The Backlash Against Women in Tech Is in Full Swing

Ej, what have you been seeing in terms

of how like the political shifts

have been playing out for women?

Oh, I mean, everything's terrible right now

in virtually every sector.

It's really just swung so far right

that over the past decade or so, you know,

since I started reporting

that it's kind of unbelievable to think about.

And there are lots of different reasons for that, right?

Like, there's the political climate,

and, you know, the cultural climate and algorithms

enabling manosphere content and all of those things.

I mean, I am just sort of astonished

by just how bad it's gotten.

When I started out my career, like I said before,

like I used to get online harassment all the time

just by virtue of being a woman on the internet,

writing publicly about sexism and the internet.

And I used to get anonymous death threats,

and now people will just like write their full names.

And the last email I got, a guy included his LinkedIn.

And that seems to be like the real shift for me

is just that people feel so emboldened to say things

that they would otherwise have said

hiding behind a veil of anonymity,

just using their full chests and attaching their real names.

Yeah, I think more often what I probably experienced,

I'm sorry by the way, Ej, that you went through that

and you have gone through that consistently.

I think more often

it's that people sort of assume you're dumb

if you're a woman writing about tech

and whether it's because you're writing about something

highly technical or complicated

or trying to better understand it through your reporting.

Or because you say something

that ideologically doesn't align

with the way perhaps men in a certain type of workplace

have just kind of developed this, you know,

this sort of aggressive culture.

And if you challenge that in some way as a journalist,

then you're sort of automatically dismissed.

So it's more that, I think, and I think that's very real.

And, you know, what we're experiencing as journalists

is kind of reporting from the outside

as much as we're trying to get into these cultures.

And so I can't say exactly what it's like for women

working in the industry right now,

but based on my reporting within the industry,

it's not great either because there's been this acceptance

of bro culture increasingly over the past couple of years.

And that, to get back to Sandra's original question,

is sort of that pendulum, the backlash

swinging hard in the other direction.