Brogrammers’ other victims

The other side of sexism in Silicon Valley

In the wake of the Whitney Wolfe scandal, the topic of sexism in startup-land is once again setting tongues a-wag across the tech blogosphere. Wolfe’s claims, ardently refuted by her former partners, were the subject of a lengthy piece in TechCrunch last week—which could easily double as the treatment for the first Silicon Valley soap opera.

Whether or not Wolfe’s accusations are entirely accurate, it’s altogether likely that sexism played a role in her ouster from the company. The tech scene is famously inhospitable to women, with notable exceptions (Sandberg, S. and Mayer, M.)

But I’m not here to add yet another article decrying the lack of women in technical roles. I’m not a woman or an engineer, and my perspective is hardly relevant. Rather, I’m seeking to raise awareness of the inverse issue—the lack of men in non-technical roles.

In doing so I am not at all seeking to downplay the seriousness of the plight of women in tech. Theirs is a more entrenched and pernicious problem. However, I’d argue that men applying for non-engineering jobs face odds not much better than their female dev counterparts. These issues are inherently interrelated—with the lack of female early hires leading to a flood of females in later stages.

Take the screenshot below (markup mine), captured from the website of a startup here in San Francisco.

Out of 25 employees, 17 are engineers. Fairly typical for an early-stage startup. Out of those 17 engineers, only one is female. Even by the already stretched standards of tech-industry gender ratios, that’s a massive disparity. Yet when I look at team profiles like this startup’s, I see not only the obvious lack of female developers, but also the discrimination facing non-technical males. Of the 8 non-dev employees, only one is male. Sure, that’s double the ratio of female devs, but striking in its own right.

In a way, it’s understandable—think about how most startups start. A few guys code an app. They get some seed funding, then hire a few more engineers and some salespeople. Suddenly they’ve got 12-15 employees, and guess what—they all have Y chromosomes. When the time comes to start building out their marketing team, are they going to hire a guy? Of course not! There may not be ample female coders, but there are plenty of talented female marketers. And beyond that, female designers, recruiters, customer support reps and more. Suddenly, all the non-technical positions are filled by females (and not just any females—it’s hard to ignore the emphasis that girl-starved startups place on physical appearance).

Hiring females as ‘growth analysts,’ ‘operations managers’ and other vaguely titled roles allows startups to even out their gender imbalance, which is (unquestionably) a commendable goal. However, doing so sidelines qualified male applicants. In the end, it all comes down to the eternal affirmative action debate—one of those social dilemmas with no easily defined ‘answer.’ Does a company have a duty to hire the most qualified person for every position? Or should they maintain the prerogative to hire according to cultural concerns, like diversity of race and gender?

To be sure, my data sample is scant. I surveyed the team profile pages of several companies who publicly display their employees, including Remind, Stripe, Hipmunk and Postmates. In all four, my hypothesis held true. Females typically comprised 10-15% of the technical employees, while males made up about 20-30% of non-technical employees. Better, but not by much.

Solving these problems can only happen concomitantly: start hiring (and encouraging the CS education of) more women, which will lead to a better balance early on. Such a shift would likely reduce the practice of ignoring male applicants for later hires. Let’s kill both sides of this coin with one stone.