Silicon Valley Gender Gap Essay

In this paper, I am going to list several factors, both external and internal, that account for the Silicon Valley’s gender gap and how they affect women in the work place. First, women’s greatest concerns in working or running start-up in Silicon Valley remain unsolved: lack of affordable child care, scarcity of mentors for younger women, sexual harassment for younger women and virulent ageism for elder women. Most women care a lot about their children; however, female professionals are facing the dilemma: it is tough to keep balance between work and family if there is no affordable childcare provided by the community. In telephone interviews (Flynn, 2001) with a random sample of 826 women aged 21 to 61, nearly three-quarters said the area had not been successful in providing access to affordable …show more content…
What obstructs female entrepreneurs succeeding in this tech industry? A recent report (Burleigh, 2015) on women entrepreneurs by the Kauffman Foundation identified the chief challenges to female entrepreneurship, “lack of available advisers” at the top of the list. Lack of mentorship is not the only reason that makes women hard to survive in tech industry; sexual harassment is also a big concern for young women who just enter the industry. Recently, three high-profile sexual harassment lawsuits have been filed against Tinder and two of the biggest venture capital firms—Kleiner Perkins and CMEA Capital. When Ellen Pao talked to senior partners about sexism within the firm to solve the problem internally but did not receive positive feedback because almost every senior partner in the firm is male. Women who stay in the industry beyond their late 30s may be less subject to sexual harassment than their younger counterparts; however, it is still not the time for them to succeed because they are sidelined by virulent ageism in the industry (Burleigh,