Silicon Valley Women, in Cultural Shift, Frankly Describe Sexual Harassment

One of the West Point/Sloan MBAs, Chip, showed his dick to a recruiter.

One of my lawyer friends had a hiring manager show his dick to her.

I've been in tech for a decade and haven't met anyone who has been exposed to a dick in person.

Stereotypically, you have cash equities at one extreme and exotic derivatives at the other. Outside of banks, the culture at an HFT firm or quant hedge fund will be completely different from the culture on a "bro-y" bank desk.

London just happens to have a large financial sector. I can assure you that the same thing happens in the oil, tech, and real estate industries for example.

If we're taking about anecdotes, I had a friend in college who was a sex worker and most of her customers were in tech.

I think one of the larger problems that society is struggling with is the idea that two different people can be in very similar proximity, interact with the same people and yet one can have to suffer through radically different (and horrible) treatment.

The reason I believe this is so difficult, is the other person legitimately think "I know that person, I know that place, I've gone through that and I've never seen anything remotely close to that." And reasonably conclude that it didn't happen. It's difficult to accept that there is an entire world that they don't ever experience.

But we all need a find a way to account for this, because too many people go through beimg mistreated and their concerns are simply dismissed.

I think they often are. But you don't hear about it, because almost no one cares about males at the bottom of the social ladder. At the bottom, men are "valued" (for a lack of a better word) even less than women.

Generally, when guys get screwed over by a terrible VCs it's "well they're a terrible vc ... you know them." But when it's by women "they crossed this boundry? I'm shocked!"

I'm sure they use their positions of power in many different ways that affect both men and women, but their sexual advances obviously target women because most of them are straight.

The exact opposite is true. Almost nobody would take a man who complains about sexual harassment seriously. Just look at the night and day difference in response to teacher student abuse when the student is a guy or a girl.

I do not understand what world people live in where constant special concern is twisted into a lack of it. I mean, I do, in so far as it's just benevolent sexism masquerading as equality, but I can't wrap my head around those people considering themselves rational.

That's actually a medical/psychiatric diagnosis. I don't really think it applies here (or maybe it does, I don't know, I only know that you can't just throw that casually at run-of-the mill creeps).

I'd love to know what you mean here, because I can't see how this follows anything.

Some of the actions described in the article are crimes - these assholes should be prosecuted.

Rather than refuse to understand how someone could have gotten there, let's try to understand the assumptions they made along the way. Then rather than pretending we're unaffected by the culture around us, let's see if we share some of those assumptions. If we want to fix things rather than be blindsided by them, these are at least the first steps.

There are two reasons for this. First, punishment of the "bad apples" deters others in the future, and brings about the larger societal change. Second, as a basic principal of a free society, people must be held accountable for their actions.

What this article is about: rich white men are sexist.

I fail to see the connection.

So something can become so horrible, that even a mistaken action should be defined as evil? Sorry, but that sounds wrong, and itself willfully vengeful. In that case, shouldn't we just do away with manslaughter and just say everyone who has killed someone is a murderer?

It's not fainting couch feminism, it's pragmatic feminism. These interactions happen in a context where peoples' livelihoods, their hopes and dreams, are on the line. Are you going to expect them to jeopardize that by overtly calling someone out?

There is a reason we put the onus on men to not make unwanted advances instead of putting it on women to clearly reject them. It's costless to refrain from hitting on your coworkers/underlings/potential hires. In contrast, there is potentially a very high cost to a woman overtly rejecting an advance. At best, it results in hurt feelings and embarrassment in a superior/potential boss/potential investor. At worst, it can result in negative repercussions (a coworker badmouthing you as "a bitch," a hiring manager passing on your application, an investor passing on your idea).

If you consider yourself a decent person, why would you put someone else between a rock and a hard place like that? There are literally billions of women on the planet, and 99.99% don't work with you/for you.

