At today’s Techcrunch Disrupt diversity panel, the conversation was dominated by the topic of “women in tech.” Panelists Sukhinder Singh Cassidy (of Joyus), Tracy Chou (of Pinterest) and Isis Anchalee (of OneLogin), have each come to the forefront of this topic, and as moderator Alexia Tsotsis mentioned, the last time that the annual conference hosted a similar discussion was in 2010. The main reason? No women wanted to be on a “women in tech” panel. But with today’s talk, and last week’s Dreamforce, it looks like that sentiment might be shifting.
On Friday, San Francisco cloud computing company Salesforce closed Dreamforce, its annual 160,000-strong software conference. Just as much a pep rally as networking and sales opportunity, the gathering included special guests ranging from Stevie Wonder to Goldie Hawn, and included a first-time cruise ship (or “Dreamboat”) to accommodate overflow out-of-towners.
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But this year, another first came to the 13-year-old conference: A handful of events dedicated to “Women’s Leadership.” There was a conversation hosted by Re/code executive editor Kara Swisher on “Advancing Women in the Workplace” with Salesforce chairman and chief executive officer Marc Benioff and cofounder Parker Harris; a “fireside chat” with actor and activist Patricia Arquette and Equal Rights Advocates executive director Noreen Farrell; and a keynote in which CBS’ Gayle King interviewed YouTube Susan Wojcicki and The Honest Company founder Jessica Alba.
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The theme was a conscious choice from San Francisco’s largest tech employer to lead the charge toward improving male-female employee ratios and wage disparity at Salesforce and, the hope is, in Silicon Valley.
In his talk with Swisher, Benioff said that when he started the company 16 years ago, he made a major mistake by not making this a priority in his company. “I had no awareness around this. I had been at Oracle for 13 years, and it was not a part of the narrative,” he said. Benioff called for other large Bay Area companies and their ceos to set the example. “It can’t be HR’s issue,” he said. “It has to be something that we’re leading with.”
Themes throughout the day covered a range of issues at the forefront of popular conscience.
Arquette famously accepted her Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for “Boyhood” by calling out for equal wages for women — a political statement, she later said in her dressing room, that the academy frowned upon. But, she said, she’s always been a troublemaker.
During her talk, Arquette said that she’d had to walk away from projects in Hollywood “because they were unwilling to give me parity to my male colleagues in some way.”
“We are lying to our daughters when we tell them they can do anything, because girls are going to crash their heads on a glass ceiling,” she said.
In April, Benioff, who is becoming one of tech’s more high-profile feminists, announced that he had begun evaluating the pay of Salesforce’s 16,000 employees to compare male and female employees, and that he had given some women raises.
Farrell called this audit “incredible.”
“Not a single company thinks it doesn’t pay people equally until they do an audit,” she said.
Later during the keynote, Wojcicki and Alba continued the conversation, with key moments turning to the numbers of women in tech and to maternity leave.
The latter has come into increasing focus, as Netflix announced a full year of maternity leave while Yahoo ceo Marissa Mayer shared her recent pregnancy and her intentions to return to work two weeks after giving birth.
Alba announced at the event that she’d be increasing maternity and paternity leave at The Honest Company to 16 weeks.
Wojcicki, who had just come off maternity leave from having her fifth child, said that having a longer maternity leave at Google, where she was the company’s first pregnant employee, helps retain female employees. (They offer 18 weeks.)
But, she said, the lack of more women working in tech was both a retention problem and a pipeline problem. “Computer science has a reputation and it’s not completely accurate,” she said. “I think it should be a required course for everyone when they go to school, just like biology and chemistry.”
Finally, King asked each to share what they knew “for sure.” Wojcicki provided an optimistic sentiment that reflected the theme: “I know for sure,” Wojcicki said after a moment of thought, “that technology is changing our lives in ways we can’t even imagine. It has to become more inclusive — and it will.”