60% of women in tech reported unwanted sexual advances
elephantinthevalley.com
elephantinthevalley.com
If they're just asking if women who happen to work in tech now have ever received unwanted sexual advances in their entire life, well, that is worthless without a non-tech statistic to compare/contrast it to.
Also what is an unwanted sexual advance? Someone touching someone? Someone asking someone out once? A boss pressuring their underlings for sex/dates? It has no precise meaning.
Unfortunately I spent some time studying Sociology in my youth and one of the biggest takeaways from that was "you can make people agree with any position you want by changing the wording on the questions." So precisely what you ask is super important for knowing what to do with the conclusion. We actually created surveys where we got completely opposite results from exactly the same democratic just through word-alterations (on purpose).
Given that only 60% of women reported unwanted advances, it's safe to say that it's not "at any point in their lives in any context." That being said, you make a good point about disclosing details of study.
Do you have data on the level of unwanted sexual advances over the course of a woman's life? I just googled it and cannot really see too much.
PS - Although boiling down a definition of an "unwanted sexual advance" is required to compare/contrast different data sets.
This. Also: any other questions asked which got less news-worthy results. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publication_bias
I wish there was was something like a wikipedia page which listed every paper / survey with a conclusion on a topic out there. Kind of like examine.com but for social science results rather than nutrition.
There's a stark difference between an inappropriate advance and an unwanted advance, and it generally comes down to whether or not the recipient has free agency to reject the advance without fear of reprisal in a power-imbalanced situation, workplace or otherwise.
>60% of women in Tech reported unwanted sexual advances.
>
> -- 65% of women who report unwanted sexual advances had received advances from a superior, with half receiving advances more than once
> -- 1 in 3 have felt afraid of their personal safety because of work related circumstances
(emphasis mine)
Power-imbalanced? Yes, for 39% of them, and 30% had some multiple times.
I agree that "unwanted advance" could mean someone asked me out and I didn't like them. I'll be honest, I don't deal with that problem myself because men aren't asked by women in our society, but I think you should define what you think draws the line between unwanted and inappropriate.
"24% of women in Tech reported inappropriate sexual advances" is a less scary headline.
It's still way too high, but when you also factor in the selection bias and poor methodology, I have a very hard time taking these numbers at face value.
As for "afraid of their personal safety", that's subjective enough -- and introduces significant response bias in the already selective audience -- to be useless.
If the authors are reading this, consider that.
Disclaimer: Just to preempt the easily offended, I obviously acknowledge that sexual and regular assaults are real crimes that happen way too often, but the statistics being thrown around are ridiculous.
People have different definitions of sexual assault. Asking about specific scenarios is a way to control for those varying definitions, and it's a standard requirement of good survey design.
There may be problems with those surveys, but the solution is not to just ask, "Have you been sexually assaulted?"
The law was written in the context of how it would be applied. It was not designed as a metric for sexual violence in our society. It was designed as the legal rules that judges, just one part of the process, must apply once a case is brought before them. And only then in the context of constitutional law and old common law like de minimis.
If you're asking loaded questions, you're getting loaded results. If the results in question are college sexual assault statistics and no one bothered to ask "have you been sexually assaulted" then that's what I would call loaded.
In England that could meet the threshold for common assault, which is an arrestable offence.
That's not because courts interpret the law narrowly, it's because crime is under reported, and under prosecuted.
Plenty of people get prosecuted, and convicted, for common assault that only involved verbal threats.
You claim this is a problem. Here's a simple solution: Make tech companies segregated by gender. What about that? The thing is, I presume, people who did the study don't want to solve a problem of "unwanted sex advances" in the workplace. They want to solve a problem of not enough women in tech. And this is not the way to go about it.
It is also an interesting question, and I am genuinely curious. I also doubt women actually choose the career based on amount of unwanted sexual advances, and having the numbers could finally put that stupid theory to rest (if it's false, of course, maybe it's not, I dunno; but based on the above provided link, it probably is false).