It's not the responsibility of the person being pursued to protect the pursuer. It's pretty straight forward: if you ask someone out several times, and they keep making up excuses, they're not interested. Stop asking.

We absolutely should encourage this, but let's not ignore that we need to build a culture that doesn't ostracize and attack people when they do this.

So far, we have HR departments that have an incentive to ignore, minimize or deflect these problems. We have a culture of employment that says that this is all part of dealing with a job in a tough industry. And we have internet trolls ready to harass people when they come out against this behavior.

The first part, of asserting yourself and claiming your agency, is extraordinarily important. But there's so much more to it. If someone is sexually harassed, and they hit a brick wall at every turn, the best case scenario is that they ditch the startup or tech industry and go to more established companies that actually have a solid culture and process in place. And that is an absolute loss for everyone, especially because the kind of person who can see everything weighed against them and still takes a stand is what the startup scene is supposed to be all about. We shouldn't punish or ignore those people.

Did you ask multiple times? This sounds like what could easily happen when someone won't take the initial "no," implicit or not, for an answer. Based on the rest of your comment, I expect so.

A few important points:

1. Repeated asking has been held to be sexual harassment, if repeated for long enough.

2. Here's a simple rule: ask once, and only once. She knows where you work. If she's interested, she'll ask for a rain check and get back to you.

> I just don't think this is suitable verbal behavior for supposedly rational adults

3. Rational adults understand and respond to signalling. They don't demand that all communication happen explicitly and on their terms, because they know that such demands are ineffective for all purposes, will not be heeded, and might make them social pariahs.

You're blaming women for not being "adult" enough in their response to juvenile male behavior. It is these men who should start acting like adults.

And how do you know the women didn't say no? The article notes that some of the women faced retribution after rebuffing men.

> Disclosure, this comes to mind because of something that happened between me and a colleague of equal rank in a volunteer organization who went directly from "I don't think I can see a movie tonight" to "This situation is making me uncomfortable" with nothing in between.

It sounds like you need to work on reading other peoples' comfort level with your behavior. In a professional setting the standard is very high for ensuring you are not making someone uncomfortable. Consider how a customer would feel if they walked in a store and, out of the blue, got hit on by staff that they had zero chemistry with. Who then the blames the customer for not being "adult" enough.

No, it doesn't; that description negates the agency and responsibility of the powerful.

Power (basically by definition) weakens external constraints, including constraints that inhibit expression of corrupt impulses.

The problem here is you're not reading signals correctly. If someone says any variation of "I don't think..." that means they are not interested. If they are interested but just legitimately busy or whatever they will 100% suggest a time that will work or at least give you some kind of an in. Granted, there can be mixed signals and it's not always the easiest thing to figure out, but you have to just accept it for what it is. The truth is asking people out is hard, rejecting people is hard, and we have these little dances to save face.

Given the many first-hand accounts of ordinary everyday harassment and men who flat-out do not seem to understand what is and isn't inappropriate, or what the words "no" or "I'm not interested" or "leave me alone" mean, yes, it does seem there is a significant population for whom this type of basic education is absolutely and vitally necessary.

Think of it like driver licensing -- many people, probably most adults, are, with a few lessons, perfectly capable of safely operating a car in most situations. And would seek out those lessons (whether paid from a professional teacher, or informally from an experienced friend or family member) regardless of whether they were required. But enough people wouldn't that we have to force every single person who wants to drive to obtain a license through a process that involves examination of their knowledge of driving and traffic rules.

So "teach about how not to harass/teach about consent/etc." should not be interpreted as "this person is calling out 100% of all men alive as well as me, personally and directly, out of blind hate", but rather as "just like driver licensing, there are enough assholes out there who ruin things that we probably need to make sure people are taught this".

Also, mandatory teaching/training ensures that nobody can pull a "well I didn't think that was wrong" excuse -- if people are taught what is and isn't acceptable, and there's a record of them being taught it, then they know it's wrong and we know they know.

