Name: Brotopia
ISBN: 9780735213531

Brotopia

Reveals how male-dominated Silicon Valley became sexist despite its utopian ideals and decades of companies claiming the moral high ground, and how women are finally starting to fight back against toxic workplaces and sexual harrassment.

What Hacker News says

padolseyNov 2025

Some randoms I remember : )

  - Thinking in Systems - by Donella Meadows
  - Dead Aid - Dambisa Moyo
  - Day of Empire - Amy Chua
  - Mistakes Were Made (not by me) - Caroll Tavris 
  - Brotopia - Emily Chang

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guiambrosJun 2022

> And it doesn't have to be someone's fault or society's fault. It just is.

I really have a problem with this line of thinking. It puts the blame on women for "not being interested in tech", and gives all the tech bros a free pass for their atrocious behaviors, and the toxic culture in tech.

If you never heard countless stories of abuses suffered by women in tech, including microaggressions, being talked over in meetings, passed over on promotions, pay inequality, company parties at the strip club, sexual harassment, conscious and unconscious biases, "you should smile more", etc, you're not looking hard enough.

Rinse and repeat this over 4+ decades, and you get your "1 in 25" ratio. Unfortunately the situation is so bad today that it will take a few decades to fix the systemic issues, before we start to see a better balance. But the first step is to recognize we have a problem.

If you're interested, there's many books and serious research in this area, but one I really liked is Brotopia, by Emily Chang. When you know what to look for, it's hard to unsee.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Brotopia-Breaking-Boys-Silicon-Valley...

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Barrin92Sep 2020

>My explanation for this? In general, men are simply more interested in computers than women.

to a degree possibly but the extreme skew in engineering disciplines makes that hard to believe. In almost all other fields with a gender bias that could be put down to preference there's usually still a sizeable amount of the opposite sex. In psychology where women outnumber men it's like 30-70, even women in the national guard on active duty are more common than in CS departments. Even other adjacent STEM fields like maths usually look more diverse than CS.

And in the workplace compared to academia it arguably gets worse. Just from personal experience in software development jobs, I put a lot of it on culture. Just look at how 'boys summer camp' like startups are run, with frequent stories of drinking at the workplace and stories that sound more like out of a fraternity than an actual job. Emily Chang wrote a good book about, 'Brotopia'

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/01/brotopia-silicon-val...

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malcolmgreavesJun 2020

Men don't receive a constant barrage of sexual misconduct. Where did you get this idea?

There's countless data and evidence showing instutionalozed sexual discrimination from men against women. If you want an enlighting read as it pertains to tech, read Brotopia. Or read about how Uber only bought leather jackets for it's men SREs and explicitly chose to not buy the same jacket for their women SREs.

Or simply ask any woman about an instance where a man pressured her for some sexual act. Or made them feel unsafe or uncomfortable. Or where a male boss of theirs made sexually discriminatory or otherwise hostile remarks against them in a workplace (dismissing a woman's perspective on a topic definitely counts here).

And really - where is your perspective that "women only want exceedingly wealthy, attractive, muscular men" come from? Listen to straight women when you ask them or read what they wrote on what they want in a romantic partner. I am pretty sure this idea you have isn't actually reflective of what women want, at all. This really reads as what a straight man thinks a woman wants.

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guiambrosAug 2018

> the facts are that 1000 people (0.000003% of the population) are killed by police annually. 24% of those killed are black

Per 2016 US Census [1]:

   > Black or African American = 40,241,818 (12.6%)

Now compare with the number of people killed by the police in 2017 by race [2]. The math is left as an exercise for the reader...

If you really believe that under-represented minorities are not at a major disadvantage in our society, facing multiple layers of explicit and implicit discrimination against them, then, in my opinion, you're part of the problem.

> the lack of female representation in tech...

Likewise, if you took the pseudo-science [3] by disgruntled engineers for granted, and believe that the lack of female representation in tech is due to some ridiculous genetic predisposition, ignoring 50+ years of biases and stereotypes, on top of open sexual and moral harassment, then you're part of the reason for the divide. It's exactly this kind of thinking that creates gender stereotyping and legitimizes the systemic sexism in our industry.

If you're interested in understanding more about the true root causes of our gender disparity, a good initial read is "Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley", by the amazing Emily Chang [4]. No pseudo-science required.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Demography_of_the...

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de...

[3] https://www.recode.net/2017/8/11/16127992/google-engineer-me...

[4] https://www.amazon.com/Brotopia-Breaking-Boys-Silicon-Valley...

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eternalcodeJan 2018

This is all real. I’ve been to some of the parties she mentioned. I hope that people read Brotopia and see that what Emily Chang is deriding isn’t Burning Man, renegades, or the like.

It’s how a predatory part of the startup population exploits these kinds of environments to use and hurt people.

I’ve gotten a lot of questions recently why I sort of dropped off the radar a few years ago in going to a lot of VC/founder rage scene. This is a big part of why. I don’t want me or the people I care about to be exposed to this.

And to be honest, I don’t know how to stop it.

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