How Silicon Valley can prove it is pro-family

Summary

Katherine Boyle’s speech is a sign of a new song making its way through the tech world: one that trills the importance of investing into our social infrastructure, strengthening our nation, and, yes, building families. It’s a hopeful message. But like tech’s early forays into politics — which began as a vague mood board of civic aspirations before coalescing into real policy efforts and wins — the pro-family cultural shift still has a long way to go. This is not to say there isn’t real movement happening, and, as a parent, I’m grateful for it. But I still feel the gap between rhetoric and reality as I navigate the tech world as a writer and researcher, particularly when visiting the San Francisco Bay Area. Dinner conversations still tend to circle around whether children are worth having at all, or they treat global fertility rates at arm’s length. Many in tech embrace a borderless lifestyle that implies constant mobility, hosting events in cities like New York and Austin, which doesn’t blend well with family obligations. Children are rarely present at social gatherings. I’ve had the strange experience of bringing my child to events where I’m praised for this act as some sort of pro-family ideological flex — which, while flattering, misses the much less glamorous truth: with no evening child care available, I didn’t have a choice. There’s something telling about this disparity. Tech is clearly eager to recast itself as pro-family, but it hasn’t yet internalized what is required to support families day to day. Boyle, as a parent herself, is right to highlight pragmatic changes as the scaffolding that’s required to build a pro-family culture: flexible work, improving and reducing the cost of education, raising the status of parents. And like Boyle, I believe that tech has the ability and resources to bring this future to fruition, if it wants to. Oddly, however, it is tech’s unmatched capabilities that might be what’s holding it back. Tech is arguably the best place i...