ANH PHAM

On April 13th, we did a presentation about “Gender and Silicon Valley”. Basically, our topic revolves around the problem of gender inequality in the biggest technology vector of the world - Silicon Valley in particular and STEM field in general.

Initially, when I saw the list of topic choices that the class teams can choose, I was drawn instantly to this topic because it hit very close to home to me. I myself am studying to be a Software Engineer in the future, and I also have had some experiences working in the actual software companies for my internship. As an aspiring female software engineer, I feel that nothing is more important than telling my story as well as many other females’ and want to offer my perspectives on this topic.

The first part is all about History of Silicon Valley, presented by Rachel. She presented about the history of 80 years of the most vibrant and lucrative technology sector in the world, from the 1930s (Radio Communications) to the 2000s (Apple). Silicon Valley truly has a great growth chance for the past decades thanks to key companies such as Apple, Tesla and Facebook. In my opinion, one of the greatest inventions in the history is the Internet and Silicon Valley has used it well to the very essence of it. They innovated many products that are valuable to consumers and completely changed the scene of technology which used to be in-house and inaccessible to mass customers. Now these days we can hardly find anyone who does not use a single product from billion-dollar companies like Apple and Google, truly revolutionary companies. Listening to Rachel listing the whole timeline of Silicon Valley in our presentation was very informative and thought-provoking to us. Who knows maybe some time in the future, a new Bill Gates and Steve Jobs will come out from this very place and rewrite the history for mankind? History is meant to be preserved and created. She also presented the definition of gender equality. We have already discussed about how we should explain to the audience the very important concept we are presenting here: the explanation needs to be concise and straightforward. That is why we have decided to divide the term into two different concepts we can talk about separately, then afterwards will discuss about it as an entity (“Gender, Equality”). I think Rachel did a very good job in explaining the basic concepts and preparing this particular slide: she made a two column tables that are filled with “Men” and “Women” respectively, then listed some very crucial characteristics of each gender. She had shown us the potential reason why it is what it is - why gender equality has become an actual issue that we need to address in technology field. She mentioned that women possess certain personality traits that helped them excel in certain types of industries, and so do men. The point is a perfect transition to our second part, which was presented by Athena. The second part is about the gender equality in Silicon Valley: what is currently happening and the reason of that. The truth is Silicon Valley is having a gender inequality crisis, when only a handful of companies can be said to have enough efforts to achieve diversity in their workforces. In other words, men had completely dominated the tech industry, especially in Silicon Valley area – the famous heaven for “unicorn start-ups” (Courtney 2). Generally, women hold 25% of jobs and women earn less in income and shares than men with female-dominated companies receiving only 2% of venture capital. Most notably for me, the genetic testing and analysis company 23andMe, which has the highest proportion of women in executive positions. Of the 17 managers, eight are women. Also, Facebook has 132 female managers, 27% of all managers, the highest headcount across the list. LinkedIn is a close second at 120, or 37% (Cao 2). These striking numbers are what made me remember the most about Athena’s part because the numbers never lie, we can be aware of how serious this situation is happening over there. In addition, Athena gave convincing reasons for the issue backed up by concrete real life evidences. I am sure we have read news headlines similar to these: “Sexual harassment”, “not having flexible working hours”, “unequal pay gap”, and so on. Women engineers tend to have lack of confidence and security in the male-dominated workplaces, because the situation they’re working sadly does not allow them to feel otherwise. They do not feel safe at their own office. They do not feel respected or feel undervalued compared to their male counterparts. Not to mention, female workers are obligated to be offered childcare and maternity leaves from their employers, hence more likely to be a liability in their company’s point of view. I wholeheartedly agree with the arguments my friend had given for her part. I myself have had similar experiences in terms of feeling undervalued in my tech workplace, which I already planned to talk about it in our QnA part at the end of our presentation.

