Silicon Valley Isn't a Meritocracy. And It's Dangerous to Hero-Worship Entrepreneurs

In a cultural context where idealists have linked social media to democracy, egalitarianism, and participation, the tech scene in Silicon Valley considers itself to be exceptional. Supporters speak glowingly of a singularly meritocratic environment where innovative entrepreneurs disrupt fusty old industries and facilitate sweeping social change.

But if the tech scene is really a meritocracy, why are so many of its key players, from Mark Zuckerberg to Steve Jobs, white men? If entrepreneurs are born, not made, why are there so many programs attempting to create entrepreneurs? If tech is truly game-changing, why are old-fashioned capitalism and the commodification of personal information never truly questioned?

The myths of authenticity, meritocracy, and entrepreneurialism do have some basis in fact. But they are powerful because they reinforce ideals of the tech scene that shore up its power structures and privileges. Believing that the tech scene is a meritocracy implies that those who obtain great wealth deserve it, and that those who don’t succeed do not. The undue emphasis placed on entrepreneurship, combined with a limited view of who “counts” as an entrepreneur, function to exclude entire categories of people from ascending to the upper echelon of the industry. And the ideal of authenticity privileges a particular type of self-presentation that encourages people to strategically apply business logics to the way they see themselves and others.

Taken as a whole, these themes of authenticity, meritocracy, and entrepreneurialism reinforce both a closed system of privilege and one centered almost entirely around the core beliefs of neoliberal capitalism. This does not make technology intrinsically better or worse than any other American business -- I’d certainly rather socialize with tech people than bankers. But it does reveal the threadbare nature of digital exceptionalism.

The Myth of Meritocracy

The myth is that anyone can come from anywhere and achieve great success in Silicon Valley if they are skilled. It holds that those who “make it” do so due to their excellent ideas and ability, because the tech scene is a meritocracy where what you do, not who you are, matters.

There is some truth to this statement. To a certain extent, there is a lower barrier to entry in tech than in some other industries. Having a famous father or coming from an old money family would not necessarily be an asset as it might in banking (it wouldn’t necessarily hurt, either). And certainly the highest status in the tech scene comes from one’s job rather than family name, although wealth factors considerably into status.

I frequently heard variations of the saying “everyone wants to take the pretty girl to the dance,” which refers to the tendency venture capitalists have to cluster around popular deals. (The prevalence of this phrase is very revealing of who is in these meetings.) In reality, everyone wants to be in business with young, white, male entrepreneurs with connections to high-status people, a pedigree from certain companies, a well-known mentor. Sharon Vosmek, CEO of the nonprofit Astia that helps fund women entrepreneurs, identified “systematic and hidden biases” in technology funding:

VCs hold clear stereotypes of successful CEOs (they call it pattern recognition, but in other industries they call it profiling or stereotyping.) John Doerr publicly stated that his most successful investments -- and the no-brainer pattern for future investments -- were in founders who were white, male, under 30, nerds, with no social life who dropped out of Harvard or Stanford.

This formula certainly filters out enormous numbers of people who may be equally skilled.

The myth of meritocracy also ignores the level of privilege that participation in the tech scene involves, as *i09 *editor Annalee Newitz points out:

Let’s say that most people can have access to computers sometimes but only some people can have access to computers all the time, and then an even smaller group can have access to the net while they’re just out wandering around doing Twitter, right? They’re like, I have my phone and I can say things while I’m walking around where somebody else has to actually go home, to their one computer that they own. So the more that you want to participate in this network of wealth and entrepreneurialism, the more stuff you have to have to participate in it. So there [are] these levels of participation that are enabled by either being wealthier or having the free time to participate.

Certainly, a level of material wealth is necessary to participate in San Francisco tech culture. Very few pointed to the elephant in the room of assumed wealth: “People behave as if we all make kind of the same.” To forge the type of social connections necessary to move into the upper echelons of the tech scene requires being able to take part in group activities, travel to conferences, and work on personal projects. This requires middle- to upper-class wealth, which filters out most people.

The result of this mythology is that it denies the role of personal connections, wealth, background, gender, race, or education in an individual’s success. If, for example, women (or people of color, or gay people) are not getting venture-capital funding at the same rate as men, the myth maintains, it is due to their lack of ability rather than institutional sexism. It also justifies immense wealth as the worthy spoils of the smartest and best.

