I can’t think of many graduation-gift books that aged as poorly as Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg’s 2013 #girlboss manifesto on female corporate empowerment. Take a seat at the table, Sandberg told women, and assert yourselves more — then equal wages and advancement will surely be yours.

Maybe that’s true in some industries, but it hasn’t panned out in Sandberg’s native tech. The share of women in high-tech roles has barely budged in two decades, despite the invocation to … lean in. The percentage of women in tech leadership roles is also trending down, as is the share of venture capital raised by female founders.

Meanwhile, the industry’s loudest voices — almost entirely men — have soured on diversity and post unironically about “woke mind viruses.” Even its run-of-the-mill tech bros have embraced cybertrucks, reactionary politics and carnivorous diets.

Eleven years after Lean In came out, in other words, Silicon Valley has — alarmingly, and increasingly — never looked more macho.

“It’s so obvious that there are problems, that there are massive power imbalances in the tech industry,” said Marianne Cooper, a sociologist at Stanford University who helped Sandberg compile research data for Lean In. “But when you look at the day-to-day tech workplace, it doesn’t look that different” from when the book published. (A representative for Sandberg said the former Meta COO was too busy to comment.) 

That Silicon Valley is a boy’s club is news to no one, of course. When I raised the topic with Kara Swisher, the doyenne of tech journalism, she sounded almost derisive: “I don’t think that’s a startling revelation in any way,” she said. As Swisher was coming up, in the 1990s and 2000s, few women ever reached the C-suite. That’s presumably how we wound up with institutions like “booth babes,” the bikini-clad models who accessorize many a tech trade show, and reckless, risk-taking ethos like “move fast and break things.”

But in the early and mid-2010s, you could at least imagine a Silicon Valley where women held sway. From 2008 on, Sandberg was essentially the second in command at Facebook, where she was later joined by other female executives including Marne Levine, Maxine Williams and Jennifer Newstead. Marissa Mayer, formerly of Google, took over at Yahoo in 2012. Elizabeth Holmes, not yet a felon, was well on her way to becoming the country’s youngest self-made female billionaire. “Women who run tech startups are catching up,” proclaimed one 2013 headline in Bloomberg, reflecting a sense of widespread optimism for the industry’s future. 

This was the golden age of the “girlboss,” well before girlboss — rather like “lean in” — became a loaded term. At the time, I was a 24-year-old reporter covering digital culture and the tech industry, and I recall this sense of boundlessness — like anything was possible.

Sure, the internet could be a brutal place for women: Certainly Twitter and Reddit harbored their share of sexist, hateful trolls. But the arc of the online universe also seemed to bend toward justice, as tech companies pledged to hire more women and people of color — particularly in the wake of #MeToo — and newly promoted female executives promised to clean up both their platforms and their fratty corporate cultures. 

Many of those promises have, however, amounted to little. By some metrics, women in Silicon Valley are actually doing worse now than they were five or 10 years ago.

Today, just one in four tech executive roles are held by women, according to the Women Business Collaborative, an advocacy group. Sandberg herself stepped down as Meta’s COO in June 2022, then left the company’s board roughly 18 months later. Several other women who clawed their way to tech’s upper rungs have also left their posts in recent years, including YouTube’s Susan Wojcicki, IBM’s Ginni Rometty and Pinterest’s Françoise Brougher. The most prominent female CEO in Silicon Valley today is arguably X’s Linda Yaccarino, who often seems to function largely as Elon Musk’s corporate sin eater. 

Those disparities are particularly glaring on the industry’s latest frontier, artificial intelligence. Last weekend, a headline in the tech industry mainstay The Information declared that “women in tech are sounding an alarm”: “Funding for women founders is evaporating. And AI mania is encouraging tech to backtrack to its bro-tastic past,” the article goes on. 

To be clear, many tech companies and executives do continue to strive for diversity and gender parity in their workforces, and women appear to have made some incremental gains in entry- and mid-level positions. Still, women — as well as Hispanic and Black workers — remain significantly underrepresented in tech compared with the workforce as a whole, according to a new Equal Employment Opportunity Commission report.

