• Brotopia

  • Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley
  • By: Emily Chang
  • Narrated by: Emily Chang
  • Length: 9 hrs and 6 mins
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars (794 ratings)

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Brotopia

By: Emily Chang
Narrated by: Emily Chang
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Publisher's summary

Instant National Best Seller

A PBS News Hour-New York Times Book Club Pick!

"Excellent." (San Francisco Chronicle)

"Brotopia is more than a business book. Silicon Valley holds extraordinary power over our present lives as well as whatever utopia (or nightmare) might come next." (New York Times)

Silicon Valley is a modern utopia where anyone can change the world. Unless you're a woman.

For women in tech, Silicon Valley is not a fantasy land of unicorns, virtual reality rainbows, and 3D-printed lollipops, where millions of dollars grow on trees. It's a "Brotopia," where men hold all the cards and make all the rules. Vastly outnumbered, women face toxic workplaces rife with discrimination and sexual harassment, where investors take meetings in hot tubs and network at sex parties.

In this powerful exposé, Bloomberg TV journalist Emily Chang reveals how Silicon Valley got so sexist despite its utopian ideals, why bro culture endures despite decades of companies claiming the moral high ground (Don't Be Evil! Connect the World!)--and how women are finally starting to speak out and fight back.

Drawing on her deep network of Silicon Valley insiders, Chang opens the boardroom doors of male-dominated venture capital firms like Kleiner Perkins, the subject of Ellen Pao's high-profile gender discrimination lawsuit, and Sequoia, where a partner once famously said they "won't lower their standards" just to hire women. Interviews with Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, and former Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer--who got their start at Google, where just one in five engineers is a woman--reveal just how hard it is to crack the Silicon Ceiling. And Chang shows how women such as former Uber engineer Susan Fowler, entrepreneur Niniane Wang, and game developer Brianna Wu, have risked their careers and sometimes their lives to pave a way for other women.

Silicon Valley's aggressive, misogynistic, work-at-all costs culture has shut women out of the greatest wealth creation in the history of the world. It's time to break up the boys' club. Emily Chang shows us how to fix this toxic culture--to bring down Brotopia, once and for all.

©2018 Emily Chang (P)2018 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

"[Chang] is clearly engaged with and often incensed by her subject, and the best parts of Brotopia are those moments when she actively resists the 'it's all good' ethos of the Bay Area and cuts down chauvinism with the disdain it deserves." (New York Times)

"Brotopia goes far beyond the salacious to offer an important examination of why the technology industry is so dominated by men - and how women are pushing back." (Financial Times)

"When reading Brotopia, it's easy to envision it as a film…. Women who have triumphed in tech despite the odds…could be the film's heroines, and so would the young girls learning how to code despite it all." (The Verge)

What listeners say about Brotopia

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Insightful, Infuriating, and Important

Last year, Hidden Figures got me started on biography binge, devouring every book I could find on the accomplishments of trailblazing women in STEM. They left me inspired, empowered, and somewhat confused – how did the tech industry go from being built by the likes of Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper to the dire state of imbalance and discrimination that exists today? In Brotopia, Emily Chang answers that very question. She picks up where those stories left off, telling us exactly how women were systematically shut out a field that they helped create.

The book has been making waves for exposing some of Silicon Valley’s more salacious practices – think “optional” team bonding events and career-defining fundraising meetings set at strip clubs and in hot tubs. However, what really sets it apart are its revelations about the subtle and sometimes even unintentional forms of exclusion and intimidation. The little things - putting tech toys in the "boys' section" of the toy store until far too recently, universities choosing a provocative photo from Playboy as the standard rubric for whether or not students have built a successful image compression algorithm - these are the insights that make Brotopia the perfect read for a generation trying to change the norms that have necessitated the #MeToo movement.

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Double Standards

This book was a big waste of my time. The author promotes double standards by criticizing men for behaving in a certain way, whilst at the same time applauding women for doing the same. I have no doubt that harassment in the workplace is a big problem, but harrresment and hiring someone from your university is quite a few steps apart. In the end the book underwrites a short-sighted solution to the problem.

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Gender studies plus anecdotes

Anecdotes are supposed to add color to research that would otherwise be boring. They are not supposed to be the research. The one useful thing this book did is expose some really crummy hiring practices that have gone on in Silicon Valley. And it seems unsurprising that a bunch of immature men left to their own devices would come up with really terrible HR practices. This is an important issue to discuss, although probably not news to anyone.

But the author's gender studies approach doesn't address any arguments that don't support her conclusion. If you already believe that women are treated unjustly and we need new laws and regulations to level the playing field, then you will enjoy how this book confirms your biases.

