This is why women don’t want to work at your tech company

WRITTEN BY LIZZY HILL

Imagine the scene: You’re a young woman studying STEM on the hunt for your first job out of college. You check out a talk by recruiters at your university from a big Silicon Valley company. Onstage, a couple of guys make jokes about video games you’ve never heard of and drop references to porn. You zone out because their jokes aren’t relevant to your interests. They play a promo video for their company, and the only women featured are cast in support roles, answering calls for their male colleagues with helpful, happy smiles. The men on stage joke about all the beer pong in the office and their “work hard, play harder” culture—long hours in a frat-like environment aren’t really selling it for you. Their female colleague is busy fixing snacks for everyone and doesn’t get up on stage to talk. It’s hard to imagine yourself fitting in at the company.

Situations like those described in the above scene are actually quite common, says Alison Wynn, a research associate at Stanford‘s VMware Women‘s Leadership Innovation Lab. Wynn shared her qualitative observations last year, after she and three undergraduate research assistants attended 84 recruiting sessions at an elite West Coast university. Their goal? to understand why recruiters weren’t connecting with women. Working with Dr. Shelley Correll, Wynn and their team blended in with the students and observed sessions incognito and found that many tech companies had surprisingly gendered recruiting practices that created “a chilly climate” for women, like the one described above. Their work revealed that while there’s a serious lack of women in STEM jobs, recruiters aren’t doing enough to help address the gender gap.

Read more at fastcompany.com