'AI beauty pageants' are not the future we wanted

Historian Margaret O'Mara talks women in tech, "woke mind viruses" and 17th-century fashion

Now that I know how to make collages I really can’t be stopped. (Photos via iam_os and Multi Awesome Studio on Unsplash)

There has arguably never been a good time to be a woman or girl on the internet. But even by that chronically and depressingly low standard, the near future of female life online looks … unpleasant. 

Gender-based harassment surged during the pandemic, and has apparently remained high ever since. TikTok’s algorithms, per a recent academic study, disproportionately amplify “misogynistic content.” Generative AI, meanwhile — widely and breathlessly feted as the future of technology — is terrorizing both high school students and female celebrities. (That is, when it’s not perpetuating more PG “regressive gender sterotypes” around things like household labor and conventional beauty.)

I don’t know about YOU, ladies, but I’m unenthusiastic about this future. So unenthusiastic, in fact, that in a recent fit of reportial pique I Googled the share of women working in artificial intelligence.

I expected a small number; the number still shocked me. As of 2021, it was roughly one in five. How the hell, I wondered, is that still the case? And what happened to all of Silicon Valley’s shiny, #MeToo-era promises to ~lean in~ and ~diversify~?

For answers to these and other questions, I reached out to Margaret O’Mara — a brilliant writer and historian who for years has illuminated the modern flaws and foibles of Silicon Valley by studying its past. O’Mara is, among other things, the author of the 2019 book The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America¹ and the chair of the American history department at the University of Washington.

We talked about the long and surprising legacy of women in tech, Harvard classes for business wives, the politicization of Silicon Valley and what 17th-century fashion trends (!) can teach us about modern AI hype. If any of this interests you, stay tuned: I’m working on a related freelance piece. Until then, plz enjoy this conversation, which I’ve edited lightly for clarity and length.

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I apologize in advance for this question, because I know you literally wrote the book on the history of Silicon Valley and I’m basically asking you to sum all that up in just a couple minutes. But I do want to start at the beginning.

Can we talk a little about the role that women have played in the U.S. tech industry historically, and how that evolved over time? 

Women have been part of the tech industry workforce from the very beginning. Software programming originally was a feminized job, it was mostly women doing it — and that was a reflection of a time when the hardware was considered most valuable. The knowledge work was building the hardware, building the things, and programming was kind of a rote clerical task. 

But over time, it was recognized that software programming actually requires a lot of knowledge work — and a lot of skill, both tacit and trained. There’s still a massive number of women in the computer industry in the ‘70s and the ‘80s, but as the industry grew, their numbers got fewer and fewer.

It’s funny, because we think of tech as this future tense, reinventing and disrupting everything, but it's partially a reflection of these really, really deep historical patterns. The technology industry has its roots in engineering, and in the 1950s and ‘60s, computer engineering and electrical engineering programs did not admit women, generally. Business schools in the 1950s and ‘60s did not admit women. Harvard Business School had a class for wives on how to take care of their businessman husbands. But that was about as close as women got. 

Wait, first off — was that a real class? [Reader, it was!]

And secondly, I’m curious when and why the technology industry diverged from the rest of American business on the subject of gender parity. Today roughly half of entry-level business-workers are women. But the figures are still much lower in Silicon Valley. 

Right, you would think: “Okay, well, that was 60 years ago. Why does it matter?” Part of the answer has to do with the way that Silicon Valley in particular has grown: this whole concept of the intergenerational passing of the baton, which Steve Jobs once alluded to, where you have one generation of operators and financiers and venture capitalists advising the next one. 

There's actually this really strong connective tissue between the people of the Mad Men generation and the present. You know, these guys at semiconductor companies where the management culture was super, super competitive and hyper masculine and where, frankly, being an asshole was not seen as a problem. That generation gives their know-how on how to build and grow a company to the next generation of founders. In the process, they’re also identifying who those founders are. And so, in many cases, they’re looking for people who will fit into this tough, sharp, super-aggressive, sharp-elbowed and to some degree risk-embracing tech culture. Those are very culturally masculinized qualities. 

There was briefly quite a lot of activism and momentum to change this, right? It started in the mid-2010s, when Ellen Pao — who readers will probably know best as the former interim CEO of Reddit — sued a previous employer, the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, for gender discrimination. Then it picked up during #MeToo, when it came out that some major tech companies had paid off men accused of sexual harassment.

A number of companies promised sweeping changes. But what became of all that? Where did it go? 

Sure, I mean — women in tech have been complaining about this for a really long time. It just wasn't out in the open. But then all of a sudden a lot of people were talking about this real gender problem, and it went against the kinder, gentler capitalism that some big tech companies had marketed. So then you have these big companies that decide they need to do a better job of diversity, there needs to be more action taken. 

That being said, I really don't think that a lot of the power players felt strongly that this should be a priority. There was an impatience, a sense that this is a diversion from the main act. Again, I don't think tech is alone in this, but many people in tech, in particular, have internalized this notion that it doesn’t matter where you’re from or what your gender is, you just need to do good work, and people who do good work get promoted. 

I think that kind of belief in a technical meritocracy becomes part of the push back against the DEI/Lean In movement. And that also has a long history behind it, because this industry in the beginning was made up of people who really weren't given a shot in corporate America. When you look at the first generation, in the ‘50s and ‘60s, all the semiconductor guys were very, very middle-class, if not poor. But the engineering talent and their aggressiveness got them where they were. 