The Myths of Entrepreneurship

The myth of the entrepreneur goes hand in hand with the myth of meritocracy, setting entrepreneurs apart as a rare, visionary breed who uniquely deserve their success.

Because entrepreneurs are so high status, there is an enormous industry focused on teaching and promoting entrepreneurship. The *Princeton Review *now ranks both graduate and undergraduate entrepreneurship programs. Stanford, which has an outsized influence on the tech scene, has a Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at its business school, the Stanford Technology Ventures Program in the engineering school, and so many other groups devoted to entrepreneurship that there is an umbrella organization called the Stanford Entrepreneurship Network that coordinates them all.

A common myth about entrepreneurship is that it was an inherent personal attribute that could not be taught. As journalist Om Malik described, “You are a natural born entrepreneur. There is no other way, you know. Like, you have to be hustling from day one. Winners are those who just know one thing, basically. My favorite description of an entrepreneur is a person who cannot handle the status quo and who wants to rearrange the world basically in their own vision.”

In this sense, entrepreneurs are like writers who cannot help but write: they cannot help but “change the world.”

Yet in reality, both writing and entrepreneurship require a great deal of repetitive grunt work without which few will be successful. Moreover, the entrepreneurs who are successful are so at least partially due to luck. Many great products never gain a significant user base, and other ideas fail and are replaced with newer and trendier iterations. Most successful entrepreneurs fully acknowledge this, and scholarship on innovation backs up this perspective.

It turns out that the entrepreneur as a “great man” falls into the myth of technical innovation in which individuals are responsible for progressive leaps in technology. Rather than a “great man” with a eureka moment who single-handedly invents something game-changing, most innovations involve parallel developments, uncredited contributors, failures and starts, and lengthy social histories -- all of which make for a far less exciting narrative.

The myth of the entrepreneur is so popular because it aligns with core American values. For example, American culture places a high value on the “self-made man” and the rags-to-riches story of Horatio Alger, both of which are still remarkably persistent tropes in popular discourse and business writing. As Orvis Collins and David Moore write in The Enterprising Man:

The entrepreneur is a “heroic figure in American folklore akin perhaps, to Davy Crockett and other truly indigenous epic types -- stalwart independents who hewed forests, climbed over the mountains, built new communities, rose from nothing to something, and did all the things American heroes must have done to build a great nation.

How These Myths Play Out When It Comes to Women in Tech

The trope of the successful high-tech entrepreneur is surprisingly similar across twenty-five years of technology development: young, brash, rich, famous, intrinsically risk-taking, innovative, and intelligent. In Silicon Valley specifically, the image of the entrepreneur that has persisted through thirty years of boom-and-bust cycles is almost always young, white, and male.

This image has deep implications for the way the technology industry functions, particularly when it comes to gender. Entrepreneurialism is a loaded concept that incorporates male-normative notions of behavior and success -- and because entrepreneurs are so high status, this means that women have been systematically excluded from the highest levels of the technology scene.

John Ogbor writes that entrepreneurship “has sustained traditional dichotomies, oppositions and dualities -- between male and female -- where the male-oriented definition of reality is upheld as the legitimate world-view celebrating masculine concepts of control, competition, rationality, dominance, etc.” Studies of entrepreneurship discourse have repeatedly found that entrepreneurs are male-gendered, while female entrepreneurs are ignored, under-covered, and portrayed less favorably than men. For instance, in her study of entrepreneurs, Helene Ahl found that in business discourse 70 percent of words used to describe entrepreneurs were male-gendered -- these included “self-reliant”, “assertive”, “forceful”, “risk-taking”, “self-sufficient”, “leader”, “competitive”, and “ambitious”.

This skewed discourse positions entrepreneurship as a male enterprise, and portrays female entrepreneurs as unusual. Yet that doesn’t actually map to the reality of American entrepreneurship. No less than 40 percent of privately held businesses in the United States are owned by women. And despite the attribution of entrepreneurial traits to men, studies have shown no significant differences between women and men who start companies in terms of education, technical background, or motivation.

In fact, by some metrics, women-owned companies outperform the average: women owners, on average, are more conservative about spending money, and are more likely to survive the transition from startup to established company. Despite this, women are virtually absent from the upper echelons of technology. While venture-backed technology companies do not represent the majority of U.S. companies, they are given the highest status in Silicon Valley and are overwhelmingly run and funded by men. Only 8 percent of venture-backed startups are founded by women, and only 14 percent of venture capitalists are women; at the top technology venture-capital firms, only 8 percent of investment professionals are women.

