Emily Chang

I did a non-scientific survey of my two sons. My oldest has a computer science degree and now is in his second job after graduation, and working in the automotive supplier industry. My younger son is a sophomore at a nearby university and also pursuing a computer science degree.

I surveyed the two of them about gender make-up of the companies my oldest son has worked for and the classes they have taken in college. It pretty much dovetails with Emily Chang's stats in Brotopia which is pretty disheartening. My oldest son's first company, an automotive company, has a larger share of female engineers than the second company he is working for, which is an automotive supplier, but it is still not great..roughly 25% in his division. This second company has about 100 employees, of which 7 are female. 3 of the women are in HR and only 4 are engineers.

My younger son's college experience so far is that the percentage of men to women in his computer science classes is about evenly split...50/50. This is a university in mid-Michigan near the capital. My oldest son's college experience in a university in the upper peninsula of Michigan was a lot more uneven. Computer science classes at most had 15% women in attendance.

My amateur, non-scientific survey doesn't provide anyone but me with any great revelations but it does show that what Emily Chang points out in Brotopia is still happening despite efforts to rectify the gender imbalance. My younger son is currently looking for an internship for the summer...it will be interesting to see where he ends up and what the gender situation is there.

Brotopia was another eye-opening book for me. I picked it up because it was a pick of the Now Read This book club and I am glad I did..they have been consistently suggesting books around inequality, immigration, the environment, etc...all current topics that need to be discussed.



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This isn't new information if you've been reading the news, but Chang puts it together well. She starts with how we've built the bro stereotype of coding--that it's innate, that boys are better at it, and that we've kept women out. And from there she examines how companies either recruit or fail to recruit women, the myth of meritocracy in Silicon Valley, and the toxic culture in tech and venture capital. There are a lot of interviews with women in Silicon Valley and she does highlight when there have been successes--Google's early efforts to recruit women, for example. Bonus fun: Peter Thiel comes off even worse than usual. Good read.… (mehr)