Inside the life of a tech activist:

 Tracy Chou's life as a tech activist: abuse, and optimism (fastcompany.com)

Inside the life of a tech activist: abuse, gaslighting, but ultimately optimism

Tracy Chou has been a tech activist for almost a decade. Her story reveals what it’s like to fight Silicon Valley’s establishment.  BY PAVITHRA MOHAN

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A decade ago, at the height of society’s optimism for Silicon Valley as a force for good, even the biggest players in the data-obsessed tech industry refused to divulge the makeup of their workforce. When CNN tried to obtain data on race and gender from a handful of tech heavyweights in 2011, the inquiry was met with stony silence from all but three companies. (Many tech firms also thwarted Freedom of Information Act requests from CNN and other media outlets.)

In the fall of 2013, Chou headed to the Grace Hopper conference, an annual gathering of women in tech. She was troubled by a keynote conversation with Sheryl Sandberg, who claimed the number of female engineers was actually falling. “not to be morbid,” Chou tweeted en route back to San Francisco, “but if this flight out of minneapolis goes down, silicon valley is going to be down a substantial % of female engineers.” The Medium post that Chou wrote soon after asked the uncomfortable questions, “Is the percentage of women in engineering going up? What’s working? Is anything? Does anybody know?” Chou then implored companies to share data on the number of women in technical roles. “For me at that time,” she says, “it was, I’m just writing down some thoughts occasionally. That ended up getting a life of its own.”

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A decade ago, at the height of society’s optimism for Silicon Valley as a force for good, even the biggest players in the data-obsessed tech industry refused to divulge the makeup of their workforce. When CNN tried to obtain data on race and gender from a handful of tech heavyweights in 2011, the inquiry was met with stony silence from all but three companies. (Many tech firms also thwarted Freedom of Information Act requests from CNN and other media outlets.)

In the fall of 2013, Chou headed to the Grace Hopper conference, an annual gathering of women in tech. She was troubled by a keynote conversation with Sheryl Sandberg, who claimed the number of female engineers was actually falling. “not to be morbid,” Chou tweeted en route back to San Francisco, “but if this flight out of minneapolis goes down, silicon valley is going to be down a substantial % of female engineers.” The Medium post that Chou wrote soon after asked the uncomfortable questions, “Is the percentage of women in engineering going up? What’s working? Is anything? Does anybody know?” Chou then implored companies to share data on the number of women in technical roles. “For me at that time,” she says, “it was, I’m just writing down some thoughts occasionally. That ended up getting a life of its own.”

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As big tech companies finally released their first diversity reports, starting with Google in 2014, each was bleaker than the last, with women accounting for less than a quarter of leadership and technical roles at most companies; Black and Latinx representation in those departments hovered around 3%. The tech industry proclaimed that diversity, equity, and inclusion were important, spawning a cottage industry of DEI consultants and experts, training sessions, and hiring initiatives, and throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at the problem.

Around this time, Pao lost her gender discrimination suit against Kleiner Perkins and then was pushed out of Reddit. Meanwhile, Erica Joy Baker—an engineer who’s now CTO of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee—had compiled a spreadsheet of salaries while at Google to help stamp out pay disparities. Chou’s blog post had prompted diversity reports and a wave of admissions from tech leaders that their numbers were disappointing and as they reflexively admitted, there was more work to be done.

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she says. “I can speak much more authentically to [how] it’s not great to be sexually harassed while fundraising. And apparently it still happens—even in my case, where I have made a partial career out of calling people out for their shit.”

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t the time, her harassers had multiplied to include someone who was peddling an absurd theory that Chou was romantically involved with a public figure, and they had even manipulated images in an effort to prove it. By the fall of 2018, Chou had done extensive research on the market for anti-harassment and moderation tools and set her sights on what would turn into Block Party, a suite of tools to screen out online abuse on platforms such as Twitter.

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 she hosted a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” session. It was promptly overrun with trolls, sparking an onslaught of abuse across Twitter and email, and polluting the Block Party waitlist. “There were thousands of trolls that descended on me, and Reddit’s response was: ‘We don’t condone harassment. You can report any harassment you see,'” she says. “I was like, ‘Why is the burden on me?'”

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Me:  there should be a report that Asian Americans and Americans of color are being systematically targeted and ousted by 1st gen Asians in the Silicon Valley, Tech and STEM.