'Silicon Valley' Season 6 Episode 5 points at tech industry’s sexism as Gilfoyle succeeds in making people like him while Monica fails
In ‘Silicon Valley’ Season 6 Episode 5, ‘Tethics’, while Richard Hendricks (Thomas Middleditch) was busy trying to bust Gavin Belson’s (Matt Ross’) lie about ethical behavior, two of the other main characters were involved in their own shenanigans.
Monica Hall (Amanda Crew) and Bertram Gilfoyle (Martin Starr) were informed by PiedPiper’s human resources head Tracy (Helen Hong), their coworkers did not like them. Piper Pulse, an anonymous survey that allowed employees to rate their senior managers on things like acumen and interpersonal skills, yielded not-so-great results for Gilfoyle.
While he got 9.9 out of 10 on the former, he received only 1.5 in the latter, with descriptions like “unapproachable, rude, and capable of great hurt with an unflinching stare.” Monica, although a bit better, barely clocked a 2 out of 10 in the same category.
Gilfoyle challenged Monica that he could get his numbers up in two days and she agreed. But things did not prove easy for her. In fact, Gilfoyle, who everyone is nervous around and has a menacing stare, had an easier time getting friendly with the younglings at the company.
Monica, on the other hand, could not even manage to get even the slightest of friendly interactions from the male engineers, even after she dons a Princess Leia hairdo. Gilfoyle’s explanation -- “Gaining someone’s confidence is easy. Appear open and interested by mimicking their body language and repeating what they say back to them” -- may make sense, but there is an obvious and villainous elephant in the room: Sexism in the tech industry.
In her book ‘Brotopia’, American journalist Emily Chang explains that “Silicon Valley is a modern utopia where anyone can change the world or make their own rules if they are a man. But if you are a woman it is incomparably harder. And that shows in the numbers.”
In an interview with The Guardian, Chang said, “Women were programming computers in the early days of the military and NASA. Then, as the industry started to explode, these personality tests were developed to identify people who could be good at this job. And it was decided, though there is no evidence to support the idea, that good programmers ‘don’t like people’. Well, the research tells us if you hire people who don’t like people, you hire far more men than women. These tests perpetuated the stereotype of the antisocial, mostly white, male nerds who many of us think of when we think of computer programmers.”
Sexism in tech is, perhaps, more rampant than any other field. According to a study titled 'The Elephant in the Valley' that conducted a survey of 200 senior-level women in Silicon Valley, 84 percent of the participants reported that they had been told they were “too aggressive” in the office, 66 percent said they had been excluded from important events because of their gender and 60 percent reported unwanted sexual advances in the workplace.
Over the years, myriad incidents of sexism and aggression against women in Silicon Valley have been documented and reported on. Yet nothing seems to change. Or at least not visibly. These incidents include women seniors being questioned by their male juniors, women being mansplained their roles by male coworkers, despite their proven competency and of course, general and undeserving aggression from male colleagues -- equals, superiors and juniors.
So, Gilfoyle’s Jedi mind trick may be a useful hack, but it’s only useful if you’re a guy. For Monica, winning over male colleagues would have been a Sisyphean task. And if Gilfoyle has an easier time changing employees’ perception of him, then one can see there is a big, big problem that remains unaddressed not just in PiedPiper, but really the whole industry, outside the show’s confines.
New episodes of ‘Silicon Valley’ premiere Sundays at 10 p.m. on HBO.