It seems like more than a mild conceptual disagreement on meritocracy, though. A handful of really prominent men in tech have taken really strong positions against DEI. I think Elon Musk has called it racist and sexist. And outside of that really sensational, attention-seeking stuff, a lot of big tech companies, including Google and Meta, downsized their DEI programs.

I think what changed pretty clearly, in the last couple of years, was the tech downturn. That seems like it's in the rear view mirror now, but a year ago, everyone was talking about layoffs. So all of a sudden, there was this sense that “we need to get back to basics here. We need to engineer well and ship product. Part of our problem is that we've gotten too distracted by all this other stuff.”

It's the broader politics, too — it’s amazing how political the big tech leaders have become. And I mean, to be clear, my book is all about how they were secretly political the whole time, and how they’ve always been involved in government policymaking and have been the beneficiaries of policymaking from the very beginning. But even I, who have made it a big focus of my research to show those connections, am stunned by how politically outspoken so many tech leaders have become. Particularly in the past three years, with all this anti-DEI, woke mind virus type stuff. That is super interesting to me.  

What do you attribute that to, that politicization? Like, is it part of a wider anti-“woke” backlash? Or are there other factors that are unique to the tech industry and environment?

Well, I think Silicon Valley has always championed itself as a disruptor — they’re iconoclastic, they’re thinking differently. But there’s always been a bit of groupthink. When you have a few prominent tech leaders speak out, that gets the flywheel going. And people like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen are not only outspoken, but they have real power and centrality to the power structure of Silicon Valley. There’s this interesting anti-institutional attitude that so many of these people have that has become intensified.

They also exist in what I call the other tech bubble — it’s this bubble of wealth and immense success and geographic concentration, where all these people spend all their time in the same spaces. They’re all on the same podcasts, they all have their fan bases. 

You know, before I became a historian I worked in the White House. And I feel like that Oval office phenomenon, where it’s hard for a president to get a sense of what’s actually happening because he’s surrounded by all these “yes” people, also happens in Silicon Valley. It’s people who have gotten very successful and pretty insulated, but it's interesting seeing the specific ideological trajectory. Someone like David Packard or Bill Hewlett — they were maybe quietly aggrieved about things, and they might grumble about big social spending or high taxes. But to present oneself as something of a public intellectual is just so unusual. And not only in the history of tech, but in the history of American business. 

This has been so fascinating, thank you. I just want to ask you one more question and then I’ll let you go, because I know we’re a little over the time we had scheduled.

But I’m curious about how all the trends we’re talking about — the gender inequity, in particular, but also the extreme wealth you mentioned, the insularity — how does that filter down into the products and services coming out of Silicon Valley? Like, what technology are we not getting, as consumers, because of the world these people live in? Or what are we getting that perhaps we shouldn’t be? 

It definitely filters down. But it filters down in ways that are both known and not known. There's the ongoing problem of products being built for certain types of consumers and not for others, or markets being missed. And then I think there's this bigger philosophical issue around the tech industry’s growth orientation and its push for the “next big thing.” It’s always bigger, bigger, bigger. And with AI, we’re seeing this mindset manifest at the biggest scale ever, as companies chase these next-generation models and AI-enabled software and products. 

This actually relates to my wacky idea about beaver-skin hats. I’m still working it out. [Ed. note: We spoke briefly about beaver-skin hats at the start of the call, before I hit record!] But the development of the fur trade was driven in great part by demand for beaver-skin top hats in Europe and the U.S. in the 19th century. And that fashion was driven by the abundance of beaver in North America. Beavers were so abundant that they built out these trapping networks and just kept going and going and going until the beaver was nearly extinct in most places. Then, when there were no more beavers, people suddenly figured out how to make top hats from silk instead of fur. Like oh, it turns out that’s totally possible! 

I get a beaver-fur hat vibe from some of the AI conversations now. These companies have so many resources: so much money, so much talent, all these massive data centers, the ability to create incredibly powerful models. And so they are creating those models, and the market is growing to meet them. 

But it’s not always apparent if we really need this technology, in every case, or if anyone’s asking those questions. The attitude is much more “go, go, go,” techno-optimistic, “more is going to be better, more is going to be more powerful.” And that’s partially a function of this relatively small, insulated community of very wealthy and powerful people who all talk to each other.

They’re all very smart and very engaged — I’m not saying they’re dumb. But it’s a pretty small life raft, and there are mostly men on it: The AI industry has an even sharper gender imbalance than tech as a whole does. 

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Further reading

• “Why Is Silicon Valley So Awful to Women?,” by Liza Mundy for The Atlantic (2017)

• “Why Can’t Tech Fix Its Gender Problem?,” by Margaret O’Mara for MIT Technology Review (2022)

• “These Women Tried to Warn Us About AI,” by Lorena O’Neil for Rolling Stone (2023)

• “‘There Is No Standard’: Investigation Finds AI Algorithms Objectify Women’s Bodies,” by Gianluca Mauro and Hilke Schellmann for The Guardian (2023)

• “Challenging Systematic Prejudices: An Investigation Into Bias Against Women and Girls in Large Language Models,” by UNESCO/the International Research Centre on Artificial Intelligence (2024)

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Weekend preview

I’m currently reading a lot of news about my favorite newsletters, because something’s in the air, I guess? Here’s Embedded on Deez Links, NYT on Today in Tabs and (deep cut, but IYKYK) CJR on the Journo Jobs Substack. If anyone wants to profile this rag-tag operation, I am … profoundly available.

Until the weekend! Warmest virtual regards,

Caitlin

1. Disclosure: This is an affiliate link that will take you to Bookshop.org. V curious about this, never tried it before!