Two weekends ago, when I was working on client things and trying to unravel the mystery of addiction vis-a-vis Civilization V, there were some ladies getting righteous in my twitter feed. Responses to Ashkan Karbasfrooshan’s post to TechCrunch, “Who Will Be the Next Talisman of the Tech World?” had lit up my feed and set my alerts to pinging – mostly because people were DMing or cc’ing me in outrage.
Perhaps because it came on the heels of two other lists that conspicuously omitted female names, this one seemed at first glance like ‘yet another list where great women in tech are ignored.’ I’ll confess that my first response was to feel exhausted, and my second was to invade Edinburgh.
But I did eventually get around to reading Mr. Karbasfrooshan’s post. I thought it was an interesting list, this guess at who could be the ‘next Steve Jobs’.
After all, it makes for excellent link bait to write about Who Will Be the Next Steve Jobs. It supports the folklore of Silicon Valley to speculate on his heirs, intellectual, aesthetic and otherwise. Search for “who will be the next steve jobs” on google and you get 846 million results. Everybody’s doing it. I’m thinking of going as that question for Halloween, in fact.
So, who’s on the list? Scott Forstall, Tim Cook, Jonathan Ive, Larry Ellison, Marc Benioff, Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Mark Zuckerberg, Sean Parker, Evan Williams, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, Janus Friis and Nicklas Zennstrom, Mark Andreesen, and Jack Dorsey. The list is very journo- and reader-friendly – we’ve heard of these guys.
It’s my opinion that Mr. Karbasfrooshan didn’t even consider the matter of gender when he typed up this availability-heuristic-based, link-baiting listicle of guys in tech. But it’s the ‘guys’ part that pissed people off. Where were the women? Did Karbasfrooshan mean to suggest there were no worthy women in tech? Or worse, that there was no place for women in tech?
How did Karbasfrooshan respond? In the immortal words of my best friend’s ex-husband, he found himself in a hole and kept digging. Mr. Karbasfrooshan defended his post by saying, “That’s because the media remains biased against woman (fairly or unfairly). This list is largely about whom the media will turn to, most women are IMHO both put on a pedestal when it’s convenient and then viciously and unfairly attacked otherwise.” In the comments on the post, the twitter exchanges that followed, and in a follow-up post , he suggests that if Charlie Rose wouldn’t book the talent they weren’t worth putting on the list (in what I shall now and forever call the Charlie Rose Booking rule).
Because data is helpful as evidence in an argument, I did a quick search of charlierose.com. Only half of the list have ever been on the show. Jeff Bezos has been on 6 times, Larry Ellison and Michael Dell 3 times each, while Evan Williams, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Jack Dorsey and yes, Steve Jobs were on only once.
The others on the list don’t seem to have passed the Charlie Rose Booking rule; Jeff Bezos, on the other hand, practically has his own chair. So the rule seems to hold. In fact, in his follow-up blog post, Mr. Karbasfrooshan mentions a few women – “Catherine [sic] Fake, Sheryl Sandberg and Marisa Mayer.” First of all, Ms. Fake’s first name is Caterina. Second, Ms. Mayer’s first name is spelled Marissa. Third, Ms. Mayer is the only one to have been on Charlie Rose – and she’s been on three times. (So why not include her in the list if it’s really all about ‘the media’?)
It isn’t worth it to engage the kitchen sink arguments that Mr. Karbasfrooshan employs to defend his position: there aren’t enough women with enough experience, men in the media will overlook them, women in the media will overcompensate for potential perceived favoritism by excluding them, if they made it into the media we’d probably ogle their breasts, what successes they’ve had will either be criticized or minimized, oh, and tokens & Uncle Toms are bad. Seriously, he covers all that in one post. It’d be impressive if it weren’t so bizarre.
In short, the lady (here, played by Mr. Karbasfrooshan) protests too much. But he quotes Gloria Steinem several times, perhaps as some sort of innoculation from outraged women.
I leave it to any intrepid reader to find his self-defense plea tiresome, outrageous or both. Because despite the author’s apparent lack of a criteria for assembling his list (other than the Charlie Rose Booking rule), there was a common thread among those who made the list – and it wasn’t just that they are all men.
