We Went To TechCrunch Disrupt And Asked People How To Fix The Tech Industry

Attendees at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference weigh in on what Silicon Valley is missing, and how to increase the number of women in tech.

By
Katie Notopoulos
by Katie Notopoulos

BuzzFeed News Reporter

and
Katie Heaney
by Katie Heaney

BuzzFeed Contributor

TechCrunch Disrupt is a large, annual tech industry conference that happened in NYC this week. We asked 20 attendees for their opinions on their industry.

First question: "What is Silicon Valley lacking?"

* This guy just wrote his company name.

Second question: "What should the tech industry do to improve the number of women in tech?"

* I think this was a typo for "Equality."

Just after we took this picture an interesting thing happened. "You know, I've noticed there's actually a lot more women here this year," he told us.

"Oh really? That's cool," we said.

"Yeah, another thing I noticed — and I think this is an interesting observation — and I don't mean to sound sexist, is, the women here are really attractive."

We reminded him of the sign he had literally just written to "BE LESS SEXIST". We suggested he might be noticing that women at tech conferences feel pressure to dress more professionally than men (he was wearing a sweatshirt and jeans) due to biases in the industry, but he seemed insistent on trying to make a point that if there weren't sexism in tech, women at the conference wouldn't be so ... hot? It did not go well. We let him know it was not going well. He dug deeper.

"Yeah but like, when I'm walking around the streets of New York, I see a lot of attractive women, and—" he said.

At that point we cut him off to save him from saying anything worse. It was a startling reminder that while people attending these kinds of events may know how to appear decent in bullet points, many still have deeply, deeply fucked-up attitudes toward women, and are incapable of shame when told what they're saying is offensive.

Nearly every interaction we had with a man at the conference ended the same. He'd hand back our pad of paper and marker and he'd tell us: "Good luck, girls."

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