Women in Tech (w/ Kara Swisher)

It's blind spots all well, being clear and blunt about what she thinks the responsibilities of the industry and its leaders are well here that by numbers alone, the tech industry looks like and often is, a man's world. Women hold roughly of leadership positions in tech companies, and the percentage of women earning computer science degrees is about half of what it was. So we're arguably losing ground in the fight for an equitable future for women in the

tech industry. And then they're funding. Last year was a record breaking year in terms of interricopital funding, and yet women only led startups received just two percent of total investment dollars, the lowest share since And when you look at women teamed up with men, the percentage jumps to fifteen point six percent. Still, that means that more than eighty percent of funding went to all male teams, and

of course numbers don't tell the full story. There's the lived experience of being one of the few women in a male dominated field. The sexism, the man splaining, the exclusion, the harassment, the feeling and the knowledge that your ideas aren't being taken seriously, and the pressure of feeling like

you're representing an entire gender. That said, there are certainly bright spots female founders, investors, inventors, engineers, and CEOs, including Chard Dubai, the CEO of the Match Group, a dating and tech company, who will hear from later this season. Kara Swisher has probably talked to more tech leaders, over more time and more places than well anyone. She's been described as the most feared and well liked journalist in

Silicon Valley. Among her many accomplishments, she was a reporter for The Washington Post in the Wall Street Journal, and she co founded the tech news website Recode. She now co hosts the podcast Pivot for Vox Media, and she writes an opinion column and hosts the podcast Sway for the New York Times. So just before I ask any questions, I just wanted to say thank you, thank you very much. And I hope since this is Women's History Month, we

could start with a little bit of your history. I don't think that many people listening may know that you didn't first start off as a kind of internet or tech reporter. No, well, there wasn't the Internet. I'm old. There wasn't the Internet. Yeah, so can you talk about like your first jobs in journalism, You're time at the Washington Post, and then how you the decision to take this big leap into the future. Well, like I said,

digital wasn't really existing. There were obviously computers had been introduced, but it wasn't widespread. It wasn't a consumer item really, it was just starting to become one. I had an Apple to see at college, and then there was the iMac at some point, but I had I hadn't been very technical at all, and I didn't have an office job. And where I started work, we didn't have typewriters. We

had these large computers. I can't remember the system, but it was not the most consumer friendly experienced the way it is today. Then I worked at the City Paper, in Washington, which is a free paper. And then I got a job in the mail room at the Washington Post. And I had been a stringer at the Washington Post in college to from Georgetown and it got me into

Columbia Journalism School. So it was sort of this weird back and forth with the Post, but eventually I ended up the Post as a reporter, and I covered retail if you lived in which you did live in Washington.

There was a half family track Auto Dark Drug. They owned a beverage thing, and they were a very famous retail family, and so I covered them and they were fighting, and I covered Heckender and Woodies and all these things that were just local retail essentially, but at the time it was under siege from a very technically literate company called Walmart, which was eating everybody's lunch because they used technology so definitely in terms of how to stock stores,

and I was super interested in and I was like, oh, that's interesting. And then I was going out with someone who lived in the former Soviet Union and I communicated over these Internet things and I was fascinated with it. So that was your first experience with the internet, was communicating with ding. Yeah, exactly, and it was very it was super hard to do. And then suddenly there was a lot of commercial stuff and they were all in Washington because one of the hubs of the Internet was

in Washington. There's May East and May West. If tech people are so funny, and so May East was here. And then suddenly there were all these Internet connection companies. And when I was at the Post, I did a fellowship at Duke University and I started downloading books onto the system, and I was fascinated with it, and I messed it up once. Do you remember the first book

you downloaded? Calvin and Hobbs Cartoon Collection because I wanted to see something visual, And the guy who was running the computer center, and I was mad at me because I did something wrong. They mucked up to say, you know, it would take time. Everybody couldn't be on at once. It was sort of like having one single spicket. And I kept saying, I downloaded a book into my computer. You believe that? And he's like, yeah, whatever, And I was like, no, no, no, this is really a big deal.

