By Karen Gullo
Working for a tech company or startup in Silicon Valley is a special kind of employment. Swanky cafeterias with professional chefs, foosball tables, a workforce of mostly 25-year-old tech bros, all-white male leadership teams, impossible deadlines, constant pitching for funding, and, if you’re lucky, million-dollar paychecks.
Mai Ton, a human resources executive with more than 20 years of experience working in Silicon Valley, takes us on a journey into the often sexist and diversity-free world of working in tech in her new book “Come into My Office: Stories from an HR Leader in Silicon Valley.” Ton has been VP of Human Resources (HR) at seven Silicon Valley startups and is a consultant and trainer for startup CEOs and HR executives. Her book is an unvarnished insider’s look at tech startup culture, which is in turn infuriating, funny, shocking, and inspiring.
“Come into My Office” traces Ton’s own professional journey from investment banking analyst to a human resources leader and advisor to tech startup CEOs. The trip has been a roller coaster ride, and the challenges at start-ups breathtaking. Often the only woman and minority in an executive position, Ton had to navigate and try to change office conventions created by CEOs who fostered bro cultures that reflected their own world: sports, games, money, and other male-dominated topics. Young CEOs often leaned on her to fix issues with workers that they themselves should have dealt with.
When the CEO of one company she worked at (none of the companies in the book are identified by name) commented on a photo in a company Slack channel with a racial comment, she marched straight into his office. “What were you thinking?” she asked. He looked at her like she was crazy and defended the comment. Welcome to startup land!
At one job she had to coach a new college graduate who didn’t know how to make the transition from frat life to work life. At another she coached someone who told her that he tried to limit himself to seventeen (!) drinks per work event. At another, a sales manager yelled at her to make a female worker stop taking her daily 10-minute meditation breaks in his team’s corner of the office because he found them annoying and inappropriate. He had no problem with his own team members taking multiple breaks to play ping-pong because, he said when challenged by Ton, that’s what they needed to de-stress.
Ton told him that she wouldn’t make the woman stop taking meditation breaks, just as she wouldn’t put an end to his team’s ping-pong games. When the manager asked if he could talk to the woman himself, Ton said she wouldn’t stop him, but would he mind if she talked to his team about their ping-pong games? That was the end of it, and everyone got to keep their de-stressing practices.
“I realized this silly office squabble was about more” than the worker who meditated, Ton writes. “This was about how my companies and coworkers viewed women in the workplace.”
Ton was undeterred and recounts her efforts to foster inclusiveness and diversity over the years. She hosted unconscious bias trainings, hired external trainers on diversity in the workplace, and launched employee engagement surveys to measure employee sentiments around leadership, collaboration, and other topics. She launched compensation studies to ensure women and people of color were paid as much as their male counterparts and hosted lunch sessions on why diversity matters.
Mai Ton, tech executive and author of “Come into My Office: Stories from an HR Leader in Silicon Valley”
It was hard, lonely work that led to burn out, Ton writes. But her efforts brought results—one company she worked at won an award for being one of the one hundred best places to work in the U.S. In all, Ton has won 14 awards for her companies, and has three individual awards including Top 50 Most Powerful Women in Technology, Top 50 Tech Leaders and Top 20 Tech Trailblazers.
In a recent chat over Zoom, Ton talked about her motivation for writing the book and the challenges women continue to face in the tech industry.
Q: The book highlights a personal journey for you. You write that you got tired of being berated and disrespected and started standing up to CEOs and calling out managers for creating a toxic work environment. How did you learn to push back and stand your ground when the executives you worked with were clearly out of line?
MT: I’m a petite Asian female, and my cultural heritage is that “we don’t speak up, and don’t make waves.” In the workplace, that type of upbringing doesn’t serve you well. I worked at a consulting firm where we had 150,000 employees. There’s a lot of politics that are played, and I didn’t realize that was happening around me. I thought if I just worked hard, that was enough. But while I was working, people were off schmoozing on the golf course and at happy hours, not getting their work done, and they were getting promoted. That was my first aha moment—I’m the idiot working my tail off and others were getting ahead. I got tired of seeing that.
