Really interesting at the beginning (and to a lesser extent, the end,) but the middle was full of what felt like a lot of gossip. It is definitely a problem that these men behave the way they do, but I was more interested in hearing about the forces at play that created the uneven playing field than I was in hearing about the misdeeds of particular Silicon Valley players.

It is an interesting, important topic however. Glad I read it.

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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Mandatory reading for anyone who uses technology aka everyone. ( )

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. ( )

Worth a read, and has a lot of interesting information from interviews, but also had a pre-existing agenda and is unsupported (and I think wrong) on a good number of points.

The biggest problem I have with this book is repeatedly conflating "generic bad Silicon Valley management" with sexism. Companies which double in size every year often have these problems. They seem worse in companies which are sitting on "money faucets" to the point where they don't have harsh competitive pressure.

The chapters on the "elite sex parties" and such were pretty LOL, and the implication that this doesn't happen in the gay part of SV as well was silly.

The most interesting part for me was more insight into just how dysfunctional Google's management and culture has been over the years, in multiple and contradictory ways.

The author is a reporter, not an entrepreneur herself, but I still think the argument for work-life balance and that startups can all be successful while letting people work as little as they want, flexibility, etc. is off the mark; while there are famous executives like Sheryl Sandberg who are able to do this in some cases, it's because of the efforts of a lot of other people without this level of flexibility. I don't think 90 hour weeks forever for everyone are the solution, but there are times and places where exceptional work is warranted.

Overall, this is a good book -- just don't accept it uncritically, particularly for anything beyond the message of "sexism in SV is a problem". ( )