The Invisible Women of Silicon Valley
Thoughts on the HBO pilot that forgot the fairer sex
On the heels of the Game of Thrones season premiere last night, HBO introduced a brand-new series from Office Space director Mike Judge. Silicon Valley follows a startup team of five software engineers who get caught between two rival billionaires looking to get their hands on the team’s audio compression algorithm. It’s pretty funny — the dialogue is deliciously snarky and full of nods to the absurdities of Silicon Valley, from hacker hostels to artisanal purées to self-aggrandizing CEOs. The cast has a good mix of comedic chops, too. But there’s one thing that’s pretty hard to miss about Silicon Valley’s characters: they’re all dudes.
This wasn’t a huge surprise for anyone who had seen the trailer for the show, in which literally the only woman appearing on screen was a stripper. Similarly, the pilot includes exactly two speaking female characters: a nameless secretary in Billionaire #1’s executive office, and Monica, the doe-eyed, tailored-skirt-wearing assistant-or-something of Billionaire #2. Monica, to her credit, seems to know something about technology — she spouts a good amount of expository information about the value of the algorithm while talking awkward engineer Richard into working with her boss. But between her perfectly styled hair and makeup, the semi-flirtatious doe eyes and the click of her heels as she walks Richard to her car, it’s pretty clear what Monica’s purpose is in the Silicon Valley story. She’s eye candy, or perhaps an eventual love interest — either way, she probably doesn’t write code. It seems that as far as Judge and HBO are concerned, all the real contributors of the tech world are (mostly white, all straight) men. And that’s left more than a few women wondering why they’re being ignored.
When HBO’s Girls first appeared on screen, there were plenty of complaints along the same lines — except the missing characters were not women but people of color. While Lena Dunham promised to try harder to include non-white actors in the cast — and ended up doing an okay job of it — several commentators reminded us that the lack of racial diversity in the first season of Girls probably doesn’t pose a problem for the show’s credibility. After all, it’s not inconceivable that a group of spoiled Oberlin graduettes attempting adulthood in Brooklyn would run exclusively in white circles. For Silicon Valley, on the other hand, the homogeneity of the cast isn’t just an iffy-but-plausible casting decision — it’s a blatant refusal of the facts. Women are here. In tech. Doing things other than traipsing around in high heels, I can assure you.
I work at a 30ish-person hardware startup in Palo Alto, the exact city where Silicon Valley is set. And lo and behold — half of the humans I encounter in my office every day are female. I’ll admit that I work in marketing and don’t personally write code, but lots of these kick-ass women do — along with designing our hardware, testing our firmware, building our IT infrastructure and managing the massive task of bringing a device to production. We wear the hoodies. We make the geeky jokes. We innovate, disrupt* and decide. And it’s pretty lame of Silicon Valley to pretend we don’t exist.
This isn’t to say there’s no hope for a more realistic Silicon Valley— the seven episodes left in the season should be plenty of time for Mike Judge and his cronies to introduce a girl-geek or two. Or perhaps it will come to light that the whole female disappearing act was a conscious decision meant to skewer the sexist system that still prevails in many parts of the Valley. We’ll see. Until then, I will high-five my lady-colleagues and cross my fingers for a future where we’re truly represented.
*I think this word is obnoxious, but it worked for the alliteration.
