Kim Malone Scott, who headed operations and sales, left in April 2013 Anna Christina Douglas, who headed product marketing, left in August and VP of Operations Ruchi Sanghvi left the company last October. The company has been expanding its hiring yet the number of women in management is declining.

That’s 6.3 percent in an industry in which 18 percent of the hiring pool is women.ĭropbox recently completed $250 million of funding at a valuation close to $10 billion according to the Wall Street Journal. It is rumored to be heading towards an IPO. Dropbox, for example, had only 9 women in its 143 person engineering team as of October 2013. By 2011 this proportion had dropped to 18 percent. Most technology firms refuse to release gender and diversity numbers. Indeed, the trend is getting worse. In 1985, 37 percent of computer science undergraduate degree recipients were women. This causes women to self-select out of technology jobs. Subtle cues in the physical environment of companies such as Star Trek posters and video games lead to women being less interested in being a part of an organization when compared to a neutral office environment. Whitney cites research which shows that a strong and pervasive stereotype of computer professionals as devoid of a social life alienates women.

As an example, the superhero concept is going to resonate much more with men, as demonstrated by the demographics of the superhero movie attendance. Telle Whitney, CEO of Anita Borg Institute, which is working on getting more women to study computer science and have more women fully engaged in creating technology, says its research shows questions such as these cause women to get screened out more often than men.

They fortify the male-dominated, frat-boy culture that Silicon Valley is increasingly being criticized for. They hurt the employer by limiting the talent pool. Such hiring practices also disadvantage women. Join today’s leading executives at the Low-Code/No-Code Summit virtually on November 9.

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