Linkedin boss blasts frat boy culture in tech

LinkedIn
Multimillionaire Allen Blue said that the sector should be aiming for gender equality by the end of the decade

Technology firms need more 
female role models to help the industry shake off a male-dominated frat boy culture, the co-founder of social networking site LinkedIn said on Wednesday.

Multimillionaire Allen Blue, who helped set up the Microsoft-owned site and grow it to 660m users, said at the World Economic Forum in Davos that the sector should be aiming for gender equality by the end of the decade.

The image of Silicon Valley has been tarnished by a series of sexism scandals in recent years. The most notorious 
example is taxi app Uber, which paid $4.4m last month to settle charges from the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission over a culture of sexual harassment, a scandal that toppled founder Travis Kalanick in 2017.

LinkedIn analysed its data to identify the most in-demand skills in tech – such as artificial intelligence, computer software engineering and cloud computing – and found that “among that group 85pc or more are male”, compared with an even gender split in the Seventies and Eighties.

Mr Blue said that part of the problem was that “when you look at the past 20 years of technology, the stories we hear are stories about men”.

He added: “We have a set of predispositions that there is something uniquely male about this space.”

He said: “You’ve got to have women in leadership roles in technology today, in order for you to conclude that this is a career path. In order to do that, we’ve got to figure out where to get those 
female leaders today.”

One path could be persuading women to switch from more gender neutral sectors such as biotechnology according to the tech boss, as well as improving the flow of candidates from universities.

Computer science graduates are now 80pc men and the sector is “leaving a tremendous amount of talent on the table”, by not improving its diversity performance, he added.

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