On a recent Sunday morning, a friend texted me a photo from the checkout line of a Palo Alto Whole Foods. It was the cover of a Newsweek special issue entitled “Founding Fathers of Silicon Valley.” Seven faces graced the cover: Bill Gates. Mark Zuckerberg. David Packard. Bill Hewlett. Jeff Bezos. Elon Musk. Steve Jobs.
Three words for you, Newsweek: What the hell?
OK, put aside the fact that three of those men don’t live in the Bay Area. At least one of them wasn’t born when the valley’s orchards were first being transformed into ground zero for the computer revolution. And any history that holds up seven white men as the founders of the computer revolution obscures the true collective nature of innovation.
Most important, it eliminates a valuable recruiting tool for getting women into tech, and for propelling them to more powerful positions: representation. As Marian Wright Edelman, Founder and President of the Children’s Defense Fund said in the 2011 documentary Miss Representations: “You can’t be what you can’t see.”
I posted the cover on Facebook, calling the publication out for its narrow approach. Kira Bindrim, who was then Newsweek’s managing editor (and has since left for Quartz), responded to the post, blaming an outside company for the faux pas and writing that whenever you have seven white guys on a cover, “someone somewhere should always go, ‘… now hold up.’”
So, hold up.
History unfolds in the telling. The story of the birth of Facebook, for example, has a different set of main characters, depending on whether you’re hearing about it over a glass of wine with the founder’s sister Randi Zuckerberg or his nemesis Tyler Winklevoss, and neither of them is going to tell you the story that former Harvard President Larry Summers would share.
Too often, in Silicon Valley as in other places, women are involved in significant events, but their stories go untold. They are the cofounders who are not named in press articles. They are the computer scientists who didn’t leave to start a company, but instead made important contributions in research labs. They’re the people we gloss over in our hurry to recount the life and times of Steve Jobs yet again. “Look, we know Silicon Valley has a gender issue and it’s bad,” Leslie Berlin, who is the project historian for the Silicon Valley archives for Stanford, told me. “But let’s not erase the women who helped make this valley.”
What happens when you tell the history of the birth of Silicon Valley a different way? It offers a map to a generation of young men and women looking for new leadership models.
So to the current editors of Newsweek, here’s my version, in which, as an exercise, I gloss over the men in my effort to highlight the contributions of seven important women. The stories are no less dramatic. The characters are no less deserving of HBO’s parody treatment. They’ve gotten fired, too, and they’ve also come out of retirement to save their companies. They’re outrageous, ambitious, and technically sound. Let me introduce you to the Founding Mothers of Silicon Valley: