Technology’s Rainbow Connection

Technology’s Rainbow Connection

Silicon Valley’s Embrace of the Gay and Lesbian Community

SAN FRANCISCO — If it weren’t for the one naked guy, the furries with their articulated ears and the small gaggle of leather-clad members of the Society of Janus, this city’s 44th annual Pride parade in June could have been easily be mistaken for a technology conference.

Every big company in the city and Silicon Valley — Netflix, Facebook,Google, Apple — each offering its own take on gay, lesbian, transgender and bisexual pride, lined up along Spear Street before joining the one-mile parade route on Market Street.

Netflix’s contingent marched carrying a blown-up poster featuring the women of “Orange Is the New Black,” with the slogan “Break Out the Pride.” The biotech giant Genentech’s group wore T-shirts proclaiming “Pride Is in Our Genes.” Facebook’s impossibly young employees wore shirts that announced “Pride Connects Us” and branded spectators

Looking at the elated faces in the crowd, many stamped with that Facebook “Like,” it almost seemed as if the tech industry and the gay communities in San Francisco had merged in a kind of ecstatically branded, hashtag-enabled celebration of shared ascendancy. And yet, for all these public strides, insiders say the culture has yet to fully transcend its frat-boy programmer reputation. Perhaps that is why companies like Facebook are aggressively recruiting and supporting L.G.B.T. employees and offering what Sara Sperling, its senior manager of diversity, calls “unconscious bias training.”

“It’s not about telling them they’re bad,” Ms. Sperling, 42, said of Facebook’s two-hour training course aimed at increasing understanding of the need for diversity in the workplace. “It’s recognizing bias and what are you going to do about it?”

“We realize we have a really complex product and we need a lot of different people with different perspectives,” Ms. Sperling said. That partly explains the company’s effort to create a more inclusive user experience, most recently changing its drop-down menus to include 50 kinds of gender identification. (In 2012, Glaad honored Facebook with an award for efforts on behalf of L.G.B.T. users.)

Back at the parade, Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, described by The Wall Street Journal as “a vocal supporter of gay rights,” marched with his employees and the company posted a video shortly afterwardshowing Mr. Cook mingling and high-fiving Apple employees. Apple has long been in favor of same-sex marriage and put out a strongly worded statement of support when the Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act in 2013.

This is by no means a new trend. Last year, Google’s parade T-shirts showed the word “pride” nestled within Google-color brackets, a sly programming reference even the most casual computer user could easily understand: Pride is written into the company’s operating system. And Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and chief executive, marched in the parade. “People were like, ‘Hey, I kind of know that guy,’ ” said Mike Rognlien, 41, a Facebook employee whose title is (really) “Builder of Awesome Managers” and who accompanied the founder at the parade. “The reaction when they realized it was Mark was touching.”

 “It means a lot when companies make an effort,” said Vivienne L’Ecuyer Ming, chief scientist at Gild, a company that develops software that aids in job recruitment. Ms. Ming, 43, is a trans-woman who started her career a decade ago as a Ph.D. named Evan Smith. She also holds a position on the board of StartOut, a nonprofit dedicated to developing the next generation of L.G.B.T. business leaders.

Ms. Ming says she is optimistic about the advances being made in her industry and the culture at large, but she takes a more nuanced view than many of the young, barely-out-of-college engineers and entrepreneurs flooding into this drunk-on-technology town. “Being here in the Bay Area, people tend to be very accepting — sometimes even celebratory,” she said. “But there’s a difference between being openly embraced and taken seriously.”

Or, for that matter, being truly accepted. In April, Brendan Eich stepped down as chief executive of Mozilla, the company behind the Firefox browser, after his opposition to same-sex marriage was revealed. Mr. Eich’s ouster opened up a debate about whether the tech industry, long considered a bastion of live-and-let-live libertarianism, continues to be a hospitable for everyone in its current sudsy incarnation.

Social media companies like Snapchat and Tinder have been bedeviled by leaks and lawsuits painting their executives as immature and fratlike. The epithet “brogrammer” is thrown around to describe the loutish behavior sometimes exhibited by young, moneyed tech workers, and some gays and lesbians find the culture around tech less than comfortable.

“You see this young bro culture emerging,” said Sean Howell, founder of Hornet, a gay social networking app. “When you go to an event, you see all the bro dudes in one corner, all the geeks in one spot. You also see this rising group of gay people. Which makes networking easier.”

Mr. Howell, 34, sees more “cluelessness” than homophobia, noting, for example, “shock that a colleague might be gay.”

“They have no idea how to be politically correct or value diversity,” Mr. Howell said of some tech workers he’s encountered. “It’s just un-self-aware geek culture.”

“When I go to women’s event, it’s very heterosexual,” said Leanne Pittsford, a founder of Lesbians Who Tech, a national organization dedicated to supporting and connecting gay women and their allies working within technology. “When there’s a panel of women and they talk about ‘Lean In’ and Sheryl Sandberg, and they talk about their husbands and how he should be supportive. That’s outside of lesbians’ experiences.”

Ms. Pittsford, 33, is heartened by some of the changes she’s seeing, many brought on by groups like the one she started in 2012 with Leah Neaderthal, her former partner. As she spoke, Ms. Pittsford was in Washington, where she was participating in the White House LGBT Innovation Summit, which she tweeted about with the hashtag #bestsummitever. “Literally, this is the most diverse event, L.G.B.T. or tech,” she said. “There’s so much overlap. It’s all about bringing people together.”

At Hi Tops, a sports-themed gay bar near the Castro, a patron on a recent Saturday night said that he thought that categorizing colleagues by sexual orientation was becoming irrelevant. “It’s a job,” said Luke, a program manager who declined to give his last name because his company prohibits employees from talking to the news media without authorization. “There’s all sorts of people going into tech.”

“There’s a person on my team who can unicycle for three miles,” he said. “And there’s a lesbian on my team. And I’m on my team. It’s cool. I like that.”

But for some gays and lesbians in tech, there are still obstacles. Robyn Exton, the founder and chief executive of Dattch, a location-based dating app aimed at lesbians, once pitched her product to a venture capitalist who asked a colleague, “Do you think if I invest, people will think I’m gay?”

“Right, so if you invest in a taxi app, people will think you’re a cabdriver?,” Ms. Exton remembered thinking at the time.

“Whenever I’m pitching to a V.C., the second question pretty much always is, ‘So, you’re gay then?,’ ” said Ms. Exton, a 27-year-old from London who was in San Francisco this past spring raising funds. “The first time, I was really surprised by it. I haven’t talked about my sexuality hugely,” she said.

“It’s always men,” Ms. Exton said. “Their first question is ‘What are you doing?’ and the second is, ‘Are you a lesbian?’ ”

“But that’s just the tech industry,” she said.

Ms. Exton, who also attended the White House summit, first presented Dattch (the name is a portmanteau derived from date and catch) to United States-based users at the inaugural Lesbians Who Tech conference at the Castro Theater in San Francisco this year. “Literally, girls were fist-pumping and whooping,” Ms. Exton said. “I was like, this is crazy!”

According to its founders, the conference attracted 800 women, many of whom had never been to an event that slanted so heavily female and so overwhelmingly lesbian. “I didn’t know there were that many lesbians in San Francisco,” said Tracey Kaplan, 26, a vendor manager for Google Enterprises who was in attendance.

“We’re starting some good conversations,” said Ms. Neaderthal, 34, San Francisco city director and chief operating officer of Lesbians Who Tech. The group holds happy hours in 14 cities that regularly draw hundreds of women for socializing and networking. One such happy hour, held in March at Slate Bar in the Mission District, was a shared event with a relatively new meet-up group called Gays Who Tech. While well attended, it had the feel of a high school dance, with the women and men on separate ends of the bar talking among themselves. While the groups barely mixed, for an outsider willing to cross from group to group, the mood was warm and extremely inclusive.

“People need this,” Ms. Neaderthal said. “The women who come to these events, they are the only engineer in the room most times, they’re the only woman of color or lesbian in the room most of the time.”

 “Things have changed so much,” said Kara Swisher, founder and editor of Re/code, a tech industry news site. Ms. Swisher, 51, and recently separated from Megan Smith, a vice president of Google[x], speaks often at gay- and lesbian-themed tech events, including the first Lesbians Who Tech Summit in San Francisco.

Ms. Swisher said younger men and women often thank her for being open about her sexuality and holding the industry to high standards. While many of her colleagues in the tech reporting space are occasionally frustrated by high-level executives who choose not to come out but rather wave from inside a Gorilla Glass closet, Ms. Swisher takes a longer view: “There are different eras of gay. I’m old enough to remember the price people would have to pay. I didn’t pay a price, because I’ve always been out, but there’s a certain type of gay person of an era who just doesn’t want to talk about it.”

“Discrimination still occurs,” said Ari Kalfayan, the 29-year-old founder of GoBoldly, an app that connects users of all orientations with people who share their passions. “Let’s not kid ourselves. We still live in an old boys’ club. There is an institutionalized network.... I have investors who shall not be named who work at Fortune 500 companies at the corporate level who say that if they talk about their partners, they become ‘that gay person.’ ”

“The norm has not been set,” Mr. Kalfayan said. “Luckily in the start-up and tech world, we get to reset culture.”