Silicon Valley is the place where the future is being built. It has a responsibility, then, to ensure that the future does not look like a more convenient and connected version of the 1950s.
The digital disrupters have transformed work, travel, communication, and relaxation. Yet they have had very modest success at maximising their use of human capital by correcting the gender imbalances in their offices.
The severity of this problem was emphasised this week in a blog post from Susan Fowler, a software engineer who worked for a year at Uber, the ride-hailing company, before quitting. She claims she was sexually harassed by her boss in an explicit, verifiable way. The human resources department and management refused to take effective action, were serially dishonest with her, and effectively punished her for bringing the issue forward. The treatment of women engineers at Uber, Ms Fowler says, was so bad that their proportion of her part of the company’s software operation fell from 25 per cent to 3 per cent during her tenure.