Why Silicon Valley isn't a meritocracy | Margret O'Mara | Big Think

Silicon Valley wants to be a meritocracy. Here’s why it’s not.

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Silicon Valley prides itself on rewarding good engineers, regardless of gender or race. But that may not actually reflect reality.

The Valley started out as a Mad Men-esque place, where women in particular were excluded. That culture still persists in the form of venture capitalists funding many of today's startups.

Furthermore, many in Silicon Valley fail to acknowledge how becoming a startup founder is often restricted to certain groups of people and how more diversity can ultimately result in a better product or service.

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MARGARET O'MARA

Margaret O’Mara is the author of "The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America." She is a professor of history at the University of Washington, where she writes and teaches about the history of U.S. politics, the growth of the high-tech economy, and the connections between the two.

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TRANSCRIPT:

MARGARET O'MARA: The Valley culture, the business culture -- you know, the Valley, we think of it as a very present tense, future tense place. But I see the business culture as the product of 70 years of a way of running companies and learning about how to run companies. And if you go back to 70 years, 60, 50 years ago, the worlds of engineering and of finance and business management were almost entirely male, right? Very, very few women. Women were not in many cases allowed to major in some of these STEM disciplines. Like, department chairs would use their prerogative and say no, you can't take this class. And so out of this entirely male world comes a culture that gains its strength in part because you have like-minded people who are both working together and socializing together. The semiconductor industry, which was really the first big home-grown industry in the Valley, was famously incredibly competitive. You had to have a really thick skin to kind of get ahead, there. There was unvarnished criticism. There was an expectation you would work incredibly long hours. Part of what made these companies work was the fact that these men had wives at home, who were taking care of everything else so that they could just focus entirely on work. So those women are really important to the Valley, but they're not in these companies. And it became a really difficult and challenging place for the few women who were there, the few technical women. One of the people I write about in the book is a woman named Ann Hardy, who was a programmer who starts at IBM in the 50s, works her way up to management. Constantly frustrated by the sexism she encounters. At one point, she's managing this whole team -- all-male team -- and she discovers that every single man on her team that she supervises is making more than her. And then IBM gives her a raise. And some of them are still making more than her. So then she quits. She ends up working at a time-sharing company in Palo Alto, and builds the operating system for really -- she's the central technical person for this whole operation, building the operating system for the computer that's at the hub of this time-sharing network. It's so critical, that afterwards, the CEO of her company, who is, I think, a pretty good boss. But he does confess to her later that if I had known that this operating system was going to be so central to our business, I never would have hired a woman to do it. It just was -- it was unimaginable. So you have this world, this Mad Men world, right? Of the 60s. And this is the world that so many people who came up in this industry, they go on to become the venture capitalists, the founding partners, of these iconic venture capital firms that are picking the winners of the next generation. And again, there was this really fierce belief that this was a meritocracy. And in many ways, it was. Early Silicon Valley didn't really care who your daddy was. Didn't care if you came from money or didn't. There was all these incredible stories of people from really modest backgrounds, from the middle of the country. A lot of guys from Texas and the Midwest, end up in the Valley, because they don't have connections. They don't have ways -- other options to get in some managerial job at a Fortune 50 company. They're just smart engineers. And so there was this assumption that, OK, if you're a good engineer, then that's all we want. And you still hear that, today. People like, you know, if you're a woman, or you're a person of color, and you're a really good engin...

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