Marqeta CEO and
founder Jason GardnerImage: Marqeta
Before the drive, Gardner told his father: "You need to show me this place, Silicon Valley. I want to see HP. I want to see Apple. I want to see Intel." He liked what he saw. "I was blown away," he recalled. "I fell in love with the Bay Area and the balance between nature and technology. There's this balance between the beauty of the Bay Area and the technology that's being built. I never forgot it as a little kid."
Fast forward 40 years, and striking a balance is something he's had to become increasingly familiar with.
Gardner now calls the Bay Area home and is considered a pioneer in a key segment of fintech: the infrastructure for issuing debit and prepaid cards and processing payments. That means he treads a careful line between competing and collaborating with corporate giants including JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Visa and Mastercard, as well as fending off rivals such as Galileo and Fiserv.
On Thursday, the Oakland-based fintech took another step along that tightrope, announcing a new credit card-issuing platform geared to businesses looking to launch their own credit card programs. It's a bold move in a space dominated by legacy providers such as Fiserv. It's also a potentially lucrative push at a time when fintech infrastructure has become a growing and increasingly competitive market, as more businesses look to incorporate financing services on their platforms.
"We're now tackling the credit card issuing space which is very very complex," he said. "This represents for us a major product extension because we know that this area of the card market is ripe for disruption."
The disruption Gardner speaks of features a significant trend: Financial tools and services are becoming ubiquitous. "Every company is becoming a fintech company of a sort," he said.
Marqeta's client list underscores this. It includes fast-growing fintechs including Affirm, Expensify and Square as well as Wall Street giants like JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs. But Marqeta also serves clients outside of financial services that are now incorporating payment and finance tools into their platforms, such as Uber, DoorDash and Instacart.
"A lot of companies are becoming financial services companies," Gardner said. "You saw this with Apple creating the Apple card and then the Apple prepaid card. And you see Uber getting into the space." Big, established companies, such as major retailers, typically have a good understanding of their customers and see the value of offering them financial services on their own platforms.
Thanks to a legion of fintechs, companies can now build those financial tools and services on their platforms. "In the past, when you wanted to go build a card product you had to call a bank," he said. "But these open platforms and the ability to deliver open API's allow a company to create very specific experiences for their constituency."
Marqeta's credit card platform rollout follows recent,
other big news. Last July, JPMorgan Chase announced it was using
Marqeta's technology to instantly tokenize commercial credit cards
into mobile wallets. With Thursday's announcement, Marqeta is
expanding its platform capabilities to allow customers to build and
issue new credit card products.
In September, Marqeta introduced tokenization-as-a-service, which gives card issuers, including those not on the Marqeta platform, access to its tokenization technology which seeks to secure a digital card's identification data. Last month, Goldman Sachs said Marqeta will be its partner in developing a checking account for Marcus, the Wall Street firm's digital bank.
Logan Allin, managing partner at Fin Venture Capital, said Marqeta's new offering is "definitely an early mover" and a "differentiated" initiative. "Marqeta continues to be the leader in the fintech space for B2B card issuance, whether those are debit, virtual, tokenized and now bank-sponsored credit cards," he told Protocol.
But Marqeta is also competing with other fintech infrastructure companies in an arena dominated by corporate giants, including major banks and financial institutions, including JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Visa and Mastercard. In most cases, the infrastructure players have forged partnerships with these giants, which Marqeta has also done, with tools for better payment systems. But there have been signs of consolidation as some of the big players move to acquire these technologies: Last year, Marqeta rival Galileo was acquired by SoFi, Visa tried (but ultimately failed) in its bid to buy Plaid, and rival Mastercard just acquired Finicity.
"We're a utility," he said. "We think of ourselves as a hardware store. If you need to solve a problem, you buy specific tools for the job." Marqeta, he said, is creating tools "to help [not] only large issuers, but [also] these large tech companies, new entrants in the digital banking space and commerce disruptors."
