An open letter to Silicon Valley, from a woman in tech

I think a lot of the joking around is taken as serious threat by some people. Gender and ethnicity play into that I'm sure. When most people are male, they get used to harassing each other for fun. It's possible that by giving you lip they were trying to bring you into that fold.

What bothers you could legitimately be funny and fun to them. They don't understand getting so offended.

They also could have been asses. I wasn't there. However, if they were real asses, you should have had something so horrible they did that you could just go get them fired. Sounds like nothing that serious happened.

You're probably in a bit of a culture shock and making things worse than they are. The worst thing I read was someone demanding they pay the bill for lunch right?

It sounds like there's a problem with the incentive structure for the company. Ideally, the threat of a lawsuit should incentivize the company to address the problem; but the HR department acted as though addressing the problem would increase its legal liability. But I don't know enough about sexual harassment law to understand what causes this. Maybe addressing the problem would mean acknowledging it exists, and acknowledging it exists would make it harder to defend against a lawsuit? Would it be possible to reform the laws around sexual harassment so that the HR department actually has incentives to side with victims?

Wow! Great article, thanks for sharing such a personal and challenging story. I wish I could upvote more than once.

[edit: thanks for sharing mainly directed at original author, but thanks to Dinah as well for posting it here!]