Pinterest and the Subtle Poison of Sexism and Racism in Silicon Valley
The day Françoise Brougher was fired from Pinterest began like so many of her workdays. It was April 2, 2020, and the company’s chief operating officer—with her rescue dog Dogbert nearby—was a few weeks into the pandemic and remote work, managing her team of 750 from her home in Silicon Valley. The gentlest social media site, built for “pinning” visual inspiration to virtual boards, appeared to be in equilibrium.
Brougher wasn’t giving much thought to the recent brief but irritating meetings and calls she had had with Todd Morgenfeld, the company’s chief financial officer. On a recent Friday, she had texted their mutual boss, Ben Silbermann, the CEO and co-founder of Pinterest, about what she describes as a particularly dismissive and erratic interaction she had with Morgenfeld where he had hung up on her. On Monday, Silbermann suggested Brougher talk to human resources to smooth over the conflict. It was the first time in Brougher’s 30-year career she had gone to HR about her own issue.
Now, a few weeks later, Jo Dennis, Pinterest’s chief human resources officer, was on the line. “She said, ‘I want to prepare you for your call with Ben tomorrow,’” recalls Brougher, who had a standing one-on-one scheduled with her boss. “‘Your job is going to change.’”
“I said, ‘Oh interesting, can you tell me more?’ She said, ‘No, I cannot,’” says Brougher. “And I said, O.K., don’t waste my time. Put Ben on the call.’” A calendar invite from Silbermann soon popped up on Brougher’s screen. They exchanged brief pleasantries. Then, he fired his second-in-command over video chat. “I never saw it coming,” she says. “I was like the intern, fired in a 10-minute call.”
And thus the French-born engineer, 55, would begin a journey far from her decades of anonymity as a Harvard Business School graduate and respected senior executive at Google and Square, suing a company with a market cap today of $122 billion for gender discrimination—the most senior Silicon Valley executive ever to do so. Now, in her first major interview since her lawsuit settled, Brougher says flatly of her last day at Pinterest, “No, we didn’t have a giant going-away party.”
That month, Ifeoma Ozoma was waging her own battle at Pinterest. The daughter of Nigerian immigrants, Ozoma, a Yale graduate who joined Pinterest from Facebook, had been new to the company’s burgeoning public-policy and social-impact department. Wonky and raised in Anchorage, she was behind widely praised Pinterest initiatives that blocked searches for antivaccination posts and stopped the promotion of plantation weddings. She also had concluded that she and another experienced woman on her team, Aerica Shimizu Banks, who is Black and Japanese American, were being paid less than what their job descriptions indicated per Pinterest guidelines. Ozma’s salary disparity—about $64,000 annually—was significant but not as meaningful as the stock grant given every employee based on position, and hers appeared to be 33,675 shares short of what her job description merited. Post-IPO, she says the shares could have amounted to a value close to $2.5 million over a four-year period of vesting. After human resources refused to increase their compensation, they involved a lawyer. The friction, Ozoma believed, caused her white male manager to snipe with statements such as, “Why does everything have to be about race?” Later, Ozoma’s cell-phone number and internal company emails appeared on extremist platforms including 4chan and 8chan following leaks by a white male colleague, a software developer, to Project Veritas, the far-right activist group founded by James O’Keefe. She received threats of rape and death. She kept a gun. She moved. And then she and Banks, whose allegations of mistreatment were dismissed by the company after repeated internal investigations, negotiated their departures in May.
When, on June 2, in the wake of George Floyd’s death, the company posted an earnest Black Lives Matter message on its corporate website and social channels, Ozoma reached her breaking point. “Are you f-cking kidding me?” she thought. Days later, she and Banks, 33, would go public with their stories, violating nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) attached to their severance packages. “I lost my mother in college,” says Ozoma, 28. “I can’t think of a single thing I’ve been afraid of since then, because the worst thing that could happen to me already did.”
Over the next months, Pinterest’s warm, fuzzy veneer would unravel like one of the platform’s chunky knitted sweaters. An employee walkout to show solidarity for Ozoma, Banks, and Brougher followed; Pinterest hired law firm WilmerHale to conduct an investigation of workplace culture; a shareholder lawsuit alleged mishandling around issues of discrimination; and a record $22.5 million settlement was paid to Brougher—the largest known settlement for gender discrimination in U.S. history—with $2.5 million of that jointly committed to nonprofits that support underrepresented groups in tech.
