Survey of YC female founders on sexual harassment, coercion by angels and VCs
blog.ycombinator.com
blog.ycombinator.com
Given that there are responses which declined to report anyone, the actual number is obviously higher. This is happening at the top startup accelerator in the world, where there is likely to be more scrutiny than elsewhere. (The problem is likely worse in other places.)
Kudos on publishing this research, great work.
I don't see any specifics on the number reported vs the number that experienced harassment, just the number of respondents who experienced it. Where is that in the article?
From your comment:
> Nearly 20% of responders reported sexual coercion or quid-pro-quo
From the survey:
>> 88 YC female founders completed the survey
>> 19 founders experienced one or more inappropriate incidents by angels or VCs:
Yes, 19/88 of founders surveyed stated they had been harassed to YC as part of the survey.
From your comment:
> Given that there are responses which declined to report anyone
The reporting here is between the founder and authorities, other founders, other VCs, in context of the incident and not the survey.
From the survey:
>> When founders did report, their main reason was to protect others: “I wanted to make sure that other founders funded by this VC would NOT be in contact with this person, so I shared.”
I'm not assuming any malice on your part, just a misreading of the survey results.
In absolute terms it is clear that it's a lower bound. In percentage we cannot say because as stated in the footnote:
> Callisto chose to send the survey to the 125 founders [of 384] who signed up for the YC female founder email list.
It can be argued that being harassed and subscribing to that list may be correlated. Hence, the percentage of harassed women on that list may be higher than in the general population of female founders.
Also, someone may argue that women who were actually harassed are probably more involved in these matters, and hence more likely to respond to such surveys. They got 88 responses out of 125 reach-outs (70%) so there's also the possibility most of that other 30% were not harassed.
Therefore, the true lower-bound in percentage terms would be 19 (that we know were harassed) of 384 (total population), around 5%. As the name implies, this is just a lower bound.
The equivalent upper bound would be 69 (that we know were not harassed) of 384 (total), setting it at 82%. The real number lies somewhere inbetween. Extrapolating "40% of respondents" to "40% of the population" is debatable, and claiming that is a lower bound would be just wrong.
You're mixing a population about which you can make an inference (survey participants) with a population about which you cannot (people who were not even contacted about the survey). The resulting percentage is essentially meaningless.
But since we like to be pedantic on this forum, I’ll defend the parent: if you want a true, 100%-confidence lower bound (ignoring the possibility of false reports), then that would be 5%. It’s a completely useless statistic, and you shouldn’t use it for anything, but it’s correct for the strictest possible interpretation of “lower bound”.
You may argue this, but I wouldn’t say it’s a given. For one thing, especially at the higher end of the scale (“unwanted sexual contact”, or hypothetically even rape), people who have had traumatic experiences may have a strong desire to avoid recalling them – especially for something as (relatively) unimportant as a survey – potentially producing the opposite effect.
Doesn't surprise me. A couple years ago my co-founder and I were at a startup event, and an investor came up to another founder next to us and made a comment like, "Oh, you're way too hot to be a startup founder, what are you doing here?"
It's a tricky problem to really make sense of though just because investors are so diverse. You've got things like:
- People who got an MBA and for whom investing is their actual career.
- Founders who exited their own startup and now it's their hobby or second career.
- People who made a couple million dollars as doctors or lawyers and are now taking it up as a hobby in their 50s.
- People who made tens or hundreds of millions of dollars from crypto or whatever in their early 20s and have now lost all touch with reality.
- People who quietly manage family offices who occasionally add a startup to their portfolio.
Not that it necessarily matters from the founder's perspective. But it's just a very different problem than addressing sexual harassment in tech companies, because you have a mix of people doing it as a career and people doing it for completely different reasons.
Are you suggesting that traditional VCs and traditional tech leaders are less rapey than the list above? That seems like wishful thinking!
Meta: these downvotes are wild. -4 at present. Someone makes a bullshit, hand wringing, concern trolling comment about how this is a "tricky problem" and that it cannot be pinned on VCs and tech leaders because of schlocky retired doctors and bitcoin barons. The statistics don't back that up as cited by a sibling commenter. What's funny about downvotes like this is that it's not even a social deterrent. I can get +4 for a one word comment as long as it's funny, but if I callout someone for getting the vapors and saying "not all men" I get wild downvotes
Are they? I think it could be argued that investors are one of the least diverse groups.
Analysis of 1,500 investors:
==70% are white
==40% of venture investors have attended Stanford or Harvard
==One percent of venture capitalists are Latinx and only three percent are black.
-https://blog.usejournal.com/where-did-you-go-to-school-bde54...
https://www.businessinsider.com/infographic-women-control-th...
For example, women control a majority of assets in large part because they statistically live longer than men. This makes them a higher percentage of the population in general, but a much higher percentage of the population of retirees with retirement savings. And they do most consumer spending because they're typically the ones who do the shopping for the family, even if on average half or more of the money is from the husband. The numbers are largely accurate.
Though it's not clear how many 80 year old widows are inclined to invest their nest egg in a startup.
See also the quote about the American poor viewing themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires, and voting to support the interest of actual millionaires.
Class membership can be useful as a proxy for e.g. power structures, but if you're already looking at investors, the most important factor influencing power structures is that they have a lot of money. Maybe there are differences in the ways white and black people with lots of money abuse their power, but that'd surprise me.
Meanwhile, you completely ignore the data about investors being heavily skewed towards two specific universities. Isn’t that a past life experience? Isn’t VC investor a “class” in itself?
The comment you're replying to was very clear in that they were talking about career and background diversity -- as in, VCs have their money for diverse reasons.
There were like 5 bullet points about it, making it crystal clear what kind of diversity was being discussed.
For the rest of us, race is already here.
There is at least one exception in me.
It’s understandable that you want to focus on the diversity of outcomes, just know that others might be interested in the inputs that led to those outcomes.
I’m not sure how you arrived at that assumption. The point is that this is the data (as pulled by one person), you have chosen to take the giant leap that somehow those people “think as a block and can be generalized.” Why no mention of the other data points and focus solely on this one?
Assuming these are American numbers, wouldn't you expect it? Wikipedia says 60% of Americans are White, and the number is higher if you include Hispanic people - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Americans
So it would make sense for white people to be the majority in any group, isn't it? Maybe there are exceptions, like certain sports.
Just to be clear, I am not white. I am only wondering about the numbers, not about any group's behavior.
People who are having trouble understanding why this kind of thing is harassment should try changing gender to something else. For example, imagine if you heard:
"Whoa, listen to that Southern accent! Surprised to hear that here."
"You're a Christian? Didn't know anyone who believed in that stuff would be in engineering..."
"Sure you want to start a startup? You look like you need to lose some weight and sitting in a chair all day coding's not going to help..."
... and so on.
I actually heard a version of the Southern accent example once. Classism and place-ism are things too. It wasn't long ago that students in some universities were advised to lose their Southern accent if they wanted to get work as engineers.
That's exactly the point: if you can switch some group labels around and make an insult, then don't use the version involving gender.
