Brotopia: Breaking up the Boy's Club of Silicon Valley

Author: Emily Chang 

Emily Chang has a lot of experience interviewing the titans of the Tech Industry. As the Executive Producer of Bloomberg Technology, Ms. Chang had unfettered access to many of the movers and shakers in Silicon Valley. She packages up all of her rich experiences with this colorful cast of characters into a digestible format that is relatively easy to consume. The topics however are serious ones and are definitely of interest to anyone who works in Silicon Valley. 

The recent decline of women in Computer Science has a lot of people scrambling to find out why. Every Tech company that I have come across is eager to improve its gender diversity and have many programs to turn this around. However, to date, the improvements are marginal at best. Emily dives into this from the very beginning. She goes back in time and questions the initial premise that Computer Science is for antisocial, nerds. This self-fulfilling stereotype attracted a subset of boys and men that ultimately were a turn-off for most women. Emily challenges this notion and it definitely got me thinking about the veracity of the stereotype. 

In later chapters she examines some of the excesses in Silicon Valley and misbehaviors of powerful men. This book was written before the #metoo movement, but its not hard to imagine some of the recent exposes fitting right in this book. If you have read the excerpt in the Vanity fair then you already know all about the sex parties in Silicon Valley. Entrepreneurial women were damned if they participated or didn’t. It is clear, that Emily had an up close view into many of these sordid and sad stories of abuse by men in power in high flying tech companies. Hopefully, with the current #metoo movement, most of these are a thing of the past.

Ms. Chang highlights how history is written to glorify the male entrepreneurs and tends to downplay the contribution of women. She gives the example of Susan Wojcicki and how she had an oversized influence in the early days of Google and is responsible for the monetization of their Search platform. However not many people talk about this or even know about it. 

This book is a must read for anyone who wants to do something to improve the gender diversity in the Tech Industry.