What struck me as the true criteria was that the men on this list (with a few exceptions) are inventors. Take a look at the list this way:
OS & SOFTWARE INVENTORS
- Bill Gates is a software developer who invented MS DOS and Windows.
- Larry Ellison is a database developer who invented Oracle.
- Scott Forstall is a software engineer at Apple who helped develop OSX and iOS.
INTERNET INFRASTRUCTURE INVENTORS
- Marc Andreesen invented the first web browser, Mozilla.
- Sergey Brin is a computer scientist who co-invented Google.
- Larry Page is a computer scientist who co-invented Google.
- Elon Musk is an inventor with an interest in physics & engineering who co-invented PayPal.
- Max Levchin is a computer scientist who co-invented PayPal.
- Niklas Zennstrom is a business development guy with a tech background who co-invented Kazaa and Skype.
- Janus Friis is a network developer who co-invented Kazaa and Skype.
SOCIAL WEB INVENTORS
- Mark Zuckerberg is a coder who invented Facebook.
- Sean Parker is a hacker who invented Napster.
- Evan Williams is a programmer who invented Blogger.
- Jack Dorsey is a programmer and software designer who invented Twitter.
E-BUSINESS MODEL INVENTORS
- Michael Dell turned a side business upgrading computers into a vendor license into a business model – the no-overhead PC manufacturer, selling direct to their customers.
- Jeff Bezos is a network engineer who invented Amazon.com, transforming the way you buy books, music and video content.
- Marc Benioff worked at Oracle for 13 years in sales, marketing and product development before creating his own SaaS, cloud-based business, salesforce.com.
VISIONARY ENABLERS
- Peter Thiel was a hedge fund manager and venture capitalist who saw the potential of PayPal and other start-ups.
- Jonathan Ive is an industrial designer who redesigned Apple.
- Tim Cook is an operations expert who reinvented the way Apple makes and sells its products.
All but 3 are inventors of the products their businesses sell.
And this is the real problem for women in tech. It’s not (just) that the media don’t like us or sex sells or that bias and sexism exist. It’s that we don’t have enough women who are true inventors in our midst who take their inventions and turn them into multi-billion dollar businesses… And either stay on to be CEOs or sell the business to a bigger fish.
The sad truth is we don’t have enough inventors right now, especially in the US, where enrollment in STEM degree college programs (which would at least give you the basic skills and knowledge for inventing physical things – or say, getting a job even in this economy) is down across the board.
Even those with an interest in engineering don’t get degrees – 1/3 of the list Karbasfrooshan assembles didn’t finish college, much less get a computer science degree. So it’s not required to have a STEM degree to invent something, but in terms of skills acquisition, women are poorly represented in the shrinking population of those who do study science, technology, engineering or math.
Perhaps more telling however is how few engineers rise through the ranks of existing companies to be CEOs. In most of the biggest companies in the world, STEM degrees are not tickets to the boardroom.
If you look at the Fortune 500 for 2011, 18 companies are helmed by women: a media company (Gannett), food and food production companies (Campbell Soup, PepsiCo, Kraft Foods, Archer Daniels Midland), a cosmetics company (Avon), a pharmaceutical company (Mylan), retail & wholesale companies (TJX Companies, BJ’s Wholesale Club finance and insurance companies (Guardian Life Insurance, KeyCorp, WellPoint), energy and fuel companies (Sempra Energy, Sunoco), and yes, tech companies (Xerox, Hewlett-Packard, IBM).
These CEOs are distinguished women, many graduating with honors. Most of these women went to prestigious schools. 10 have at least one post-graduate degree. The vast majority have been with their current company at least 5 years, some as many as 30. They have worked hard, risen through the ranks, worked for increasingly prestigious brands, working their way up their industry food chain. But while 6 do in fact have STEM degrees, of those, only one seems to have held a related post, the newly named CEO of IBM, Ginny Rometty. Others, despite their mechanical, civil or electrical engineering degrees, came up through operations, finance and marketing roles. Even Ms. Rometty went from systems engineer to the consulting arm of IBM, and from there worked her way up. Meg Whitman says she abandoned a math & science degree in favor of the more lucrative and employable economics degree.