We can imagine examples of weird and uncomfortable compliments that are in some way related to the demographics of the recipient - like someone attempting to flirt by telling a French man "Your voice is way too sexy for you to be a founder" or a well-built black man "You look way too athletic to be a founder". These seem about as socially inept as the "way too hot" example and strike me as reasonable analogues. But the examples in the post I replied to higher in this chain are nothing like this.
If you look at the example the parent poster gave, that's exactly the implication. "Oh, you're way too hot to be a startup founder, what are you doing here?"
Let's give another example of a complement that really isn't:
"Wow, it's nice to see some black people at this event for once". It's a positive statement, sure, but it's not an appropriate comment to make.
Can you understand how this belittles people?
The 'too xyz to be here' comment is typically made by people that aren't in a position to judge, possibly for a number of reasons.
Assuming you are a man, imagine being at an event and someone coming up and saying something like, "Woah get a load of Fabio over here". Being compared to Fabio might be a compliment in an objective physical sense, but I'm sure that isn't what you want to talk about when you are trying to get funding or make connections.
And there's some studies on this form of discrimination.
http://sites.middlebury.edu/lngt101fall2015/files/2015/11/ar...
https://web.stanford.edu/group/journal/cgi-bin/wordpress/wp-...
Religion is a funny one in Silicon Valley because it's outright religious discrimination of Judeo-Christian traditions, while embracing Islam. It makes no rational sense at all for anyone with even the most superficial understanding of religion or history.
With race I can see the logic of "well, people that looked like your ancestors were really good at empire-building a while ago, so we're going to favour everyone else instead of you to try to make up for that" and gender "well, women in the workplace is a relatively new phenomena and they're 50% of the population, so we're going to favour them in order to hasten their representation in the workplace and make up for recent transgressions". But the religious one is truly baffling.
This is absolute nonsense. What you characterize as a wholesale embracing of a religion is actually the recognition that there is systematic discrimination against a religious minority in this country and an attempt to fix it. Islamic traditions are rejected just as much as Judeo-Christian ones.
You shall keep thy relgion tho thy self.
That minority stones people to death if it has the majority. Female people. So what does the PC-Catalog suggest, when one minority wants to end tolerance and other minoritys, once it is the majority?
Is that an honest question? Because it sounds like trolling.
In what way does protecting a minority promote them to a majority? In what way does it condone their belief systems? Why do people have such a ridiculously hard time not conflating the adherents of t religion with the religion itself?
https://www.citylab.com/equity/2012/08/exploding-amish-popul...
Now take a dogmatic religion, that is not peacefull- and watch wherever it comes to power- minorities beeing routed and pluralism and democracy falter.
As examples may i cite the Arab spring countries, turkey, syrias sunnites, indonesia - http://sp2010.bps.go.id/index.php/site/tabel?tid=321&wid=0
Im pretty sure, i can take your standardized reply from here. First of all its not one religion, its many variants - so nobody is responsible by the virtues of distribution of failure into the privat sector of the individual choice. To which i reply:
Yes, and no. Its one species of humans, planetwide, and religions are particular lousy to limit those human emotions in times of crisis. While christianity is tamed, well behaved or even in decline in the west- one religion-group then, has a track record for not working with democracy. There are not many islamic democratic countries, which are not sliding into toletarian directions.
Having to flee from ones self created social catastrophe, does not make one a virtue-angel by the grace of weakness.
If evangelicals would try to escape a trump ruled Gilead- does theire religion and culture warrant a special treatment?
No compromises, no colonialization of the public mind sphere, with illegtime power structures and moral concepts. Keep religion private.
It's only mistaken for this by people who both confuse Christianity (and often particularly Evangelical/Fundamentalist Protestantism, and often strains of those traditions that are particularly anti-Semitic) for some broader Judeo-Christian whole and confuse being prevented from imposing adherence to their system of ritual and values on others with discrimination against them, and who further confuse not actively discriminating against the Muslim community with “embrace of Islam”.
My wife works in biotech (has been in both ag and pharma, with the same experience) and seems to get exactly this (often verbatim except that “engineering” is replaced with “science”) almost as much as gender-based harassment and microaggressions.
Just amazing that to me something that would seem totally out of place at work or seem "crazy" to have happen... a lot of people experience in the same workplaces I'm in.
The 'event' is more than the time it takes to happen, it colors the rest of your interactions with a company. (Do the other people know? do they condone? Who is safe? if the initial event was minor, will that person escalate?)
exhausting.
I was angry but my GF just shrugged and said, "this happens all the time in Yorkville".
You don't see it because predators don't act out if there are other men around.
I don't think you can assume that. I think it's very likely that the number is higher, but it's also possible that it's lower - that women who have experienced harassment are more likely to complete a survey on the topic than women who have not.
The survey is of 88 YC female founders from a pool of 125 people on a particular list. This already makes the list fairly small and on the world stage and in the public eye.
If you really need it to remain quiet, your policy of saying nothing needs to be absolute.
Do you disagree that an anonymous survey with yes/no answer is sufficiently anonymous? Perhaps folks from Callisto can comment further.
-edit- Clarification: I don't believe an anonymous survey with yes/no question is the same as a survey that ask for detailed answers that can potentially be identifiable. Hence this survey is not the same as what Doreen is alleging. (it's not the small elite circle part that I was disagreeing.)
> "18 experienced unwanted sexual overtures or sexual badgering"
Badgering is beyond the pale, "unwanted sexual overtures" are unwelcome but I don't see how they are ever going away; if men don't make a first sexual overture there aren't going to be a lot of men who end up having sex. Some of those overtures are going to be unwanted, but the men basically have to try to find out.
Things like Tinder where you can filter for "interested only" are pretty much a new phenomenon and havn't really had time to influence the culture of anyone aged over 30.
Anyway, I'd like to know how persistent these "unwanted sexual overture" is before it is reported in the survey as harassment. Minor point in a larger picture.
Here's an amazingly novel idea: maybe angels and VCs who are lonely should have social lives where they can make sexual overtures? Making sexual overtures in a professional context where you hold a position of power (i.e. you are a angel/VC and you're making overtures to a female founder) is grossly unprofessional regardless of whether they are persistent.
Also 'inappropriate incidents' is completely undefined.
Working long hours doesn't immediately excuse you from adhering to social contexts, especially when there are obvious power structures present which evidently is rampantly abusive across industries.
'Innappropriate incidents' is entirely subjective and can't be defined beyond a personal context. If one party believes the manner in which someone else operates in a context is inappropriate, that's enough of a definition, especially in the context of such a survey.
That's unacceptable. If there are no firm, objective rules then anyone can be guilty of anything and "inappropriateness" loses all meaning.
I could consider the fact that you don't pray before eating something inappropriate in a work dinner context.
The "inappropriate incidents" bit is not "completely undefined" - it refers to the things in the list that follows. I think for a survey the response was surely detailed enough?
