The two days of Mark Zuckerberg’s interrogation before U.S. congressional committees often seemed like one of those long weekends where you spend most of your time explaining to your mother how the TV remote works. Why do ads for chocolates stalk me across the internet, Senator Bill Nelson wanted to know, as though chocolate sorcery was the way that Russians would win in the end. How does Facebook remain free for users, asked Senator Orrin Hatch, who was perhaps yearning for the halcyon days of slate pencils.
All the while Mr. Zuckerberg sat there, nearly immobile, rarely blinking, as only a man whose wealth was increasing astronomically by the minute could (Facebook’s stock soared during the hearings, increasing his net worth by US$3-billion. Take that, haters.) He sipped water as if he were someone who had never seen a water glass. “It genuinely looked like Zuckerberg sent a robot version of himself,” Trevor Noah said later that night.
But that’s the point, isn’t it? He’s the robot king, the geek emperor, the very modern model of a social-media mogul. Everything we have been trained to believe about the proper appearance of a tech genius is contained in Mr. Zuckerberg’s aspect: He is white, male, expensively educated, awkward, ego-driven and he does not necessarily play well with others. And that’s the heart of the problem – a huge problem for Silicon Valley and for our collective futures, and one that was barely touched on during the hearings.
“In tech’s earliest days, programmers looked a lot different,” Emily Chang writes in her new book, Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys’ Club of Silicon Valley. In the postwar period they looked like women, because many of them were women. Cosmopolitan magazine called them the Computer Girls. Programming was not a particularly high-status or lucrative job, until the computer boom in the 1960s and 70s; with the rise in status and pay, women began to be squeezed to the edges of this brave new world.
Hanna Barczyk/The Globe and Mail
One central factor in the exiling of women from the profession came in the mid-1960s, Ms. Chang writes, with the introduction of a recruitment test for programmers that revolved around one dubious claim: successful programmers didn’t like other humans or social interaction; they preferred things to people. This personality profile became a self-fulfilling prophecy in the industry, and one that favoured men, who were thought to be more interested in gears than gabbing.
Ms. Chang, who is the also the host of the TV show Bloomberg Technology, draws a line from this beginning to Silicon Valley’s current sorry state of gender and racial employment equality: Well, it’s not a sorry state if you’re a brogrammer, but it is if you’re a woman trying to work as an engineer (only 20 per cent of technical jobs at Google are held by women, 19 per cent at Facebook and a whopping 23 per cent at Apple), or a black or Latino employee (who make up 3 per cent and 5 per cent of the work force at Facebook, respectively.)
Companies led by women received only 2 per cent of venture-capital funding in 2016, Ms. Chang notes, and female programmers earn 72 cents to a male programmer’s dollar. The retention rates for women in the tech industry are often dismal, perhaps due to women not wanting to hang about in workplaces where sexual harassment is second only to Ping-Pong as an occupational distraction.
Why is this important, setting aside the whole issue of fairness? It’s important because our lives are increasingly defined by algorithms and artificial-intelligence programs, which do not hatch all neutral and bias-free in some shiny incubator, but bear the fingerprints of imperfect creators who may not even be aware of their own blind spots. We’re only starting to become aware of those blind spots: the facial-recognition technology that only understands white faces or the image-recognition software that sees a kitchen and immediately wants to match it with the word “women.”
“We face a near-term future of autonomous cars, augmented reality, and artificial intelligence,” Ms. Chang writes, “and yet we are at risk of embedding gender bias into all of these new algorithms.”
And, of course, racial bias, too. In 2016, a high-school senior named Kabir Ali demonstrated that when he typed “three white teenagers” into Google, he got Hallmark-worthy images of kids laughing and playing sports, but when he typed “three Black teenagers,” he got pictures of police mugshots. Technology is never neutral and the meritocracy that Silicon Valley claims as its main fuel often just means “bonded over beer at the same Ivy League grad school.”
As he sat answering questions at the congressional hearings, Mr. Zuckerberg had a cheat sheet on his desk to remind him of his talking points. Under the heading Diversity, his notes said, “Silicon Valley has a problem and Facebook is part of the problem.” And “personally care about making progress; long way to go [3% African-American, 5% Hispanics].”
When two members of the Congressional Black Caucus brought up Facebook’s racial homogeneity as a problem that needed to be addressed, Mr. Zuckerberg found a use for the talking points: “From the conversations I have with my fellow leaders in the tech industry, I know this is something we understand and the whole industry is behind on, and Facebook is a big part of that issue,” he said. “We care about this not just from the justice angle but because we know that having diverse viewpoints will help us serve our community better.”
He said this as if it were a revelation, a startling memo that someone had delivered from Menlo Park, Calif., that very morning, when in fact the whole tech industry has known for a decade about a problem that will have increasingly dramatic ramifications. And yet, the hills of Calfornia continue to ring with the mantra, “We need to do better.” In the bitter words of one of Ms. Chang’s sources, a female engineer who’d worked at Google and Slack: “This failure is still in progress.”