One of them would casually explain in conversations the software he had written to crawl dating website. We was very open with things such as the mirror above his bed, sharing pictures of it. Before leaving the company at last, he had received multiple sanctions including an interdiction to get too close to some women who had worked with him.

Had I not met those people, I would be unable to believe that they exist.

My theory is that they are bold, assertive and have no shame. They don't "play" with people; people like them. They seduce managers and investors. They try to do the same with coworkers.

It's unethical, because the superior/subordinate relationship makes a romantic affair coercive even if nobody participating intends it to be.

It's a leadership failure because the superior should behave better than the subordinate as part of providing their leadership function. Yes, you could say the suborndinate started it or whatever, but the superior is supposed to know better than to get involved with that. If you don't want people to be confused, don't add to the confusion by dipping your pen in the company ink.

Fraternization is different from harassment. Among other things, consent is irrelevant. It also covers a broader scope than romantic relationships. The inappropriateness of the relationship comes from the disruption in the chains of command and responsibility, and the conflicts of interest that are inherent in the relationship.

I think that the military is correct in forbidding this kind of relationship, because of the effects you mentioned. It doesn't have to be confusing. It just needs to also be considered inappropriate by the organization.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment

I don't think this actually follows from the prior premises you put forth. If I'm the 10x programmer, do I need to have my performance handicapped because some psychopaths exist somewhere in the world? That's a kind of inequality which I would argue isn't relevant.

Yesterday I read an article about Tinder in the German Cosmopolitan: http://www.cosmopolitan.de/dating-app-tinder-tinder-im-test-...

One of it's points being that a big draw for many women is how they like being "admired" by so many men on Tinder in the same way they used to appreciate being catcalled: "Es ist dieses dauerhafte Umgarntwerden, das den Reiz ausmacht. Wie früher das Hinterherpfeifen oder Zuzwinkern.

So what's the message here? What is a single male supposed to do in such an enviornment? Some women like the catcalling, others consider it harassment. Meaning: The saver option is not to catcall, but that also results in vastly reduced chances of getting to know any woman at all. Especially when the "competition" does not bother at all and just keeps on catcalling and thus actually ends up getting to know new people, while you sit in your misery alone thinking "Well, at least I didn't harass anybody.." hell of a good time!

Then there is online dating, which has it's own slew of massive issues as a single male. Competition is extra fierce because on these platforms quite often men outnumber women 2:1 or worse. There you might not be called out for harassing that quickly, but there you need a harassing like behavior to be actually successful. You need to be somewhat dishonest about yourself in your presentation, you need to approach/contact as many women as possible (while disregarding their plight of getting spammed), to increase your chances for a successful reply and meeting.

All these are things "we" are supposed not to do, yet they seem like the only viable tactic to any measurable "success". Nobody is gonna start a relationship with me because I'm just such a nice guy who didn't come on to her, those are exactly the kind of signals that keep you in the notorious "friend zone" for all eternity, but those are the kind of signals that are seemingly expected from males in any and all situations or else you might be considered a "creep" or a "harasser".

This get's even worse when culture actually adapts. Not too long ago a common complaint would be how "Men always feign romantic interest to get sex", true enough. Now increasingly men (and some women) have become more pragmatic about this and state their intentions in quite a blunt way and guess what? That can quite easily also be interpreted as "sexual harassment" when somebody comes on to you with "I'd like to have sex with you".

So what's a single guy to do? Especially when you are also lucky enough to be on the spectrum and have a hard enough time parsing social situations already, this constant ambiguity makes it an impossibility to improve my understanding about social interactions and dynamics, literally paralyzing me.

I'm in my mid-30's and I've given up any intend to actively look for a partner because I don't want to inconvenience anybody with my failed approaches or end up being seen as some kind of "creep" who "harasses" people and makes them feel uncomfortable, when that's actually the exact opposite of my intensions.