The old guard of the financial service industry faces its own challenges, of course. "The big banks and the big financial institutions need to create much better experiences," Gardner said. "They can't just expect to create the same model, the same experience, the same functionality they've been doing for years, and continue to be relevant."
The rise of digital banks and other fintech companies has "really disrupted" the industry. He said: "It woke up the sleeping giants to figure out how to begin to compete in managing financial services."
It's a market in which Gardner has been a trailblazer, said Allin, who called the Marqeta founder "an incredible entrepreneur and CEO," adding: "He was prescient and very early to the 'embedded payments' and 'payments-as-a-service' themes and now is in a position to dominate this space."
Gardner came up with the idea for Marqeta while having dinner with a friend in San Francisco in 2010. His friend wanted to "put a bunch of coupons on a card," he said. "I found that kind of a cool idea, to see if we could solve that problem," he said. "And the only way to solve that was build an issuing processing system from scratch."
Gardner said he set out to build a platform that would deliver its services via open APIs. That in turn helped define Marqeta's strategy, which is focused on developers.
Kevin Doerr, Marqeta's chief product officer, described the company's focus on developers as essentially a battle for "hearts and minds." "Developers are a unique cohort of the population at a technical level and if you can win [their] hearts and minds because you're doing the things that appeal to them, then ultimately you can win the business," he told Protocol.
He cited Twilio as a company he watches closely, noting that the cloud communications platform has "done an outstanding job with their developer platform." "They interest me from that perspective," Doerr said. "Understanding developers, building what they need, having that focus is really key for Marqeta."
In fact, Allin said Marqeta "exemplifies the Twilio-ization of fintech," citing the company's "developer-first sales approach, using open APIs and sandbox technology to provide self-serve options to fintechs at all stages for card issuance."
"It's a true bar-belled approach to growth which creates sustainable moats, less customer concentration and diversified revenue streams and margin profiles," Allin said
Marqeta is unveiling its new product at a moment when the getting is still good on the markets and many when major fintech names are understandably looking to go public. On Tuesday, the company reportedly confidentially filed papers to go public. The company has no comment, a spokesman told Protocol.
Gardner said he preferred not to discuss a possible sale or an IPO. "We're focused on building a business," he said. "I wouldn't comment on these types of outcomes. There is a lot of work to do. The world is changing rapidly, especially around financial services. We see this great opportunity. And we're in the right place at the right time with our platform." From Your Site Articles * Robinhood's handing of GameStop shows fintech's PR problem ... > * Visa failed with Plaid. What's their new fintech plan? - Protocol ... > * The tech IPOs to watch in 2021 - Protocol -- The people, power and ... > Keep Reading Show less Benjamin Pimentel Benjamin Pimentel ( @benpimentel) covers fintech from San Francisco. He has reported on many of the biggest tech stories over the past 20 years for the San Francisco Chronicle, Dow Jones MarketWatch and Business Insider, from the dot-com crash, the rise of cloud computing, social networking and AI to the impact of the Great Recession and the COVID crisis on Silicon Valley and beyond. He can be reached at bpimentel@protocol.com or via Signal at (510)731-8429. Sponsored Content Designing a world where intelligent automation and humans co-exist Ivan Bajic / E+ / Getty Images February 16, 2021 John Kucera, Salesforce John Kucera is Senior Vice President of Product Management for Einstein Automate. He is responsible for Einstein Chatbots, Flow, and Einstein Next Best Action. John also drives the Einstein Automate vision across the Salesforce Platform, Mulesoft, and Salesforce Industries, enabling end-to-end automation, integrated across any system. John earned his BS in Electrical Engineering at Northwestern University, and his MBA in Business at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Connect with John on Twitter, @NotHackedJK or Linkedin, John Kucera. February 10, 2021 Not surprisingly, the COVID-19 pandemic sparked a permanent shift in how businesses in every industry view artificial intelligence (AI) and automation. In the past, many saw these technologies as a nice-to-have; and therefore, pushed them further out on their roadmaps. Today, companies are realizing how imperative these technologies are as a means to be more productive in an all-digital, work-from-anywhere world. Plus, they're starting to question why employees should be trapped by repetitive processes that hinder their ability to move fast and engage customers with empathy at a time when people need it most. Throughout this past year, my conversations with our customers and other business leaders have shifted from casual inquiries about automation, to the immediate need for more efficient and informed teams. What once were long-term initiatives have become urgent business priorities. In fact, nearly 70% of consumers and business buyers surveyed by Salesforce say COVID-19 has elevated their expectations of companies' digital capabilities, and nearly 90% of customers expect companies to accelerate digital initiatives due to the pandemic.
