Devshi Mehrotra couldn’t speak highly enough of her three-month internship with Google’s artificial intelligence project, Google Brain, this summer. “Oh, it was so great,” says Mehrotra, a 19-year-old computer science major at the University of Chicago. “It was this program tailored to people with my background—women, people of color—and it was an environment that really pushed me to work as hard as I possibly could.”
But as career-affirming as her internship was, Mehrotra’s time at Google coincided with several public revelations about the way women are treated at the company. According to an internal spreadsheet of base salaries reported on by the New York Times, women are paid 4 percent to 6 percent less than men at nearly every job level at Google. The company is also under investigation by the U.S. Labor Department, which alleges widespread gender-based discrepancies in pay. (Google, which declined to comment for this article, has denied these accusations.)
Mehrotra was also at Google in August when a 10-page, 3,300 word manifesto written by one of the company’s software engineers went public. The memo’s main conclusion was that women are underrepresented in tech because their biological differences from men tend to make them less suitable for the job.
“I’ve really struggled with what to make of that,” Mehortra says. She says she felt nothing but encouragement and support at Alphabet Inc.’s Google, and yet, here was definitive proof that at least some employees believed her gender might play a role in her ability to do the job well. “I read the memo. I saw how the other women at the company were so upset. I overheard their conversations.”
It’s been a particularly restive moment for women in technology. In addition to the Google memo, there’s also been the unending debacle at Uber Technologies Inc. and another brewing at Social Finance Inc., along with sexual harassment allegations at venture capital firms including Greylock, Ignition Partners and Binary Capital. In July, 500 Startups’ founder resigned and apologized for “being a creep.”This adds up to more than a social or legal concern for tech companies. This fall, many will offer jobs to their best summer interns, hoping to secure them as employees after they graduate. As female computer science students weigh their career options, their decisions may rest on more than just job title and salary.
“The good news is that I don’t know anyone who’s decided not to go into computer science or tech because of this,” says Emma Pierson, 26, a data scientist currently earning a Ph.D. in computer science at Stanford University and who has worked at the genetics company 23andMe Inc. “That said, the degree to which a company is known to have a gender problem will absolutely guide my career decisions.”
That’s something founders and executives may not fully understand. Silicon Valley firms claim to want more women; many of them are enthusiastically funding science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) programs for school-aged girls, hosting all-female hackathons and launching internship programs tailored to women and minorities, including the one Mehrotra participated in at Google. But only 18 percent of computer science graduates are women (at Stanford, the number is higher, at 30 percent) and if a significant number of them eschew a company because of its bad reputation, there won’t be many left to choose from.
The dozen or so women interviewed for this story differentiated between the general aura of misogyny they see as prevalent in tech and more specific situations like the one at Uber where, former employees allege, multiple complaints of rampant harassment and retaliation were routinely ignored.
“I’d never accept an offer from Uber, ever,” says Courtney Thurston, a computer science major at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University who’s currently interning at Microsoft Corp. “I’d be very reluctant to work at Uber,” echoes Pierson, from Stanford. A spokeswoman for Uber said the company is undergoing a cultural transformation—some 20 people were fired as a result of an outside audit of previously reported harassment complaints, and the HR department is growing—and the company hopes in time people will change their minds. But if enough women feel the way Thurston and Pierson do, it’s going be hard for Uber to make good on new Chief Executive Officer Dara Khosrowshahi’s promise of a significant culture change.
Shreya Sankar, 20, a computer science major at Stanford, chose to intern at Facebook Inc. this summer, partially because she’d heard positive reviews of its workplace culture. She says she turned down an offer from Palantir Technologies Inc. over political concerns. Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel is one of President Trump’s few outspoken supporters in Silicon Valley and, Sankar says, “I’m very anti-Trump in my beliefs.”