Elissa Shevinsky is pissed off. Shortly before we speak over the phone about her new project to encourage gender diversity in tech, the news broke that Michael Moritz, CEO of venture capital firm Sequoia, had blithely announced in an interview that he simply can’t find enough women to hire. “Oh, we look very hard,” he told a Bloomberg reporter. “We just hired a young woman from Stanford who’s every bit as good as her peers, and if there are more like her, we’ll hire them. What we’re not prepared to do is to lower our standards.”
Shevinsky first went deep-dive on the lack of women in tech while editing a collection of essays, Lean Out, which illustrates the toxic conditions they (and LGBT people, and other minorities) face in the industry. The book’s anecdotes of sexual advances in interviews and casual racism and sexism in offices act as a rejoinder to the argument offered by men like Mortiz: that women either don’t want to work in the field, or aren’t qualified or skilled enough to be there. As Shevinsky has learned, this argument, sometimes called the “pipeline problem”, just isn’t good enough. “He needs to start seeing the people who he’s not seeing. I see candidates everywhere.”
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