In response to elevated demand, businesses are doubling down on adoption to boost innovation, improve customer service and automate routine tasks so employees can focus on more strategic work.
International Data Corp. predicts that global spending on AI will double in the next four years, reaching $110 billion by 2024; meanwhile, Gartner expects that organizations will be able to run 25% more tasks autonomously by 2023.
In addition to customers, we're in the early stages of realizing the full potential of how automation and AI can unlock the magic of happier, more fulfilled employees. Despite the need for speed and productivity, humans will always be front and center when it comes to automation. After all, there are some things computers cannot do, like delight customers and build meaningful relationships. Automation can free employees from the hand-cramping, repetitive work they dread, and instead amplify efficiency, insight and skill sets.
Automation, itself, has existed for decades. For years, programmers have been using business rules to tell a system what to do, thus reducing the need for human intervention and errors. AI, on the other hand, uses algorithms to simulate how the human brain works by performing astonishing feats of pattern recognition at scale. Its' usage has been amplified as AI tools have become more ubiquitous, affordable and capable of solving specific business problems.
Automation and AI go together like peanut butter and chocolate - they're just better together. This is proved by the fact that AI without automation is meaningless because you need to connect insights to action in order to see value. AI accurately interprets what customers need, and automation executes on those insights. Together, this pair of transformative technologies can solve numerous problems that neither can tackle on its own.
Today, we continue to see a true need for intelligent automation. But, what does that really look like in practice? Here are some examples of this transformative duo together:
When the pandemic hit, companies like Sun Basket faced a sudden 50% spike in case volume and needed to quickly adapt their customer service. The company turned to AI-powered chatbots to manage the influx of customer requests to help customers track their orders or packages, report issues and get credits or refunds. Then, if customers needed additional support from an agent, the chatbot was able to create a follow-up action for the agent with the customer's preferred method of engagement.
Another example can be found with agencies that handle unemployment claims in numerous states, which also turned to AI-powered chatbots to manage a crush of claims amid the pandemic. With application volumes spiking throughout 2020, only by adopting intelligent automation features could unemployment offices meet the urgent needs of constituents. For example, the New Mexico Department of Workforce Solutions operates a chatbot called Olivia that supports its team of customer service agents. Olivia has managed roughly 100,000 interactions to quickly answer frequently asked unemployment questions.
AI-powered recommendations are also an example of where insights lead to action to help supercharge productivity. For example, IT departments now support an increasingly remote workforce. AI-powered recommendations are applied to support tickets (i.e. a request for new equipment) to efficiently analyze historical data to predict which type of equipment to deploy based on a user's parameters and needs. Then, by using an automated workflow, the item is quickly shipped, while at the same time updating the inventory in the system.
Together, intelligent automation frees up employees to do what humans do best - make decisions and build relationships.
Every day I talk with businesses that are under pressure to do more with less - they can't just hire more people to gain a competitive advantage.
Take sales, for example. A recent State of Sales Report found that 76% of sales teams that use AI say the technology has become more valuable since the pandemic, while top-performing companies adopt AI at nearly three times the rate of underperformers. This is a great example of humans working with intelligent automation.
Humans are uniquely capable of managing relationships, while AI is great at synthesizing lots of information and extracting relevant insights.
