Interview with a Wadhwa

There's a reason female detractors have taken to calling him "Dadhwa"

The email began with a compliment, then asked if I wanted to talk about my "angry tweets" by phone. There had been only one tweet. "This is the top tweet in my feed right now if you search for @wadhwa," I wrote, linking to Stanford University's Twitter account, which promised that an upcoming lecture from Wadhwa would provide "a fresh perspective on diversity." (Wadhwa is a fellow at the law school.) Stanford's claim to freshness was ballsy considering the growing number of female voices asking Wadhwa to stop speaking on their behalf.

The blowback cycle started as a reaction to Newsweek's recent cover story about sexism in Silicon Valley, where Wadhwa described women as "humble," "practical," self-effacing non-"nerds," who needed to be reassured they are "wonderful." He meant it as praise, but it came across as condescending and facile.

Critics say he misrepresents women in the industry and, worse, takes up their space on the page. Amelia Greenhall, co-founder of Double Union, a hacker space for women in San Francisco, had laid out the case recently in a widely read blog post. She argued that Wadhwa's role as the go-to quote machine on women in Silicon Valley is self-serving — and that his aggressive dismissal of those who challenged his expertise was hurting the people he claimed to help. "Vivek seems to interpret such criticism from influential technical women as ‘silencing,'" she wrote, "when by appointing himself the unwanted spokesman for women in tech he has kept actual, qualified women's voices from being heard widely in the mainstream media."

Straw men, false flags, psychological projection — you name it, Wadhwa tweeted it. Repeatedly

Before I could respond to his first email, Wadhwa sent me another. He had a better idea. Why not come to Stanford, watch him deliver the lecture, and see first-hand whether he really was "taking away" the voices of women?

The request surprised me. There's nothing out of line about inviting a reporter to cover your talk. But had Wadhwa slept through his own takedown? In the past few weeks, women expressed discomfort with his eagerness to move online criticism offline, followed by an invitation to meet him on campus to discuss it in person. Being scolded, then stage-managed by a stranger while no one else is watching is an invasive and uncomfortable power dynamic. Kelly Ellis, a female software engineer at Medium, sparked discussion about whether this was appropriate in late January after she posted a series of direct messages that Wadhwa sent her on Twitter. In the DMs, he took a public conversation private, expressed his "disappointment" in her, invited her to Stanford, then mentioned visiting Stanford again after she declined.

The denouncements against Wadhwa were vehement and targeted — and they escalated quickly. But I didn't need to watch Wadhwa perform on campus to know that he had put women on mute. Even if his intentions were good up until the outrage erupted, the proof was in his response. He tried to marginalize and discredit the women who criticized him, and accepted backup from Milo Yiannopoulos, opportunist-in-chief at Gamergate, a movement to harass outspoken women that has been poorly disguised as a fight for ethics in video game journalism. Straw men, false flags, psychological projection — you name it, Wadhwa tweeted it. Repeatedly.

That's why I took him up on his offer to meet in person. The aversion to Wadhwa as an ally had been an open secret among women in tech, a gray-area grievance shared mostly off the record — perhaps because of the need for male allies, perhaps because they didn't want to be scolded for their angry tweets. Only a few women publicly argued that it was time for him to pass the mic.

If that secret was out, then I had some questions.

As the van rattled down I-280, Kelsey and I listened to an NPR podcast called TLDR that had become a focal point for the backlash. TLDR initially interviewed Greenhall about her blog post without seeking comment from Wadhwa or fact-checking any claims, neglecting journalistic best practices. He cried "libel," and a new podcast was put up in its place. Over an excruciating 23 minutes, we heard Wadhwa patronize Meredith Haggerty, the show's young female host, and insinuate that his detractors were an "angry" mob of randos. When Haggerty asked about Ellis and the DMs, Wadhwa said the problem with social media is that you "don't know if they're an alias or a real human being," adding, "Have you verified that she’s in software engineering?"

