ttung / helloworld

Companies without Female Leaders are Fundamentally Flawed

FTP

Companies without Female Leaders are Fundamentally Flawed

TLDR

Sexism persists in the tech industry. Culture comes from the top, and the only way to stop sexism and prevent future #MeToo moments is to increase the number of women in leadership positions. Add a PR at the bottom of the ReadMe with your handle as a show of support and a pledge to not interview at or take a job working for companies that don’t have women in 50% of top leadership positions. This is not a call to quit your current job, but to ensure that your next job is at a more equitable company.

Pledge

Make a PR as a show of support/solidarity. Feel free to tell your story or just sign with your github handle.

• To not interview with such companies
• To not take a job working for such companies¹

If you work at a particularly egregious offender (0-1 women at the top level) or are just excited to have an opportunity to work at a company where women’s voices are heard, there will be a networking event on October 30th. Email [email protected] for a calendar invite with more details!

If you are a company interested in attending (and 50% of your top level leadership team is female), feel free to email [email protected].

If you have data to help track the gender breakdown in leadership, please include it in your PR (or for anonymity fill out this form). Phone screens are a great opportunity to ask for this information!

If we make it harder for companies lacking diversity at their highest levels to hire talent, and easier for diverse companies, we can speed the diversification of boards and C-suites throughout the tech world. Individually our voices mean little but if we speak and act together we can force those in power to listen and adapt. We cannot let the biases of the past be written into the code that structures our future.

Background and why this matters

I worked as a software engineer at DoorDash from November of 2016 to May of 2018. While there, I both experienced and witnessed numerous acts of sexism. Some of these experiences are detailed below, in the hopes that transparency will illustrate why it is so important to push for change. The stories I didn’t personally experience were told directly to me by the by the women who did and I believe them to be true.

The majority of the situations described were reported to HR or a member of the executive team, but from my perspective little, if anything, was done to prevent these situations from occurring again.

-- Two months after I started, an engineer on my team I barely spoke with brought gifts back from his holiday trip for everyone on the team. The men received a variety of gifts including a painting and bookmarks. All of the women got face cream, except for me. I received sex dice. Each side of the dice contained stick figures engaging in a sexual activity and a description of each written in Chinese characters (kiss, spank, etc). When I asked the giver about the gift, he responded that “you have to play with your boyfriend to find out, I played with my wife last night”. I called over the product manager (PM) for my team, handed him the dice and asked my coworker to repeat what he had said. He repeated it verbatim, at which point my PM immediately put the dice back on my desk, said “I’m not touching this” and walked away. He never brought the incident up to me again.

My manager was unavailable, so I messaged my manager’s manager and arranged to meet. He agreed it was an inappropriate gift, said that other female engineers had had problems with that person in the past, and promised to talk to the gift giver. He then spent the rest of the meeting describing features of the gift givers upbringing. At the end of the meeting he promised if anything else happened he would talk to HR.

I later asked my manager if I could speak with HR directly instead of waiting for another incident She said something to the effect that, while it was my decision, DoorDash is a startup that didn’t have procedures for those types of situations yet. Instead, she said she would speak with the engineer who gave me the sex dice, eventually he set up a second 1:1 to apologize. Shortly after he was assigned a female new grad to mentor. This was not the only time DoorDash assigned someone who had been reported for harassment to mentor a new female employee.

A month later, following Susan Fowler’s letter describing her experience at Uber, the DoorDash general counsel, sent out an email essentially saying he didn’t want us to be like Uber. Taking him at his word, I met with him. He seemed genuinely concerned and set up a meeting for me with the head of HR for the eng team. Both the HR representative and the general counsel assured me that DoorDash did have a sexual harassment policy — they seemed to be implying that my manager (and her manager) simply didn’t know better.

-- Our old office was a block from a strip club called Gold Club. People regularly joked about going there. Engineers invited everyone to go there with them ‘for the buffet’ which one man claimed they could expense. A female intern told me at one point a well regarded male employee got her and other interns bottle service. Eventually, the VP of engineering spoke at an engineering all-hands meeting and stated that we shouldn’t discuss going to strip clubs at work. This was gratifying to hear, but also frustrating that it was something that needed to be said out loud to a roomful of adults in 2018.

-- Eight months into my tenure at DoorDash, my manager began treating with me with increasing levels of disrespect: skipping or repeatedly rescheduling our 1:1s, and dismissing or ignoring my ideas in meetings. Initially, I assumed this was my fault. Maybe I was asking stupid questions or misunderstanding the context. I found myself speaking up less and less in meetings with my manager but also in general.

Then, a newly hired female PM asked me about the dynamics she had observed in a meeting and encouraged me to discuss the issue I was having with my manager’s manager. In our next 1:1, my manager apologized for his treatment of me, pleading stress. He promised our interactions would be better in the future. For the first time in a long time, I felt hopeful.