My company sent me to a program specifically designed for employees from Asian cultures. Whereas the culture is one that teaches you not to make waves and let your work speak for itself, this program taught me the opposite. At work they don’t care if you’re being mindful and diplomatic. You should state your opinion and speak up. That was a shift for me, and I learned that I had to play the game and schmooze. So, part of me is assimilated, and I thought why bottle all this up? If you want to climb the ladder you have to navigate the politics and speak up.
Q: How much progress has really been made in the tech industry to make workplaces more diverse, fair and equitable, in your estimation?
MT: Diversity means a lot of different things to different people. At tech companies we talk a lot about the need for diversity, and there have been efforts, yet we are barely moving the needle—even with female executives, which is just one part of the problem. But things are changing. Employees are not satisfied with settling for the status quo. They want a mission-driven company that invests in philanthropy, promotes diversity, that doesn’t solely focus on making profit. The times are changing–COVID helped with that because everyone was working from home, and you’d see people in their homes, and see their family in the background. There is more awareness of people’s lives outside of work. There’s more empathy for working parents. All these things are registering, finally. That’s where progress can be made.
And I think we are making progress, but it just doesn’t feel like it. It needs to move faster. We still see issues when people speak up—women get hurt for being whistleblowers. We have a lot more to do. I want to speed up this journey for my daughter Emma, who, when she saw a company photo of me where I was the only woman and Asian on a panel of white men, said, “Why does the world look like this? Why do you work with a bunch of men?” When that picture was taken, I didn’t see it that way as “that was my normal.” I think about my daughter Emma, and I hope she inherits something that doesn’t look like this.
Q: When I look at that photo, I wonder: how did those executives accept you into their all-white male club? What was that like for you?
MT: They didn’t view me like that. They said: I don’t see you like that. I see you as part of the team, one of us. They just got used to me, and even shared confidential information with me–there was trust. I think they made a lot of progress when I would call them out (for inappropriate or insensitive remarks or emails). On the more serious matters, they absorbed and listened. Generally, they didn’t treat me any differently than others on the team.
I do think there is one wave of folks who are just oblivious, and they don’t think about how things will land. They weren’t paying attention, and that’s their excuse. There’s more awareness now with all the social justice protests in the world around us, and that’s affecting how leaders communicate. The best leaders are the ones who are double clicking, and thinking, how would this sound to people? They might have someone specific in mind, and think: if I were to put this out, how would it come across to them? There’s a way to be empathetic and passionate. And they honestly don’t want to look like an idiot.
Q: When I’m looking up a company online, I always go straight to the “About” section and click on “Leadership Team” to see if there are any women. Often the only woman is the head of HR. Why are corporate HR directors mostly women?
MT: HR is predominantly made up of female professionals. I think a lot of people have accidentally gone into HR. Most of the time people are landing there because of other work or experiences. I have also seen in other big companies that HR, marketing, and diversity departments are the three places where there are likely more women in those professions. The position of Chief of Diversity is important, it’s where you have the best shot of driving diversity in your organization. You often see women or people of color in this job, because companies want to have someone who is different, who brings a different perspective. I choose to look at that with a lot of optimism, that diversity leaders can use their positions as a voice and platform to disrupt the homogeny.
Q: You say in the book that companies are trying their best to find diverse talent for executive jobs. But many industries, including tech, continue to be dominated by white males. What needs to happen for that to change?
MT: It will take all of us to be more thoughtful and look at our biases. You hear people say, “I’m hiring the best for my team.” But they’re drawing from their network of college buddies, and it may not reflect diversity. Ellen Pao founded Project Include, where companies can sign up and pledge and commit to moving the needle faster on various diversity measures. We need companies to join and make real progress on diversity matters, and not just to join the bandwagon.
It will take us more time to get where we need to be. Tech companies have the ability to disrupt, and they’ve been so successful in disrupting consumer product markets. I wish we could push the needle with the diversity component. It will take a back seat if your top executive isn’t behind it. I think of the CEO of Intel who sought to make the company’s workforce more diverse to make the industry a better place for his daughters: He tied his executive team’s bonuses to hitting their own diversity goals. I believe the world can change, but it takes that kind of action from the top to lead by example. After all, tone starts at the top.
Karen Gullo is a freelance writer and former Associated Press and Bloomberg News reporter covering technology, law, and public policy. She is currently an analyst and senior media relations specialist at Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in San Francisco.