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Wu is struck by “the countless times I’ve had to move a man’s hand from my thigh (or back or shoulder or hair or arm) during a meeting (or networking event or professional lunch or brainstorming session or pitch meeting) without seeming confrontational (or bitchy or rejecting or demanding or aggressive).” In a land of grand ideas and grander funding proposals, she found that the ability to neatly reject a man’s advances without injuring his ego is “a pretty important skill that I would bet most successful women in our industry have.”

a recent survey called “Elephant in the Valley” found that nearly all of the 200-plus senior women in tech who responded had experienced sexist interactions.

nly about a quarter of U.S. computing and mathematical jobs—a fraction that has actually fallen slightly over the past 15 years, even as women have made big strides in other fields. Women not only are hired in lower numbers than men are; they also leave tech at more than twice the rate men do.

Studies show that women who work in tech are interrupted in meetings more often than men. They are evaluated on their personality in a way that men are not. They are less likely to get funding from venture capitalists, who, studies also show, find pitches delivered by men—especially handsome men—more persuasive. And in a particularly cruel irony, women’s contributions to open-source software are accepted more often than men’s are, but only if their gender is unknown.

For women of color, the cumulative effect of these slights is compounded by a striking lack of racial diversity—and all that attends it

Three years in, Silicon Valley diversity conferences and training sessions abound; a cottage industry of consultants and software makers has sprung up to offer solutions. Some of those fixes have already started filtering out to workplaces beyond the tech world, because Silicon Valley is nothing if not evangelical.

The industry’s diversity numbers have barely budged, and many women say that while sexism has become somewhat less overt, it’s just as pernicious as ever.

When Silicon Valley was emerging, after World War II, software programming was considered rote and unglamorous, somewhat secretarial—and therefore suitable for women. The glittering future, it was thought, lay in hardware. But once software revealed its potential—and profitability—the guys flooded in and coding became a male realm.

The percentage of female computer- and information-science majors peaked in 1984, at about 37 percent. It has declined, more or less steadily, ever since. Today it stands at 18 percent.

“workplace conditions, a lack of access to key creative roles, and a sense of feeling stalled in one’s career” are the main reasons women leave. “Undermining behavior from managers” is a major factor.

gender bias is a big problem in start-ups, which are frequently run by brotherhoods of young men—in many cases friends or roommates—straight out of elite colleges. In 2014, for instance, Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel was two years out of Stanford and already leading a $10 billion company when his frat-boy-at-his-misogynistic-worst undergraduate emails were published and went viral. In them, his only slightly younger self joked about shooting lasers at “fat girls,” described a Stanford dean as “dean-julie-show-us-your-tits,” and for good measure, saluted another fraternity because it had decided to “stop being gay.”

“I, and most women I know, have been a party to at least some sexist or discriminatory behavior in the workplace,” she wrote, explaining that she and many other women had witnessed things like “locker-room discussion during travel with colleagues,” which they tried to brush aside, since “any individual act seems silly to complain about.” The Pao trial, however, shifted her attitude.

Eighty-four percent of the respondents had been told they were too aggressive; 66 percent had felt excluded from key networking opportunities because of their gender; 90 percent had witnessed sexist behavior at conferences and company off-site meetings; 88 percent had had clients and colleagues direct questions to male peers that should have been addressed to them; and 60 percent had fended off unwanted sexual advances (in most cases from a superior). Of those women, one-third said they had feared for their personal safety.

many people there believe—despite evidence everywhere to the contrary—that tech is a meritocracy. Ironically enough, this very belief can perpetuate inequality. A 2010 study, “The Paradox of Meritocracy in Organizations,” found that in cultures that espouse meritocracy, managers may in fact “show greater bias in favor of men over equally performing women.”

telling participants that their company valued merit-based decisions only increased the likelihood of their giving higher bonuses to the men.

a 2015 study published in Science confirmed that computer science and certain other fields, including physics, math, and philosophy, fetishize “brilliance,” cultivating the idea that potential is inborn. The report concluded that these fields tend to be problematic for women, owing to a stubborn assumption that genius is a male trait.

“The more a field valued giftedness, the fewer the female PhDs,” the study found, pointing out that the same pattern held for African Americans. Because both groups still tend to be “stereotyped as lacking innate intellectual talent,”

At Google, the initial tally showed that just 17 percent of its technical employees were women. The female technical force was 10 percent at Twitter, 15 percent at Facebook, and 20 percent at Apple.

Lately, unconscious-bias training has emerged as a ubiquitous fix for Silicon Valley’s diversity deficit. It’s diversity training for the new millennium, in which people are made aware of their own hidden biases.

