SXSWorld
Issue link: https://sxsw.uberflip.com/i/456163
1 8 S X S W o r l d | F E B R U A R Y 2 0 1 5 | S X S W. C O M nteractive keynote speaker and luxury retail entrepreneur Princess Reema Bint Bandar Al-Saud is so security-conscious that she won't allow direct photographs to be taken of her. Her efforts to promote women's rights and bring women into the workplace in Saudi Arabia have made her a controversial figure in her home country, where she has challenged traditional roles for women head on. The surface of the cultures in Saudi Arabia and in the United States may appear vastly different, but in both countries, there are spaces in which the idea of women even existing is still a matter of contention. This became clear last fall when women working in tech as game developers and critics were hounded during the Gamergate episode by harassment that spanned everything from Twitter attacks to death threats. The FBI got involved and the primary targets, Zoe Quinn, Brianna Wu and Anita Sarkeesian, canceled public appearances and went into hiding. While conversations about women in technology used to focus on getting more females into the workforce pipeline, the conversation has shifted. Now instead of discussing how to recruit women into STEM majors and industries, the dis- cussion is about the inequality and hostility they encounter once they are there, and why they leave. In December, The New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor published an investigative piece about the Stanford University class of 1994, a historically successful group. She found that the gender gap was glaring, especially for a graduating class steeped in the school's strong diversity efforts. It also included several future successful tech entrepreneurs who, as students, were anti-diversity reaction- aries who worked together on the Peter Thiel-founded libertarian Stanford Review paper. Writer Kate Losse, whose book The Boy Kings was about her time as an early Facebook employee, said that it is interesting to see the roots of current tech culture in Silicon Valley's mythical past: "People still believed in the meritocracy and all the other things Silicon Valley says about itself, but now people are looking a little closer. Maybe it's not as equal opportunity as it likes to think it is." Access to funding is a key to part of the gap, but so is a generally rough climate for women. Selena Deckelmann works as a data archi- tect at Mozilla and is a director of the Python Software Foundation. She founded the PyLadies PDX user group in 2012 and in a Portland Business Journal editorial about women leaving tech due to harass- ment said that the worst part of forming the group had been the deluge of stories about workplace hostility. "I don't think that the harassment is all that different than other fields," said Deckelmann. "What may be different is that the women in tech are economically advantaged enough that a few of us can speak out, suffer the consequences and not be completely ruined by the experience. Even with that, women I know still feel constrained, like they can't fix their own companies, like they have to bear sexist treatment to keep their jobs." Deckelmann works with the Ada Initiative, a nonprofit organiza- tion that promotes the interests of women in tech by working on anti-harassment policies and conference codes of conduct. In addi- tion to general culture change, she said that the state of maternity leave in the United States is a major concern for women. As primary caregivers, women tend to experience much more dramatic work- place consequences than men do when they become parents. Amelia Abreu, a user experience designer and doctoral student at the University of Washington, has written about gendered labor roles for women in tech. "I have a three-year-old daughter, and after I had my daughter I realized, 'Oh, you can't talk about your caregiving activi- ties in a professional setting as a woman,'" she says. "A man with three or four kids: 'Oh, he's a provider. Give him more money!' Whereas if a woman has three or four kids: 'What is she even doing out of the house?' " When women leave tech companies or are not even there to begin with, the impact is often felt by female users of apps and networks. This is because women often have a set of privacy and security concerns that do not necessarily occur to male developers. "A lot of times I've noticed that men are thinking from the position of the hacker and not from the position of the hacked," said Losse. "When it comes to these social applications, it's like, 'I want to see all this stuff, I want to gather all this information.' And women are thinking 'OK, well, who's going to turn that on me? Who's going to look for me?' I think it's something many of the women I know in tech think about a lot and want to build things in a different way." As women become the builders and creators of their own compa- nies, perhaps change will become more apparent. Founders drive a company's culture, and female founders can hopefully create situa- tions that will attract more women. "There's a wave of women coming out of the big companies who make some money there, and then they want to create something," said Losse. "That's a position where someone can really make a dif- ference, just be like 'I'm actually just gonna build this a completely different way.' " In this way, the struggles of Princess Reema's female employees and those of American women are similar. Change and opportunity are accelerated most when women have the finances and power to build their own companies and decide how they will work. Gender Discrimination Still Crosses Cultures and Industries by SuSan eLizabeTh Shepard I Prin ces s Re e m a B in t B a n d a r A l S a u d B I N T B A N D A R A L S A U D