HBO’s SV Damaging Portrayal of The Valley

When I first watched the pilot of HBO’s Silicon Valley, I thought it was pretty funny. I found its over-the-top antics about startups, venture capitalists, and Google comically accurate. Some of my friends were less amused, primarily by the complete lack of women. While initially, this didn’t bother me, I’ve come around to a different point of view: I think the depiction of the valley with no women and asshole guys negatively impacts both the valley, and efforts to increase the number of women in engineering.

Take it from the perspective of a high school girl considering pursuing computer science. Would you want to go off to a career where you’d be the only woman, the men were not only dorky, but mean, and your opinion wasn’t respected?

The effort to get more women into computer science is an uphill one already – we don’t need to make it any more difficult.