More specifically, a feature like Einstein Call Coaching gives sales teams the ability to see insights, key moments and trends that are surfaced within conversational data to understand what's going on in customer calls. Creating a workflow that automatically integrates those insights into action saves salespeople time and sets them up to make better decisions and use their skills more effectively.
Likewise, a customer service agent has the unique ability to empathize with customers and build rapport. By introducing automation at the beginning of the interaction, a chatbot is able to handle the time-consuming, routine requests like updating an address or resetting a password. This frees up the agent to focus on more complicated cases. By integrating intelligence into the employee experience, customer service agents can then see relevant next best actions, such as offering a rebate based on the lifetime value of the customer, in real-time. Agents can then focus on customer engagement and creative problem-solving.
Automation doesn't have to be intimidating. For those just getting started with AI, automation or a combination of the two, here are some tips:
We are all crunched for time these days, whether jumping from one meeting to the next, or crashing your child's Zoom classroom presentation between meetings. Despite how far technology has come, we humans are still the best at creative problem-solving and handling the unexpected. Intelligent automation is well-suited to handle the repetitive, time-consuming work that we don't typically relish.
Now is the time to invest in customer relationships, while empowering employees and increasing their workplace satisfaction. After all, we could all use our own personal assistant working behind-the-scenes.
Keep Reading Show less John Kucera, Salesforce John Kucera is Senior Vice President of Product Management for Einstein Automate. He is responsible for Einstein Chatbots, Flow, and Einstein Next Best Action. John also drives the Einstein Automate vision across the Salesforce Platform, Mulesoft, and Salesforce Industries, enabling end-to-end automation, integrated across any system. John earned his BS in Electrical Engineering at Northwestern University, and his MBA in Business at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Connect with John on Twitter, @NotHackedJK or Linkedin, John Kucera. sponsored Protocol | Enterprise The GE Mafia: How an old-school firm birthed a generation of tech leaders The conglomerate hot-housed graduates in the '90s and '00s to create an adaptable army of tech talent. Now those execs are everywhere. February 17, 2021 Joe Williams Joe Williams is a senior reporter at Protocol covering enterprise software, including industry giants like Salesforce, Microsoft, IBM and Oracle. He previously covered emerging technology for Business Insider. Joe can be reached at JWilliams@Protocol.com. To share information confidentially, he can also be contacted on a non-work device via Signal (+1-309-265-6120) or JPW53189@protonmail.com. January 11, 2021 Look at the resumes of the top tech executives at the nation's largest companies and you're likely to find at least one theme: a stint at General Electric. The once-quintessential American conglomerate has served as a launch pad for individuals now spearheading IT operations at companies such as Airbnb, United Airlines, Unilever, Morgan Stanley, AIG and dozens of others, according to analysis by Protocol."You look across [top technologists in] the Fortune 100, it's pretty hard to find someone that doesn't have a background in GE," said Nationwide Chief Technology Officer Jim Fowler, who departed the company in 2018 after a 18-year tenure. "It was by design that it became something of a producer of talent," he added.
GE's ability to cultivate leaders is widely known. The company's famed former CEO Jack Welch, who stepped down in 2001 and passed away in 2020, was laser-focused on pinpointing the most promising talent across the enterprise. But an early emphasis on IT -- and the training of its executives to focus on it -- put the company on the precipice of what is now one of the biggest trends in corporate America.
In recent years, enterprises have been rushing to digitize their operations, transforming IT leaders from help desk aficionados reporting to chief operating officers into top executives overseeing billion-dollar tech transformation efforts with a direct line to the CEO and board of directors.
That phenomenon has put new pressure on a position that, until recently, could function largely within its own silo. Chief information officers and similar positions are tasked with figuring out how tech such as cloud computing and artificial intelligence can not only support existing operations, but give the firm a new competitive advantage. Or, more bluntly, turn IT from a cost center into a profit center.
