| Toptal is moderating and deleting any comments that aren't in support of their twisted publicity stunt, but here's my open letter to their CEO. Taso, Your vociferous moral crusade against LinkedIn has highlighted a few equally disturbing issues with Toptal. Trusting everything you've written here, I'm hoping you can explain why Toptal operates antithetically to your claims of defending female engineers and "regular professional women." First, your site raises question -- what women? - Toptal's homepage features 10 images of its tech professionals. Not just engineers, but specific titles like Django Developer and Security Specialist.
0 are women. - Toptal's team page features 9 employes and investors.
0 are women. - Toptal's blog features photos of its 10 latest post authors.
0 are women. - Toptal's 2-minute homepage video features "clients like Mark and developers like Andrew," and cartoons of characters dressed in everything from business to scuba suits. I counted over two dozen of them, but let's say 21.
0 are women. Out of 50 -- FIFTY -- featured Toptal employees, investors, engineers, developers, specialists, clients, bloggers and candidates... 0 are women. Professional women are just as offended when tech companies sex-up their images to promote their products as they are when their images are excluded all together. Between Toptal's ads and website, women are either 1). as attractive as professional models, or 2). don't exist at all. Second, why should we believe you? Searching toptal.com for any support for female technologists, or even a mention of women, woman, female, girl, diversity, etc. reveals 0 results prior to this post. In fact, Toptal's only discussion of women is in a blog post you wrote about how Toptal built "The Ultimate Remote Culture" by organizing a four week long company trip to Thailand. Not only are there no women, but you publicly label your employees' female partners "The Problems" and shamed one employee for returning to his family after two weeks away. I'll let your views speak for themselves below: "The Problems
The second problem almost brought the trip to a halt. Actually, this particular problem can often bring the whole world to a halt. What could it be? Any guesses? Girlfriends. Or wives, in some cases. That’s right. Most of the girlfriends (especially the Russian ones) were not okay with their significant other going away for more than two weeks, much less four. One of our engineers (whose name will go unspoken) was such a victim, and could only stay for the first half of the trip. Pretty much every single attendee asked if they could bring their girlfriend/wife for at least a week. But, alas, this was a company event, and the answer was no. Everyone acquiesced and, in the end, the biggest hurdle was surmounted." http://www.toptal.com/remote/the-ultimate-remote-culture If this is how Toptal feels about women, it seems the only thing we need defense from, is you. |