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tech have proportionally fewer women than several non-tech industries: namely, healthcare, retail, government, education, and nonprofits.” In 2009, the National Center for Women & Information Technology reported that 56 percent of women with STEM expertise leave the industry midway into their careers. “They are seeing they cannot have the careers they want in this industry,” Karen Catlin, a former vice president of Adobe Systems, told
Fusion
in 2015. With the exception of some notable examples, such as Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook; Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo!; and Meg Whitman, CEO of Hewlett Packard, there are few highly placed female executives in Silicon Valley. In the digital revolution, which has provided so many job opportunities and seen the start of so many businesses and empires, men have reaped most of the profits.
    And the culture of Silicon Valley is a male-dominated culture, some say a “frat boy” culture, populated by “brogrammers” and “tech bros.” “In inverse ratio to the forward-looking technology the community produces, it is stunningly backward when it comes to gender relations,” wrote Nina Burleigh in a 2015
Newsweek
piece, “What Silicon Valley Thinks of Women.” “Google ‘Silicon Valley’ and ‘frat boy culture’ and you’ll find dozens of pages of articles and links to mainstream news articles, blogs, screeds, letters, videos and tweets about threats of violence, sexist jokes and casual misogyny, plus reports of gender-based hiring and firing, major-league sexual harassment lawsuits and a financing system that rewards young men and shortchanges women.” In 2014, a group of female leaders in the tech industry penned “An Open Letter on Feminism in Tech” in which they described the hostile atmosphere they’d encountered in the industry. “We’ve been harassed on mailing lists and called ‘whore’/‘cunt’ without any action being taken against aggressors,” the letter said. “We’re constantly asked ‘if you write any code’ when speaking about technical topics and giving technical presentations, despite just having given a talk on writing code. We’ve been harassed at these same conferences in person and online about our gender, looks, and technical expertise.”
    “It’s a community in which the porn-inspired, ‘drading,’ ” or drunken, “college tweets of Evan Spiegel, the CEO of Snapchat, go public,” Burleigh wrote, “where a CEO’s history of domestic violence has no repercussions but female executives get fired for tweeting about sexist jokes they overhear. It’s a place,” she continued, “where companies routinely staff conference booths with scantily clad ‘code-babes’ and where women are so routinely sexually harassed at conferences that codes of conduct have become de rigueur—and the subject of endless misogynistic jokes on Twitter.” Burleigh likened Silicon Valley today to the egregiously sexist world of the go-go ’80s depicted in
The Wolf of Wall Street,
noting that while Wall Street these days seems “tamer,” in Silicon Valley, “misogyny continues unabated.”
    So what impact does the culture of Silicon Valley have on the place that girls are experiencing all day, most days, on their phones? While not every one of the thousands of social media sites and apps reflects the tech industry’s frat house atmosphere, of course, it would be blind to say that none of them do; and it would be naïve to say that some of the most popular apps, some of the ones most often used by girls, don’t.
    You could start with the concept of “hot or not.” “Hot or not” is a prevailing social media conceit, first seen online in 2000, with the launch of the photo-rating site Hot or Not by two Silicon Valley–based software engineers and Berkeley graduates, James Hong and Jim Young. The site grew out of an argument the two were having about whether a certain woman was attractive, or “hot.” Hong and Young created a way for