"That's just the way this role has evolved," Silicon Valley Bank CIO and 17-year GE veteran Mark Rohrwasser said. "If you are just a pure technologist ... I don't think you're going to be in the key roles going forward."
That's perhaps the key reason why so many tech leaders today have been on GE's payroll: The company made it a priority to give its most promising future IT executives a broad range of skills, and pushed them into positions in the conglomerate's many different verticals: everything from healthcare to investment banking. Nationwide's Fowler, for example, worked in seven business units throughout his tenure; Rohrwasser served in eight.
"At that period of time, that was pretty unique. You were sitting at the same table as the business leaders, you were expected to engage," Rohrwasser said. "That's commonplace now."
GE also pinpointed those individuals early on in their careers and provided ample training and leadership development opportunities. It was a major investment in a relatively small selection of workers, one that former execs say is foreign in today's workforce.
"They figured out that they needed to pay attention to people throughout the continuum of their careers," said Lynn Boyd, a former talent development executive at GE who helped lead the IT leadership programs. "It's harder to do now, to invest that kind of money [only] to have people leave on."
While the company's troubles are well-publicized, including the way it navigated its own digitization efforts, GE's leadership development programs, many of which bore the fingerprints of Welch , became a de facto gold standard in corporate America: Outside of CIOs, it's not uncommon to find a GE alumni as a CEO .
And in a display of just how strong the connection between alumni is as a result of these initiatives, as many as 25 former GE tech execs get together roughly every other month at events sponsored by an outside consulting company, according to Fowler.
But the foresight to focus on IT, specifically during the late 1990s and beyond, was particularly astute. At a time when a glob of internet startups careened from success to failure amid the dot-com crash, what set GE apart from other corporations, former employees say, was its willingness to spend money to bolster its internal workforce. Instead of relying on the increasingly big providers like SAP and Oracle to manage the tech stacks, it chose to fend for itself.
Working with software companies, "if you didn't know what you were doing, you just gave the farm away. There's a lot of companies that don't know what they are doing," said Boyd, who is now an executive coach. "It became evident to GE early on, maybe because they were so big and were spending a pot-load of money on this ... that we just can't have somebody come in and mismanage it," she added.
To cultivate that kind of talent, GE started early, recruiting IT employees straight out of college. Those individuals would immediately be placed into a two-to-three week bootcamp, setting them up for what would hopefully become a decades-long career complete with several more iterations of executive training. Once the introductory sessions were over, each person was rotated to four different positions across the enterprise over the following two years. The program also encouraged these next-generation leaders to specialize in a specific technology field, like application development or coding.
"We basically took the material that was coming out of colleges and we would 'GE-ize' it and teach it what we do, why we do it and how does technology play into it," Fowler said.
As they progressed from early to mid-level careers, the coursework would intensify. Each year, roughly 30 first-time IT managers would be tapped to attend the Experience Information Management Program at GE's storied Crotonville campus. At the two-week gatherings that occurred four times a year, they could schmooze with other emerging leaders, such as reps from the top business schools in the country and executives from other divisions. (A standout "rock star" at these events was former GE CIO Gary Reiner, who still serves as a mentor to Fowler and others). But it wasn't all social: Each was given a business problem to work on and, after six months, would report in with a division CIO at the company on their progress.
"We called it a mini-MBA," Boyd said. "That put you on the map. If you weren't already on the map for other reasons, that put you on the map."
Ultimately, a segment of that group deemed executive material was then advanced to another gathering at Crotonville that focused more on developing long-term strategic vision. Of that group, as few as three would be ultimately tapped to serve as a group CIO, former staff said, leaving as many as 20 executives who were likely to jump ship in order to ultimately reach the coveted role.
That is one reason why there is such a large network of GE alumni at the nation's biggest businesses. But it also meant that, when those internal positions did become available, there was little delay in appointing new individuals.
"There was never a time when one of those top jobs came open that we didn't have a list of five to six really strong candidates just ready to walk in," Fowler said.
