I don't want to comment on this particular story. These are terrible allegations and they deserve their day in court. There's also a drive-by, rubber-necking, gossip-mongering aspect to these stories. Hate to contribute to it.
I would like to comment on all the heat sexual discrimination cases are getting in the public eye lately. (I have no idea if the number of actual cases are increasing, decreasing, or staying the same). Big, public, messy scandals are no good for anybody, and they're not a new phenomenon.
We have various professions where lawsuits of a sexual nature can be especially damaging. A couple that come to mind right off the bat are politicians and religious leaders.
I've heard that in many cases, the threat of an unfounded lawsuit is so great, and it could cause so much harm, that folks are sticking with same-sex environments where there are always 3 or more people in a room together.
I wonder if we'll see such adaptations in the startup industry. It could be that the public outcry after so many of these things, to include more women, might actually drive out more highly segregated work environments. It bears watching.
I don't know about politicians and religious leaders, but somehow or another law firms, accounting firms, management consultants and medical practices seem to manage without needing rules about having "always 3 or more people in a room together".
Look at the numbers. There are still pay equity issues all over the place, but in terms of participation, every other white collar industry puts technology to shame. 66% of staff attorneys are women. ~40% of biglaw partners are. And in law, 40% is a problem. In technology, it would be a dream.
And yet technology implementation is the single most accessible industry I can think of, with most of those, esp in Europe, who succeed at it, being largely autodidacts. Everything you need to learn is there and free and you can do it in your bedroom.
The industries you cite are largely people businesses with restricted knowledge paths and require intense experience and with outcome of individual projects being much more vague and often predetermined by the inputs they received when taking on the project.
> In technology, it would be a dream.
My feeling is that females in tech are largely suffering from the outcome of some inherent risk analysis that we experience. Girls are more likely to take definite paths with known success ratios.
This brings the question, why don't we have significant outliers in female in tech given the low barrier to entry at the root level.
I'm not arguing what is required. I'm simply pointing out the adaptation some actors have used in similar circumstances. I'm also making no comment one way or another about women in tech.
I understood your argument, and my response was to put it in perspective. Law didn't fix this problem by coming up with rigid rules about men and women being alone in the same room together.
ISTM we're considering two different problems here. The first, and more important from society's POV, is that there aren't enough women working in the industry. The second, and for some much more personally important, is to avoid being sued for harassment. The people who worry about the latter may be grossly overestimating the danger, but their reactions to that overestimate could still make the first problem worse. Reactions like "same-sex environments", for instance.
So by "putting in context", you're simply saying that other industries had other ways of dealing with things.
Ok. So what?
I would expect different people and different industries to respond differently. Maybe you don't. How various people in various industries react to external stimulus is beyond my knowledge. That's why I find it interesting.
Implicit in your comments is the idea that you can't work with women without the risk of lawsuits. This is classic victim-blaming.
The problem is not the lawsuits. The problem is harassment, and further, the men who are so incapable of not harassing women that they segregate their workplaces.
We should recognize that the number of lawsuits pales in comparison to the incidence of actual harassment. We should be blaming the perpetrators of this harassment, and the men who would avoid working with women rather than change their behavior. We should not be blaming the women who raise these suits, or decrying their nature, as there is a very real and serious problem of sexual harassment in our industry.
Allegations of victim blaming tend to be used to shut down conversastion rather then contribute to it. There are times when mentioning victim blaming is appropriate, but you have to be extra careful with this concept.
If anything, this case is system-blaming. More importantly, it is looking at how the system works, and what unintended effects are attempts to improve have. Specifically, observing that the increase is lawsuits leads to the creating of single gender environments, harming other metrics of gender equality. There is no concept of blame in this observation. It is merely a conjecture about cause and effect which can be used to make more informed choices.
Having recognized this we may decide that sexual harrasment lawsuits are not worth it, in which case I may leave the country. Or we could look for ways to conduct these lawsuits in a way that is less damaging. Or we may decide to use/develop other responses to sexual harrasment before going to a lawsuit.
This is a discussion that needs to be had, and your response preculudes it.
Nothing of that nature was implied; rather, you read misogyny into the comment due to your own biases.
The original post was very careful not to put either sex in either role. It even went so far as to not exclude homosexual relations by suggesting that you'd want three people in the room despite a segregated workplace.
Your post, in contrast, insists that harassment suits are always filed by woman against men. It goes so far as to suggest these hypothetical employers must be men and that their motivation is an inability to control themselves.
The implication was simply that as sexual harassment cases become more costly, it may be pragmatic to take more drastic measures to prevent them. I'm very disgusted by your post.
Allegations of "Victim blaming" are a classic tactic to shut down discussion by implying that anyone who steps out of the appropriate mental box will be deemed an accomplice.
You can invent whatever descriptions you wish, but it is victim-blaming. Vague threats of a public backlash against sexual harassment lawsuits is an attempt to blame women for filing them and attach implicit suspicions to their claims. Reminder that Tinder has confirmed the inappropriate messages.
