A reckoning for tech’s bro culture is long overdue, many believe.

In November, Tesla, headed by the world’s richest man Elon Musk—who himself is often all sorts of inappropriate—was hit with a lawsuit over “nightmarish” sexual harassment on its Fremont factory floor. The company is silent on the allegations, but Musk has been busy making jokes about gimmicks that “blow the whistle on Tesla.”

Meanwhile, calls for game developer Activision Blizzard’s CEO Bobby Kotick to step down have intensified in the last month as evidence of years of sexual misconduct at the company comes to light.

On Nov. 18, educational non-profit organization Girls Who Code severed ties with Activision, a partner for its two-week summer coding programs for schoolgirls: “The news about Activision proves that our priorities are fundamentally misaligned. We cannot in good conscience continue to work with a company that is so antithetical to our own values.”

While it’s a bold stance, Girls Who Code continues to work with Tesla for the same program. Its long list of partners includes several other big tech firms who’ve faced allegations of gender discrimination and harassment, including Apple, Rockstar Games, Amazon, and WeWork.

Girls Who Code concluded that Activision crossed the line, but it also believes disengaging is not an ideal solution. Especially when it comes to trillion-dollar companies like Tesla, Apple, and Amazon, which collectively employ millions of people. Instead, the non-profit believes in having the tough conversations.

Twitter/Tarika Barrett

Girls Who Code CEO Tarika Barrett.

“We try to encourage companies to look deeply at their own practices and interrogate what they might be doing to alienate young people, and especially young women and people of color, or what they are doing to prevent them from being hired in the first place,” Tarika Barrett, CEO of Girls Who Code, told Quartz. “Every company is different and so there’s no blueprint for this type of process. But at the very least, we hope companies have discussions about work culture.”

Below are edited excerpts from Quartz’s interview with Barrett.

Why has tech’s frat bro culture become such a fixture of Silicon Valley?

Barrett: Culture is created by those empowered to be the loudest voice in the room. And the rooms in Silicon Valley tend to be very homogeneous, and representative of a very specific type of white, cis male. Whether the reasons are implicit …….

Source: https://qz.com/2097941/girls-who-code-ceo-tarika-barrett-on-techs-gender-gap/