While these women have much to be proud of, not one invented the product their company sells or have revolutionized the businesses they helm. They have made them profitable, made interesting acquisitions, improved productivity or efficiency or morale. But they haven’t utterly transformed the way people think about packaged food or cosmetics or pumping gas.
But here’s the thing. Most Fortune 500 CEOs are not the inventors of their products, not the visionaries, not the game-changers. So this is not a female problem. It’s a CEO problem.
Some of the tech brands on Mr. Karbasfrooshan’s list are on the Fortune 500: Apple, Microsoft, Dell, Amazon, Google. And you’ll find companies from tech booms past: H-P, Intel, Cisco, eBay, AMD, Yahoo, alongside those old stalwarts Xerox and IBM. But those companies are now starting to look more like their colleagues in consumer packaged goods, finance/insurance/real estate, media & marketing, and so on. They hire CEOs, they acquire new technology, they maximize for productivity and cut for efficiency. They answer to shareholders and the Street.
If his logic holds true, we won’t count the women OR THE MEN of the start-up scene until they have invented and grown their businesses to the size that makes lists like these – household names even Charlie Rose would book.
The companies not on the Fortune 500 created by his tech talismen are an interesting mix: Meg Whitman acquired both PayPal and Skype (Skype is now owned by Microsoft). Google bought Blogger. Best Buy bought Napster. Comcast bought Plaxo. Netscape belongs to AOL. Facebook could IPO any day, they keep saying, while Twitter continues to seek a business model. So perhaps the other future for a product inventor is to exit well and become an investor or serial-entrepreneur.
In other words, it’s about that vision thing. Karbasfrooshan didn’t omit women because of sexism and bias and discrimination – at least not directly. He omitted women because there just aren’t any playing at the level these very few guys play at who are visionaries about new products and services built out of technology. There aren’t enough women who are inventors and cultural visionaries or industry game-changers… because there aren’t enough of those kinds of people, full stop. They are, almost by definition, rare.
As ever, I come back to the wise words oft-repeated by Cindy Gallop: you can’t be what you don’t see.
Clearly there were women in the 70s and 80s who had engineering degrees but who either could not, or would not, or didn’t know how to put those degrees to use in a way that would serve their considerable talents and ambition. But it wasn’t just the women who struggled. If we’re seeing enrollment in STEM programs decline it’s because the business culture makes the case that a strategist at McKinsey, or a trader at Goldman, or a lawyer at White & Case will make the big bucks; the media culture makes the case that a pro-ball player, or a rock star, or an actress, or a reality show contestant will be famous; and both still seem to believe that nerds who invent stuff lack the necessary skills to be either rich or famous, all evidence provided by the dudes on Karbasfrooshan’s list to the contrary.
There aren’t enough of them to really break the mold – so far, these 20 guys just have cracked it slightly, proffering the exception that proves the rule (think of all the nasty comments and characterizations of Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg as unattractive or socially awkward, or of Steve Jobs as a cruel egomaniac). It’s upsetting, yes, that we don’t have more female role models in tech. But what’s more upsetting is that we have so few role models in tech altogether.
Still, Mr. Karbasfrooshan should have accepted responsibility for his words instead of playing the ‘blame the media’ card. He should have simply said, “I was talking about inventors and visionaries who are inventing what’s next, and can helm businesses and stay relevant. I was talking about Steve Jobs, not Steve Wozniak.” That criteria makes it hard to think of anyone you’d add to the list, male or female. He could have simply played it as it lay. But he took the bait he no doubt unwittingly set, and now looks like a fool or a jerk or both.
So, who are the women (or the men we haven’t heard of, for that matter) who are inventing new OSes, software that changes the way you interact with the world, social platforms that alter the infrastructure of the internet, technologies that enable new kinds of transactions and business models, boxes of wires and silicon that transmit and calculate data in new ways?
If you know who they are, please say so in the comments here, and I’ll follow up with that list.