Now, nearly a year after their departures, Brougher and the two colleagues she had never met while at Pinterest—all performance-driven, and obsessed with process and results—stand among the most significant figures in a reckoning not just at Pinterest, but in the long exclusionary saga of Silicon Valley, where 5% of tech leaders are women, far fewer are Black or Latinx and only 2% of venture capital money goes to female founders. Their stories fit an unnerving pattern in an industry once optimistic about changing the world that instead has fallen behind even legacy industries in diversity and inclusion. This, even as study after study, in particular a 2015 McKinsey report, reveals how diverse teams perform better financially. Pinterest, Google, Oracle, MailChimp, and Facebook are among the behemoths that publicly champion women and diversity through initiatives and hashtags — even as their own employees come forward as regularly as smartphones on an assembly line with allegations of discrimination and pay disparity. Ozona calls much of Silicon Valley’s talk performative, or, as she puts it, “diversity theater.”
San Francisco attorney David Lowe represented Brougher and has argued dozens of gender-discrimination cases. His firm handled Ellen Pao’s landmark gender-discrimination case. He calls the stories of professional women “startlingly similar.” “Often the critiques are, like what Françoise heard, ‘You are not collaborative, not good with working with others. Too assertive,’” he says. Being a person of color adds another layer of potential bias and pain, particularly, as in the case of Ozoma and Banks, when a company external messaging is at odds with its internal culture or stated company values.
“As you go higher, the number of women and people of color thin out,” says Lowe. “When you get to the apex, there are hardly any. It’s not because they lose talent or interest. In fact, they are gaining talent. The only plausible explanation is that stereotypes and subtle forms of bias seep in. It’s like climbing a ladder and then getting knocked down, rung by rung.”
Among all the big talk and little action, the three women are now taking extraordinary steps to help fix things themselves. Brougher says the first two organizations that have received money from her settlement are /dev/color, which supports a professional network of Black engineers, and Last Mile Education Fund, which offers financial support for low-income students to bring them to graduation and into tech. After attorney’s fees and taxes, Brougher and her husband Bill additionally have set aside half of her remaining settlement for groups with similar missions through a donor-advised fund. From the other half, they paid off their mortgage and gave directly to other causes, including medical research. “Some donations will be public, some not,” says Brougher, whose parents never graduated college. “I’m trying to do good with what I got.”
Meanwhile, Ozoma and Banks are flexing their public-policy skills. A California Senate committee will hear arguments on March 23 for legislation abolishing employer NDAs around racial discrimination that they and their attorney helped draft. Ozona raised $108,000 to support the cause and, along with state senator Connie Leyva, Earthseed, her own consulting firm, will act as the bill’s co-sponsor. Ozone will offer main testimony on behalf of the bill; their lawyer, Peter Rukin, will be the second person to testify in favor, on behalf of the California Employment Lawyers Association. Banks’ powerful letter of support also has been submitted to State Senator Leyva, in which she condemns how NDAs leave victims to “suffer in silence.”
How it happens
In the past decade, social media has been used to share often devastating stories using #MeToo, #BlackLives Matter, or more recently #StopAsianHate. Those who post often are met with even more abuse, threats of violence, and graphic memes. Consequences for harassment are rare. The consistent message sent to the outspoken: Shut up. Or else.
Pinterest was considered different. A sort of Internet Xanax, since its 2010 launch, it has been a haven for the women who comprise 70% of its users and tilt toward the crafty and domestic. The perils of other social media—the trolling, the culture wars—are largely absent. The top-performing content is about food and drink; after that, home decor. With his benign platform and mild-mannered image, Silbermann, a 38-year-old Iowan, wasn’t a swaggering mononym à la Bezos and Zuck, and certainly wasn’t subject to congressional tongue-lashings or consumer finger-wags. President Trump—presumably not a baker or scrapbooker—never became one of the 459 million users of Pinterest, instead of communicating on Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram.
It was the potential of that special culture, not yet as buzzy or revenue-optimized as its peers, that attracted Brougher and Ozoma to Pinterest 2018 a few months apart; Banks joined in 2019. “Like everyone else, I thought Ben was very reserved and thoughtful,” says Brougher. “I was excited.” Another selling point was Pinterest’s upcoming IPO. “Every Big Tech employee’s dream is to work pre-IPO at a company,” says Ozona. “This wasn’t some no-name startup. This was a company that people love.”
Brougher and Ozoma each would survive Pinterest for only 23 months.
Banks, drawn by the opportunity to lead Pinterest’s Washington, D.C., office, just 12.
