "Excellent." — San Francisco Chronicle Silicon Valley is a modern utopia where anyone can change the world. Unless you're a woman. It's time to break up the boys' club. Incisive, powerful, and a fierce rallying cry, Emily Chang shows us how to fix Silicon Valley’s toxic culture--to bring down Brotopia, once and for all. Silicon Valley is not a fantasyland of unicorns, virtual reality rainbows, and 3D-printed lollipops for women in tech. Instead, it’s a "Brotopia," where men hold the cards and make the rules. While millions of dollars may seem to grow on trees in this land of innovation, tech’s aggressive, misogynistic, work-at-all costs culture has shut women out of the greatest wealth creation in the history of the world. Brotopia reveals how Silicon Valley got so sexist despite its utopian ideals, why bro culture endures even as its companies claim the moral high ground, and how women are speaking out and fighting back. Drawing on her deep network of Silicon Valley insiders, Chang opens the boardroom doors of male-dominated venture capital firms like Kleiner Perkins, the subject of Ellen Pao's high-profile gender discrimination lawsuit, and Sequoia, where a partner once famously said they "won't lower their standards" just to hire women. Exposing the flawed logic in common excuses for why tech has long suffered the “pipeline” problem and invests in the delusion of meritocracy, Brotopia also shows how bias coded into AI, internet troll culture, and the reliance on pattern recognition harms not just women in tech but us all, and at unprecedented scale. "[Chang] is clearly engaged with and often incensed by her subject, and the best parts of Brotopia are those moments when she actively resists the 'it's all good' ethos of the Bay Area and cuts down chauvinism with the disdain it deserves." — New York Times " Brotopia  goes far beyond the salacious to offer an important examination of why the technology industry is so dominated by men—and how women are pushing back." — Financial Times "When reading Brotopia , it's easy to envision it as a film…. Women who have triumphed in tech despite the odds…could be the film's heroines, and so would the young girls learning how to code despite it all." — The Verge "…Chang's scrutiny breaks open a wide doorway, allowing fresh ideas about a tainted industry to circulate and spark discussions." — Kirkus Review  Emily Chang is the anchor and executive producer of Bloomberg Technology, a daily TV show focused on global technology and Bloomberg Studio 1.0, where she regularly speaks to top tech executives, investors, and entrepreneurs. She was previously a CNN correspondent based in Beijing and London, and has won five regional Emmy awards for her reporting. She is a graduate of Harvard University and lives in San Francisco with her husband and three children. INTRODUCTION   NOT JUST A PRETTY FACE: TECH’S ORIGINAL SIN     Lena Söderberg started out as just another Playboy centerfold. The twenty-one-year-old Swedish model told the magazine she’d left her native Stockholm for Chicago because she’d been swept up in “America Fever.” In November 1972, Playboy returned her en- thusiasm by featuring her, under the name Lenna Sjööblom, in its signature spread. If Söderberg had followed the path of her predeces- sors, her image would have been briefly famous, then relegated to gathering dust under the beds of teenage boys. But one particular photo of Lena Söderberg would not fade into obscurity. Instead, her face would become as famous and recognizable as Mona Lisa’s—not to most Americans, but to everyone studying computer science for the next half a century. In engineering circles, some refer to Lena as the first lady of the internet. But others call her the industry’s original sin, the first step in Silicon Valley’s exclusion of women. Both views stem from an event that took place back in 1973 at a University of Southern California computer lab, where a team of researchers, led by William Pratt, PhD, was trying to turn physical photographs into digital bits. The work would pave the way for the development of the JPEG, a compression scheme that allows large image files to be efficiently trans- ferred between devices. But the JPEG was far into the future. In 1973, researchers needed to test their algorithms on suitable pho- tos—pictures full of detail and texture. And their search for the ideal test photo led them to Lena. Until now, the role of Dr. William Pratt in the choice of Lena’s photo has been completely unknown. I tracked Pratt down thanks to a passing lead on an old message board. He had left USC to take a job at Sun Microsystems and was working pro bono at Stanford Hospital, scouring MRIs and CT scans. In a telephone interview, Pratt explained how he and his team had just received a large grant from ARPA (today known as DARPA), a Department of Defense ag

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