Remember when Mark Zuckerberg, speaking to Joe Rogan, lamented that corporations had become “culturally neutered”?
“Masculine energy is good,” he said. “Having a culture that celebrates the aggression a bit more has its own merits.”
That was in January 2025. The father of three daughters had timed his comments to land mere days before Trump returned to office and on the literal same day that Meta killed off its DEI programs. That’ll un-neuter corporate culture!
Alas, joke’s on you, Zuck, because there was never a problem to solve. The masculinity and aggression you so dearly missed have been flourishing all along. That’s one of the big takeaways of WIRED’s recent in-depth survey of women in tech. Across companies of all sizes and at all levels of experience, women shared an outrageous collage of disparagement and disappointment. “Colleagues talk down to me like I’m an idiot,” one woman told WIRED, despite having 30 years of experience in her field. “I’ve had male clients assume I’m the secretary or dispatcher and scoff when they learn I’m the CEO,” another added. A third woman said she was accused of performing sexual favors for job assignments. “They didn’t think I could handle the job,” a fourth woman said, “even though I ran circles around them.”
The 634 women WIRED surveyed weighed in on AI, bias, and the state of tech culture, and their answers are a blazing indictment of tech leadership. “One of the executives would dress as Santa at the holiday party and make the young women sit on his lap,” a woman reported. “I’ve had a boss insist I walk in front of him so I could ‘improve [his] view,’” another person wrote. “I learned that a group of guys were regularly ranking women’s body parts on Slack and that I was their favorite,” a third woman offered. Sorry, what year is this?
These stories don’t fit at all into the prevailing discourse—to the extent that it exists—on women in tech. Conferences and organizations pitch themselves as empowering or inspiring women, while AI-pilled execs everywhere pretend the gender problems have been solved, so let’s please move on. Decades of research have enumerated the specific barriers facing women and, of course, turned up solutions for them to implement. Find a mentor. Sing your own praises. Practice your talking points before asking for a raise. Organizing internally for workplace change is very 2020; collecting a paycheck and keeping your mouth shut seems more 2026.
Of course, plenty of women in WIRED’s survey reported feeling satisfied with their careers, and not everyone’s been, shall we say, manhandled. But so many have. More than a third of the women surveyed said they’d experienced gender-based harassment or bias at work. One after another, women reported being sexually harassed by male supervisors, getting paid less than their male peers, getting passed over for promotions, getting talked over in meetings. They were denied opportunities because men can “handle the pressure better.” Another popular trope is the man who only seems to hear a good idea when another man says it. You don’t need to listen to a three-hour podcast to find the manosphere; it’s right there in the conference room.
“I hate the right-wing CEOs marching us along to a dystopian fascist hellscape because they get a boner over escaping to Mars.”
ENGINEER, AGE 45–54
“Is Sundar really worth a thousand of me? Because I work with the sales teams that allow him to be so successful and it sure doesn’t seem like it to me.”
OPS WORKER, AGE 55–64
“Even the pretense of compassion and caring for employees is being dropped. (My latest employer literally dropped ‘people are our priority’ from their principles.)”
ENGINEER, AGE 35–44
“In the last few years, there have been a LOT more people clearly in it for the money who openly bring no other values with them.”
DEVELOPER, AGE 35–44
“My outlook these days is profoundly grim and cynical.”
OPS WORKER, AGE 45–54
“I got laid off this year. I was able to get a new job but have had to settle for a $20K pay cut and working 100 percent in-office. And my work will have to involve a lot of AI slop cleanup.”
DESIGNER, AGE 35–44
The editor in chief of Gallup has said: “We have ample evidence from decades of survey research that Americans have a predictable tendency to be more negative about elements of life at the national level than at the local level.” Everyone in Congress sucks, except my representative. Every public school is going down the drain, except my kid’s school. The economy’s a wreck, but my finances are OK. Even health insurance companies benefit from this so-called local positivity bias.
To some extent, the same effect may have been at play among the women who took WIRED’s survey.
But when WIRED asked whether, compared with five years ago, the tech sector is better to work in for women in general, the sunny majority all but disappeared.