I had to hit pause a few times when Kelsey started talking back to the audio system. Kelsey also works as a software engineer. Hours before, she published a brilliant (I'm biased) post on Medium about how Wadhwa's "toxic" brand of advocacy is actually "damn common" in the startup world. Villainizing Wadhwa, she argued, risks drawing a false line between good and bad people, obscuring the ways in which we all perpetuate and "fail to challenge systems of oppression."

The fact that Kelsey's essay on Wadhwa was blowing up while she waited for me in the back of her van ("listening to KMEL and reading my Twitter mentions," she later revealed) added to the feeling that we were somewhere between online and real life. Imagine Tweetdeck as a video game played out in the parking lot of a Silicon Valley strip mall. I had to make the right moves.

Wadhwa was sitting outside the Starbucks where we were supposed to meet. Neither of us bothered with coffee. He was much more subdued than he sounded on TLDR. Defensive, but not at all combative.

My first question was a test: Name five women in tech we should be paying attention to. Given how Wadhwa's self-defense strategy discussed his supporters in aggregate, rather than by name, I wasn't sure if I would get a blank stare. He quickly rattled off seven names and details about their accomplishments. Four of them (Kim Polese, Heidi Roizen, Lynn Tilton, and Megan Smith) are the interview subjects highlighted on the promotional copy for the book Wadhwa co-authored called Innovating Women.

We were off to a lukewarm start.

The unfortunate effect of TLDR's initial oversight is that more attention has been paid to Greenhall's criticisms that aren't true than to the ones that are. Wadhwa published a point-by-point refutation and has been challenging everyone to fact-check the allegations, but at Starbucks, I found him ill-prepared for that challenge.

For example, he repeatedly drew a dichotomy between the angry women whose objections were amplified by social media and a group of "humble," "low-key" women around the world who are not on social media and have more serious issues to deal with. There was a gesture that went along with it. On the table between us, he would make a small circle with his hands on the left — symbolizing a tiny group on the margins — versus a big ol' circle with his hands on the right.

Wadhwa was ill-prepared for his own fact-checking challenge

"It's a different crowd than I've been researching," Wadhwa explained. I told him that was beside the point. "But that does matter," he interrupted, if you have one set of people saying, "‘Stop speaking, stop speaking, stop speaking,' and you have another set of people saying ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you.'" I snapped back: Where in the world were these grateful women saying "thank you"? Did he think he was doing so much good that women begged him to speak on their behalf?

"I'm speaking for the broader set of women," was the only detail he offered.

Sounds like a straw-man argument to me, I replied. Why, I asked, wasn't he listening to people like Ellis or Kelsey, who worked in his industry? After the Newsweek article, Ellen Chisa, a former product manager at Kickstarter, looked up who Wadhwa was following "because he clearly holds a different perspective from me." Something gave him the impression that these women could be ignored. If he had been paying attention to the conversation about women in tech, these Twitter handles would have been familiar to him.

They use social justice warrior tactics because they work. Politeness didn’t get a response from Wadhwa in 2013. Politeness in 2015 was likewise sidelined.

On occasion, Wadhwa threw up a shield that he wasn't trying to represent anyone, only his research. His unpopular observation in Newsweek that women undersell themselves? "I'm sorry, Nitasha, but that's based on research." Wadhwa also focuses on immigration, where his critique of H1-B visas has helped shape public opinion about Silicon Valley's motivations, as well as the Ray Kurzweil school of futurism as practiced by Singularity University, a for-profit unaccredited institute where he serves as a distinguished fellow. Wadhwa told me his next book is going to be about "what life will look like in 2025–2030 and the legal and ethical issues."

When it comes to gender, he typically references studies from 2010 and 2014, as well as women from his book. However, Katty Kay and Claire Shipman found a similar pattern in their research for "The Confidence Gap."

So what research backs up that women are more "humble" outside the United States, I asked. "Well, that is anecdotal, that is my opinion," he replied.

