第四十八期杂志选文——《硅谷如何吸引更多女性》(上部)

小山林卡

How Silicon Valley Can Change Its Cultureto Attract More Women

硅谷如何通过改变自身文化吸引更多女性

（上半部分）

BY VAUHINI VARA

From2015-03-26 The New yorker

本文摘自2015年3月26日《纽约客》杂志

                  

登录/注册后可看大图

Women who work in the high-tech industrygather for LeadOn, a conference held in February in Santa Clara, California.

CREDITPHOTOGRAPH BY MARLAAUFMUTH/GETTY FOR LEADON

二月份在加利福尼亚的圣克拉拉举办的会议LeadOn，此会议聚集了来自高科技行业的女性。

Amy Wibowo, a graduate of M.I.T. and asoftware engineer at Airbnb, wears pastel-colored floral dresses, makes lavishuse of emoji on Twitter, and gets around on a mint-green bicycle. She presentsherself like this—as “feminine,” in her words—not only because she feels likeit but also, she recently explained, “to say a big FUCK YOU to the patriarchy.”Wibowo made that comment in January, during a speech at an Oakland gathering ofAlterConf, an event series focussed on diversity in the tech and gamingindustries. In early March, she posted a transcript to the Web site Medium, and it became a minor viralhit. Encouraged by this success, on Monday morning, Wibowo launched a Kickstarter campaign to publish a series of zinesabout computer science that would be geared toward high-school students. Theproposed publication reflects her own sensibility and, she believes, that ofmany girls. One sample cover, for an issue about the computer-security practiceknown as cryptography, features a drawing of a cat whispering into anothercat’s ear, and the words “Secret Messages” written in bubble letters andsurrounded by a heart. Wibowo also wants to emphasize applications of computerscience that she feels will appeal to girls, like using natural-languageprocessing to research the needs of women in developing countries. Her messageresonated; within four hours of launching her fund-raising campaign, she hadreached her goal of ten thousand dollars. By Thursday, people had pledged morethan twenty thousand dollars. Wibowo told me that she had decided to leaveAirbnb to focus on the zine and other educational initiatives.

Amy Wibowo作为麻省理工学院的毕业生，现在在Airbnb当软件工程师。她常穿着淡色印花连衣裙，在推特上大量使用emoji，骑着薄荷绿的自行车出行。她是这样表现自己的——用她自己的话说就是她很"女性化"，不仅仅是她自己这么认为，且她最近解释这是“对父权社会狠狠地说FUCK YOU”。Wibowo是在一月参加的一个奥克兰的"Alterconf"——一系列专注于科技与游戏行业多样性的会议演讲过程中出此言论的。三月初，她将会议副本放到网上，引起了小范围的轰动。受此次成功经验的鼓舞，周一早上她面向高中生发起了一个有关“信息技术”这一主题的杂志的募捐运动。她构思出的这一杂志反映出了她敏感的个性，她认为也能反映许多女生的敏感性。在一个为“信息安全实务（也就是密码学）”设计的封面样本上，一只猫正对另一只猫耳语，一个心形图案包裹着用泡泡体写出的单词——“秘密信息”。Wibowo想强调她认为信息技术的运用会吸引女孩，比如，使用自然语言方式研究女性在发展中国家的需求。她的行动获得了反响；在发布募捐运动的四小时内，她已经达到了筹资一万美金的目标。截至周四，人们已认捐超过两万美元。Wibowo告诉我她已经决定离开Airbnb，专心于杂志和其他教育性的倡议。

Airbnb, like many Silicon Valley companies,employs few women in technical positions; women make up thirteen per cent ofits engineering team, a spokeswoman told me. Not long ago, such statisticsinvolving women in Silicon Valley were little discussed; some people seemed toaccept the dearth of women as the natural order of things. Then came a seriesof much-publicized stories about instances of overt sexism in techcircles,ranging from a couple of men getting onstage at the TechCrunch Disruptconference and describing an app called Titstare to the C.E.O. of Uber jokingabout a hypothetical women-on-demand app called “Boob-er” to the C.E.O. of Microsoft remarking toan audience of female engineers that womenwho don’t seek raises have better “karma” than those who do. Then, lastyear, a female engineer at Pinterest,Tracy Chou, helped persuade several of Silicon Valley’s mostprominent companies, including Google and Facebook, to reveal the percentagesofwomenthey were employing in tech positions. In most cases, the figure was belowtwenty per cent. Other research has shown that the percentage of women incomputer science has declined in recent decades, while the proportions haverisen in many other scientific fields.

Airbnb像很多硅谷公司一样，在技术岗位很少雇佣女性；一个女发言人告诉我，女性只占他们公司内工程师的13%。不久前，此类关于女性在硅谷的数据很少被人谈及；一些人似乎对女性的缺乏习以为然。之后在科技领域出现了一系列明显的关于性别歧视的例子——从几个男性在TechCrunch Disrupt会议的舞台上向Uber的首席执行官描述一个叫做Titstare（意为“盯着乳房”）的软件，并开玩笑假设一个为女性需求设计的软件叫做“Boob-er（意为“拥有乳房的人”），到微软的首席执行官向一位女性工程师观众强调那些不努力寻求升职加薪的女性能得到更好的因缘。之后，去年一位Pinterest②的女性工程师Tracy Chou帮助说服了包括谷歌和脸书在内的硅谷的几个最主要的公司去曝光他们在技术岗位雇佣的女性的比例。大部分公司的女性所占比例低于20%。有研究表明，尽管近几十年女性在科学领域的比例有所上升，然而这个比例在信息技术领域却有所下降。

It has started to dawn onSilicon Valley executives that this state of affairs is unacceptable. InJanuary, Intelannounced a three-hundred-million-dollar investment, over five years, to make itsworkplace more diverse; its C.E.O., Brian Krzanich, said at the time that nothaving a workforce that more closely mirrors the broader population meant thatthe company had been missing out on business opportunities by failing tounderstand what its customers sought. (Airbnb, the spokeswoman said, feels itsproportion of women in technical roles is unacceptable and is trying severalmeasures to improve the number.) Partly because the problem was ignored for solong, though, there has been relatively little research to explain why itexists and how to address it.