WIRED’s Women in Tech Survey
In a field devoted to techno-optimistic progress, how inspiring is that?
47%
70%
said they were paid fairly
64%
said they were satisfied with their careers in tech
said tech is unchanged or worse for women
76%
felt their current employer takes harassment and discrimination seriously
63%
felt confident their current employer fairly promotes and compensates women
Who Took the Survey
*totals may not equal 1oo due to rounding
wonderful
an addiction
exhausting
lazy but advanced
very antihuman
very futuristic
computer-brained
very shallow
uuuuuugggggghhhhhhhhh
very male- and youth-oriented
a fun and inclusive community
a game of follow-the-leader
fearless and overwhelmingly positive
still as bro-y as fucking ever
a “the emperor has no clothes” situation
less strenuous than investment banking
way more doom cult-y than it used to be
unstable, adversarial, greedy, bloated, gutted by private equity
fast, innovative, but often burnout-driven
cold and uninspiring
vicious
strange
TECH CULTURE TODAY IS...
Midsize companies had
the most satisfied employees
“Several colleagues have said to me, ‘I don’t know who I am outside of my job,’ ‘my whole identity is my job because it’s so demanding,’ or ‘maybe I should just make pottery and live out in the woods.’ I’ve lost count how many have told me that, especially if they work for one of the big 5.”
Designer, age 25–34
HUSBAND
B&B”
“My
seems to think he lives in a
Her advice for a woman just starting out in tech: “Find your allies and do your best to create a community that's supportive and can counteract the bullshit you'll face in the office.”
She’s dissatisfied with her own career and feels the tech industry has gotten worse for women to work in.
“The same issues persist related to it being run by an aggrieved boy's club who hate women. I don't want to discount that there are good people in the industry and I've been fortunate to work with some incredibly talented and supportive people. But the higher-ups have stymied us all.”
She uses AI “under duress” a few times a week. “I hate it,” she writes. “It's dumb, and I spend more time prompting it to do what I need it to do than just doing it myself, but management demands it, so…” Her fears about an AI takeover are tempered, though: “The gambit seems to be backfiring and people are in the FO part of FAFO, where we all realize this is a tool, not a magic wand.”
“I'm Convinced These Bozos Are Going to Torpedo the World”
45-54 years old, more than 20 years in tech
Senior in sales/marketing at a huge company
A relative newcomer to the tech industry, she felt “a little nervous and apprehensive” five years ago—but now feels “quite comfortable.”
“I use AI every day to help write code that we use for the software we develop,” she writes. She’s unconcerned about where AI may lead. “What makes me feel that way is the way that I use AI,” she writes. “I'm constantly running checks on the code that I write and there's no way that I could let AI run wild in my system.”
“Tech culture is exciting today. We're in a very hopeful place with the implementation of AI. We just want to bring it to the world.”
“Honestly with Trump employing all the women he does it sets a very fine example that women can accomplish great things too.”
“Put in Long Hours and It Will Pay Off”
45–54 years old, between 5–10 years in tech
Chief information officer at a midsize company
For some, tech is a calling. For this respondent, it was the “best work-from-home option available.” She’s dissatisfied with where her career is now and concerned about where AI is pushing the industry.
“I see the bias firsthand. Part of the job I do is identifying bias so it can be trained out, but not enough women are working in the industry, so not all the bias is caught. Men won't notice any bias, it all looks normal to them. AI pushes stereotypes because the people training it aren't disadvantaged enough in their own life to perceive the stereotypes as harmful.”
“Things were exciting and new five years ago. The team was small, my contribution actually mattered. Now it's over 10,000 freelancers and we're all just anonymous numbers. One mistake and you're out. None of us matter.”
“Tech culture is terrible and toxic. Full of condescension and arrogance. The super tech dudes screenshot things from Slack and make fun of those workers on Reddit. Tech culture glorifies bullying people who are trying to learn. Tech culture loves making fun of women—as a woman there is nothing you can do in tech that won't get you picked on or made fun of. I would get rid of ‘tech culture’ entirely if I could.”