Discussion about what, exactly? That women are not trusted enough to not bring false allegations, therefore men should always have witnesses to make sure that men are not victims of even false allegations?
Seriously, if you are the victim of a false allegation that is later proven to be false, then your reputation is not destroyed. If you are the victim of one instance of a false allegation that later reveals a pattern of bad behavior, then you should not have behaved badly in the first place.
Your post is an example of concern-trolling. You're implanting the idea that this lawsuit is part of some greater threat of unfounded sexual harrassment lawsuits, disregarding the fact that the inappropriate messages were confirmed by his employer. Additionally, you've "heard" that the filing of sexual harassment lawsuits has caused some sort of draconian same-sex policy, somewhere. You end with the threat that there will be a public backlash to "so many of these things" being filed by women, implying that they should keep quiet.
I was wondering a related question, which is whether or not there is a higher, similar, or lower incidence of sexual harassment in "technology" firms than other firms of similar size (number of employees, annual revenue).
It is not uncommon for people who work together, to get romantically involved in spite of advice against such relationships. But I don't see anything specifically 'tech' related that would make this more or less likely. Hence the question.
It is not uncommon for people who work together, to get romantically involved in spite of advice against such relationships
Is there any correlation between long work-weeks and romantic relationships between employees? Have any studies been done of this?
I'm reminded of Philip Greenspun's "How To Make Your Software Engineers Work 80 Hours A Week" article [1] about ArsDigita where he got his employees to work crazy hours while he was dating one of his employees. That's the part that was most offensive to me when I first read it years ago ("girlfriend for me but not for thee"). Other parts offend me more these days, but I'm still wondering if a good policy against sexual harassment is to make sure your employees have time outside of work to find someone to copulate with.
There is a strong correlation between romantic involvement and shared stressful experiences. Its a movie trope but there have also been studies done. The last one I read about was in Scientific American in the late 90's/early 2000's. You can check 'romantic relationships and stress' on scholar.google.com and find lots of hits.
There is also a correlation between having an excuse to be close together and opportunity. This apparently got pretty bad for Microsoft employees on the road such that the company issued guidelines. But I don't know if corporate was any more or less affected.
Call me cynical, but when I read all the comments on sites like this and others about these lawsuits in the tech industry, it leads me to believe that a lot of writers and editors somewhere are not idiots -- they're digging these things up and feeding them to us.
That didn't answer your question, I know. My point is that there are tons of tech companies. It can certainly appear to be a tremendous surge when in fact it's just a small extra effort made in reporting cases. Without a statistical survey we can't be sure.
We can be sure about the economics of creating content, though.
With this kind of visceral reaction, it's a publisher's dream. Not only can you report the allegation, then you can report the reply, then the comments from the community, then the play-by-play action in court, etc. Just gauge how much effort to put into it by how many pageviews you're pulling. Newspaper 101 stuff.
Call me naive, but when harrassment this egregious is exposed at a well-known tech company, I don't feel the need to stroke my chin and wonder if there's a media conspiracy to make it appear worse than it is. I don't even know how this could be made to look worse than it is. What possible spin could a publisher put on this that is not already present in the allegation and evidence?
I mean, it's well known but not well established - I highly doubt there's much sexual harassment in a typical corporate environment with an HR department.
Well, I'm not sure I agree that not much harassment goes on in more established companies, but you're absolutely right that at least they're more likely to have procedures in place for dealing with it.
This is why I'm astonished to see such strenuous effort go into confecting explanations why there might not really be a problem in startup culture. You've got young, inexperienced founders and a tendency to dispense with formal HR practises in favour of "cultural fit" - the ingredients are all there for horrible abuses of power, and yet when said abuses inevitably surface, there's an almost desperate effort to hand-wave them away as isolated incidents. It's bewildering, it really is.
Model View Culture have been publishing some superb work in this area, most relevantly in this article:
One, the nerd/geek stereotype where those of us more interested in high tech are supposed to have worse social skills; this would lead to more defective attempts at starting relationships, and to more of the relationships that do happen going bad.
Two, the inherent necessary hubris of startup culture and the noise around "10x" or "rock-star" or "A-player" etc programmers, the apparent canonization of people like Jobs and Zuckerberg; the resulting pervasive sense of entitlement and superiority would also not make for healthy relationships.
I would like to comment on all the heat sexual discrimination cases are getting in the public eye lately. (I have no idea if the number of actual cases are increasing, decreasing, or staying the same). Big, public, messy scandals are no good for anybody, and they're not a new phenomenon.
We have various professions where lawsuits of a sexual nature can be especially damaging. A couple that come to mind right off the bat are politicians and religious leaders.
I've heard that in many cases, the threat of an unfounded lawsuit is so great, and it could cause so much harm, that folks are sticking with same-sex environments where there are always 3 or more people in a room together.
I wonder if we'll see such adaptations in the startup industry. It could be that the public outcry after so many of these things, to include more women, might actually drive out more highly segregated work environments. It bears watching.