I think you're missing the point here. How did the survey define which unwanted sexual overtures are inappropriate? You write that this was put in the context of harassment, but how this context was presented to the respondents has a big impact on what their responses really mean. At face value, it seems like the study considers all romantic advances to be inappropriate. This seems like an overly simplistic definition, as per my example here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18225474
Asking for further context is entirely warranted. Studies like these can often be made (intentionally or unintentionally) to seem alarmist due to poorly defining categories of harassment. For instance, I was counted as a victim of sexual assault in one of my university's surveys because I answered yes to the question "have you received unwanted sexual advances in the last year?". Yes I had, but all of them were from people who ceased their advances after being denied and generally acted with respect. While there's always some element of discomfort in being put on the spot like that, I would absolutely not consider any of these instances harassment in any way shape or form. Asking someone out on a date or inviting them over for intimate contact, and ceasing all advances after being denied was considered an act of sexual harassment by this survey. I'm not kidding, if someone asked a person out respectfully, they got told no, and both parties walked away with no further contact this was considered sexual harassment. This also disturbed me because it not-so-subtly implied that I had harassed literally every person I had asked out on a date and was denied, even though I've never continued pursuing someone after being told no.
Sexual overtures at a bar: okay.
Sexual overtures at a sex party: very okay.
Sexual overtures at a house party: prob okay.
Sexual overtures at a grocery store: eeeeh maybe if you're really hot and she gives you the look.
Sexual overtures at the office: very not okay
Sexual overtures at a VC event: way not cool.
Sexual overtures at an office party: not good.
Sexual overtures at an official after-party of a business event: nope.
Sexual overtures at the after after party with those 10 people who wanted to party some more after a business event after party: depends, read the room.
It's about context. Don't be a creep.
There are absolutely situations in bars and house parties where one should not make any kind of move. Likewise, there are office parties where one could.
Before I get to the next bit, it's important to realise and understand that "no" really does mean no. With that in mind, it's also true that there are men and women who say "no", but still mean yes. This is one small facet of that whole debate, but the point is subtleties matter. People saying "no" when they mean yes is still a real thing, like it or not, and some people have a hard time differentiating when this is the case. There are also people who of course don't care, but they are far less controversial. What we need to do is all pull together to work to clarify how we communicate interest in each other. And that means all people, of all sexes and genders and orientations and class.
I believe some situations require more assurance of “it’s okay” than others. In the office, I’d have to be super very absolutely certain it’s okay before saying anything. At a singles event in a bar I might lead with a sexual overtone and see what happens.
And no always means no. Once you say no I say sorry and move on.
Although I do like the policy of a sex club I was at once: If you do anything you have to apologize for, you are banned from the club for forever.
More venues should adopt that policy.
I was especially surprised to see someone get that and say that context matters, but then still start reeling off "yes"s and "no"s to settings without context.
Interesting. Multiple women I know started dating co-workers (in entirely different parts of the company) at work parties, and did not think it was bad or unusual. Perhaps interpretations of statements like "don't be a creep" are a lot more diverse than you think.
I think this is a big part of why online dating is growing in prevalence. Why take the social risk of being labeled a "creep" when you can go to places where whether or not women are interested is determined upfront?
Rule #2: don't be unattractive
Let me remind you that a work setting is nothing like Tinder, nothing like a bar, nothing like any place where trying to get laid is considered OK.
You wouldn't ask someone if they wanted to shag at a funeral, would you?
No, I'm implying there is a very high background rate of men asking women for sex, and I havn't compared this instance to the background but I assume women get propositioned at a very high rate _wherever_ they are.
> Let me remind you that a work setting is nothing like Tinder, nothing like a bar, nothing like any place where trying to get laid is considered OK.
My parents met in the workplace. I have a friends who have too. I havn't looked up the statistics but I assume it is double-digit percentages of marriages start as workplace relations. It is unfortunate if you think that isn't acceptable, because it clearly is.
> You wouldn't ask someone if they wanted to shag at a funeral, would you?
I wouldn't, but I don't see why it would be unacceptable. There are a lot of people at funerals who are't particularly committed to grieving but making a statement of social support, and they'd just be there doing what they do at any social event.
Conflating financial power relationship dynamics with garden variety workplace romance is some serious moving of goalposts.
Seriously, one of the major reforms in venture capital in the last 25 years has been to reduce the amount of power tripping that goes on between VCs and founders. That's the idea that YC is founded on. This is another example, and an incredibly shitty one. Why defend it?
Because "unwelcome sexual advances" is a spectrum from acceptable to unacceptable.
The acceptable part of that spectrum is very small (being a guy awkwardly asks a girl for sex, she says no, and that is the end if it) and the unacceptable part is very large (fondling, using pressure from corporate power, etc).
However, despite the fact it is small, the acceptable part of that spectrum is important to protect because there are a lot of men who are not very socially adept, but want to have sexual relation with women and don't know many outside the workplace. They should be able to seek out relationships in their comfort zone without risk of formal censure. I assume there are a lot of women in a similar position.
In this particular instance "unwanted sexual overtures or sexual badgering" is probably more of the badgering end that we don't want, but the language here is important - there needs to be /some/ tolerance of unwanted sexual overtures that do not lead to badgering. Being awkward, being wrong and misunderstanding a situation isn't a punishable offense. Being persistent, using threats or getting physical is.
And so I'd like to see a little more clarity on what the low-end standard being used here is. It is important to the conversation. In a minor way.
Being asked by a VC about sex, going on a date, or grabbing a drink while trying to secure money from them is far worse than being fondled by some random guy in a nightclub.
This is actually really inappropriate IMO. Who the heck thinks it's okay to "awkwardly ask for sex"? No. You awkwardly ask for a date or some such, and -- if that is accepted -- then within that context the rest can be opened up. Maybe we're just in extremely different cultures.
People should not seek out relationships with those over whom they wield significant power professionally. That's a pretty decent and obvious rule most people live by.
While there are exceptions, if someone doesn't intuitively understand the reasons for the rule they should seriously consider dating outside of their professional environment.
This is especially true for people who are likely to make such advances to those under them through sheer ignorance of social norms. The set of people who make advances and badger others usually do so in bad faith and have practiced ways to hedge, mislead, and leverage the people around them to remain safely tolerated. That leaves the decent, socially inept people wide open to be made examples of by HR because they never thought to use their power or influence to threaten others. (Or, out of desperation they start to use that influence to save face.)
That may sound unfair to the socially inept. But the point is that there is no way to separate the wheat from the chaff-- people acting in bad faith who get caught almost always claim social ignorance, or harmless intentions, mis-communication, etc. There is no credible way to signal to an underling that a sexual advance comes without the threat of badgering or other more subtle repercussions. (And esp. no way to explain one's actions as harmless after the fact.)
And that's not even to mention situations where an underling says yes to an ostensibly "non-badgering" advance because a) they confused the wheat with the chaff and b) the power imbalance makes them think they have little choice. If the person making the advance is not particularly socially aware then it greatly increases the chances that they take the lack of error reporting as consent. Meanwhile, the underling is convinced that reporting an error would result in immediate or eventual termination. Not a particularly sound system for exploring romance IMO.
Anyway, those are just a few reasons why most people believe strongly in the rule I stated above. It's a field of social land mines. If one is socially inept then an entire class of problems vanishes simply by following the rule. (Besides, widely-available web dating services do exist.)
In a situation where there is a lot at stake, socially savvy people generally want to know the answer will be "yes" before the question is asked.