While GE still runs its postgraduate program for IT staff, it no longer runs the later-stage development programs. Instead, it is planning a new, more accelerated training program that will be rolled out this year. Still, two decades after Welch left GE, the focus on pinpointing leaders early on and exposing them to the numerous facets of the business remains.
"With the speed of change across the industries in which we operate, developing technology leaders with the skills to take on complex, real-world problems is critical," current CIO Nancy Anderson. "We're proud of the tech leaders we've produced at GE."
From Your Site Articles * Atlanta is the future for Black leaders in tech > * How tech leaders changed in 2020 > * Ron Klain, Biden's new chief of staff, gets tech - Protocol > Keep Reading Show less Joe Williams Joe Williams is a senior reporter at Protocol covering enterprise software, including industry giants like Salesforce, Microsoft, IBM and Oracle. He previously covered emerging technology for Business Insider. Joe can be reached at JWilliams@Protocol.com. To share information confidentially, he can also be contacted on a non-work device via Signal (+1-309-265-6120) or JPW53189@protonmail.com. ge airbnb morgan stanley unilever united airlines aig nationwide cio enterprise Protocol | China More women are joining China's tech elite, but 'Wolf Culture' isn't going away [DEL::DEL]It turns out getting rid of misogyny in Chinese tech isn't just a numbers game. Chinese tech companies that claim to value female empowerment may act differently behind closed doors. Photo: Qilai Shen/Getty Images January 27, 2021 Shen Lu Shen Lu is a Reporter with Protocol | China. She has spent six years covering China from inside and outside its borders. Previously, she was a fellow at Asia Society's ChinaFile and a Beijing-based producer for CNN. Her writing has appeared in Foreign Policy, The New York Times and POLITICO, among other publications. Shen Lu is a founding member of Chinese Storytellers, a community serving and elevating Chinese professionals in the global media industry. January 27, 2021 A woman we'll call Fan had heard about the men of Alibaba before she joined its high-profile affiliate about three years ago. Some of them were "greasy," she said, to use a Chinese term often describing middle-aged men with poor boundaries. Fan tells Protocol that lewd conversations were omnipresent at team meetings and private events, and even women would feel compelled to crack off-color jokes in front of the men. Some male supervisors treated younger female colleagues like personal assistants. Within six months, despite the cachet the lucrative job carried, Fan wanted to quit. A woman we'll call Zhang had a similar experience at her former employer, Baidu. She told Protocol that senior colleagues joked that Zhang and her younger female coworkers were hired to "please their eyes."Alibaba and Baidu look and act like they value female empowerment. Alibaba, the ecommerce giant, hosts a Global Conference on Women and Entrepreneurship every year. Its founder, Jack Ma, has positioned himself as a champion for women and has repeatedly said that Alibaba owes its success to its female workers. Ma has touted the company's relatively hefty share of women in top management -- currently, six out of 14 of the most senior roles are staffed by women. Search engine behemoth Baidu, too, likes to tout its relatively high ratio -- 46% -- of women in management.
"Workplace equality is a core value of Baidu. Female employees account for 43% of Baidu's workforce and 46% of management. Women play significant roles as top executives of the company driving technology innovation and strategy," Baidu said in an email reply. Alibaba did not respond to Protocol's requests for comment.
So why do women like Fan and Zhang have such a rough go of it?
This is the terrible paradox at the heart of Chinese tech, one that will threaten its capacity to innovate in the future. A wave of Chinese women are joining elite tech companies and their boardrooms, often in numbers that compare favorably to tech industries abroad, but it turns out that getting rid of sexism is far more than a numbers game. Women in Chinese tech are marginalized, demoralized and exhausted. When they get home, they're still expected to shoulder most of the childcare and household chores.
The result: Those who manage to ascend have to learn to play -- and win -- a man's game. This paradox is going to sharpen as more women enter tech and become aware of gender inequality.