Yes, "How are other fields doing" is a question that can be asked - but it is one of the least interesting ones. Suppose that every other industry is at 40%. Or suppose they are all at 60%. It doesn't change the fact that ours needs to seriously deal with it. (And as seen by ~1/3rd of the comments in this thread, is more interested in splitting hairs.)
Fine, why choose tech then? Are they biased? It simply doesn't make sense.
If they want to help women, they could perhaps start in an industry where it's most likely to be a problem (and I'd bet it's somewhere where women are doing low paid job). Here's why - we probably already know at least a partial solution, just look at what are the other industries doing. You don't get either information without a survey.
Work in tech.
So yeah, they are biased in wanting to get their industry in order. There is no ulterior motive, here, and no reason to get so defensive.
I think that these "unwanted sexual advances" may come from the fact there is power differential, i.e. hierarchy and bosses. Maybe we could try to eradicate that first, that is, have more cooperatives (democratically owned and run companies)? In tech, these would be pretty easy to set up due to low investment requirements..
EDIT: And I forgot the link :)
[0] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/19/1-in-3-women-sexual...
1) There is a bias in the cited sample (not the huffpo's, the op's).
2) Silicon Valley is one sleazy place.
I want to be open minded because I as a man am someone oblivious to a lot of these issues, but it might be called for if we had some details on the OP's study.
Are you implying that 60% is an acceptable number because it may hold in other industries? Are you implying we should only focus on the industry with the highest rate of sexual harassment? Or are you implying that it's unfair to examine tech as a separate industry?
The fact is that tech is a particularly female-unfriendly industry, and it merits examination in isolation. Yes, we should examine all industries, but there's nothing wrong with a subset of people focusing on a subset of different industries.
That doesn't mean that as an industry we should put up with gender inequality. Gender inequality is an incredibly irrational historical artifact and in times where it's so hard to hire excellent employees - creating a gender equal workplace gives employers an edge.
This sort of data can give employers the confidence that investing in fixing the problem would indeed help giving them an edge over other workplaces since the problem is so widespread.
We can draw the conclusion that MOST women in tech are sexually harassed! What comparison is required? Why does it need to be worse than other industries to require examination and action?
It's like saying, "Well, we know 500 people were killed in Chicago last year, but that doesn't tell us anything until we find out how many people were killed in London, Beijing, and Tegucigalpa."
http://www.logicallyfallacious.com/index.php/logical-fallaci...
It's true and incredibly relevant. The responses from women with 10+ year experience paint a shocking enough picture, and this survey doesn't even cover those women who left the industry or never felt welcome in the first place.
I'd like to see the peer review on this one, to tell you the truth.
Furthermore, if there are 400,000 tech workers in Silicon Valley, then 200 gives us a less than 8% margin of error (95% confidence level). This still gives us a result of at least 50%.
But we're not surveying the entire tech industry, we're surveying women in Silicon Valley, which is a number much closer to 100,000 (although that doesn't radically change our margin of error).
- women who were assaulted, harassed, or threatened have already left SV
- women who were assaulted, harassed, or threatened were more likely to respond
- women who don't believe in an anti-female culture in SV were more likely to respond
- etc.
It's up to the designers of the survey to control for these things within the survey and/or disclose them. Unfortunately, they haven't.
The problem is there. It's staring you in the face. The tech industry has not offered the same opportunities to women as it has to men.
Act now and solve it. Don't wait for that perfectly conducted longitudinal study, covering a representative sample of women entering the industry and their experiences ten years later. You don't need it to see what's happening.
By doing what?
There's nothing you can do to avoid it except avoid posting stories which imply Silicon Valley has any sort of sexism problem.
The original survives:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10887846
These dupes still survive (as of 0200 GMT):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10887846
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10895364
Plus the introductory article on Techcrunch:
Example Definition: Disparaging remarks, comments or statements are those that impugn the character, honesty, integrity, morality or business acumen or abilities in connection with any aspect of the operation of business of the covered individual or entity."
Now, if "unwanted" means "He asked, I declined and he kept asking me out every day after that" then yes it is a problem.