The last couple of months have not exactly been a high point for women in the tech sector.

There was Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella's unfortunate remarks in October – at an event discussing challenges for women in technology – in which he stated that women could trust "good karma" to bring them the raises they deserve. To his credit he swiftly apologised and issued a company-wide memo to express how Microsoft would work to encourage and reward women employees.

Then there was egg-gate in which Apple and Facebook decided to offer female employees the opportunity to freeze their eggs, a procedure often done to enable women to preserve eggs in their 20s to postpone having children until their 30s or 40s. While I do see benefits for some women, what is this actually saying to women who are already scarce in the senior ranks of technology firms?

“Give us your youthful years when you are a less costly, lower ranking employee. Then you can go off and have your children – and sideline your career – around the age at which your male colleagues, already promoted across this sector at considerably higher rates than women, can continue to step past you into our senior job ranks.”

Exasperation list

The Twitterstorm this week over comments made by an Uber executive, in which he suggested harassing journalists by leaking private, personal data in the company’s logs, is just the latest item on my exasperation list.

Emil Michael, a senior vice-president at Uber, suggested that in particular a team could target PandoDaily editor Sarah Lacy, a vocal critic of Uber who had infuriated the exec by arguing the service didn't adequately address women's safety.

Michael’s comments were made at a large dinner in New York and some initial indignation was expressed because they were supposedly off the record. That defence stinks on two accounts – first, on the stupidity level. “Off the record” might apply in discussions with a trusted individual but not in a crowd. And second – most obviously – because if that’s the way you think what are you doing working (and being retained) at a senior level in a company that should have trust, discretion and privacy as its core values?

Not only does Uber have a great deal of sensitive data on all customers – both personal information and travel details – but many of its clients are women who often feel at risk travelling alone in taxis.

A campaign began among women to delete their Uber accounts as more stories emerged to make the company seem like a Mad Men throwback. There's that French Uber ad campaign encouraging men to book with Uber because of the chance to be paired with its "hot chick" female drivers. (Well, that promotes women's safety, doesn't it?)

Then there was chief executive's Travis Kalanick's comments in March to GQ about his escalating desirability. He joked about having a women-on-demand app: "Yeah, we call that Boob-er." Oh. Thoughtful, expressive leadership there.

Lacy told tech news site Re-code that racist comments by executives and public figures are routinely condemned, “yet we believe that frighteningly misogynist comments like this, anti-First Amendments comments like this, are ‘boys being boys’ and that ‘they’re geniuses and this is what it takes to build a company’.”

Just days earlier academic Kate Crawford had made a similar point in a book review in the New York Times. She identified a thriving, testosterone-fuelled Silicon Valley motif she calls the "Jobs Narrative".

“First there’s the grand vision of the founders, then the heroic journey of producing new worlds from all-night coding and caffeine abuse, and finally the grand finale, immense wealth and secular sainthood.”

Believing their own press

The problem, she says, “is that Silicon Valley now believes its own press, and the proliferation of ‘great men in history’ stories from the grinding code-mills of northern California is contributing to a bigger problem of exclusion and exploitation [of women].”

Consider: only 4.2 per cent of the venture capitalists that invest in start-ups are women, only 7 per cent of venture capital goes to women-owned businesses, and women hold only 11 per cent of executive technical roles at private, venture-backed companies, according to Dow Jones VentureSource.

Don’t blame a shortage of female STEM grads. A recent report by Catalyst indicates just 18 per cent of female MBAs take managerial jobs in the tech sector, compared to a fourth of their male counterparts. Half eventually leave the industry. Why? Almost three-quarters said they felt like “outsiders” in the industry. Only 17 per cent of male MBAs said the same.

This week venture sector analyst CB Insights stated that Uber was unlikely to alienate potential investors by its gaffes – not “as long as they continue to grow as they have been”. Which comes on the heels of an Uber investor shrugging off the company’s attitudes with the observation that “disrupters tend to be A-holes”.

Male A-holes, it goes without saying. Boys being boys. Secular sainthood. You can’t touch us.

Time for that narrative, that Valley-wide, industry-wide, passively as well as actively supported view to be disrupted.

Gentlemen, it’s way past time.