“That sort of discipline really, really resonated effectively with the hard scientists we have here.” Facebook put unconscious-bias training front and center in its diversity efforts, too; both companies have posted online videos of their training modules, to offer a model for other workplaces. Since then, talk of unconscious bias has spread through Silicon Valley like—well, like a virus.

Too many decisions are made on gut instinct, the training argues: A time-pressed hiring manager looks at a résumé and sees a certain fraternity or hobby, or a conventionally white or male name, and bang—thanks to the unconscious brain making shortcuts, that person gets an interview

“Virtually every company I know of is deploying unconscious-bias training,” says Telle Whitney of the Anita Borg Institute. “It’s a fast and feel-good kind of training that helps you feel like you’re making a difference.”

Unconscious-bias training may not work. Some think it could even backfire.

even just talking too much about gender inequities can serve to normalize them: When you say over and over that women come up against a glass ceiling, people begin to accept that, yes, women come up against a glass ceiling—and that’s just the way it is.

“You would think all things are equal,” she said, “but these backdoor conversations are happening in settings that women are not invited to. The whole boys’-club thing still applies.

Mike Eynon, wrote in a Medium post that bias training makes “us white guys feel better” and lets the “privileged realize everyone has bias and they aren’t at fault,” while nothing changes for discriminated groups.

if you can’t easily dispel bias, what you can do is engineer a set of structural changes that prevent people from acting on it.

the first 20 seconds often predict the outcome of a 20-minute interview.

The problem, he wrote, is that such quick impressions are meaningless. He added that Google strongly encourages interviewers to use a combination of skill assessments and standard questions rather than relying on subjective impressions.

It is, for example, a hallowed tradition that in job interviews, engineers are expected to stand up and code on whiteboards, a high-pressure situation that works to the disadvantage of those who feel out of place. Indeed, whiteboard sessions are rife with opportunities for biased judgment.

“Tying bonuses to diversity outcomes signals that diversity is something the company cares about and thinks is important,” she says. “Managers will take it seriously.”

Ms. Melendez recalls one meeting about three years ago where she and other members of the digital-marketing team talked about spotting edgy fashion photos where models were using highlighter—a type of makeup that accentuates facial contours. In a matter of days, the team was working on a separate landing page for Sephora’s site to showcase the product. “It’s easier to forecast what’s coming and what’s going to be needed because the line is so fine between you as an employee and you as a client,” says Ms. Melendez, now digital-marketing director at Aquis Inc., a San Francisco-based beauty company.

Terre Layton, an engineer by training, had worked in Silicon Valley for nearly two decades, for small startups and large companies such as HP Inc. and Sun Microsystems Inc., before she joined Sephora in 2011. Recruited as a product manager to lead the retailer’s website redesign, Ms. Layton says she found being in the presence of so many women leaders empowering after years spent in male-dominated workplaces. When it came time to brainstorm ideas, or even articulate concerns about a project’s direction, bosses made a point of asking team members for their opinions, she says. “You knew you were being heard. You had a voice,” says Ms. Layton, who last worked for Sephora in 2015 and now advises early stage startups on product management and user experience.

Ms. Linnenbach, who served as Sephora’s interim vice president of talent for six months in 2014, says the company makes a point of moving high-performing women into digital and tech roles that round out their skills and experience. “They have that longer-range view of what would be better for the organization in terms of talent development,” Ms. Linnenbach says. “They are willing to put a person in a position where [the company is] willing to lose ground so this person gets exposure on the international side or experience with a P&L,” she says. A similar philosophy applies to staffing technology teams, where company recruiters encourage women to consider roles that might not fit precisely with their skills and experience.

“Even if a female candidate doesn’t have all the requirements for a technical job, we want that person to come in and show what they can do,” says Yvette Nichols, the company’s vice president of talent. Sephora’s approach represents a departure from the way many large technology companies, especially those in Silicon Valley, handle recruitment, says Jane Hamner, a veteran recruiter with Harvey Nash Group PLC, whose clients include Amazon.com Inc., Expedia Inc. and Uber Technologies Inc. “Most companies that we work with are looking at skills over all else,” she says. “They can be very picky about skill sets and go only for the top of the talent pool.”

the tech industry has lately been shaken by allegations that high-profile venture capitalists have abused their position to prey on female startup entrepreneurs.

Meanwhile, the representation of black, Latino, and female employees at top Silicon Valley technology firms remains so disproportionately low that a government report published last year described the problem with the same word that Jackson uses: “segregation”. For all its forward looking technologies, Silicon Valley is in many ways mired in the ugliest practices of the American past.