Now what freshly contrieved linguistic contraption is this? Just say "male" and "female", or "men" and "women", no need to obey the latest gender studies fad.

Many people say this but I wonder why they believe it.

I respect him, but my sympathy isn't with him.

I'm sure it's deeply uncomfortable to be under this level of scrutiny and lumped in with people who have been caught doing things that seem skeezier. But you know what's worse? Not being a billionaire and trying to make a living in a world where people you need are more interested in having sex with you than your business value, or at the very least, are more than willing to tie one to the other.

Heck no! That was the whole point of my saying, "Not saying that is necessarily happening here." Maybe I should've left out the necessarily.

Your comment is just "men's rights" activist talking points.

My point is a valid general observation about the power dynamics. One has to worry when valid general observations go unanswered by association with what some group says.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_fallacy

Are you saying they're false accusations?

(Law enforcement is exempt from this restriction, of course).

As for burden of proof, I don't see it. It's like saying that asking people to lock their houses is a burden, when thieves are the criminals.

If you are a VC having a meeting with a founder, arrange for for more than 2 people to be there, such as a co-VC, a co-founder, a secretary, or whoever. Are business meetings with 3 people suddenly a human rights violation?

If I'm a VC and I've scheduled a meeting at my office it is as simple as letting the party I'm meeting with know that I had planned on recording for my archives.

Nothing unusual or sketchy about the request, especially in a business setting.

Its not foolproof by any stretch, but it's excellent risk management on multiple fronts.

While looking up the relevant law, I looked through the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of sex and various other things, and discovered that there is an explicit exception written in to the law for members of the Communist Party. So you can totally discriminate against any commies who might try to work for you. Not really relevant here, but so weird I just had to share.

"In the months ahead, IGE hired more adults, a slew of VPs with decades of industry experience among them. The company also brought on a former Goldman Sachs investment banker named Stephen Bannon, whose mission was to land venture capital."

https://www.wired.com/2008/11/ff-ige/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmaRTZpJgPA

https://youtu.be/4eeGX4SlF1s?t=1h8m8s

I only learned about about Steve Bannon's connection to Brock Pierce (who recently posted a Facebook photo of himself wearing a red "MAKE BITCOIN GREAT AGAIN" trucker's cap at Trump's Inaugural Lounge) when Mother Jones and Wired covered it during the last election. It looks like the "First Kid" is trying to work his way back into the White House.

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10155736654012782&se...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_t7ubr0jBII

Here's a fascinating article I just found about how SAG AFTRA tried to censor and suppress "An Open Secret":

http://deadline.com/2015/06/sag-aftra-threatening-sue-an-ope...

And here's a a map of the rabbit warren: a timeline of the scandals that started at DEN, including Brock's attempts to whitewash his past and ongoing lawsuits around his online gold trading company IGE, which Steve Bannon was involved with, up to his election to the board of the Bitcoin Foundation and the resulting resignations:

DEN Sources: A document-in-progress compiling firsthand reporting on DEN, Bitcoin, Brock Pierce and the Mike Egan / Bryan Singer lawsuit

https://medium.com/@cuttlefish_btc/den-sources-af289efd690b

What do you mean by "If you didnt believe in #PG prior"?

But I did find this somewhat interesting 1995 history of the lengths they went to in order to protect their privacy:

http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=199...

There are definitely women out there who will ask guys out, but I'd wager, based on my own circumstantial and spotty experiential evidence in my culture, that it's men's responsibility to initiate has generally remained the case. I think guys who are less adept socially/are timid have difficulties resolving this facet of dating with the decreasing tolerance for overstepping boundaries--some dudes get wet feet because they realize they have to initiate but scare themselves out of it because, compounded with their inherent difficulties in socializing, they now build up this ridiculous fear-based narrative wherein their social clumsiness leads to misinterpretations which wind up screwing them way harder than a simple rejection.

