A new survey explains one big reason there are so few women in technology

A new study finds that sexism is rampant in the tech industry, with almost two-thirds of women reporting sexual harassment and nearly 90 percent reporting demeaning comments from male colleagues.

The study, called “Elephant in the Valley,“ surveyed 200 women who work at tech companies, including large companies like Google and Apple as well as startups. The study focused on women who had 10 years of experience in the industry, and most worked in Silicon Valley.

The project was inspired by former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao’s failed gender discrimination suit against her former venture capital firm. Two co-authors of the study, former Yahoo executive Michele Madansky and Pao’s former co-worker Trae Vassallo, said that after Pao’s suit they started hearing an outpouring of stories from their peers about harassment and other problems.

“What we realized is that while many women shared similar workplace stories, most men were simply shocked and unaware of the issues facing women in the workplace,” the report said. So the authors decided to go out and get some data. They asked women about their experiences in five main areas: feedback and promotion, inclusion, unconscious biases, motherhood, and harassment and safety.

The results were startling. Sixty percent of the women surveyed had experienced sexual harassment. (That’s about twice as often as women report harassment overall.) The vast majority of the women surveyed said they’d had demeaning comments made to them by male colleagues, or that they’d witnessed sexist behavior at company offsites or industry conferences. Significant numbers of women also felt pressured based on their actual or perceived family choices, or even felt physically unsafe at work.

Some of the sexist incidents were subtle but still infuriating. “At Company X we had a joke that there were only two reviews for women — you are either too reticent or you are too bossy — no middle ground,” said one respondent. Another woman, a venture capitalist, described a pitch meeting with her two male colleagues and a male founder: “Despite my background/skill set being clearly the most relevant, the founder didn’t make eye contact, and didn’t really listen to the questions I asked before answering.” Another had male colleagues tell her that once women get pregnant they become “irrelevant.”

Other examples were more egregious. One woman was groped by her boss at a company event, reported it, and had to leave the company after being retaliated against. Another had a client ask her to sit on his lap in exchange for buying her products.

Women in science, math, engineering, or technology have a hard time at just about every level of hiring for academic positions, due to the unconscious bias of those who do the hiring. There’s overt sexism, like that awful peer reviewer who said women researchers should get help from men, and subtler forms, like how male researchers tend to choose fewer female trainees to work in their labs. And the STEM bias starts as early as grade school.

This usually isn’t because people intentionally discriminate against women and girls. Harvard has a fascinating research project that tries to measure unconscious biases. You may believe with all your heart that women and men are equally capable at science or math, Harvard’s researchers say, but your automatic associations may show otherwise. This explains how even a feminist science teacher who knows she is being observed can still give a disproportionate amount of talking time to the white male students in her classroom.

Pao argued in November that the low numbers of women in technology fields isn’t just a “pipeline problem” caused by lack of interest among women. The problem is that women are treated badly at every level of entry to these fields. One study found that an uncivil workplace culture systematically pushes women out of engineering fields. While 20 percent of engineering graduates are women, just 11 percent of all engineers are women.

Pao also said that sexism in Silicon Valley is getting better — not really in the sense that men are doing less of it, but more that women and other marginalized groups are banding together to speak out and fight back against it. The culture of silence around these issues is starting to crack, and people are bringing consciousness to unconscious bias.