And I kept sort of focusing on it, and I kept being really interested in At the Washington Post, we had a big cell phone, essentially a suitcase phone, but it was portable and you could take it with your car. I'm the only one who used it. Really, I felt like I was. We had these things, these k pros, these portable computers that we'd put couplers on a on a telephone and send stuff. And I was like, this

can't be the end of it. So I started to get really more interested in that than the stories I was writing, and I kept talking about it, and David Ignatious was my editor at the time who's now writes about national security and other things. He was like, if you're so interested, you should write about it. And I was like, okay. And I there was a company called A O L And that was the first commercial consumer oriented company, and it was here in Washington because of

the location close to May East. And I met Steve Case when he had a very small amount of people and was riveted instantly. I understood that it was a shift, a major shift in communications, just like the printing press or television or radio. And I had been a student of that, so it was like, Oh, this is going to change everything. And I was I think I saw it way before other people. And did you expect it to change your life too. Yes, I was totally interested

in it. Being at the Washington Post, the big thing was to cover politics, and I was like, I'm not interested at all in politics, which was at Washington Post. It was like, what do you mean we want to give you this pollet. I was a good reporter, and they wanted me to move there, and I was like, I couldn't be less interested. So I said, I'll cover this, and I started covering a o well. And then it

extended to Amazon, which was a very small company. Jeff showed me around this sort of crappy little space and and then I met the Yahoo guys and Mark Andres and he was very young who created the browser. And so I was riveted instantly because I think I understood what it would do to media. I was particularly obsessed with classified and about delivery and subscriptions and delivery of information and so so I had plenty to write about. And I just I have not gotten tired of it since.

And Karen, listening to you recite the founders that you met, they're all men, Yes, indeed they were are Was that something you were aware of at the time. It's just like man after man generally white man after white man. Oh. Absolutely, something I talked about a lot, and I talked about it for years, and I believe it has to do with why we're having so many problems too. One time someone said, what do you think the real reason it's

so much problematic around misinformation and safety? And this I said, because the people who created the modern internet never felt unsafe a day in their lives. They just weren't unsafe people. And so if you don't feel, if you have a lack of feeling about safety, you don't think about building it into a system. Right. I don't think it's cruel or maleve one. It's just it's not the way they think. You know, I have sons and they don't feel unsafe.

They don't in America. They don't have things coming at them all the time. When they built these tools, they didn't think people would use them in a malevolent way necessarily, But once it started happening, they needed to do something about it, and Karat they still haven't. No, they haven't, no, no, no, they didn't want to get dragged into this. That's what you have to understand, is, you know, the the analogy I use is a city they've created a city and

they don't care about the police. They don't want to give you firewater, you know, everything, stop signs, everything that makes a city, okay, like anything police, anything with standards, and they're like, we don't want to do that, but we're taking all the rent via information via data. But you know, you're on your own. They don't want to take responsibility and and they're also are unqualified to do so, and I think they sense that. So I definitely was

struck by. It was me and a lot of men in a room essentially, and then the women that were there. There are some women technologist absolutely and very critical ones. There's several a Apple, for example, in other places that were there in the early days, but they kind of got flushed out. You know. It was an interesting thing to see. And often they were in positions of marketing. And as anyone who covers technos, if you're not in the tech part, you ain't no one, right, that's the part.

You have to be a techie to have power in technology companies. That's always true in other companies for sure. We'll be right back, stay with us, okay, I think about these different data points whenever this conversation comes up or admittedly when I catalyze it, which is that I got my first computer from Santa And how old are you? I was seven? Okay, Santa Claus brought me a computer. What was it? I was a commodore. What did you do on it? What did you actually do on it?

I played math games, basically interesting because I was nerdy, and all right, that felt like a great way to be a nerd. And it was all though, that kind of weird pulsating green color. I remember when I got my next computer. I think when I was twelve, and there was color. Yeah, probably an apple, right, yep, I just like, this is amazing. But in seven more than a third of the computer science graduates in our country were women. And then when I went to Stanford in

the late nineties, it was still about a quarter. And then when I became a parent seven half years ago, it was like, right, So we've seen this deterioration. And the deterioration also obscures the raw number challenge, because clearly the denominator has only grown from the mid nineteen eighties of computer science programs, and yet the percentage of women. Let me ask you, why didn't you go into computers. If you were a math person, what happened? Yeah, I