Another research chimera? When I asked if he used Institutional Review Board (IRB) standards for Innovating Women, Wadhwa said the book was done through Singularity University and Farai Chideya, his co-author. (One good measure of Wadhwa's value for diversity: how often do you hear Farai's name associated with the book?) "It also wasn't research, it was journalism/reporting...SU doesn't receive government research funds, so no IRB regardless."

I was able to confirm one more disputed fact about donating the proceeds of his book to educational grants for women (through Singularity University). The school's spokesperson told me that $60,000 in initial supporting funds from Wadhwa's Innovating Women were donated to the Singularity University Fund, "a corporate-advised fund" at the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. The donation had been allocated to the University's Graduate Studies Program. The funds were used to "award more GSP seats" to winners of its 2014 Global Impact Competition for Gender Equality, "which resulted in three women attending the GSP for free or reduced program fees." It hasn't been calculated yet, the spokesperson added, but "net proceeds from book sales will also be donated to the Fund."

"I'm speaking for the broader set of women," was the only detail he offered

Wadhwa was not aware of the latter. He told me to try his publisher, the university, or SVCF, and one of them would know. There were other fact-checking road blocks. Wadhwa mentioned a public spreadsheet created by journalist Glenn Fleishman with the names of women from the book. He claimed the subjects of his book "felt harassed" by critics who were "going around digging up dirt on me" (also known as journalism). He compared the spreadsheet to Gamergate.

Wadhwa's understanding of Gamergate shifts when it's convenient for him. When I asked why he aligned himself with Gamergate, Wadhwa said, "I don’t even know who these people are, you’ve got to realize." When I said that that’s a problem, he said: "Nitasha, Nitasha, I read horror stories about it, and I tweeted my horror at that." When I asked why he was palling around with @Nero, he said, "You’re talking about Milo? I’ve known Milo since — I mean Paul Carr introduced me to him when we were at TechCrunch." All those responses? Within the span of a couple minutes.

In any case, he gave me the name of one woman who felt harassed by the spreadsheet: Screenmancer's founder Quendrith Johnson. She said the harassment fears "did not pertain to her." However, Johnson staunchly supports Wadhwa and called the case against him "a tangled mass of vitriol" with "competing agendas and misdirected firepower."

Fleishman told me he started the spreadsheet because some of the women listed as "ambassadors" had no idea. "At least two have sworn it off," he said.

There were other oddities. On TLDR, Wadhwa said that four to five times a week reporters contact him to comment on a story related to women in tech and, instead, he directs them to the aforementioned women. But I had to press him to identify even one of these people who call him four or five times a week. It wasn't until I said it sounded like he couldn't name any that he coughed up an example. That reporter confirmed that Wadhwa directed him to speak to other women, however, the media request came after the controversy. Nina Burleigh, the author of Newsweek's cover story on sexism, couldn't recall and didn't get why this mattered:

I had already interviewed dozens of women - many off the record and not appearing in the story, when I called Wadhwa bc I needed a male voice, and his writing seemed interesting. I don't recall whether he suggested I speak to any more women but since I already had talked to at least 30 already I wasn't looking for more.

I honestly do not understand the attacks on this man. The world needs more men speaking out on this topic, and there are few enough of them already. If you are interested in pursuing this you should contact Jackson Katz, a prominent male anti rape speaker, writer.

There is a movement of pro feminist men out there and it needs to be nurtured not attacked.

We're stuck in a debate about amplifying women's voices that revolves around a man

From many angles, the fixation on Wadhwa does look futile. We're stuck in a debate about amplifying women's voices that revolves around a man. In order to explain the terms of the debate, the spotlight has to shine back on Wadhwa. And he, in turn, has co-opted terms for abuse that often targets women in order to sideline his female critics. Mary Trigiani, founder of the marketing firm Spada, told TLDR that Wadhwa "reframes the question as a personal attack towards him and uses words like ‘stalking' and ‘harassing.'"

It's a real Turducken of irony. A Matryoshka doll of absurdity. It is a hot mess.