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NEEDs some major fact checking !

This book wasn’t for you, but who do you think might enjoy it more?

This book should be classified as fiction. I know first hand that there are facts not checked and published. If that is the case with a major chapter in the book I am to conclude that other chapter contain poor fact checking as well. I expect much more from a Bloomberg journalist.

Has Brotopia turned you off from other books in this genre?

No.

Would you be willing to try another one of Emily Chang’s performances?

Perhaps if she issued an apology for he lack of journalistic integrity and accepted that she behaved in poor judgement to publish fake news to sell a scandalous book.

You didn’t love this book... but did it have any redeeming qualities?

I had high hopes for this book to be the book that addresses the gender biases in tech and the workplace. I was really hoping that a journalist at Bloomberg could shed some serious light on this timely issue. Instead I found the book to be poorly research and one that mostly read like Page-Six, name dropping and exaggerated story telling. Perhaps she is planning to go work at TMZ. One sentence on page 166 (yes I read the whole book) captures it all “whatever happened, men in technology are finally being held accountable." There it is. She does not care to get a fully story, to verify facts, or to take accountability for erroneous descriptions. I feel confident posting this because I first hand know that there are erroneous descriptions in this book. Hence, I can confidently deduce that the fact checking was loose or absent. Exactly what we need in todays world more fake news taunted as investigative reporting. Sorry Emily but you failed women, journalism and the current gender conversation.

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Justified topic, poor execution

This is an extremely important topic which requires taste and professionalism, neither of which delivered. The flippant attitude and personal attacks directed in the book lead to nothing more than literary revenge than addressing the problem. The author is better suited to writing for gossip columns than important social topics that need to be resolved with professional, adult supervised, urgency.

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A Critical Read

This is a scary and sad story with a real possibility of hope..IF we take the situation seriously and make achievable changes. Reporting, contributing to, and writing this book took courage. We owe all who participated a debt of gratitude, and Emily Chang enormous credit for so clearly showing us how to save our future.

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trashing men is not going to help women in tech.

I am a software engineer (not US citizen) and in my country the percentage of women in tech is the same as the US. in my country there is NO silicon valley or bro culture... this book does not explain this VERY IMPORTANT DETAIL.
crying about men is NOT going to help women in tech.

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A waste of time

Empty, is the first word came to my mind after finishing reading it. it's a waste of time.

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Total waste of time!

This is the most biased, one-sided, ill-researched book out there. If there is a zero star option, I would have selected that. What irritated me the most was the 'orgy' chapter. It has nothing to do with the theme of the book whatsoever. Right in the middle of the book, the author starts to describe the sex lives of tech entrepreneurs. First of all, it is NONE of your business. Second of all there was no illegal activities happening. Third of all, why bring it up at all?? It seems to me the author is using the motto "sex sells" to increase the number of sales of this useless book. What am I suppose to think , 'Wow Elon Musk in a costume at an orgy!!" I must read that book.

Regardless of that chapter, the super thin content of the rest of the book makes you wonder what is the point of all this. The way the author is reading the book as if it is pure gold and it is supposed to change the world without giving any useful "solution" to the "problem" she contrived. Is she aware that STEM programs are male dominant? Does she tackle any of this in her book except mention that high school students are attending code camps.

What about Elizabeth Holmes? No mention of her at all in the book. A famous female entrepreneur that deceived investors, how can she be omitted from the VC chapter. (granted I have skipped some parts to speed up the process of going through book).

Clearly this book is one sided.

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An industry-changing effort.

What did you love best about Brotopia?

Just finished "Brotopia", Emily Chang's much-anticipated study of the ingrown biases against women (and minorities) in Silicon Valley.

Working in tech (albeit in Seattle and on the sales end of the business) and raising two girls, I felt both pride for Chang's efforts and shame for the indifference with which I unkowingly embody the industry's biases against women.
Her tact was calculated and brilliant. While all of the write-ups on the book focus on the salacious details (and there are countless that make you ill), Chang begins with and continues to return to the fundamentals of a system that is inherently biased. Simple things like boys being targeted by toy companies selling entry-level computers goes so easily unnoticed, but if you hand a 3-year-old boy a simple computer and a 3-year-old girl a doll, who is more-likely to leave Stanford with a computer science degree 20 years later?

This is as important a book as has been written on the tech industry in years. You may love it. You may hate every word of it. But as tech becomes less about the technology and more about the user-experience, we cannot ignore 51% of the population.

The biases in the industry are no longer a problem for women, but a problem for us all.

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