On the other hand, the third point was handled by Anh Khieu and it is all about the solutions to the problem, what the said companies had done and what we can do individually to tackle it. My take from Anh’s part is many Silicon Valley companies have been taking meaningful actions to improve the situation: applying the law requiring including women on the board, increasing equal work pay, investing diversifying gender and ethnicity, giving more benefits for parents, etc. That is the corporate work, as for ourselves individually, we also have a lot of things to do. We should discuss and talk between ourselves and with family or acquaintances, who are women, to understand one another more. Women should share, sympathize and welcome one another as we fight against gender inequality in the tech vector. Only then will we have the courage to speak up about our own struggles and challenges, to protect ourselves. Last but not least, men should also work with women in order to better the situation. They can start by starting to listen and to appreciate the women’s real hard work and contribution to the team and the company. Make them feel safe in their workplace. Make them feel valued and respected. Have basic human decency and use the right attitude when approaching or working with women. Mutual respect is very vital. Finally, we conclude our presentation by my part, which is more insights on this Silicon Valley and gender topic. I intended for my part to be able to provide more insights on not only on technology field but also on other male-dominated industries such as business, construction, etc. Starting off with a “Today I Learned” style question “Did you know… the first computer programmer ever in the history of mankind, is a woman?”, I hope I had grabbed the audience’s attention by stating a fact that not everyone knows. Yes, when you think computer programming is only for males, think again, literally the very first person to do computing work is a woman. So it is very interesting for me to be able to provide the audience with this small information. Then I went on to show my research on inspiring technology women that I personally idolize, such as Margaret Hamilton – who led the development of on-board flight software for NASA’s Apollo Moon missions (1969). After this, I thought it would be nice if I could change the tone of our presentation from negative (reporting the bad situation of gender equality in SV) to positive, by showing the audience some comparative advantages of being minority in male-dominated fields. We women have higher emotional intelligence, we stand out from the crowd, we stay motivated to succeed, we all rise by lifting others. It sets up a very uplifting mood towards the very last part of our presentation, when I gave a conclusion by emphasizing that women and men need to work hard together to shift the paradigm, and quoting a quote that I have always related so much to: “Women can succeed right now, regardless of appearances. We don’t have to wait until demands are met and wage gaps close. When we employ our strengths and build strong alliances with the right people, right where we are, we can do anything we set our minds to.” (Tryphena 3).

Last but not least, we have prepared a QnA section where we would ask the students a couple of questions relating to the topic that we have just covered, in hopes of getting a meaningful and constructive discussion out of it. My favorite question personally is the question “Has anyone ever faced sexism or discrimination in the school or workplace? If yes, what do you think about it?” Because I myself wanted to tell the story of me dealing with those kinds of issues. When I was doing an internship at a tech start up, there were a lot of times when we were in a group discussion, they would favor a male student’s opinion over mine even though we share the same qualities as interns. They get me involved, but they don’t really listen, and that’s what bothers me a lot. After going through it, I think to myself to not let this challenge define me, stop me from trying and doing what I love to do. I should keep a positive mindset and just keep working hard for what I am going after in life. I believe that always doing my best is the best solution for myself as what I plant now, I will definitely harvest later. No pain, no gain. Indeed.

In conclusion, our April 13th presentation was such a memorable experience for me in UNIV 2001 course. I got to work with three other incredible ladies and delivered a great teamwork performance. Also, I got to talk about a topic that I am very passionate about, one that is just very close to my heart. Gender inequality, as we know, is very much an on-going issue in Silicon Valley and other male-dominated industries and sectors, but with great efforts, we can definitely solve it, one at a time.

 

 

References:

Courtney, Connley. “A new report highlights Silicon Valley’s stunning gender equity gap”. Make It. Sep 20, 2018.

Cao, Sissi. “A Data-Backed Look Into Silicon Valley’s Gender Equality Problem”. Observer. No. 13. 2017

​Tryphena, Wardlaw. “Challeging and changing gender norms”. The Panther. May 10, 2015.