Wadhwa has not helped himself. It's easy to assume that becoming a Twitter target takes its toll. A recent Washington Post investigation showed feminist writers (not in tech) retiring because of the psychic toll of online abuse. In Wadhwa's mind, he's had a few weeks of it, they have been at it for years. But he reacts as badly to one detractor as he does to a dozen. Trigiani was at a Bloomberg conference in January 2014 when he used the term "token floozies" and she wanted an explanation. As he did with "nerds," in Newsweek, Wadhwa blamed it on a lack of familiarity with American slang. There is no possible explanation for this epic "apology" to Trigiani that gaslights her for having "personal difficulties" (this is in the apology) and tells her to "do your homework" by reading his articles and familiarizing herself with his expertise. If you can believe it, the letter sounded worse when Wadhwa recounted it at Starbucks.

The equivalent this time were those DMs to Ellis. In the initial TLDR episode, Haggerty said DMs were "the hand on the knee of social media communication." In the follow-up episode, she stood by the phrase. Probably because it's 2015! Women are starting to build a vocabulary to talk about the gray-area interactions they face online. Managing the expectations of a "mentions pest," for example, is incredibly energy-zapping, but I never had a word for it until Lily Benson's etiquette guide list this month. Wadhwa blames the "hand on knee" comment for allegations of sexual harassment and being called a sexual predator, but Wadhwa is the one who keeps bringing it up.

Last week was not the first time Wadhwa invited me to Stanford. He offered to meet there once before. I would not classify any of his messages to me as harassment. That was never part of the backchannel conversation. I have, however, found many (many) of his emails to me to be uncomfortably paternalistic. I never called him on it before the meeting, so that's on me.

The thing is, when I did, he seemed to get it. Maybe it was the fourth or fifth time I made the same point, but he listened and nodded and thanked me. His mental posture seemed to shift.

It was a relief. I wasn't sure how he was going to react when I told him this was an open secret, or that he has made it harder for women to talk about sexual harassment, or that he is out of touch with feminism in tech today. The last one happened when Wadhwa asked me what "gaslighting" meant. If he didn't know what gaslighting and Gamergate meant, he had no business speaking for women in tech, I replied, incredulous. "I can see the stress in your voice," he said, with a sympathetic look.

It's the parallax of outrage culture

Wadhwa started his end of the conversation by trying to explain to me what it was like when he began writing about diversity. It's just my impression, but I remember the tenor of tech blogging then, and I can believe he started down that path with good intentions. He reminded me of Y Combinator founder Paul Graham, a hero to hackers since back when engineers were not the rockstars and ninjas and Jedis and assholes, whose worldview just wasn't as nimble as the startups he invests in.

It's the parallax of outrage culture that Kelsey warned about. It's easy to make heroes and villains. There should be a vocabulary for gray areas in this sphere, too.

Over and over and over and over again, Wadhwa told me that he was getting out of the diversity game. The only time I believed him was right before we parted ways. What if all of this attention had been paid to women in tech instead, I asked. "There's nothing I would have liked better," he replied. You refocused it on yourself, I shot back. He let out a kind of exclamatory sigh. "Ah, that's the last thing I wanted to do. The last thing I would have chosen is to be in the middle of this, and frankly, I want to get out of it." Considering that he was going to get on the phone with one of the biggest newspapers in the country as soon as I walked back to Kelsey's van, I didn't buy it.

The next day, Wadhwa sent me another email. "After reflecting on the things you said, I am going to be announcing that I am exiting the debate." On Monday, his column for The Washington Post was headlined, "Why I am stepping out of the debate on women in technology."

"I got frustrated, and it showed, and the quality of the discussion suffered," he acknowledged. "Today there is a chorus of very powerful, intelligent voices who are speaking from personal experience. The women who I have written about, who have lived the discrimination and abuse, as well as others, deserve the air time."

In classic Wadhwa fashion, the extended cuts of his exit letter posted on his personal blog and on VentureBeat, as well as his accompanying Tweetstorm, swung back to claiming that contributors to his book had been "harassed" and implied that TLDR used the phrase "come sit on my lap," as well "hand on the knee."

We'll see which version of retirement he sticks to.