Asian women fight to crack through Silicon Valley ceiling
At tech companies’ executive level, they are underrepresented
Sysamone SAN FRANCIS CO Phaphon felt lucky when, after quitting her job in health care to start a tech company, she was approached by an investor at a pitch competition.
After the investor lured her on a business trip to New York, she said, she realized the offer to help her raise money was a ruse to try to sleep with her. “I wasn’t the only woman at the pitch competition. There were other pretty women there,” said Phaphon, founder of FilmHero, a Web app for independent filmmakers. “I was the one he hit on because I was Asian.”
By most measures, Asians and Asian Americans are well- represented in the tech industry, holding 41% of jobs in Silicon Valley’s top companies.
Though Asian women hold fewer of those jobs than Asian men, they’re employed in far greater numbers than other women of color, which might lead some people to assume they do not face the same levels of discrimination that African Americans and Latinas do.
Research from Joan C. Williams, a professor at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, shows that Asian women report experiencing as much bias, and sometimes more, than other women.
Asian women are the demographic group that is the least represented in the executive suite relative to their percent-
age in the workforce, according to a study of major San Francisco Bay Area tech companies by the non-profit Ascend Foundation.
Fighting to crack that leadened combination of glass ceiling and bamboo ceiling is the subject of Ellen Pao’s tell-all memoir out Tuesday.
Reset: My Fight for Inclusion and Lasting Change details the legal battle against her former venture capital firm that captivated Silicon Valley and brought attention to discrimination against women, in particular Asian women. Pao accused Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers of not promoting her because of her gender and retaliating against her for complaining. She lost on all counts.
In Reset, Pao recalled going to work for Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers’ John Doerr as his chief of staff. He picked her, she said, because he liked the idea of a “Tiger Momraised” woman. He had two chiefs of staff, the other one a man who focused mostly on investing, while she was asked to help with email, speeches, even babysitting his daughter and other “less desirable work.” “There are certain things I am just more comfortable asking a woman to do,” Pao said Doerr told her.
“Some of us lose and some of us win,” Pao wrote. “What’s important is that we’re telling our stories and standing up for ourselves and for each other.”
That’s what some women have been doing since Pao filed her lawsuit in 2012, putting their careers on the line to call out companies and individuals they accuse of discrimination. In Silicon Valley, it’s called the “Pao effect.”
Software engineer Tracy Chou pressured some of technology’s most powerful companies to release annual demographic reports on their workforces, revealing how few women and people of color they employ.
Female entrepreneurs, many of them Asian, stepped forward to expose the predatory behavior of tech investors who sexually harassed women, leading to those investors’ resignations and promises from the tech industry to reform.
Phaphon said the example set by Pao and others gave her the courage to tell her story. “Only if we are willing to speak up will we be able to change the stereotypes,” Phaphon said.
Asian women working in the tech industry said they are frequently pressured into traditionally feminine roles. They get stuck with office housework such as organizing team lunches and with grunt work such as fixing software bugs.
Getting fewer “stretch” assignments that advance their careers, they said they encounter more bias on performance reviews and get overlooked for promotions and pay raises. When they assert or promote themselves, they said, they’re penalized.
“Asian women face a double whammy of racial and gender discrimination,” said Bo Ren, who worked as a product manager at Facebook and Tumblr.
When pitching investors, Asian female entrepreneurs said, they’re told they speak too softly or they should bring on a male co-founder. They are mistaken for other Asian women. And, they said, they get propositioned all the time.
Beatrice Kim sued her former employer BetterWorks and its then-chief executive officer Kris Duggan in July, claiming he assaulted her in a sexually suggestive manner during a company retreat and permitted a hostile work environment. After the lawsuit was filed, Duggan said he would step down as CEO to take the role of president.