Women are increasingly populating Chinese tech offices. Data shows that some of China's biggest internet companies, including ByteDance, Baidu and ride-hailing giant Didi Chuxing , each employ at least 40% female staff. By way of comparison, statistics show that female employees fill between 28% and 42% of roles at America's five largest tech companies. In India, women make up 34% of the tech workforce; in the U.K., the figure is 19%.
Women have also made it into Chinese tech leadership. Seventy percent of Chinese startups have at least one female executive, a higher proportion than companies in the U.S., U.K. and Canada, according to a 2019 survey conducted by Silicon Valley Bank. And more than 1,000 women have made it into the boardrooms of China's public tech companies, according to a study conducted by Tianyancha, a data technology service company.
Yet Alibaba and Baidu are not the only "greasy" companies. Leading Chinese tech firms, including Tencent, have posted job ads depicting their female employees as "pretty" or "goddesses" to attract male candidates, according to a 2018 Human Rights Watch report. In 2017, WeChat's parent company Tencent apologized after footage emerged of a corporate event where female employees were kneeling while using their teeth to open water bottles placed between men's legs. A 2012 job ad for food-delivery group Meituan declared that "finding a job equals finding a woman," featuring a suggestive image of a thong hanging between a woman's legs. "Do what you most want to do," the ad concluded, using a verb for "do" that colloquially means "fuck." In the years since, Meituan has repeatedly depicted young women in its promotional ads as food on the plate for delivery.
In gender studies, the theory of critical mass hypothesizes that deliberative bodies must be made up of at least 30% women to impact policymaking. But at least when it comes to tech, it's clear that neither a high percentage of female execs nor a workforce approaching gender parity equate to workplace equality. Julie Yujie Chen, who teaches at the University of Toronto and has researched the experience of Chinese women in tech, doesn't believe the presence of more women executives in a Chinese tech company will work in favor of female employees. "Women in tech is not a representation issue," she told Protocol. "It is about challenging the norms."
Lin Zhang, an assistant professor at the University of New Hampshire who has interviewed dozens of female entrepreneurs in China's tech companies, said many of the women who thrive in this ultra-competitive, male-dominated industry not only have become resigned to workplace masculinity and sexism, but have internalized it. "Because of the generally hostile gender culture in China, there's not much solidarity among women," Zhang said. "Now that they're up there, they feel like, 'I have paid my dues. It's your turn.'"
Alibaba's Fan echoes this: "Although women are much present in Alibaba's senior management, they all have transformed themselves to be greasier than the men. That's how they entered that powerful circle."
Shi is a 30-year-old manager of a content-producing team at Nasdaq-listed video-sharing platform Bilibili. Like Fan and the other female tech workers interviewed for this story, she spoke to Protocol on the condition that she be identified by a pseudonym to avoid retaliation from her employer. Shi said the women in her company leadership "completely subscribe to the 'wolf' mentality. They are just as territorial, aggressive and exploitative as the men."
One result is tech products that objectify women and reinforce gender stereotypes, at least in the way they are marketed and used. Didi Chuxing is helmed by a woman -- company president Jean Liu -- and Didi's staff was 40% female in 2017, the most recent year for which statistics are available. However, it encountered scandal with Hitch, a carpooling service launched in 2015 that suggested hookups between drivers and passengers in its 2018 ads. Two female Hitch passengers were raped and killed that same year. The general manager at Hitch was a woman named Huang Jieli.
Even relatively "woke" Chinese companies demand a lot of their employees. A major culprit is Chinese tech's infamous 996 work schedule -- 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days per week -- which can wear workers down. I spoke with most interviewees after 10 p.m. in China, after they had finished a long day's work. Message alerts from colleagues often interrupted our conversations.
This work culture further disadvantages women because of the larger milieu in which they live. Women still shoulder most of the childcare and housework burden in Chinese households. A 2019 National Bureau of Statistics report showed that women spent more than twice as much time as men on unpaid household work. "The lack of reliable childcare service becomes a structural barrier for women to advance their career," said Chen, "especially in sectors like the tech industry."
