Sophia Chung is waiting for the day Silicon Valley has more female role models than horror stories — It will make recruiting a lot easier.
Facebook Inc engineering manager Chung often fields questions from prospective hires alarmed by what they hear and read about, like what women heading startups have said about venture capitalists making advances at pitch meetings, or the crass e-mails Snapchat Inc’s chief executive officer apologized for sending four years ago when he was in college.
Facebook has had its own boys club associations to deal with.
“There’s been this Facebook meme of ‘brogrammers,’ the fraternity guys drinking a lot of beer,” Chung, 33, said.
So she makes a point of stressing that the world’s largest social networking site, “of all the companies I’ve been at, is welcoming to women engineers.”
She cites herself as a great example: She just had a baby and Facebook awards a new parent US$4,000 in “baby cash,” offers four months of paid leave and subsidizes daycare.
“Every young girl that you talk to, a conversation can steer them toward a great career,” Chung said. “It can change the numbers a little bit.”
The numbers might scare people off: Men hold almost 70 percent of all jobs and more than 80 percent of engineering positions at major technology companies. So it is important to focus on the positive, Airbnb Inc engineering manager Surabhi Gupta said.
She likes to point out that more than half of the company’s technical interns last summer were female, some of whom she recruited at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference.
“We need to make sure to help get women comfortable in this industry,” Gupta, 31, said.
She herself doesn’t feel isolated at work, because the heads of product and design on her team are women too.
Persuading more women to choose Silicon Valley can mean overcoming the drumbeat, which has been intense recently.
In the past month, a feminist video game critic canceled a speech after an e-mail threatened a massacre if the “craven little whore” appeared; a woman journalist who covers the industry wrote about receiving a sex toy, K-Y jelly and raw oysters from a startup founder; and when Advanced Micro Devices Inc hired its first female chief executive officer, it paid her less than her predecessor. (The company said the exiting chief executive received incentives common for a new employee that his replacement, who has been at the company for years, would not get.)
IAC/InteractiveCorp, which owns mobile matchmaking application Tinder, began a search for a new CEO after a female executive sued, alleging harassment and discrimination. The company declined to say if there is a connection.
“Sexism does exist,” Chung said. “But when those stories come out, it actually hurts women who want to join the industry.”
Every new recruit can help change the culture, she added, and the only thing to do is to counter the awful examples that grab headlines with evidence of what really matters: “It’s a great career for women.”
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