Major Misunderstanding
Yesterday, I tweeted a screenshot of the Stanford University incoming undergraduate class profile as a comment on the myth of Silicon Valley meritocracy.
Stanford is one of the most selective universities on the planet. As part of our work with them on a recent design project, we interviewed several current students about their experiences. These are some wildly accomplished and motivated young people. You’d have to be, to be one of the 5% who is accepted.*
My point was that Stanford manages to hold a very very high standard and also achieve gender balance. This isn’t the only criterion for inclusivity, and far from guarantees freedom from all gender-based bullshit, but it’s noteworthy in the surrounding Silicon Valley.
I received a couple of responses saying, yeah, but what about the majors? The implication being that it’s a bad analogy because fewer women study subjects relevant to technology, therefore fewer women work in technology—that old pipeline canard.
This is a herring as red as Stanford’s cardinal banner. It doesn’t matter. There is a huge embedded assumption that succeeding in technology is contingent on a computer science degree. Yes, women are underrepresented academically in STEM fields for reasons that have nothing to do with potential to succeed. That is a related, but separate issue.
People with technical degrees aren’t necessarily more valuable as technology entrepreneurs or start-up employees than those who studied humanities or social science. This is one of those myths that contributes to bias by offering a convenient way to rule underrepresented people out.
Stewart Butterfield, co-founder of Flickr and co-founder and CEO of Slack majored in Philosophy. Logan Green the co-founder and CEO of Lyft majored in Business Economics. Ben Silbermann, co-founder and CEO of Pinterest has a degree in Political Science.
And if you want to talk about the ranks, I have 20 years of experience working in technology and I studied philosophy. Some of the best coders I’ve hired had advanced degrees in English Literature, undergraduate fine arts degrees, or no degree at all. Some of the worst were bad despite adequate technical skills and relevant credentials because they cared about the how to the exclusion of the why. You can also be a woman with an engineering degree from MIT and work as a designer. We have one of those at Mule.
It’s time to stop looking for excuses and start looking for solutions. Trying to rationalize the current state is not a good look. A huge swath of really talented people are apparently invisible to managers and investors.
Drop your defenses and you’ll start to see.
See here: I also have thoughts about what it will take to counter the bias.
*Fun fact #1: Money is no object. Stanford is tuition-free to families making less than $125,000 a year and ability to pay is not part of consideration for U.S. applicants. There are plenty of schools that define ability to pay as part of “merit.”