At Google, Brougher had run “an unsexy part of [ad] sales,” recalls former Google CFO Patrick Pichette, now Twitter’s board chair. But Brougher became a star, driving revenue for small and medium business to 23% year-over-year growth near the end of her tenure, delivering an annual $16 billion in sales. “She would say, ‘Here’s my return. Here it is by cohort; here it is by month. And here’s what I’ve given you for the last quarter, and what I’m going to do next quarter. And that’s why you should allow me to hire another 46 people,’” says Pichette, laughing. “Resistance was futile … but she also takes the time to listen. Fairness matters to her.”
In 2013, Brougher joined Square, reporting to CEO Jack Dorsey as business lead for the payments platform startup. Like Google, Square had a similar Silicon Valley culture of candor; Brougher recalls the environment as “incredibly egalitarian.” “One of the things we’ve both always agreed on is you come to work to be respected, not to be liked,” says Nextdoor CEO Sarah Friar, Brougher’s colleague as Square’s CFO. “I actually didn’t think about my gender a lot. I worked on Wall Street for 11 years, and believe me, I thought about my gender.” They were both parts of the team that brought Square to its 2015 IPO. Today it’s worth $107 billion.
Brougher became Pinterest’s first chief operating officer and its most senior woman. Pinterest’s sluggish $500 million in annual ad sales needed goosing before the April 2019 IPO. Brougher was given half the company, including global ad sales and marketing.
Immediately, she noticed something amiss in the San Francisco headquarters: The culture was secretive. Turnover was high. Decisions were made between Silbermann and a small circle—all men—in private sidebars, causing organizational chaos. Recalls Banks: “The entire structure was built on being friends with the CEO.” Soon, Brougher, who calls herself “excessively transparent,” wasn’t being invited to certain meetings. “I asked why once, twice, and there was always an excuse. And then I’m trying at the next meeting to really contribute to the team, thinking, ‘Maybe they will invite me to the next one.’”
A CNBC story in 2019 detailed the dysfunctional culture. The story ran with the headline, “The nicest company in Silicon Valley: How Pinterest’s friendly culture has slowed decisions and hurt growth.” The writer argued that Pinterest’s avoidant culture was diametrically opposed to confrontational styles at Amazon or Netflix, citing missed revenue targets set by investor Andreessen Horowitz. One former employee, who claimed to be fired for insubordination after criticizing a strategy by one of Silbermann’s staff, told CNBC there was an extremely passive-aggressive climate. Or as Brougher would later say, “Saying what you really thought was still dangerous at Pinterest.”
In response to the request for comment on this story, Pinterest declined to make any executives available, but answered some specific questions and issued a statement detailing their commitment to diversity and inclusion and steps they have taken to improve internal culture.
For the first time in her career, maybe her life, Brougher felt self-conscious. “You speak up and have the feeling people are not focused on what you said,” she says. “A lot has been written about ‘othering,’ that you could be viewed as a female or Black first, not as your job.” In his court filing for Brougher, attorney Lowe cited a 2014 study by Kieran Snyder of tech-industry performance reviews that revealed an “abrasiveness trap” for women, where women are given feedback to be nicer and speak less. The study says “negative personality criticism—Watch your tone! Step back! Stop being so judgmental!”—showed up in 2.2% of reviews of men but 76% of women, even when reviewed by women.
“Having a seat at the table matters, but [also] having a voice at the table matters,” says Brougher. “I didn’t think [Ben] was happy when I had a different opinion. I think when it came from a woman, it was much harder to accept.” Adds Lowe, “So many features of Silicon Valley culture—to be disruptive, challenge the status quo, push back on authority—reward men who show up like that, but are negatives in reviews of women.”
Ozoma eventually would find this to be true. She interned two summers at Google before starting in its massive public-policy and government-affairs department in 2015. Three years later, she left for Facebook, where she contributed to anti-hate-speech initiatives and community standards. There she grew comfortable challenging leadership. “There were meetings where Mark [Zuckerberg] would address the whole company,” she says. “After Charlottesville, he said nothing about the [white supremacists] who had organized on the platform. During the Q&A, I asked, ‘Why haven’t you said anything to employees about Nazis marching in the street?’” Zuckerberg commended her bravery in asking the question, and the audience applauded. He admitted he should have spoken up sooner. Ozoma then questioned Sheryl Sandberg about the difficulty in reporting hate speech in the Messenger app; Sandberg said she would escalate a product fix to make it easier. But Ozoma says people looked shocked when Sandberg, appearing to deflect Facebook’s blame, discussed how much Zuckerberg donated to support social-justice causes. She saved the email the head of diversity and inclusion, also a Black woman, sent her after. “When you asked the question of Mark … there was so much energy in the exchange. I’d love to get a solid understanding from you about what you are feeling and expressing.” Still, there was no retaliation. “Facebook is direct,” says the former head of content at Facebook, Janett Riebe, who would later be a colleague at Pinterest as its safety policy manager. “Radical candor would be a euphemism to describe it.”
