By Peter Lawrence Kane
Newsweek’s current cover story, “What Silicon Valley Thinks of Women,” follows two twenty-something female programmers, Lauren Mosenthal and Eileen Carey. They’re fighting to secure VC funding for a startup in Silicon Valley’s “bro community — a culture that has been described as savagely misogynistic.” Name-checking the misdeeds of the “socially stunted boy-men that the money men like to finance,” the article highlights in great detail the barriers that keep women out of power.
Since there are few women high up the tech chain, Mosenthal and Carey conceived of a peer-mentoring platform called Glassbreakers that aims to correct gendered power imbalances. (It launched last week, with 1,500 enrollees). It’s compelling to watch two capable, confident women wrangle seed money for something overtly feminist from the Y-chromosomes at Y Combinator, especially when they’re going against men who say things like, “Women don’t look like winners.”
But there are omissions. Strangely, Sheryl Sandberg, whose Lean In empire has the same objectives in mind, gets only two glancing mentions. What the article further overlooks is whether or not Glassbreakers wants to see more female CEOs because it’s the right thing to do or because diversity at the top is good for the bottom line. Their focus is on opening up one specific career track. But if Silicon Valley achieves gender parity in the C-suites, will customer-service, the bottom rung on the tech ladder, continue to be a pink ghetto?
It’s very important not to let a boys’ club that thinks it’s a meritocracy go unchecked any longer, but as Susan Faludi wrote of corporate feminism, “Sandberg’s admirers would say that Lean In is using free-market beliefs to advance the cause of women’s equality. Her detractors would say (and have) that her organization is using the desire for women’s equality to advance the cause of the free market.” There is no examination in this story of that possibility.
And then there’s the cover image. Newsweek is on a roll with the provocative covers (remember that weird thing with the asparagus?), and it only recently came back from the grave, so this is a magazine that obviously wants to stay alive. But shoving a giant cursor up an eyeless woman’s red dress to draw attention to sexism feels like a mixed message at best. She’s still an object, and anyway, workplace sexual harassment is not the same as being denied the opportunity to advance because some powerful techies still think girls are icky.
[Via Newsweek; Photo courtesy of Newsweek]
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