Historically, when men were the primary breadwinners and women were expected to be homemakers, a man asking for a date from a woman he had determined was single was not likely to be causing big problems for anyone. If she said "No" and he dropped it, no drama would ensue.
This is not true where they are business colleagues and she has career aspirations.
I had an entry level job at a Fortune 500 company for over 5 years. I wanted to get a better paying job more in line with my education in the IT department.
One day, a senior programmer asked me for a date. I'm sure he had stopped to consider if he was in the clear and determined he was. He wasn't doing anything wrong and he wasn't going to get in trouble.
I'm equally sure he didn't stop to wonder how it impacted my career aspirations. It basically killed any hope I had of getting a job in his department. Simply asking me out closed doors for me.
I left the company shortly thereafter. I left for largely unrelated reasons, but that incident made it clear to me I could basically give up all hope of ever escaping the Pink Collar Ghetto I was trapped in because some powerful man at the company saw me as date material and never stopped to ponder how that framing might impact me.
In over 5 years, he was the only person I ever met at the company who knew what GIS was without me having to explain it. He never once wondered what my career goals were, nor what my unusual skills might do for the company. Nope. He just got all excited about the possibility of getting a date. Full stop.
This is the essence of why we are seeing studies like this one about the impact on women in specific, even though anyone can be a victim of sexual harassment.
If you need a trillion dollar idea: teach socially unsavvy people how to recognize a yes before they have to ask the question.
I know you can make boatloads of money, because I am one of those unsavvy people and every bit of information about dating basically comes down to:
"Here are 10 hints that tell you she might be interested. If you want to know for sure, ask. Oh and she might be too polite to actually turn you down, so here are 5 more tips to recognize when a yes actually means no."
This means don't ask colleagues for a date. Instead, ask social acquaintances from other parts of your life.
Whether you are socially savvy or not, you should treat all business associates first and foremost as people looking to benefit professionally from their relationship with you. Treating women like their professional life is irrelevant because you find them hot is fundamentally not going to go good places. It tends to undermine them professionally. This isn't a way to "win friends and influence people."
Operating under the old rules is frequently not (apparently) problematic for well established people who belong to a privileged class. For purposes of this discussion, that would be men who make good money and see themselves as "catches" because of it -- edit: which describes a large number of HN commenters -- sometimes while being quite bitter about all the gold digging whores in the world and failing to see that if you bait your hook with money, you shouldn't be surprised if that is the type of fish you attract.
Additionally, some blind spots are genuinely rooted in personal disability. Lack of social savvy can be due to Autism Spectrum Disorder.
I have two sons who likely qualify as ASD. I find it very effective to give them helpful tools for navigating the social landscape and avoiding the worst errors they could make due to their personal handicaps. I find it quite counterproductive to blame them as if they are being troublesome on purpose.
I try to keep that in mind when framing comments of mine. I'm human and I don't always get it right by any stretch of the imagination. But that's where I'm generally coming from.
There's a gap between an overture which gets a “yes” and one which is unwelcome, within which an overture is acceptable and will not adversely impact a relationship even though it is declined; how wide this gap is varies by individual and context (it tends to be particularly narrow, and sometimes of negative width such that there are unwelcome advances that will be met with grudging acquiescence, where the recipient is on the downward side of a power imbalance) and, I suspect, is on average in our present society much narrower for women than men (becaus of, at least, general social power dynamics rather than necessarily any inherent gender feature.)
While obviously one will prefer that the answer be yes to any overture (even an implicit one), I think that—particularly with the kind of subtle, implicit, preliminary overtures that are used to gauge interest before an explicit overture is made—the thing a savvy individual will want to be certain of is that the overture will be within the permissible range irrespective of whether it will elicit a positive response.
I think a lot of the problem (other than active malice) comes from people not recognizing the effects of context and lacking empathy and thus projecting their own broader range or permissible-even-if-not-interested onto the recipient of their advances.
If you don't see why it would be unacceptable, then why wouldn't you do it? You're admitting, whether you intended to or not, that you do in fact recognise that such behaviour would be inappropriate given the context – just like offering unwanted sexual advances to a subordinate in the workplace is clearly inappropriate.
I have a friend who has expressed to me that she thinks prostitution should be legal. By this logic, she would be a prostitute if it were.
Do you really think that's true?
https://observer.com/2015/08/better-bed-than-dead-why-mouner...
Say I sought VC funding, and met a single investor. In the end, I decide to accept funding from another firm. Afterwards said single investor congratulates me on getting funded and asks me out on a date now that we no longer have a conflict of interest. I decline because I'm not interested in this investor.
Did I receive an unwanted romantic advance from an investor? Absolutely. I was asked out on a date when I didn't want one.
But was I harassed? It seems dubious to say so. At the time of the advance I had no business relationship with this investor. If the questionnaire specifically said unwanted advances _during_ the search for funding that would be a different situation. But that context isn't given, hence the confusion.
Since YC has not provided how these terms were defined in the questionnaire, we're left to speculate - hence the confusion and contention exhibited in this thread.
Do you think it would be helpful to have a rule book for men that exactly stipulates what kind of interactions with women are professional, respectful, and friendly?
Are men that stupid? (I’m saying this as a man myself).
With that out of the way, the important thing is that injecting one's own assumptions into a survey question risks making vast misinterpretations of the results. The survey merely listed "unwanted sexual overtures". You seem to assume that every reader of this question shares your interpretation as "unwanted and unprofessional sexual overtures" or "unwanted sexual overtures received while seeking funding from an investor" or similar. In practice, many people actually try to answer survey questions honestly. The result of relying on unstated assumptions about the interpretation of survey questions is highly dubious survey results, as I illustrate in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18225907. And not to mention it risks trivializing the impact of sexual harassment, because plenty of people may look at broad definitions like this and think that the majority of cases of harassment identified by studies like these aren't harassment at all.
You seem to care about the classification and definitions of questions present in the survey.
I care about finding ways for men (myself included) to understand and think about their blind spots regarding sexual harassment.
I am not saying that you are wrong within your chosen frame of what you care about. I am saying is that your frame is not very relevant to my frame.
I am also saying that focusing on the survey question is indicative of how you rank the importance about these issues.
It’s like the house is on fire, half of the residents of the house are saying “let’s get outside right now”, and you’re saying “hold on, let’s stay inside and figure out whether the fire’s origin is an electrical fire or a wood fire?”
Regardless, I wasn't even the original commenter that pointed out the ambiguity of this item in the survey. I only responded after roenxi asked for greater context, and other commenters replied with the unqualified assumption that this item was universally interpreted by respondents as only referring to coercive advances. I merely pointed out the fact that, as it was worded in the original document, it was not exclusive to coercive advances and potentially included non-harassment examples that would fit under the terms used (and provided an example).
Also, if my frame of discussion isn't relevant to you then why did you respond in the first place?
You know, you’re so right. Why waste my time with someone who clearly doesn’t care about the core issue at hand?
If anything, our industry has more of of these sorts of people, so yes, some people actually do need a rule book. A survey providing meaningful data on what is and isn't wanted would thus be incredibly useful not only to help these people navigate the workplace, but to women who have to suffer social ineptitude.
