Love HBO’s “Silicon Valley” but wish women had more of a presence in the comedy? Fortunately it looks like a story about “the unsung female heroes of Silicon Valley” is coming to the screen. Deadline reports that Cathy Schulman’s Welle Entertainment has acquired the film and TV rights to Julian Guthrie’s “Alpha Girls,” a nonfiction book described as “‘Hidden Figures’ meets ‘The Social Network.’”
Scheduled for publication in 2019 by Currency Books, “Alpha Girls” tells the “untold story of the real unicorns of Silicon Valley — the women who identified, dressed down, moved up, and built the companies that changed the world,” Deadline writes. The book, which caused a bidding war, “explores the rise of such companies as Microsoft, Facebook, Tesla, Oracle, Salesforce, and more — all through the eyes of trailblazing ‘alpha girls’ of Silicon Valley.”
“We are going to look at each one of these women and organically develop their stories,” said Schulman, president and CEO of Welle Entertainment. “These stories regarding the most powerful women in Silicon Valley are the definition of what Welle Entertainment is all about: women in high-stakes, high-drama worlds. Each of these women’s stories is gripping, treacherous, heroic, and entertaining, and I can’t wait until we can pull them out from behind the gender curtain and give them their rightful place in contemporary history.”
Schulman is the head of Women in Film, so it comes as no surprise to see her involved in a project that will represent women in STEM.
Welle Entertainment recently acquired the rights to another non-fiction book, “The Trials of Nina McCall,” an examination of the American Plan and the woman who decided to fight against it. The program led to the incarceration of thousands of girls and young women suspected of carrying STIs and spreading them to U.S. soldiers in both World Wars.
If you’re wondering what women in the tech world think of “Silicon Valley,” head over to MTV, where Inkoo Kang interviewed women in the industry to see how they feel about the critically acclaimed comedy. When asked about the fact that “Silicon Valley” is overwhelmingly male, one lab instructor at a coding boot camp said her “gut reaction was to feel insulted. I know the percentage of women is low,” she conceded, “but apparently the writers think they are invisible.”