think about that, characause I loved math. I was good at math. I had parents who were excited that I loved math, was good at man. My calculus teacher in high school, Mrs Goldman, was a woman and was like tough as nails but fair and made learning calculus fun. I always have been interested in math as a utility for public health and medicine and biology, and so it never even occurred to me like I didn't make an affirmative choice to not go into computer science, although I

did make an affirmative choice to go to Stanford. I did have this sense in the late night the font of many of these places, many of these companies were all started so curious. I was like, what is happening in this place called Palo Alto, which from like d C felt like this like very far away land. But you didn't do it. We were in exactly the right place at the right time to move into that end,

I know, And yet it didn't appeal to me. And then I wonder was I hard coded in ways that no pun intended like to still think that wasn't for me. I don't know. Something happens to girls. And this has been studied a lot at a certain age and it's

probably just past ten years old. It's it's largely like early early middle school, yes, where it's they suddenly move away from it, and it's either because they don't feel but they belong, or that they're pushed that way, or that there's a stigma for being a geek that is way too much harder for women than men. But it's certainly apparent that something occurs. Now. Lots of women get through, for sure, and a lot of a lot of those

women end up going into medicine or the sciences. You'll you don't find that as much in the sciences in all the difference. I mean, I teach at the School of Public Health that Columbian have many, you know, women colleagues who are epidemiologists, hardcore research scientists, economists, lots of everything, and so it's a really interesting thing. Is it then it's is it the atmosphere? Is it the you sort of?

It's everything I think, And you know, Maria Clawe, who runs Harvey Mud, has a lot of interesting observations of why that is. And one of the things she told me once was that there's always one man who makes it impossible for a lot of people, one particular man in a computer us. It just really denigrates and insults and it just creates a really bad atmosphere. And it often not just women. It leaves out different people so that it tends to favor a certain kind of man.

I wrote a piece once called the men and No Women of Facebook, and all I did was published their pictures and say, hey, this guy does this, and they got mad at me. I was like, I'm just putting that's your pictures of those people. And I did the same thing years later, which I found even more disturbing, which was the men and no Women of Internet company

boards right Web two point o company boards. Now, in that case there's plenty of women qualified to go on boards, but still Twitter was a particular example of that, which was they had ten men of the same type. It was,

it was the same type of person. And when I wrote this piece about them, I wrote, I think the single best lead I've ever written, and I should have retired right after which I said, on the board of Twitter, which has three peters in a dick, there are no women and half the usages by women and third of the usage by people of color. This kind of thing, and the CEO Di Costlo is very funny called man, He's like, that's a really funny lead. I'm like, I know,

I made a penis joke. But he's like, that's unfair, because you know, we have standards. Started with that we have standards thing, And I'm like, you guys right now are in a terrible position. So how is it that you found ten men of the same type. It's mathematically impossible and I'm not even good at math to understand why how that happens, and all of them can't be qualified,

and that you can't find qualified people. And so what I began to understand when I started to talk to a lot of tech people, they always use the word standards. They never apply it to people like themselves. They only

apply it to women and people of color. The default is that people like themselves have already met the standards, whatever those standards are, whatever they are, And there are certain standards, absolutely, but there are interesting new ideas around blind hiring and all kinds of things, and it will

be interesting to see what happens after the pandemic. Because people have been working at home, so it creates a very different environment, and tech particularly has been pushing the idea that you don't need to go in the office. I think that will be interesting to see what happens when that takes hold over a long period of time. And how do you think work from home in the tech industry has affected women or what have you observed? I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I mean, they can't

create these little bro fests. And I hate to use that term, I try not to, but it really is that if there's just no other way around it, you create centers of comfort. Right, there's centers of comfort with people you're comfortable with whether they're going to go on ski trips or whatever they all do. But there's a culture around it where people either belong or don't belong. And so if you don't have those things, how do you create linkage? Is I don't know. You really can't

grow it up on zoom. It can't be. It can't. I don't think you can, or maybe they will, but it's harder. I think it'll be an interesting because it will last in tech, It will certainly last. The people will be remote, they'll be living elsewhere, they'll be creating things in other communities and tech will lead the way on that for sure. It's it's interesting, like reflecting on the challenge of creating those sort of bro hubs on Zoom, I think it would expose how purposeful those kind of