Considering your interest seems to be in reducing women's suffering in this regard, I honestly don't know why you're being so difficult about clarifying the meaning of the data.
What you're basically saying is, because 5% of people don't understand the common norms that are blindingly obvious to everyone, the 95% must go out of their way to explain and accommodate the minority.
Why is the onus on the 95% to do that, as opposed to the 5% to have the recognition that their lack of grace in this context is an issue and instead choose to find a different playground?
I'm going to be cold about this: if you do not have the ability to navigate the social norms within a professional working environment, you ethically should not be allowed to pursue romantic interests there. Bottom line. Accommodating to that inability should never come at the cost of someone else's discomfort, nor are you entitled to pursue any possible interest just because you happen to work there.
Yes. Why is that bizarre? Do you think we should accommodate blind people? Should we install ramps in buildings so the physically disabled can access them?
> Accommodating to that inability should never come at the cost of someone else's discomfort
There's no such thing as a right to comfort. I could just as easily turn it around and say that someone's comfort should never come at the expense of another's ability to work so they can put food on the table. Ideally, we should endeavour to support both goals, not sneer at people because we think we're better than them.
> I'm going to be cold about this: if you do not have the ability to navigate the social norms within a professional working environment, you ethically should not be allowed to pursue romantic interests there.
Let's rephrase: "I'm going to be cold about this: if you do not have the ability to navigate the physical spaces of a professional environment, you should not be allowed to work there."
"Stop being such a creep" and "stop being blind" don't really feel all that equivalent to me.
A creep doesn't understand what makes him creepy, that's the whole point. So it seems like the "advice" is both cases is equally unhelpful.
This line of thinking makes it more difficult for actually decent guys to get a first date. By the way, women like sex too and will make those overtures.
If you haven't had a first date with a person, keep the overtures off.
There are plenty of contexts in which men can make first sexual overtures other than investor/founder business (or similar economic power relations.)
> Things like Tinder where you can filter for "interested only" are pretty much a new phenomenon
Things like a brain where you can filter for “am I in an economic or other power relationship where a sexual overture is inherently implicitly coercive even if it is not explicitly coercive” are, however, not new, though apparently vastly underused.
Well, maybe not underused. Misused is probably more accurate; leverage rather than ignorance of the power dynamic seems common.
Those that are doing the harassing are at fault of course, but something is also wrong if men are acting on potentially career destroying impulses. Is the education system failing at teaching discipline? or philosophy? I've gone through the public education system in the U.S. and neither were taught to me, I had to seek them out myself. Maybe sexual harassment seminars should be less about defining and identifying sexual harassment and more about the type of person you can become when you stop letting pleasure and impulse define your life.
* The harassers genuinely believe they aren't doing something wrong / think their victims want it * The harassers can't control their urges in the moment / over long times * The harassers don't care that they are doing something wrong / think they have the right to do wrong.
I'm not sure which is worse. And again, it is probably a mix of the above where cognitive dissonance nudges the harassers into after the fact justifications.
But for some it is the other way round. They have to dominate in order to get sexually excited. Then, if you are in a position of power, and you feel there is a seemingly consequence-free¹ area in which to abuse it, many of these otherwise mostly rational and educated men give in to the temptation.
It is not that we suddenly have a problem with some men sexualy abusing their positions of power. It is just getting a bit more visible than it was before, now that it has become a topic. This certainly feels like illuminating a dark corner with light, to find it filled with bugs fleeing in all directions.
That is why "lets just switch off the light" is not a rational option here.
¹ in legal- and job-related terms that is. These actions still have real consequences for their co-workers and subordinates
How do we get from having men avoid these urges and situations at work (which is what is sort of the standard sexual harassment education) to having men want to better themselves and create a work space free of sexual context.
A lot of men I know already do this, but not all of them. And for the ones that somehow missed the "don't give in to your sexual urges because it will make you less than what you can be" part of becoming an adult, looking back at my own education there was very little to actually teach that other than life itself.
- Never take no for an answer
- Don't ask for permission, ask for forgiveness
- Break the law as long as you get away with it
- The bottom line is about the benefits I can extract from any given situation
A quick search will surface evidence that corporations as a whole are psychopathic and that CEOs skew heavily psychopathic (1 out of 5, similar to prison populations, according to a study - though I can't find the original paper).
I think the lesson here is that empirically, it's not potentially career destroying - in fact, it's highly likely to have pretty much no consequence.
I'm pretty confident once these actions do become at least plausibly career destroying, that men as a whole will find ways of being able to rein it in. "Consent", as an example, is a straightforward concept.
I have nothing to back this up, but I think it's one of two things.
1.) It's the culture of their day. This is applicable to older CEOs where it was the norm. They never grew out of it, because they never needed to grow out of it.
2.) They're powerful enough that it doesn't matter. Of course, if tens or hundreds of women come forward accusing a CEO of sexual misconduct, then it's going to be a problem. But in the day-to-day, it's only going to be a problem if the culture in the company allows it to be a problem.
Either of those cases has nothing to do with the inability to control urges. The problem is that those men are being overly aggressive with their sexual misconduct because they can.
I think there might be (at least) two kinds of discipline: the discipline of doing and the discipline of not-doing. Does getting up early and putting in long hours running a business really use the same mental skills as not throwing your trash on the sidewalk or coming to a complete stop on the white line next to the red octagon? We might call these initiative discipline and reactive discipline: in one case, you go out and find the situation where you're supposed to do something, but in the second, the mountain comes to Muhammad, so to speak.
There are obviously a hundred shades of gray between rape and an unwanted compliment. So if rape is the most extreme, and the most risky, and you have a 70% chance of literally nothing happening and the chance of seeing actual jail time is statistically zero... this whole category of behaviors is definitely not “high risk”.
1. Statistics compiled by the RAINN institute which uses the US Justice Department’s reporting for its main data sources. More info here: https://www.rainn.org/statistics/criminal-justice-system
I will suggest that a lot of powerful men are only just now in recent years beginning to see women "in their league." It's highly problematic for them to respond to that with propositioning these women, but it's possibly not entirely fair to say they simply haven't learned to control themselves.
In some cases, they may control themselves just fine most of the time. Then they meet some very happening lady who blows them away under circumstances where they aren't used to seeing women at all and they find themselves in new territory they aren't entirely prepared for.
FWIW, I happen to be a woman. No, this is not an "apologist" position. This is my framing for how to navigate the social/business landscape without stuff blowing up in my face.
The thing is, if somebody gives you inappropriate remarks on your appearance once a year on average it is something completely different, than if this thing happens to you multiple times a week, and sometimes even multiple times a day.
If you get robbed once, bad luck. If you get robbed multiple times a month, you will develop your ways of dealing with it.
I'm sorry - I don't approve of sexual harassment, but with all the hysteria, I am still not sure how often women simply consider sexual interest to be harassment. It seems to me sexual interest is a normal aspect of human life. And being attractive also has advantages, that the #metoo crowd never mentions. We don't really know how many women actually benefited from being attractive. Weinstein claimed many women took him up on his offer, after all.