Although a large number of young Chinese women have joined tech, they are more likely to concentrate at the lower end of the skill and productivity spectrum, such as human resources, public relations and business operations. Programming, often the power center, remains a male-dominated division, with female programmers comprising only 10.4% of its ranks in 2020, according to a report by Chinese digital working platform Proginn. (In the U.S., figures range between 8% and 11%.)
Of course, China has its share of relatively egalitarian companies. Take ByteDance. While it spent last year at the center of U.S. controversy over data-sharing with Beijing, it's seen at home as valuing diversity and inclusion. Dong, who works in the ByteDance HR department, told Protocol she chose the company for its relatively egalitarian culture. It was the only prospective employer that did not inquire about her marital status when she was job-hunting in 2018, and the supervisor of the department she was interviewing for was a woman in her late 30s.
But Dong thinks ByteDance is swimming against the tide. She says several senior female colleagues in her team still had to quit because they couldn't juggle work and childcare demands. It's not a problem unique to China, but female workers there are getting less help than in other countries. "Tech companies in other countries are trying to create a better environment for female workers who face similar social expectations," Dong said. "But in China, they won't specifically create supportive policies for you. The baseline is lower. It's like, 'I'm already doing well by not treating you badly.'"
The chorus of support for California is a vocal pushback against recent decisions made by companies like Oracle, Tesla and HPE to leave the state in favor of Texas, presumably to take advantage of the state's lack of income tax.
Whether phone calls from government officials or peer pressure from other CEOs will make a difference is unknown. But with more companies committing to the Bay, it's premature to write off Silicon Valley yet.
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From Your Site Articles * Oracle moves its HQ from California to Texas - Protocol > * Tech CEOs are staying out of a fight to fund California schools ... > * Big Tech spent millions to close California's digital divide this year ... > Keep Reading Show less Biz Carson Biz Carson ( @bizcarson) is a San Francisco-based reporter at Protocol, covering Silicon Valley with a focus on startups and venture capital. Previously, she reported for Forbes and was co-editor of Forbes Next Billion-Dollar Startups list. Before that, she worked for Business Insider, Gigaom, and Wired and started her career as a newspaper designer for Gannett. twilio airbnb doordash politics silicon valley Latest Stories Protocol | Enterprise Is serverless hitting the mainstream? Tom Krazit Joe Williams Protocol | China I helped build ByteDance's vast censorship machine Shen Lu Protocol Next Up AR helps local media shoot for the stars Janko Roettgers Protocol | China Chinese microlending is getting weird and dangerous Zeyi Yang ipo Power Your ongoing guide to 2021's biggest tech IPOs Protocol Team interview John Chambers on the Silicon Valley exodus: 'We're in real trouble' Benjamin Pimentel Sponsored Content Everyone's moving to the cloud - here's how to keep your data secure while it's there James Daly Protocol | Enterprise Salesforce is building a private CRM for the State Department Joe Williams Protocol | Fintech Visa failed with Plaid. What's its fintech plan now? Benjamin Pimentel Source Code Facebook calls Australia's bluff David Pierce See more Most Popular Everything you need to know about the Coupang IPO Zuckerberg, Pichai and Dorsey will testify (again) on misinformation Amazon's new interface tries to rein in the chaos Everyone's moving to the cloud - here's how to keep your data secure while it's there IBM's huge bet on building a cloud for banks One finance app to rule them all Bulletins February 18, 2021 16:10 EST Zuckerberg, Pichai and Dorsey will testify (again) on misinformation February 18, 2021 14:07 EST Tech lobbying groups sue to block Maryland's digital ad tax February 18, 2021 12:20 EST Tim Cook grants rare interview to a Chinese tech influencer Get Source Code in your inbox David Pierce's daily analysis of the tech news that matters. Email Address[ ] [*]Sign Me Up About UsCareersContact Us Privacy StatementDo not sellTerms of Service Get access (c) 2020 Protocol Media, LLC