bro hubs often are. You can't pretend that it's just like incidental that you all happened to converge around the ping pong table or you all happen to have a beer after work together. Yes, yeah, it'll be interesting to see what happens, especially with remote work where people you know, a lot of Silom Valley people are moving out of Silm Valley right There really was a very tight culture there, and if it's not there from a social point of view and a business point of view, you wonder how

things develop or how they fund things. That's where it all starts. As far as I'm concerned, is that the number of people that get funded women it's just dropped again quite considerably. And there's money everywhere. There's money everywhere. We're taking a quick break. Stay with us, since we've talked so much about the dearth of women in tech. And while you very much are a journalist, you are one of the most recognizable women in the tech conversation.

Do you have young or maybe even not so young women who reach out to you for advice all the time. What questions do you get? One of the things they seem to be asking is will I suffer if I take a leap? I think a lot of especially a lot of women, tend to be nervous about changing because they have a certain achievement somewhere and they don't want to jump. The other thing they tend to do is take what's offered them rather than what they want to do.

Men are very much more directed. I want to do this, and I'm going to do this. I often say where would your ideal place to work? How would your workplace look like? What do you want to spend your days, your limited days on this planet doing? I always use that word so they get a sense of, you know, time as a chicken, and so I do find women are I wouldn't say more risk averse, but there's something that they don't think they can I don't whether it's

a sense of responsibility. Obviously. Family questions come up a lot still with women. I mean the idea that we don't have universal childcare or universal treakare everything are agnomous. State is not having universal paid leave or universal paid early childhood education, and it's crazy. It's so bad for the economy, like all that stuff, And so I think women are still carry the burden of that more than men, very clearly, And that's no question. I think it's it's

going to be interesting to see. I think the pandemics and the yield all kinds of interesting trends around the workplace, how people operate with each other at home and where you work from and how the hours you work. And I think some of it does favor more involvement by women. More flexibility creates more ability to achieve. I think in

a lot of ways. Where do you think though will be in a decade or whatever the way quantum of time is in technology, I guess broadly, but also for women, do you think there will be more women in leadership position? Whether from a management perspective or a board perspective. And if the answer is not, how do we try to change that prognostication? Well, what's interesting is what's the technology going to be? Like what's happened is not what's going

to happen. There's all this movement around cryptocurrency. Is quite a lot of women involved in cryptocurrency, which is more men, but a lot more women than you usually see some of them. So a lot more women than say like web two point now, yes, a dent there, but not a lot, but more for sure. There's a lot of women in robotics, which I think is a big area, a lot more women like significantly not an AI though for AI as man man man man man, which is

which is critically important. There's a lot more women involved in, you know, all the mechanical engineering stuff, which I think will be interesting. Food is another area of food innovation. You might see climate change. There's all kinds of really interesting climate change companies, and I do run into more women in those. I call it chimate change tech. But there's whether it's carbon capture, food or water one of the two people that did the m RNA vaccine for

fives or a lot of women. And of course that's where a lot of stuff is going to focus in on in the future, is health and stuff like that. So yeah, I would hope that there's lots more opportunities as it spreads out. That said, cars mostly men like autonomous cars, and space. It's a guy thing, as you know from Jeff Bezos is Rocket, but in the big areas AI and autonomous transportation, men everywhere you look. And as technology moves from just tech only to every company

is a tech company. It's an opportunity, I would guess. So the question is where does it go, who makes the investments, who gets funded? And so whether it's cryptocurrency or a new media stuff or almost anything, it's hard to find women leaders. Yes, and so Kara, is that a pipeline challenge? Is that an investment challenge? Is that a platform slash like amplification and challenge? And how do

we try to accelerate? It's an investment challenge because if you don't have women at the beginning, if they're not if you're not a founder, if you're not on the cap table, that really is it. And then you have some women who now have a lot of money, like Mackenzie Bezos or Melinda Gates. Melinda is making a ton of investments via her firm, which is called Pivotal Ventures