I support laws against catcalling, or enforcing existing harassment laws to include catcalling. But you really lose me when you try to put saying anything--no matter how offensive or even illegal--in the same bucket as doing physical violence to another person.
I think this is where the #metoo movement and other groups that promote women's safety and well-being lose a lot of support from people who would otherwise be in agreement with them. I can go really far supporting laws to protect women from all kinds of awful things. But I can't really stretch reality far enough to say that saying something is the same as raping someone.
No one is suggesting catcalling is the same as rape; people are suggesting they're both in the same category. To use an analogy, a Ford Fiesta and a Ferrari FXX aren't going to compete in a race together but they're both cars.
To use an analogy, public urination and murder aren't doing to result in the same penalties but they're both crimes.
There is an unsavory political/propaganda purpose to putting catcalling and rape in the same category. The eliding of crimes of vastly differing degrees of severity is another warping of law enforcement and the judiciary which totalitarian states have used to oppress individuals. To do the constant work against this, we need to be careful about distinctions.
What would happen if your tools were used against you?
I certainly don't presume you and I would see eye to eye on the society I'd build.
Do you imagine your faction would be in charge? It certainly sounds like you do. "Revolutions are often initiated by idealists, carried out by fanatics and hijacked by scoundrels." -- Thomas Carlylse
Unless one views combatting unwanted sexual conduct to which people are subjected without consent as an unsavory purposes, no, there isn't.
> The eliding of crimes of vastly differing degrees of severity is another warping of law enforcement and the judiciary which totalitarian states have used to oppress individuals.
True, but irrelevant, for several reasons: first, this isn't a law enforcement issue; second, while the category of discussion overlaps with criminal conduct, it is not a discussion of crime as such, but of a category united by shared features not incliding criminality; third, no one is suggesting equivalency or arguing for ignoring the distinctions between acts within the category while discussing the broad category.
But if one views the efforts towards combating unwanted sexual conduct as a pretext used by certain people who want power as an end, then it becomes an especially unsavory purpose, no?
True, but irrelevant, for several reasons: first, this isn't a law enforcement issue
The classic strategy of non-governmental authoritarians, since they do not have a monopoly on violence, is to do what they can with the same effect. If you don't have the state monopoly on violence, then dress in uniformed hoods and do violence and vandalism under the cover of anonymous crowds. If you don't have the state function of the judiciary, then use kangaroo courts, "trial in the media," and extralegal means to make accusations with the presumption of guilt. All of the above is very relevant today.
third, no one is suggesting equivalency or arguing for ignoring the distinctions between acts within the category while discussing the broad category.
False. Exactly that is happening in order to turn the tables on current power structures, and to let one group intimidate another.
There are lots of ways to address this, but I'll limit myself to probably the biggest issue involved: Power dynamics. If your boss expresses sexual interest in you, it puts you in a very difficult situation if the interest is not mutual. See result #4 in the article, and read through some of the comments here for examples.
Catcalling is an inappropriate way to show sexual interest, especially in the workplace. Sexual harassment is a legally defined term in most places, and is not just showing an interest, it is harassment. I hope we can agree that sexual demands for career advancement is not just sexual interest, and neither is rape.
A person's sexual interest is theirs. When they chose to share that interest with another person in the workplace they better carefully gauge their position of power, and the appropriateness of the context. They should also respond in a mature and appropriate way if the interest is not appreciated or reciprocated.
You should also be careful how you throw around the term "hysteria" https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/history-quackery/history-h... as it is a loaded phrase
You might want to look at the etymology of the word "hysteria", and think about it in this context.
in general, it makes me very uncomfortable to be touched by someone without giving explicit consent, and over the years this has happened quite a few times (ranging from touching my hair at a bar to forcibly trying to restrain me from leaving after i decline sex). but if someone who i already consider attractive grabs me and starts talking to me, i don't necessarily mind and i might even like it. a whole range of behavior goes from uncomfortable to enjoyable in proportion to how much i am attracted to the person. on the flip side, knowing how uncomfortable it makes me, i will basically never touch anyone (other than to shake hands), unless they have explicitly told me it's okay. i think people perceive me as being kind of cold because of this.
my point isn't that the ambiguity condones bad behavior in any way, but rather that you shouldn't make such sweeping statements to shut people down who might be trying to have a good faith discussion. this stuff is complicated and we need to talk about it.
That said, I don't think there's much reason to think that a person who created a throwaway account to undermine the legitimacy of #metoo is really trying to have a good-faith discussion.
The point about my comment on men not understanding consent and boundaries is that it is very often a convenient lack of understanding. The claim that women are just too darned mysterious is used to justify violation of consent and boundaries. However, if those same straight men are hit on by other men, they suddenly develop a very clear idea of boundaries and consent.
This suggests to me that the lack of understanding is not just convenient but willful. As Upton Sinclair says, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" The same goes, I think, for horny dudes. Especially horny dudes living in a patriarchal culture where women used to be effectively property of one man or another, and where that patriarchy is still being slowly unwound.
In this setting it's at a minimum incredibly unprofessional, especially between people who don't know each other well and are potentially customer/client or investor/investee.
Imagine doing this stuff in a sales meeting.
Yes, they are in the same category of “unwanted sexual conduct”.
Now, sure, there are narrower categories each could also be put in which exclude some others.
> I am still not sure how often women simply consider sexual interest to be harassment.
Interest is an internal state; women may not want you to have interest, but short of some outward act they are unlikely to have anything to consider harassment.
If you are expressing unwanted interest in the workplace, or particularly in a context where you exercise economic power over the subject of that interest, they aren't wrong to view it as harassment.
Stop assuming this is hysteria, it's not. It's a collective, we're just tired of this. And let me also offer some quick and dirty math to support that it's not a majority of men. Let's assume 1% of men don't know how to be polite and in fact enjoy being abusive. They do this on average 1/week to a randomly chosen woman. Within a relatively short time every woman will have had at least one unpleasant experience.
For the most part these individuals pick on people they presume to be easy targets, so some women get treated much worse than others, just as men who are perceived to be easy targets equally have problems - probably with the same guys. That's also why the power dynamics play into it, the definition of easy target depends on that. And at some point, everybody just gives up, deals with their situation as best they can, and tries to never go upstairs ever again in Yale frat houses.
If someone suggests you're misperceiving something and your only reply is "I'm not because I know I'm not," you have an obvious epistemological problem.
Do you actually believe that many women are oversensitive to harassment?
Besides, I believe that women are often the target of sexual interest. I just don't believe that it is such a horrible thing as some of them proclaim. At the very least, many don't really have the comparison to what it is like to be unattractive, which is not very pleasant, either.
Many people expend a lot of money and time to become more physical attractive. Few people expend effort to become less attractive.
What's more, if you complain about being "sexually harassed", at the same time you signal "social proof" of you being attractive. So telling such stories is a double whammy: you can show proof that you are attractive, and get some pity points and protection, too.
I'm more surprised than I probably should be about how much this misses the mark. You don't actually believe only "attractive" women are sexually harassed do you?
Harassment isn't the same as interest.
Heck, expressions of interest aren't the same as interest.