In July 2018, Ozoma became the second employee at Pinterest in public policy and social impact, a new department amid growing calls for tech accountability. (Ten months into her job, in May 2019, she helped recruit Banks, a seasoned veteran from Google and of the Obama Administration, with a master’s from Oxford.) Ozoma believes from the first meeting she ran afoul of leadership when she questioned the company’s decision to keep InfoWars’ Alex Jones on the platform. “The entire strategy was, ‘Lay low. Don’t weigh in on anything,’” says Ozoma. “And I was like, ‘This is not controversial.’ This is someone who is harassing the parents of Sandy Hook.” Shortly after an inquiry from the tech news site Mashable in August 2018, Mashable reported that Pinterest had removed InfoWars from the platform.
Ozoma, like Brougher, kept pushing for change at Pinterest, developing relationships with the World Health Organization and the CDC to manage health misinformation. She also pushed to stop the promotion of plantation weddings. “The not-nice way of saying it is, I am a sh-t starter,” she says. “It was, ‘How do we differentiate ourselves not only having the product but also values and matching the two?’” Her six-month performance review, delivered by her manager Charlie Hale, said she “always exceeded expectations.” Ozoma even received a gift from the company acknowledging her “leadership”; the email informing her read, “Look at you, Rising Star!”
But Ozoma, Banks, and Brougher separately had unearthed issues with their compensation. (A 2017 study found Black women in tech were paid 21% less than white men for comparable jobs; all women 16% less.) Ozoma was representing Pinterest in media, and before members of Congress and the U.K. Parliament. Upon seeing the company’s hierarchy of “levels”—an organizational practice used in companies to assign pay—she believed her job description would have put her at a Level 6 instead of Level 4. The company argued she didn’t have enough experience to advance levels, though the documentation didn’t specify years of experience as a requirement. She enlisted attorney Rukin, who had represented plaintiffs in a class-action against Wells Fargo and other discrimination cases. Finding her own leveling at 5 instead of 6, Banks also enlisted Rukin. “[My lawyer] was like, ‘I’ve never had a prospective client this organized with this much documentation,’” says Ozoma. “He told me, ‘I don’t anticipate needing to work more than 10 hours on this.’” Ten months later, with matters still unresolved, he filed complaints for both clients with the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH). (A Pinterest spokesperson says the company looked thoroughly into Ozoma’s and Banks’s concerns about whether they were properly leveled and determined that their pay and level were appropriate. Both DFEH complaints were ultimately settled in mediation.)
Meanwhile, Pinterest’s public-policy work kept gaining applause. Banks created a partnership with the U.S. Census Bureau; Ozoma was quoted on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, and the U.S. Surgeon General retweeted a tweet that name-checked Ozoma. Proudly, Silbermann, the son of two doctors, but the tweet in the company Slack. “The day that I was on an interview with [NPR’s] Audie Cornish, I was exchanging emails with my lawyer,” says Ozoma. “I wasn’t threatening. They knew that I was so loyal.” But, she says, Hale took a turn. In one performance review, he acknowledged her work in deprioritizing slave-plantation content but said she should have provided “the pros” of promoting slave plantations. She says he would also verbally remark on her “tone” (as Banks said he would later do with her). After her personal information was leaked online by a male colleague, Ozoma says, even though she texted Silbermann screenshots of the threats she was receiving, the company did not help her have the content taken down, and she relied on friends from other tech companies. Riebe says the winds were shifting. “Once she persisted [about pay], it got nasty,” says Riebe. “She was starting to be kept out of loops. She had a fantastic reputation, and then [there was] a slow morphing into, ‘You are too much.’”
Banks was feeling gaslit even before she officially started. Hale told her Pinterest wouldn’t publish a press release announcing her, a customary gesture by tech companies to inform Congress and lobbyists of a new point person. She says a recruiter also asked in a phone call that she not share details of her offer. (Since 2015, it has been illegal for California employers to ask workers to keep compensation confidential.) It all gave her a funny feeling. But Banks already had resigned from Google and felt “between a rock and a hard place.” In her first month, she alerted the general counsel and other senior members of the team about the risk of employee information leaking from a potential attack from Project Veritas. The group claimed to be holding information from Pinterest. Banks says she was brushed off and told not to reply to the email chain again. The information dump ended up including the personal details about Ozoma shared on 8chan and 4chan.