这些数据开始让硅谷的高层管理人员无法接受。一月，英特尔公司公布了一项三亿美元的投资，他们将用超过五年时间使自身工作环境更加多样化；首席执行官Brian Krzanich说，在当代社会，若自己的员工不能真实地反映群众，则对公司来说就相当于因为无法了解顾客需求而失去了商业机会。（Airbnb的发言人称，他感到了女性在公司内技术职位所占比例不合理，并且正在尝试多种方法提高比例）在一定程度上因为这个问题被忽视了太久，导致几乎没有相关研究揭示这种现象的出现因并提出解决办法。

On Thursday afternoon, the AmericanAssociation of University Women published a hundred-and-sixty-pagereport, “Solving the Equation,” that attempts to do just that. Someof the findings are unsurprising: for instance, that women engineers whoreported being “frequently belittled, patronized, or systematically undermined”were likelier to intend to leave their jobs than those who don’t. But, whilemuch of the public conversation about gender diversity in Silicon Valley hasfocussed on getting rid of detrimental behavior and policies—calling out sexistbehavior, for instance, and encouraging hiring and promotion practices thatminimize the influence of subtle gender biases—the “Solving the Equation”report also introduces research that suggests a different approach: Along withminimizing the aspects of engineering education and culture that make girls andwomen feel unwelcome, what about proactively changing engineering culture sothat it’s more attractive to them in the first place?

星期四下午，美国妇女大学协会发布了一篇一百六十页的报告“解决平等”，这篇报告所做的正是找到原因并提出解决方案。一些发现并不令人感到意外：比如，研究发现“频繁地被轻视，颐指气使，或者被有意迫害”的女性工程师离职意愿更强烈。但是，硅谷大部分关于性别多元化的公众话题则聚焦于摆脱有害行为和政策，如号召停止性别歧视行为，以及鼓励雇佣、升职，这些最小化轻微性别歧视影响的行为时，“解决平等”报告也提供了一个不同的解决方式的研究：相比最小化让女性感到讨厌的工学教育和文化，积极主动地改变工学文化以让其对女性更有吸引力不是更好？

The report highlights past studies by aMiami University psychology professor, Amanda Diekman, and her colleagues, whoexamined the relationship between gender, professional options, and two typesof goals: “communal” goals, related to collaborating and helping others, and“agentic” ones, having to do with independence and self-advancement. In asurvey of undergraduates, they found that women, on average, gave higherratings to the importance of communal goals than men did, and that men gavehigher ratings to agentic goals than women did.

报告强调了迈阿密大学心理学教授 Amanda Diekman和她的同事的研究，他们检测到男女之间的关系专业见解和两种目标：与合作和助人相关的“社会目标”，以及与独立和自我发展的“个人成就”。在对大学生的调查中，他们发现平均而言，女性大部分认为社会目标更重要，男性大部分认为个人成就更重要。

The same undergraduates also rated thelikelihood that various fields would help a person meet communal and agenticgoals. On average, they rated engineering, computing, and science fields asmore likely to fulfill agentic goals than communal ones. In other words,satisfaction in those fields is perceived as coming less from collaborating andhelping people than from attaining individual self-advancement. “If you’rechoosing your career, it matters if you care a little bit more about making asocial contribution than you do about mastering some skill set,” ChristianneCorbett, a co-author of “Solving the Equation,” told me. She said the study’sfindings suggest that employers and universities could attract more women toengineering by emphasizing the communal aspects of the field—“both in how thefields are sold and marketed, but also in the substance.” Teachers andprofessors, for instance, might emphasize the social good that computerscientists can bring about, while companies might better incorporate societalgoals into their missions and better communicate their commitment to thosegoals.

同样的大学生也评测了各个行业会帮助一个人达到社会目标和个人成就的可能性。平均而言，他们认为在工程、计算机和科学行业工作的人相比社会目标更可能完成个人成就。换句话说，这些行业被认为满足感很少来自合作和助人而更多地来自达成个人目标和实现个人发展。“解决平等”的作者之一ChristianneCorbett告诉我：“如果你正在选择你的职业，应该考虑：相比精进个人的技能你是否更在意为社会做贡献。”她说，研究发现雇主和大学可以通过强调“领域集体性”这一方面来吸引女性——“不仅在该领域的销售和市场两个方面，还有物质方面。比如，老师和教授们可以强调科学技术可以为社会带来好的方面，公司可以更好地将社会目标与他们的任务相结合并且更好地表达他们对于这些目标的承诺。

翻译 by 逗逗

校对by gabriellaz

终校 by 小郭

树屋字幕组-文翻组

翻译仅供学习交流，严禁用于商业用途