BOOK REVIEW
Tech Brogrammers in the #MeToo Era: Meritocracy or Male Mafia? Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys’ Club of Silicon Valley, by Emily Chang (Portfolio, 2018) Reviewed by Kimberly Lum
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mily Chang is one of the country’s best-known tech journalists and host of the daily television show Bloomberg Technology. Since it debuted in 2011, the San-Francisco-based program has showcased Chang’s industry analysis and interviews with most of nearby Silicon Valley’s high-tech leadership. With such a highprofile author, publication of her industry expose’ Brotopia was sure to garner immediate attention. But far from being just another glossy insider account of the billionaire nerdocracy, it is instead a wellwritten look at the still-wide gender disparities in the computer and telecom industries. It gives an overview of the history of their employment trends, documenting the evolution of the idea of the “ideal programmer,” as well as the rise of the concept of meritocracy in the hiring and promotion process. While the book mostly succeeds in scrutinizing the gender hypocrisies of Silicon Valley, this reader felt that it is in places guilty of a few unfounded gender assumptions of its own.
The famed “Paypal Mafia” refers to the initial founders and key members who made their fortune through the creation and selling of Paypal. These members have gone on to start their own projects and are known for either hiring their friends or others within the Paypal Mafia circle into top positions, or have them invest in their projects. Brotopia addresses the fact that the concept of meritocracy itself is flawed, since a person’s achievements could easily have been bolstered by privilege. Examples include the many CEOs and top executives that came from upper-middle class families and attended Ivy League and a few other elite universities. There’s also the factor of being at the right place at the right time. One surprise for me while reading Brotopia was its speculation that a contributing factor of the Dot-Com Bust was that there were very few women working in the industry at the time. Chang writes that, “But if investors’ love affair with bro style helped fuel the boom - and it did – it’s fair to ask, if more tech leaders of the 1990s had been women, could they have helped avoid the bust, or mitigated it?” (38). While there’s some tangential evidence – like the fact that Google, with slightly more equal representation in upper management, fared better in the years during and after the Dot-Com Bust – her speculation makes some stereotypical assumptions about the differences between men and women that encompass a larger part of the book.
A best-seller named one of the “Best Books of 2018” by the Financial Times, Brotopia begins by illuminating the gender dynamics of the early history of computers. From the 1940s to the 1960s, computer programming was seen as a feminine job due to its association with tedious manual labor and typing skills. However, the 1980s saw the rise of the antisocial computer nerd stereotype that began excluding women from the computer science profession since employers believed this personality type would produce better work over others. What perpetuated this stereotype was the Cannon-Perry personality test, which argued that people with low social skills and a high propensity towards puzzle solving would make the best programmers. Many companies began screening for these traits to the detriment of others and this, Brotopia argues, is what began the exclusion of women in the computer science sector, since the combined traits of liking puzzles and a dislike for communicating are much more common in males.
While Chang overall does a great job advocating for women in the computer industry, she makes questionable assumptions on how women work and the traits most tend to have. Throughout the book, she assumes that women work better with people, are more willing to collaborate and compromise, and have a less combative management style. While these are ingrained into our social unconscious, and women are largely socialized to have these traits, it’s presumptuous to assume that all women will have these traits in the workplace and especially in positions of power since there’s so little precedent for women in upper management compared to men in the first place. A true test of such assumptions may only come when and if women claim far greater representation on corporate boards and in executive suites than their recent efforts have won them so far.
As the computer industry expanded dramatically in the 1980s and 1990s, the antisocial nerd stereotype was replaced with the hyperconfident “brogrammer”. This further discouraged women both with the perception that this personality type would be more successful, and the kind of workplace environment this personality tends to breed. Chang mainly attributes this shift to the brief popularity of software company Trilogy, which perpetuated a cult-like culture of long work hours followed by extravagant parties, and Steve Jobs of Apple, who presented himself as a confident, charismatic leader.
Kimberly Lum is a junior drama major at Hofstra University.
Another major theme throughout the book is the concept of meritocracy. Silicon Valley moguls claim that they hire based on merit, but often the truth is that they really hire based on nepotism.
REGIONAL LABOR REVIEW, vol. 21, no.2 (Spring/Summer 2019). © 2019 Center for the Study of Labor and Democracy, Hofstra University
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