A week later I was put on a personal improvement plan (PIP). I was completely blindsided, I think this is when DoorDash fully broke me. I felt completely betrayed and cried through the meeting with my manager and his manager, physically unable to speak up in my defense as they presented me with a list of the ‘bugs’ that had precipitated the PIP, my manager becoming increasingly uncomfortable, eventually getting up and leaving the meeting.

During the three months I was on the PIP, my manager rarely brought up my performance in most of our 1:1s. When I directly asked about my performance and what I could improve on, he provided vague non-responses. At the end of the 3 months, I was taken off the PIP with an email about my improvement and no further comments from him. His manager took the time to apologize to me in a 1:1 and told me I shouldn’t have been put on the PIP and she would have fought it harder if she had a better understanding of the situation.

-- At one point, the head of HR for the engineering organization asked me if the offsites had calmed down after the first one I attended (and I broke my arm) and we discussed an offsite that occurred a few months later. Our manager pushed us to pregame with shots, and then took us to an underground wrestling event, where he insisted on buying everyone drinks. I gave him mine back and he chugged half and then drunkenly threw the half-full cup into the crowd. In response, the head of HR said “Well, at least I have job security.” It was both the most hilarious thing I’ve ever heard from HR and deeply depressing.

-- A female engineer told me that a potential hire was condescending to her. She told me that one of the other interviewers told her he didn’t think it was a problem if a potential hire was condescending to a female interviewer, going so far as to say he thought it might have just been because the interviewer was a woman (which he didn’t see a problem with). This incident was reported to HR, which did not follow up with the female interviewer.

Qualitative data indicates this is a systemic problem rather than a personal one. When I surveyed the female engineers, 75% felt that they needed to change themselves to fit in or didn’t fit in at all. Two thirds were planning on leaving DoorDash within the next year. Based on my calculations, in 2017 DoorDash had a 38% attrition rate for female engineers compared to an 18% attrition rate for male engineers.

Please take the survey yourself or update it. Send out your own version in your workplace to help gather data on aggregate experiences and consciously create inclusive workplace norms.

When I left in May, I sent a letter similar to this one to DoorDash executives hoping they would take the opportunity to improve the overall culture. Unfortunately, in the four months since I left, they seem to have doubled down, poaching another (male) executive from Uber, losing 4 more female engineers (out of 16) and 50% (3 of 6) of women at the director level.

This attitude toward women trickles down and is reflected in how women throughout the company are treated. In February of 2017, I spotted a post on the public Bay Area Dasher (DoorDash’s term for the drivers delivering food) Facebook group about a dasher² being harassed by a restaurant manager. According to her post the manager had gotten her number from our app. I was appalled. We were masking the customer’s phone numbers, we owed our workers the same level of respect. When I brought the issue up, my PM said it wasn’t a priority. I completed the backend work anyways and insisted it was a simple client side change for the tablet. After a confrontational meeting, during which I brought up the legal implications and moral responsibilities, my PM finally agreed to prioritize client side changes in the tablet app. Unfortunately to make the necessary client side changes I had to work with the man who had given me a sex dice.

While these numbers and stories portray DoorDash in a negative light, I don’t think it is led by uniquely sexist individuals or even significantly worse than the average tech company³. I believe these issues simply aren’t that important to them and they don’t consider the investment of time and money it would take to prevent them to be worth it. I believe that this mindset stems directly from a lack of diversity at the leadership levels. DoorDash’s board contains no women and they hired their first (and only) female executive in May of this year. This lack of diversity in leadership is a problem at a significant number of tech companies.

In 2018, this is disappointing and absurd. Culture and values come from the top and it has been made abundantly clear that while many tech leaders are happy to capitalize on female labor, they do not respect women enough to put them in leadership positions or compensate them fairly for their work.

Twenty years ago, my mom’s best from college, Nikki, taught me about the glass ceiling. She was a VP at a major payments company but knew few women who made it past that level. This flew in the face of my naive understanding of equality of opportunity. I hated that was happening to her, but was so certain it wasn't something I needed to worry about. Two decades later we’ve made very little progress. Women still only hold 4.8% of CEO jobs and 10.6% of board seats at Fortune 500 countries.

We cannot let half of the population go unrepresented. The awareness, support and solidarity of the #MeToo movement will only have meaning if the fundamental power structure shifts and we can prevent this type of harassment going forward. In many cases, the perpetrators were able to stay in their position because their companies didn’t care about this behavior. This ambivalence is a cultural problem that comes from the top. The only way to prevent the MeToos of the future and guarantee women’s voices are heard and valued is to ensure we have half the seats at the table. I don’t want to feel solidarity with a new batch of women or hashtag in 2030.

We have the power to change this. Companies respond to incentives. If enough of us refuse to work for companies such as DoorDash, companies with leadership grossly disproportionate to the world, women will be hired at the top and these types of workplaces will not continue.

1. To be clear I’m not saying quit your job, just ensure your next job isn’t at a company that does not have diverse leadership at the top level.
2. Tip your drivers/delivery people in cash!
3. The more women I show this letter to, the more stories I hear. Sadly these problems are industry wide and deeply entrenched

Signatories

• MDunitz
• ttung