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How Women Are Revolutionizing Silicon Valley's Toxic Culture

This article is more than 6 years old.

Suddenly headlines plastered across the internet are announcing that Silicon Valley has a problem with women in technology, but this is nothing new. In fact, women have been banding together to change the tech industry’s toxic culture well before the recent sexual harassment allegations began bubbling up.

Back in 2007, the biggest problem discussed publicly about women in tech was that there weren’t enough of us. Communities of women entrepreneurs and technologists started coming together to amplify each other’s contributions as well as pass along opportunities for jobs and plum speaking engagements.

Women began breaking up the old boys’ club by launching their own organizations to act as megaphones for women. One of the first organizations to do this was The Li.st. Launched in 2010 by Rachel Sklar (full disclosure: I was an early member). Her rallying cry of #changetheratio called out the Goliaths of the world – men and institutions – who seemingly ignored the fact that they created an all-powerful (and rich) world almost completely devoid of women and people of color.

In 2011, Girls Who Code hit the scene, teaching young women to code in the hopes of filling the pipeline of STEM jobs that we were told would pave the way for a future free of sexism (if we could code like men, we could do anything!).

2013 was the year of “Lean In” and conversations about whether individual women needed to work harder in their careers to change the system or the system itself should be forced to change, taking women and their work seriously by creating policies to support them and their families.

(Photo courtesy of Heather Cabot)

By March 2014 the New York Time’s Motherlode blog published a piece on if men could breastfeed, following in the footsteps of Gloria Steinem’s seminal piece in Ms. Magazine in October 1978 called “If Men Could Menstruate.”

Now here we are in 2017, with a serious stew of a problem brewing as allegations of sexual harassment spread throughout Silicon Valley, taking down some of the biggest tech unicorns and their funders.

On a recent panel for the Women@Forbes Boss Moves Book Club, Heather Cabot, co-author with Samantha Walravens of the book, “Geek Girl Rising: Inside the Sisterhood Shaking Up Tech,” spotlighted the women transforming the technology industry, from those like Ellen Pao and Susan Fowler, who stood up against their harassers, to Ipsy founder Michelle Phan, who turned her YouTube makeup tutorials into an empire.

Panelist Sara Chipps, cofounder of Jewelbots and also featured in the book, pointed to one of the other major challenges facing women in tech today: the misconception that to be a “in tech” you have to be “technical,” part of an elite group of diehard coders. “Did Jack build Square? What version of Uber did Travis build? I think it’s one of the biggest disservices the development community ever did. It becomes an elite system of in or out.” And oftentimes women are on the outs.

If networks like The Li.st and Women Techmakers have taught us anything it’s that by building a community, on social media and IRL, women can do anything – from tackling sexism, to teaching each other to code, to launching new companies, to writing books. And Millennials, like panelist Teresa Miller, an intern at She’s the First, are taking note.

“These Millennials aren’t putting up with what we put up with,” said panelist Christina Wallace, Vice President at Bionic and cohost on the Forbes podcast “The Limit Does Not Exist.” “I feel like that is really optimistic. They’re like: ‘You know what? It doesn’t have to be this way.’ But it requires you to go on the record and speak out and know there’s safety in numbers and know that we can change this.”

By reaching out a hand and having each other’s backs, women of all generations are (finally) claiming their rightful seat at the tech industry table.

If you’re in San Francisco on Sept. 20 join us for our Women@Forbes Boss Moves Book Club with coauthor of “Geek Girl Rising” Samantha Walravens. To RSVP and for more details email women@forbes.com.