Brotopia
Reporting on the culture that produced Uber's 2017 crisis.
Summary
Chang, a Bloomberg journalist, documents the exclusion of women from Silicon Valley and argues that the industry's gender composition was produced by specific decisions rather than by a pipeline shortage. Her historical section is the most useful: women made up over a third of computing graduates in the 1980s and the share fell afterwards, and Chang traces the decline to the marketing of personal computers to boys, to admissions criteria that favoured applicants with prior programming experience, and to the adoption in the 1960s of personality profiles that selected for people who disliked working with others.
The reporting covers venture capital funding disparities, the mechanics of how deals reach investors through personal networks, harassment cases including those at Binary Capital and Uber, the effect of non-disparagement agreements in preventing disclosure, and the culture of specific companies. The chapter on parties, which drew the most attention, describes events attended by investors and founders and argues that they function as professional environments in which women participate on different terms.
Chang also covers the mechanics of exclusion that do not involve misconduct, including referral-based hiring, the compounding effect of small differences in early opportunities, and the way that pattern matching on prior successful founders reproduces the existing composition.
The book is journalism and its evidence is interviews plus available statistics. Some subjects disputed her accounts, particularly regarding the parties chapter. It concentrates on a specific slice of the industry and generalises from it. The historical material on how the field changed composition, and the analysis of network-based deal flow, are the parts with the most analytical value.
Key takeaways 8
- Women made up over a third of computing graduates in the mid-1980s, and the decline afterwards was produced by specific decisions rather than by any change in interest.
- Personality profiles adopted in the 1960s selected programmers who disliked working with people, which shaped who entered the field for decades.
- Marketing personal computers to boys in the 1980s created the prior-experience gap that university admissions then treated as aptitude.
- Venture funding reaches founders through personal networks, so the composition of those networks determines who receives capital regardless of any explicit bias.
- Pattern matching against previously successful founders reproduces the existing demographic composition automatically.
- Non-disparagement and settlement agreements prevented disclosure of misconduct for years and allowed the same individuals to continue operating.
- Social events attended by investors and founders function as professional environments in which participation terms differ by gender.
- Referral-based hiring compounds early differences in opportunity, which produces large divergences from small initial gaps.
Who should read it
Investors and founders examining how their own networks and hiring practices reproduce composition, and readers wanting the documented history of the field's change.
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