“Don't expect to be taken seriously. Be prepared to be hated by the guys. They will make fun of you and treat you like you don't know anything.”
“If I Quit There Are a Thousand People to Take My Place”
35–44 years old, 5–10 years in tech
Freelance AI testing and evaluation
She’s satisfied with her salary and career and thinks tech is better for women than it was five years ago—but also “more cutthroat.” She uses AI daily to automate parts of her job and isn’t overly worried about it exacerbating bias in the industry. “Humans are flawed; the technology they create will be somewhat flawed too,” she writes. “The notion of a completely fair society does not feel like a reasonable goal.”
“I have been in tech for a very long time. I can recall the days of being the only woman in the meeting; being the only woman at a startup that wasn’t an admin. Let me begin by saying that we have come a long way since then. However, I was talking to a female colleague who was being considered for a promotion. She wanted to know how much travel was involved because she did not want to have to do it with 8-year-old twins—but she was also worried that saying so would be career-limiting. That is not something that a man ever has to contemplate: my own boss just says ‘I don’t travel’ and no one holds it against him.”
“Never before have I noticed the generational differences as I do between myself and the current crop of new hires. These new workers today have no idea what tech was like in the early days: they will never be the only woman in a meeting room. No one will ever assume they will take the notes or make the coffee or order lunch for the team offsite—all things I did earlier in my career even though none of them fell within my job function. The early women of tech walked so that this generation could run, yet all I hear is how unfair everything is, older people aren’t leaving their roles so they can’t get promoted, owning a house feels so impossible, wah wah. Just stop. Work hard, wait your turn, and life will catch up. I see fabulous posts of cocktails on the beach and trips abroad, and yet the same relentless whining about how they can’t get ahead. It comes across as extremely entitled.”
“I Am Much Better Off”
55–64 years old, more than 20 years in tech
Senior ops at a huge company
Underpaid, overworked, and unsatisfied with her career in tech, she uses AI—grudgingly—every day. She and her spouse have an infant. They share the care work 50/50, but she works late more often than she’d like.
“Five years ago I used to deliver at least 4 major projects in a given year. I don’t miss the late nights and weekends spent burning my retinas out and tethered to a computer. But most satisfying was that the work delivered. Nowadays you can spend months on a project that goes nowhere with nothing to show for your time. There are so many layers to management and not a visionary bone in any of them. They operate from a place of fear and utter lack of intuition.”
“To me, anyone who reaches the upper echelons of leadership or the C-suite is basically an alien. A woman in that position has so little in common with me and lives a life that is so far out of reach for me. I know the people they serve are members of the board and shareholders and every decision they make is driven by how they can hold onto their seat for another day.”
“Because my job forces AI down our throats, much of my time is spent experimenting with it and then verifying the output myself. The reward is that ‘gotcha!’ moment where I catch an error the AI tool made. We’re moving quickly to ship products without doing the validation work, so the already biased info just gets baked into the next iteration and the next iteration like a bunch of inbred Russian nesting dolls.”
“I Feel Like a Deadbeat Parent Sometimes”
25–34 years old, 5–10 years in tech
Senior creative at a huge company
“My favorite coworkers are men, but some of them will always default to assuming a woman’s opinion is automatically less valuable,” one respondent wrote. “This attitude has not improved for the past 10–15 years.”
It should have. Back in 2013, a Pinterest engineer named Tracy Chou wrote a viral post called “Where are the numbers?” after she’d noticed that no one seemed to have good data on women engineers. Chou created a spreadsheet on Github, and people filled in their companies’ stats. Reverend Jesse Jackson took up the charge and started showing up at shareholder meetings and browbeating companies to disclose the makeup of their workforces. It worked, and in 2014 Google released its first diversity report. Facebook and Microsoft joined in. Slowly, the numbers improved year over year. Somewhat.
“I literally had to put all my performance reviews through a sentiment analyzer to demonstrate the consistent negativity and personality attacks embedded in ‘meritocratic’ systems.”