in Women Backed Enterprises. She's specific and she feels like it's an economic opportunity for her, and it's not charity it's not trying to be you know, woke or whatever. She's doing it because she thinks it's missed opportunity by a lot of men. And she's investing a lot in the childcare economy, right she is. Why not because we all need it, so hopefully for those of us that are our parents who have little girls with big dreams, we can try to at least insert that possibility. You

have girls, right, I do have a girl and two boys. Yeah, it's interesting. I just had a daughter and she's too and she's so confident. And it's really interesting because these boys and they're very confident of themselves and I she's so confident, and I'm wondering. I'm sort of waiting for that moment where something happens, and I'm paying a lot of attention to it because I did see that moment with my boys. They grew up in San Francisco. One of my kids loved the color pink, and he had

a pink hat he work forever. Loved it, and then he got a message somewhere that he shouldn't like pink. I don't know where it was, but he definitely started to get these gender things. And I was like, how did that happen? It is what it is. And I wasn't like doing the whole feminist rain dance around it running like that, but I was sort of riveted. And and and so when you have a girl, you have to

wonder what is her like. She's very mechanical, Like you can tell she looks how things are made, and I'm like, will she go that way or will she think she should be in the soft you know what I mean? Not not? I don't know. Is it going to be interesting to say for sure? Well, Kara, the last question I want to ask is just also about like other women covering tech, like how do you see your journalistic colleagues. Do you see challenges that younger women have covering tech

or they also able? Is the way you clearly have been able to puncture through the bro like culture. There are a lot of probably more men covering tech than women, but some of the really top level ones are all women, whether it's Nicole pearl Roth who covers cyber technology, tailor Lawrence who covers internet culture. She's amazing, Yeah, and she has certainly had to deal with some of the ugliest parts of the Internet. Those assholes. It's interesting they never

come from at me. They come at her, and I was always interested in that, Like, what do you think that's about? They're frightened of me and they don't feel like they're frightening, But I love them to come at me. Come will come on down. Boys, Let's see what happens in that fight. But also Jessica Lesson, she has the information, which is great. She started her own company and she's really does an amazing job. There's a lot of women

in prominent roles in technology coverage. Zephanie Rule very great business reporter, but covers a lot of tech. There's quite a few, and they're in positions of authority and just really killing it all over the place. That's great to hear. Is there one statistic or fact about women in tech that gives you hope to end on an optimistic note, No, I'm sorry. The numbers are down. I don't know what to say that. The numbers are down. Numbers are done.

And so for anyone listening, what could we do to then try to I guess, create that hope and to try to change the numbers. You know, it has to be a bigger thinking about diversity in general, not just women. It has to be people of color, age, different backgrounds, including conservative and liberal, you know what I mean. Like, there is definitely a monoculture there. And another thing I always say is that they think it's a meritocracy. It's a mirror autocracy, and maybe that's not the best way

to build these things. The more voices that are involved in it, the better for all of us. Yeah, all of us, for all of us, because we're the ones that use them and this we're the ones affected by them. And then of course Congress has to act and do something about it, legislate. Biden's made some good moves of hiring people like Lena Cohn and some others, but they've got it. Congress has aggregated its responsibility here so well.

And the tech companies continue to say they want to be regulated, even though they clearly want to write their own regulations. But it is time, I think, for for government to take its responsibility and to govern in this way. All right, here's a good one. I am very heartened by people like Senator Klovich R And Lena Cohn and some other women who are at the forefront of this, even Elizabeth Warren, who tends to lecture these guys on taxes. But the fact of the matter is the tax system

is the one. They're just following the rules. Margaret Vestiger in Europe. But I think there's a lot of women in positions of power that are significantly important. So it's really kind of interesting that a lot of women are at the lead of this stuff and they're not being cowed. They're not yeah, they're not taking their foot off the off the pedal, no way, Karen, thank you so much for everything, including your time today. Thank you, Chelsea. You

can find Kara Swisher on social media at Kara Swisher. Yeah. In Fact is brought to you by I Heart Radio. We are produced by a mighty group of women and one amazing man, Erica Goodmanson, Mart Harr, Sarah Horowitz, Jessmine Molly, and Justin Wright, with help from Lindsay Hoffman, Barry Laurie, Joey Sukuban, Julie Supran, Mike Taylor, and Emily Young. Original

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