The DC area is a kind of mirror image to Silicon Valley when it comes to hiring African Americans. Overall, blacks make up 14.4% of the workforce nationwide and 7.4% of high-tech employment. In the DC metro area, which includes parts of Virginia, Maryland, and West Virginia, blacks hold 17.3% of the jobs in 12 computing occupations, according to government employment data. But cross over to the west coast, and in Silicon Valley African Americans hold just 2.7% of the jobs in the same categories. At premiere employers like Google and Facebook, black representation in technical jobs drops below 2%.

the fact that northern California’s workforce is heavily Latino (more than 20%) is not reflected in the area’s tech companies (about 6% Latino).

Where the DC tech industry grew in a symbiotic relationship with government, many of the pioneers of Silicon Valley were techno-libertarians, ideologically opposed to government regulation and oversight.

Tech leaders like McNealy and Cypress Industries CEO TJ Rodgers were openly hostile to the idea of consciously diverse hiring. Rodgers wrote an op-ed in the San Jose Mercury News in 1999 declaring that “the only sharecropper I know is my dad” and calling Jackson “a hustler who exploits white shame for his own financial and political ends”.

At the top 75 companies in Silicon Valley, only 3% of employees are black, according to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Premier employers Facebook and Google have yet to crack 2% in technical jobs.

It’s not the fault of tech companies that the pipeline is overwhelmingly filled with white and Asian people, Silicon Valley’s defenders claim.

But there’s a problem with that argument: black students are earning computer science degrees at higher rates than they are being hired by Silicon Valley companies. In 2014, they received 9.7% of the bachelor degrees awarded in computer science, according to the National Science Foundation.

“How difficult do you think it would be to go to an engineering meeting and tell all these people who went to Cal, Stanford, and MIT that the person coming from the University of Texas El Paso or a community college can do their job as well as they can?” Miley asked. “You will not be able to convince them of that. They don’t want to believe that they’re not special.”

“Amongst the African American students that I engage with, I don’t hear many of them aspiring to work at Google.” he said. “They hear Silicon Valley and they think, ‘I’m not going to see people like me.’”

Around the world, the tech industry has failed to prove itself an open, exciting place for women to work, to be taken seriously and to advance.

The temptation of huge financial gains, and a quasi-religious faith in the hyper-capitalism of Ayn Rand, has brought in a new, macho generation with no time for any principle beyond self-interest.

A frat boy culture of bullying and exclusivity is accompanied by aggressive attempts to avoid tax. The sector is secretive in its attempts to hoard and capitalise on the private data of its customers. It balks at legitimate government attempts at accountability and restraint.

All this calls into question the legitimacy of the industry and its new role as one of the most powerful movers in the global economy, and in wider society.

When commentators routinely compare Silicon Valley today with the arrogance, isolation and destructive might of Wall Street before the crash 10 years ago this week, it is time to start thinking about reputation — and what might ensue when the glamorous superficial allure of these tech giants wears off.

what the executives don’t give as much thought to are some of the simplest determinants of how successful a company will be in hiring diverse candidates. Will women have any input in the hiring process? Will the interview panels be diverse? Will current female employees be available to speak to candidates about their experiences? Many times, the answer to each of these questions is no, and the resistance to make simple changes in these areas is striking.

We have to tell these companies to talk just as proudly about their parental-leave policies, child-care programs and breast-pumping rooms. At the very least, they need to communicate that their workplaces have cultures where women are valued. They need to show they’re not places where attitudes like that of the now-infamous Google engineer who wrote a memo questioning women’s fitness for tech jobs dominate.

executives balk at my suggestions and even wonder if explicitly talking about the place of women is sexist. But I remind them that when it comes to gender, they have to play catch-up, after long histories of eroding trust

Silicon Valley companies are in love with themselves and don’t understand why the love isn’t always returned by the few women to whom they extend employment offers.

I’m often asked which companies are getting diversity and inclusion right in Silicon Valley and across the country. Most aren’t.

“It’s not about the skills, it’s about who’s doing the work. The work gets valued in different ways depending on who is doing it.” That’s why, Hicks pointed out, today software developers have a higher status and pay than people who do quality assurance and testing—jobs that require similar skills but “because of who usually does these jobs are valued differently in a way that is disproportionate to the content of the work.”

he fix for it doesn’t involve a better pipeline, she says, but changing things at the top. We have an opportunity to do that now, she says, because “tech is becoming more diffuse; the higher you go, the fewer tech skills you need.