“Other parts of American industry have achieved more gender parity and shifted their culture,” said Margaret O’Mara, a historian of Silicon Valley at the University of Washington. “But these bro-y, male-dominated spaces, where certain types of behaviors and connections are rewarded, and other personalities aren’t — tech has kind of remained stuck in that.” 

“Stuck” might actually understate it — some high-profile tech bros have doubled down. Musk, in particular, exemplifies a new male archetype for Silicon Valley, and not one that will help its gender problems. For decades, the tech industry fetishized a certain type of eccentric, antisocial, iconoclastic male genius: the brooding, behoodied geek who could code for days, given enough bulletproof coffee and prescription stimulants. Today, those men are cucks and betas; pity the poor nerds. The ideal man in tech, as embodied by Musk, now lifts weights, wears a cowboy hat and (allegedly) asks his female employees to bear yet more of his multitudinous children. 

This swaggering, macho posture has been buoyed by Silicon Valley’s rightward lurch and a longtime fascination with “biohacking” — to say nothing of the bombastic tech influencers and investors whose antics have attracted both condemnation and idolatry. 

In addition to Musk, those figures include Stanford researcher Andrew Huberman, whose dubiously scientific podcast routinely prescribes vigorous workout routines and testosterone-boosting supplements; the entrepreneur and “anti-aging” fanatic Bryan Johnson, who has bragged about the lengths he’s gone to enlarge his penis; the “anti-woke” tech podcaster Lex Fridman, who in one interview asked Amazon founder Jeff Bezos how much weight he curls; and the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, once dubbed the “chief ideologist” of Silicon Valley, who has championed “FIGHTING,” all caps, and railed against diversity initiatives.

Even Mark Zuckerberg, the quintessential computer dweeb, has undergone what The Washington Post recently dubbed a “bro-ification” — marked by ripped abs, “loud luxury” wear and a new fascination with the ancient Romans.  

“It indicates some kind of anxiety over their status,” said Cooper, the Stanford sociologist, of the recent macho vibes. “When you feel like you’re losing status in one area, you may try to earn it in another … And one way to get that status is by doing these things that are more within the traditional, hyper-masculine culture.”

But what status could the tech bros possibly fear losing? They have amassed more money and power than prior generations ever dreamed. Musk is the world’s richest person. (The world’s 20 wealthiest people are all men, incidentally.) 

I put this question to a series of long-time tech industry observers, and end up with a grab bag of armchair theories. Maybe, as these men approach middle age, they crave a certain coolness that evaded them in their 20s and 30s. Maybe the global techlash and scrutiny of their products threatened their reputations as heroes of industry. 

Or maybe — and this seems likely to me — the platforms these men have shaped and shepherded are tuned to reward outrageous behavior. Having colonized our attention spans through their products, they now seek attention for themselves. 

Whatever the precise reason for these developments, the new Silicon Valley machismo is predictably terrible for women. Under the old geek mode of masculinity, women in tech reported an exhausting litany of workplace microaggressions. But this top-down machismo arguably invites aggression of a more macro sort: sexual harassment and abuse, the rollback of DEI programs and inclusive benefits, and — ultimately, inevitably — even fewer women in leadership or technical positions. “It makes [the workplace culture] misogynistic and sexist — in some cases, not everywhere,” Swisher said. But in places where the bros in charge have adopted more masculine posturing or explicitly moved against DEI, she added, “they set it up as if it’s a giant video game in which they’re the main player, and then they populate it with people like them.” 

For consumers, meanwhile, the trend yields worse products with fewer safeguards. Even male executives have admitted as much: Evan Williams, a co-founder of Twitter, once said harassment would be less prevalent on the platform if the company hired more women early on. At Reddit, it took Ellen Pao, the site’s first female leader, to finally cleanse the platform of its most toxic communities. 

“I do think people who are in touch with the harm caused by the platform not doing anything are going to be more empathetic to the users who experience it,” Pao told Links. 

Notably, since Musk bought Twitter and rebranded it “X,” the site has teemed with both hate speech and nonconsensual, deepfaked porn … primarily, if not entirely, of women. 

Further reading

• “Silicon Valley’s Very Masculine Year,” by Zoë Bernard for Vox (2023)

• “Silicon Valley Slides Back Into ‘Bro’ Culture,” by Erin Griffith for The New York Times (2022)

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

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