RESEARCHER, AGE 55–64
“I was told of course I’m good at writing, I’m a woman.”
TECH AUTHOR, AGE 35–44
“One time they even paid a (male) consultant to tell them the same thing I told them before for free.”
ENGINEER, AGE 35–44
“Everyone in the C-suite, all men, had a habit of sending dick pics to the receptionist.”
RESEARCHER, AGE 55–64
PROTECT
MEN
MEN
“Every single place I’ve ever worked is the same outcome.
They do not care.
in a world run and dominated by men.”
“Have you ever experienced or witnessed gender-based harassment or bias at work?”
The longer a woman has worked in tech, the likelier she is to have experienced harassment.
Now the pendulum has swung back hard, propelled by Trump’s anti-DEI agenda. (Within months of taking office, he cut the staff of an agency for handling workplace bias from 480 to 75.) Those same three companies stopped sharing their diversity data publicly. A few companies still do (kudos), including Nvidia, which published its most recent statistics in June 2026. It’s underwhelming: Women hold 17.4 percent of technical roles, and the numbers of women managers and leaders are also in that ballpark. At least the company can boast that two of its five executives are women.
With numbers like that, there’s not much ground for women to lose. But with hypermasculine dudes ruling Silicon Valley’s fiefdoms, the outlook isn’t great. “Everyone lauds awful people in those positions. Altman. Musk. Bezos,” one woman wrote. Employees who once believed they were building products to solve humanity’s problems now say they feel disillusioned, and even disgusted, by their leaders.
“I’ve been through bubbles before, but I can tell my company might not weather the storm on this one.”
TRAINER, AGE 45–54
“Claude Code is like having a brilliant colleague who isn’t creepy.”
FREELANCER, AGE 35–44
"Today is my last day of employment due to my team being eliminated after building out agentic AI while training our replacements in India. Good luck with your shit data.”
RESEARCHER, AGE 45–54
“I feel like my role is slowly being replaced, and all I can do is watch it happen.”
ENGINEER, AGE 25–34
"I would wipe AI off the map if it were an option.”
ENGINEER, AGE 45–54
“AI is the perfect pot to brew your confirmation bias.”
MANAGER, AGE 35–44
86 percent of the women who took our survey said they use AI for work at least a few times a week.
“How concerned are you that AI systems will exacerbate bias in the tech industry?”
Who’s using AI every day? You can pretty much follow the org chart.
EASE
“I am more at
and less busy now because of AI.”
SLOP”
“slop+ slop =
Stir in the AI boom, and it’s a perfect cocktail for alienation. “The push for me to vibe code is immense no matter how much I point out the designs it creates are, frankly, awful,” one woman wrote. Another responded, “I spend so much of my time cleaning up AI slop and AI mess.” When asked whether AI is likely to exacerbate biases in tech, one replied, “I’m already seeing it. Sloppy, half-assed work gets praise when a man does it with Claude, whereas if I or any other women on the team even tried to present that we’d get fired.” Women and men alike cited abhorrence for the environmental damage, job decimation, IP theft, and wealth inequality that seem inherent in AI.
All of which amounts, a respondent said, to a new kind of burnout. A poor job market has workers feeling trapped and reluctant to speak up. So it’s no wonder that when asked what she’d change about tech culture today, one woman’s answer was, “I don’t know, let me ask Claude.” It would be a shame if the conversation ended there.
It’s all politics.
Don’t stop!
Try not to let men take credit for your hard work.
Demand respect and give it too.
Keep your circle small.
Pick a different industry.
Be so good they can’t ignore you.
Keep thinking and keep documenting.
Do not make your job your identity.
Stay confident, stay alert, be positive.
The system is against you, so you should be trying to work against it.
Don’t remain silent about your struggles. If management is unsympathetic, go to the media. They’ll probably love a juicy scoop.
“What advice would you give a woman who just got her first job in tech?”
TOP ILLUSTRATION: CELINA PEREIRA; GETTY IMAGES
SPOT ILLUSTRATIONS: MABEL ESTEBAN GARCIA