You are insulting men by equating male sexual interest with harassment.
> What's more, if you complain about being "sexually harassed", at the same time you signal "social proof" of you being attractive.
No, you don't.
Because the people who actually take accusations of sexual harassment seriously don't associate it with attractiveness (people who habitually defend harassers or who are serial harassers themselves like to associate them, at least rhetorically, as part of a defense against harassment claims by arguing that the accuser isn't attractive enough to harass, but that's about as far as the association goes.)
Imagine I say, “Why are you misperceiving my actions as harassment? You seem to have an epistemological problem.”
What’s your response?
That would be the ultimate goal of the power game feminism is playing. Political correctness is another tool for that, censoring my thoughts.
If you want to convince me, show me things I can perceive and factor into my estimate of the situation. Don't ask me to simply believe stuff. That would be mind control and power games, and I am not playing.
What? You're just saying in a roundabout way that the truth is whatever you think it is. That doesn't make any sense.
What would it take for you to accept the conclusion of the posted study at face value?
Usually when I encounter someone claiming a great feminist agenda, their minds were made up beforehand and they never even tried to entertain the possibility that they might be wrong. Maybe you're the exception, but that would be counter to my perceptions.
Waiting "until people stop talking crazy" just means no action, ever.
This has nothing to do with being attractive. Ask a bunch of your female friends how many of them started getting catcalls at age 12. You might be surprised.
I brought this up to my daughter, who is 24. She said "Yeah, I was warned not to be alone with him when I was 10".
And I, as a devoted father who has a very close relationship with his daughter (she's one of my closest friends, honestly) had no idea about this. This should give all men pause. What else do you not know about, that happens to your spouses, your sisters, your daughters, your mothers, your friends?
Here's the thing. It's so common for women that they don't detail every little incident in their lives to every man in their lives, because it's too much to track. Do you remember every driver who cut you off in traffic? That's kind of the level of the low-grade sexual harassment women deal with. It's just about every day.
So no, I'm not told everything. And hopefully, most of the time, it's not that the women in my life are afraid to speak up to me about it. It's not that my then ten year old daughter was afraid or ashamed to talk to me about being warned about a lecherous, creepy man in a position of power. It's that even then, she knew it was part of life as a woman.
By age 10, I had already asked a few female friends to be her "bad aunties". Their job was to be adult women she could talk to who weren't in her chain of command - not parents, or teachers, or officials of any sort. They were there to listen and advise when she needed it. And they were specifically asked to keep her confidence no matter what - even from me, and her mother. And she knew this. She knew she had adult women her life she could turn to when she didn't have anyone else she felt safe with, knowing that her parents trusted them with her.
I recommend this to every father.
Here's the thing, business interactions are not the appropriate venue for expressing sexual interest. If someone is giving a pitch to VC's to secure funding for their company, it should be about business, not about someone trying to satisfy their sexual desires.
> It seems to me sexual interest is a normal aspect of human life.
Lots of things are a normal part of the human experience, but are not appropriate in a professional setting.
> And being attractive also has advantages, that the #metoo crowd never mentions. We don't really know how many women actually benefited from being attractive.
No, no, no, this is wildly misguided. Full stop, #metoo is about sexual misconduct and the culture that allows it. Even if some women are given preferential treatment due to their looks, it in no way justifies sexual abuse/misconduct. It does not justify abusing power to suit sexual whims, even if some women acquiesce to it.
That's true, but I've given this a lot of thought, and I've come to the conclusion that it's simply impractical and inhumane to forbid romantic/sexual interest in a professional setting. Let's face it, most new people you meet in your adult life, you meet through your job, and many people start relationships and even marriages with their coworkers.
I think we should encourage emotional maturity and sensible behaviour instead. Although this too is difficult, because most people can't achieve the former, and the latter is extremely elusive especially in the current climate.
Romance in the workplace shouldn't be forbidden under any and all circumstances but there should be a number of definite parameters:
I don't think there is anything wrong with politely inviting someone to hang out after work to see if the interest is mutual. If the answer is no, that's it, you don't ask again.
Expressing 'sexual interest' at work to me means communicating that you want to have sex with someone, which I don't think is appropriate at work. That would be along the lines of inviting someone to spend the night, sexual innuendos, or other forms of flirting. All of that is problematic in the workplace.
Some people will argue, "What if the interest is mutual?" Sure, but many people don't/won't perceive when it is not, and work is not for finding sexual partners.
'Romantic interest' is more along the lines of communicating you'd want to date someone. Even that is not something that should be going on at work. If two coworkers establish a connection and pursue that outside of work, ok.
Even then, a superior should never date subordinates. And in a sales or investment situation, it should be off limits to proposition someone seeking the sale/investment. Someone pitching their startup shouldn't feel pressure to reciprocate someone else's advances in order to preserve a chance for funding.
> I think we should encourage emotional maturity and sensible behaviour instead. Although this too is difficult, because most people can't achieve the former, and the latter is extremely elusive especially in the current climate.
I would agree, but what does 'sensible' mean? I think many times the offender didn't think they were doing anything wrong. I think people need to speak directly to what is ok and what is not ok so that there's a shared understanding.
Ah, yeah, that's exactly what I meant. The "rules" need to be clarified and spelled out as much as possible. It's just that I'm not smart enough to decide on what they should be (in part also because I'm very adaptable and extremely tolerant to behaviour others consider inappropriate).
That is bullshit feminist invented to support their victim narrative. It used to be 30% or more of couples met at work. It is normal to fall in love or get interested in people you are surrounded with.
This "professional environment" feminists love to talk about doesn't exist, because people are not robots. People have relations with each other. Even among men, there will be colleagues that bother you, or some that you like and become friends.
There are maybe some rare cases of companies aiming for that "professional appearance", but it is all fake. If that is your thing, go seek out such companies. But don't ask other people to change their work environment.
For an investor, their main professional task is to determine if someone is a good risk for investment (possibly with other people's money, who are trusting this person to make good decisions). If their criteria is a quid pro quo for sexual favors rather than whether or not someone's startup is a good place to invest, they're not doing their job. They're doing the opposite of their job.
Likewise, a manager who promises advancement in exchange for sexual favors is advancing someone based on their willingness to sleep with them rather than whether or not the person is a good candidate for advancement. Again, not only is that manager doing a shitty job at being a manager, they're almost doing the worst possible job at being a manager. It's akin to promoting someone based on their personal loyalty to the manager rather than their ability to do the job. It happens all the time but that doesn't make it any better.
TL;DR, even ignoring whether or not someone is a victim in this situation, and not caring about any of the moral or ethical aspects, the harasser has still shown themselves to not be worthy of their job. The most selfish, amoral interpretation of the situation still demands getting rid of the harasser, even if all you care about is business success and are willing to overlook everything else.
Nah, it's way worse. Promoting based on trust can be good, trust is a very important commodity (and hard to come by). In contrast to sexual availability or whatever.
I was completely blown away at how often women around me were harassed. I didn't see a reason for #metoo to be as loud as it was, until these stories started coming out.
My assumptions about most men having respect for women's basic rights was really misplaced.