This fear, of course, is unfounded. But I do think the mating initiator in most cultures, whether it be men or women, often relies on 'primal' methods in order to go after potential mates--aggressiveness, shows of power, confidence...When it comes to mating we really haven't moved far away from the schemes of any of our other animal brethren--yes we have money, cars, nice clothes, ambitions instead of colorful plummage, but things are otherwise the same--the old playbook. When you utilize this with restraint, all is well. When you let power go to your head and convince you that things are more animal than they really are and that this sort of behavior is always permissable you wind up like one of our lovely VCs here. That is still the case, and dating is of course nuanced--you have to utilize these peacock techniques but recognize a rebuff when you see one and cease your little dance. I think some guys fail to see the nuance and then read these stories correctly condemning jackasses for their behavior but lack the social understanding to realize this doesn't mean they should paralyze themselves out of asking others out, be afraid to initiate at all, or live under the tyranny of some ridiculous fear that if they so much as a approach a woman it will yield a lawsuit.

If they say no, the respectful thing is to drop it.

Do the respectful thing. This is really uncomplicated. There aren't any "ifs" or "buts" after that. The notion that this is the time to start wooing is absurdly wrong. That's the time to know you've been rejected, and move on.

Accepting rejection, incidentally, seems like something many of these VCs have trained themselves to be terrible at professionally.

It's quite clear that hitting on a subordinate is unacceptable, but when you don't work together it's a lot less clear. Would flirting with someone at a conference party be harassment? What if you were from different companies, but at equal levels? What if you're a VC and she's an entrepreneur (but she hasn't mentioned raising money from you)?

* One needs real and credible evidence to carry through with depriving another person of any liberty or property.

* Probable cause never trumps or adds to evidence -- if you investigate and find nothing, that's it.

One of the most confusing and unfortunate memes of the past year is this "believe women" stuff, because it confuses strong suspicion with proof. If these cases show us anything, it's that there is plenty of real and credible evidence -- no need to go on intuition or suspicion.

It certainly depends on your position relative to the person; but many people who are in a position to do something are also in a position to investigate -- they can take correspondingly stronger action, on the basis of an investigation.

For example, Teo had plenty of resources available to him, if he wanted to follow up on the rumors he had heard. He just chose not to do so.

The same is true at Uber: within the company there was a wealth of information available, and it was certainly feasible for Kalanick and many other people to look into the available complaints, emails, performance reviews and transcripts to determine if something was amiss.

It is true that people outside of Uber, and people not as well connected as Teo, would not have these resources available -- but then again, those people are not actually going to go into Uber and start firing people (for example), though they might refuse to associate with people they had heard rumors about.

When you say "we should treat 'a constant murmur' as much stronger evidence than we currently do.", I would ask you, evidence with regards to what? What would you do based on this kind of evidence?

I'm not doubting the stories posted in these articles. But I'm not going to believe something just because there's a "constant murmur." There was also a constant murmur that Obama hated America, etc.

Your catcalls example is not a "murmur," it was people you know, telling you what happened to them. That's different.

But still, there's lots of "constant murmurs" that don't pan out, and in many cases they're driven by agendas. It's easy to make or perpetuate claims when there's no attribution, no specific examples, etc. Just vague innuendos.

So if some vague innuendo is contrary to my personal experience, yeah I won't believe it as fact.

Kudos to these women for bringing VC sexism out of the realm of murmurs.

He knew exactly what the NYT article was going to say: they contacted him to see if he wanted to dispute it. If he were being genuine, he could have said "I did this thing, I apologize to the specific person I hurt". I'm absolutely giving him room to be genuine, he's just staying well out of that room.

... and, apparently, he's now updated the blog post disputing the NYT's account: https://medium.com/@sacca/i-have-more-work-to-do-c775c5d56ca... This is so bizarre.

He didn’t spill milk. He didn’t pick the wrong wine for dinner. He knew exactly what he was doing. He knew it was wrong. He did it anyway.