There are two major implications of this type of discourse: (1) While the technology industry is supposedly egalitarian and democratic, it privileges the voices and experiences of men. Just look at the percent of female speakers at tech conferences. (2) Because the number of women in computer science is dismally low for a variety of reasons, it contributes to maintaining a male-dominated culture of production. Technology skills are valued most, but women in tech generally work in marketing, public relations, project management, event planning, graphic design, or community management -- all lower-status jobs than developers, engineers, venture capitalists, or entrepreneurs.

These problems are widely acknowledged by others. There are many organizations dedicated to supporting women in technology, and there has been a flurry of attention paid to egregious sexist incidents at technology conferences and among tech subcultures. But complex problems have complex solutions, and the persistent idea that the technology industry is a meritocracy undermines these efforts, because it implies -- incorrectly -- that those who do not rise to the top are less capable than those who do.

Social software may inadvertently do more to promote this inequality than to counter it. While Web 2.0’s complex history bestows social media with radical, transformative power, it has ended up prioritizing entrepreneurialism, commodification, and independence. This combination has played out in complex and contradictory ways; for example, the tech scene values self-made status over ascribed status, but looks down on individuals who actively court attention rather than “earning it” for their accomplishments.

When social technologies emerged, pundits and journalists hailed YouTube, Flickr, and Wikipedia as a way for individuals to fully participate in the creation and dissemination of culture and knowledge. But what is acceptable to create and disseminate has been increasingly circumscribed by what is acceptable to be publicly judged. The “edited self ” is one constructed with a particular group of people in mind, and one that people expect will be scrutinized. The care with which people create their edited self is at odds with the stated ideals of equality, meritocracy, and collaboration that permeate the tech scene. And since women in the scene are subject to scrutiny for their appearance, information-sharing, and relationships in a way that men are not, there is a stark gender imbalance in the way user-created content is perceived and judged.

It would surprise me if there are many online social contexts where normative judgments do not break down along traditional lines such as sexuality, class, race, education, or other status markers and differentiating factors.

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People in tech repeatedly portray Silicon Valley as places where the smartest, most motivated people from around the globe are changing the world for the better, and this rhetoric has been taken up and repeated often by traditional media outlets. Unlike, say, community activists, public schoolteachers, social workers, or health care providers, technologists are ultimately focused on a small slice of the population, and they are primarily looking for ideas that will prove profitable. These entrepreneurs may have a passion for better audio streaming or e-mail, but to say that such pursuits are world-changing is a bit disingenuous.

I spoke at Google Zeitgeist a couple years ago, and was impressed by the calls for greater investment in public education, and enjoyed listening to talks by highly motivated people who had founded non-profits or otherwise donated significant time and energy to social justice and welfare causes. Rather than the libertarian philosophy often attributed to Northern California executives, Zeitgeist furthered a spirit of can-do philanthropic optimism similar to that espoused by Bill Gates, who is now at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

But the event also demonstrated the seductiveness of digital elitism, which incorporates social consciousness and intellectual discussion. “If we’re going to achieve greatness in the twenty-first century,” Eric Schmidt said, “...we have to start with some Silicon Valley thinking.” He stated that “Ultimately, this world will be owned by an entrepreneur.”

Digital elitism is optimistic, in that technology is positioned as a solution to an array of difficult problems. At the same time, it inculcates an air of superiority and a universality of experience that truly only applies to a very small number of the world’s most privileged individuals.

Digital elitism does not reconfigure power; it entrenches it. It provides justification for enormous gaps between rich and poor, for huge differences between average people and highly sought-after engineers. It idealizes a “better class of rich people” (as Kara Swisher put it) who evangelize philanthropy and social entrepreneurship -- but it also promotes the idea that entrepreneurship is a catch-all solution, and that a startup culture is the best way to solve any problem.

But not everyone can work at a startup, and the business model of startups cannot be applied to all situations.

__Adapted and excerpted from Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity, and Branding in the Social Media Age -- to be released tomorrow, November 26. Copyright 2013 by Alice Marwick. Reprinted by permission of the author and Yale University Press. __

Editor: Sonal Chokshi @smc90