Issues like Google’s, on the other hand, have yet to become the deal-breaker that Uber’s might be. Many women say they’ve already encountered similar instances of sexism at school or in their own fledgling careers and aren’t surprised to see them flare up at major companies, too. “I’ve encountered people who believe some of what was in [the Google memo],” says Julia Di, 21, who’s studying electrical engineering and computer science at Columbia University and has interned at both NASA and Lockheed Martin Corp. “Even my freshman year coding class had a lot of guys who were condescending.”
Women’s willingness to pursue careers in spite of rampant sexism shouldn’t be read as complacency. One Brigham Young University student refused a job offer from a small startup because it didn’t have a formal sexual harassment policy. A Concordia University student says she judges a company’s fairness to women by how robust its parental leave policies are. Students compare notes about which summer internships are better than others. “I have friends who interned for other companies and had bad experiences,” says Nina Tchirkova, 19, a sophomore at Olin College of Engineering who interned at Google this summer. “We all talk.”
Several women also expressed concern that focusing too much on Silicon Valley’s sexism will do more harm to their careers than good. They’re tired of being looked at through the lens of gender. “There were parts of the Google memo that I understood,” says Mehrotra, the Google Brain intern. “I can see how guys would be frustrated by special mentorship programs for just women, how it could make them feel that we were considered different.” Alexis Lee, 17, a high school senior who’s already taking computer science courses at a community college in Cleveland, has started eschewing all-girl coding camps in favor of the co-ed ones because they’ll more closely resemble what she’ll encounter in college and beyond. “I actually think having exposure to this when I’m young is going to help me in the long run.”
Rosalind Stengle, a sophomore computer science and economics major at University of Wisconsin at Madison, has done the same thing. “Sexism in tech is a problem; we know it exists,” she says. “But I go to these women-in-tech meet-ups sometimes, and all they do is talk about this stuff. I’m like, ‘OK, but when can I build a robot?’”
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.