A faceless woman being upskirted by an arrowed mouse pointer graces the cover of this week’s Newsweek cover. The provocative image attempts to tackle the tech world’s pervasive gender inclusion problem.
The magazine’s cover story, “What Silicon Valley Thinks Of Women,” focuses on two women programmers — Lauren Mosenthal and her partner, Eileen Carey — who recently launched their startup in San Francisco. But to succeed, they would have to beat the odds and fight off deeply entrenched misogyny.
The only problem with their dream is that Silicon Valley has never produced a female Gates, Zuckerberg or Kalanick. There are a few high-profile female entrepreneurs in the Bay Area, but despite the very visible success of corporate titans Meg Whitman, Sheryl Sandberg and Marissa Mayer, who signed up with companies after they took off — their numbers are relatively minuscule.
Women only make up 11 percent of all executive positions in Silicon Valley companies. But beyond numbers, women in tech often have to deal with hostile work environments, where sexual harassment and innuendo are common. Newsweek reported:
There was the young executive of a company valued at $250 million who got up in front of an audience at a conference billed as diverse and joked about “gang-bang interviews” and how he got his start by sending elusive CEOs whose attention he needed “bikini shots” from a “nudie calendar” he’d made of college women…
It’s a community in which the porn-inspired, “drading” college tweets of Evan Spiegel, the CEO of Snapchat, go public; where a CEO’s history of domestic violence has no repercussions but female executives get fired for tweeting about sexist jokes they overhear. It’s a place where companies routinely staff conference booths with scantily clad “code-babes” and where women are so routinely sexually harassed at conferences that codes of conduct have become de rigueur — and the subject of endless misogynistic jokes on Twitter.
The cover has already received some backlash on Twitter with users condemning it as part of the problem, “an insult to women in Silicon Valley.” While the overt sexual harassment depicted in Newsweek’s cover does happen, discrimination is often more nuanced.
Former Tinder executive Whitney Wolfe filed a complaint in July against her fellow senior executives for harassment and discrimination. According to the complaint, Wolfe started getting threatening text messages after ending a romantic relationship with a fellow executive. Wolfe was reportedly fired after telling her boss about the abuse and asking to resign with severance.