Yes, there's sexism in tech. Women should go into it anyway.

SAN FRANCISCO — If she asks, I’ll encourage my daughter to pursue a career in tech.

I know she’ll almost certainly encounter some utterly infuriating sexism. Not all of her experiences will be as bad as the situation Susan Fowler described at Uber. But I have also heard even worse stories. Still, I’ve had an enormously satisfying career in Silicon Valley.

Gender bias is one of humanity’s most deeply rooted problems, but the fact there’s so much focus on it in tech is a reason for optimism. I worked at Google and Apple, and have been a CEO coach at Dropbox,Twitter, Qualtrics and half a dozen other great tech companies. One of the things that’s consistent across all those companies is that they are full of people who love to solve hard problems, and who are really, really good at it.

First, don't despair

Here’s the advice I’d give to my daughter if she were 18 and just starting her first job and having to navigate her way around some attitudes and actions that hurt her ability to succeed and threaten her with a rage that could rob work of its pleasure.

First, don’t despair. Stories of the many women who have great careers in tech don’t spread like the bad news does. I have no doubt that Susan Fowler, who described egregious sexism at Uber, will go on to find enormous success and satisfaction in her work. But I’m also sure that her success and satisfaction won’t get a fraction of the coverage. My advice to young women is this: find a woman whose career you admire, and focus on her story.

Next, figure out what you want — and go get it. Early in your career, you are entitled to focus on figuring out what you want and getting it. It’s not your job to right all the world’s wrongs before you are ready. I faced the worst sexual harassment of my career in the very first job I ever had. I dealt with it by not focusing too much on it. This wasn’t a totally crazy strategy. I was so mad that I might’ve done something stupid or self-destructive. I decided to focus instead on figuring out what I wanted, and on getting it. I didn’t want the BS to define me, take up too much of my time, or get in my way. I was young and relatively powerless, and I needed to focus on putting one foot in front of the other.

Once you’re safe, speak out. Susan Fowler did a great thing for society when she wrote her blog post. But she was also smart to get another job first. I can only imagine what would have happened to her if she’d published her piece while she was still working at Uber. She needed to get herself into a more powerful position, and to find allies. I know Claire Johnson, Stripe’s COO, well, and can only imagine that over her dead cold body would she allow the kind of discrimination that happened at Uber to happen under her watch.

Advice for CEOs

Here’s the advice I’d give my daughter if she were 38 and CEO of a company.

First, give HR its independence, but don’t over-delegate. HR must serve three very different interests: the company’s, the leader’s, and individual employees. Sometimes, leaders dictate to or micromanage HR; the interests of the company come in second, and individual employees are totally forgotten. Other times, leaders simply don’t want to know what happens in HR. You can’t delegate your teeth to the dentist—you have to go. You can’t delegate your relationships with people to HR—you have to build them yourself.

Next, get rid of the bad actors. One man in an organization sometimes will make physical or even violent advances on dozens of women. The women feel traumatized, and the majority of guys can’t even imagine behaving that way. Companies must get rid of these bad actors.

Make feedback routine. Of course, there’s a lot of gender bias that bedevils ordinary, fundamentally decent people, both men and women. When feedback is routine, and speaking truth to power is safe, inappropriate behavior can be called out and addressed immediately, often before things spiral out of control.

Most importantly, don’t give individual managers unilateral authority. Unilateral authority is more easily hijacked by expediency, narrow self-interest or bias than decisions that include multiple people with different opinions. Getting the input of several people on a team yields better results both in terms of the quality and justice of decisions. And when managers have too much authority, feedback only flows in one direction. I’m not saying that unchecked power, control, or authority can’t work. They work especially well in a baboon troop or a totalitarian regime. But that’s not what you’re shooting for.

As my grandmother told me when I graduated from business school: "Women have come a long way...But we’ve got much further to go." We do, but I’m confident we’ll get there.

Kim Scott is the author of "Radical Candor: Be a Kickass Boss Without Losing your Humanity," published by St Martin’s Press in March 2017, and the co-founder and CEO of Candor Inc. Scott was a CEO coach at Dropbox, Qualtrics and Twitter and a member of the faculty at Apple University, developing the course “Managing at Apple,” and before that led AdSense, YouTube, and Doubleclick online sales and operations at Google.

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