I’m sorry, but I just cannot stand so many people having this “boys will be boys” attitude toward this.

You could really make the same point for most felons, if you got to know them.

Crazy thing is, because I don't believe in punishment but prefer rehabilitation, I actually think that most felons deserve it more.

Remember that the USA is the land of the 98% free.

If a cultural problem has lack of exposure and education at its root, then it is very easy to throw money at that part of the problem and just fix it. Right now girls and underrepresented minorities are woefully underexposed to coding, and via education we can right that wrong directly even if we can't figure out how to fix the underlying cultural issues (which definitely exist, and have made white and Asian boys much more likely to have early exposure to CS).

I'll note that students tend to rate CS as their favorite academic subject (it's slightly below art and theater) when they are forced to take it, so "force" in this context is mostly just about getting them to take the first step. They love it once they start, so whether or not it will solve the gender imbalance problem, it's such a critical skill for the future economy that it seems irresponsible not to spend money on it and prepare people to participate in that economy, doubly so when students enjoy it so much.

That's not to say at all that the cultural components should be ignored, they're just so much deeper and more difficult to fix than this particular side effect, which is amenable to solution-by-education (which necessarily means throwing money around, since training teachers takes money).

I'm working at a place where I can't imagine this happening because they, while taking harassment complaints very seriously, also take personnel actions very seriously and investigate before imposing permanent consequences, using other means to prevent furthering a problem during the investigation.

> The risks of someone making this claim are so, so high

If the company establishes a practice of firing without investigation, and the events are hard to disprove in a way which would sustain a defamation complaint by the falsely accused, the risks are near zero.

Duke lacrosse. UVA. Conor Oberst.

It happens. Allegations deserve investigation before punishment is doled out. Just because SV is doing an absolutely awful job at dealing with sexual harassment right now doesn't mean we need to swing hard the other direction and punish without proof.

It's happened a bunch of times at my company just that I've seen personally. I'm not even talking the ones that did it to me. It's a "reputable," Fortune 100 company with diverse staff and plenty of turnover currently due to management. My part of it has maybe 100 people or so. There were also real cases of sexual harassment male-on-female and female-on-male mostly resolved by employees themselves without escalation. Younger people just being stupid with some coaching and strict warning. Those that were a bigger problem, such as smacking asses or continued harassment, get escalated to management who investigates them, gets witness testimony, and fires them if witness or camera confirmation is strong. I helped get rid of a long-timer recently where you hear stories with no evidence. He got transfered to a shitty job with more people around due to poor work ethic. This time, there were 2-3 witnesses to his behavior that escalated in his irritation and we got rid of him immediately.

So, it happens both ways in my company. The thousands of women I've talked to from tons of companies also told me both happen: sexual harassment; people using fake claims including sexual harassment as a tool. We call it the "he said, she said bullshit." Fortunately, my bosses cultivated a good team where we deal with little to none of that stuff. I mainly hear it from others acting as a witness for them or developing strategy for trouble-makers on occasion.

The word harassment does not even appear in parent comment. Neither is HR. You added it to shift the topic which is an open and easy to see lie. "You are making me uncomfortable" and "fire him hr please" are not nearly the same.

For that matter, rational is different category then "fair". Unfair or even unethical dudes don't get to be called "irrational" (unless someone defend their harassment by calling them dumbass).

> This is essentially what I'm trying to say.

In this story she unambiguously informed him that he is making her uncomfortable. That is not even as open rejection as can be, but also feedback on what the reason for not continuing conversation is. You are extrapolating her rejection to entirely different things as words says. That is expecting her to walk the fine line, guess in advance how you re-interpret words and come up with answer perfectly tailored to your personality.

She tried nice as overwhelming majority of dudes would understand correctly, did not worked, she started to be direct. But she apparently should not be too direct.

Helping a stranger get promoted? At the risk of ending your career (a massive loss for most people)? With the only reward being feeling good for Doing The Right Thing (tm)? Not so much