Are you saying that from most women having been harassed it follows that most men have been harassing women?
Because if most men would do this (and most implies: a majority of them), then even the current deluge of reports would be nothing compared to what you’d expect it to be.
I’ve have asked female colleagues about this and while they did complain about sexism, it was always isolated cases. Not most men.
Of all the respondents, 20% report sexual harassment of some sort. That’s a very high number. There is no reason to doubt its veracity.
But if 50%+ of all men were like that, you’d expect this number to be way higher.
Google is letting me down on that.
This one.
Most men are great people. But, the amount of damage that the minority can cause is what astounded me.
Also noticed that some perfectly normal people, have a couple of very weird ideas about romance, sex and women that cause them to act in a way that to a 3rd person and the woman herself to rightly consider it harassment.
Personally, I feel the rules around acceptable behavior when drunk/high need to be taught in school and a few solid lines need to drawn to let in most cases men and in a few cases women, know what constitutes consent.
It only takes one abusive man to make every woman in an office miserable. If he also happens to be the boss, then what is anyone, man or woman, to do to stop him?
It's just as difficult for a man to stand up and oppose his boss as it is for a woman. More so, in fact, if he only heard about the harassment but never witnessed it. When people's jobs are on the line, it's not hard to see why we have a culture of silence.
Even small stuff like calling BS on the sort of comments that happen when only guys are around (we've all heard them).
The implicit consent of everyone around these kinds of people is what lets this stuff continue (along with everything else of course).
I don't really think so. I think there are better ways to handle this.
I've been sexually harassed as a man, and I'm not even a particularly attractive bloke. Obviously it's different, I didn't have to worry about being followed home and pinned down by someone that's a foot taller and 50 lb heavier than me. If someone's being inappropriate with me, I can tell them to fuck off with little fear of repercussions, I don't have to be polite and worry about them retaliating, meanwhile I have a friend who was punched in the face at a nightclub because she rejected some guy's advances.
Not even taking men into account seems to passively push the rather sexist mantra that men should just "suck it up" and not actually be taken serious in cases or sexual coercion and quid-pro-quo situations.
I'm not trying to argue that woman are not disproportional represented in these case, however why not just include everyone? You state Callisto is a "non-profit dedicated to building tech to combat sexual assault and harassment." if that is the case and it's not just for assault and harassment against woman, then why self-limit the scope of your survey?
And if the answer is "we would have just found no-one had any issues anyway" then I restate the question, why not just send it out to everyone and show this disproportion with data instead of just making it an assumption?
I’m sure if men within YC experience this kind of behaviour they can use the same reporting tools on bookface.
> I’m sure if men within YC experience this kind of behaviour they can use the same reporting tools on bookface.
I strongly suspect you're correct, but without seeing the tool I can't say for sure. Even so, the GP's criticism was "why weren't men included?", not "why aren't men able to report and act against sexual harassment?"
I think men not being surveyed created an unhealthy environment for discussion - not because men experience harassment at the same level as women, but because they missed an opportunity to show that and as a community we get the very sort of conversations occurring in this thread. The GP voiced a criticism, and you seem to have taken it to mean that the GP felt that men's experiences are more important. I don't believe that was the intent going in to this project, nor do I believe that was what the GP intended.
Also just because someone posts a particular opinion, doesn't mean that is their only response. The obvious response is "this is a bad thing", but that has been said several times in this thread already, and wouldn't contribute to discussion at all. If something is worth discussing, why not let people discuss it.
The purpose of this survey is to jump up and down while waving its arms in the air and yelling "WE HAVE A PROBLEM"!
We have a problem.
We don't know the exact size and scope of the problem, but at a glance it looks like it's probably bad. I would love to see reliable data about precisely how bad, including among many other things gender cross-tabs. But that data doesn't exist because nobody's gone to the substantial effort to properly collect and publish it. Maybe, if we're lucky, this report will help to create the political will to bring some of that data into existence.
For the survey, we started with a small list of female founders that we thought we could get a high response rate from. We definitely are interested in doing surveys of all genders.
Callisto Expansion for Founders is launching on November 15th and it is for founders of all genders, not just for women.
SV is run by males and so is much of society. Men also generally have far more physical ability to defend themselves, and to a much greater extent they are socialized to assert themselves. Also, I expect that sexual harassment and assault against men is much less frequent. Finally, I'm sure you are aware that a common way to derail other issues of discrimination is to claim that the people on the dominant side of the power dynamic also are victims, such as when people claim racial discrimination against white-skinned people is ignored. How do you think about these factors?
Was the intention to manipulate the rates in order to get better PR for Callisto? It seems such an odd move to damage any scientific credibility you could have wished for right out the gates if you intend to honestly change things. I understand the mentality of "Well we are fudging the numbers but its for a good cause so we'll do it anyway", but you do realize that down the road it gives a carte-blanche option of those you wish to pressure into changing to just say "Well we don't give two cents what Callisto says, they've historically fudged their surveys and as such we disregard them completely"?
> [we sent the survey to people] that we thought we could get a high response rate from.
I understood that to mean that they sent the survey to people they expected would fill it out, not that they sent the survey to people they expected would fill out the survey in any particular way. Is that an interpretation you considered and rejected for some reason?
>why not just send it out to everyone and show this disproportion with data instead of just making it an assumption?
Because all projects and studies have to have a scope or they would all use infinite resources. I'm sure there's an absolute plethora of studies that have already established the hugely disproportionate amount of sexual harassment that is by men against women.
>I'm sure there's an absolute plethora of studies that have already established the hugely disproportionate amount of sexual harassment that is by men against women.
Male victims significantly under-report sexual misconduct, have access to fewer support resources, and receive help less frequently.
- Breiding, M.J., Chen J., & Black, M.C. (2014). Intimate Partner Violence in the United States — 2010. Atlanta, GA: National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
23.4% of women and 10.5% of men report they were raped and 6.6% of women and 10.5% of men report they were victims of attempted rape.
- Fiebert, Martin S. (2000). "References Examining Men as Victims of Women's Sexual Coercion". Sexuality and Culture. 4 (3): 81–88. doi:10.1007/s12119-000-1023-7
46% of men who reported some form of sexual victimization were victimized by women.
- Weiss, K. G. (2008). "Male Sexual Victimization: Examining Men's Experiences of Rape and Sexual Assault". Men and Masculinities. 12 (3): 275–298. doi:10.1177/1097184X08322632
I apologise for throwing the book at you, but you threw a book that doesn't exist at the parent comment and your attitude is disrespectful to people who are genuinely victimized by sexual misconduct.
Let's say it happens, hypothetically - maybe it never happens, maybe happens all the time. But let's say it has happened to a certain male. Now, what is this male to do?
If he stays quiet it is the same as females who don't report. That encourages the harasser to keep doing what she is doing and we already know that.
If he reports - nobody believes him, because women don't harass. Moreover, he becomes a point of ridicule because our society expects men to be strong and unharassable by women. They are physically stronger and they can always escape or fight. It's insane to think about that - like how? How can that happen?
Actually, can a man fight with a woman? No - it's also ridiculous - because if he wins, well obviously he won, he is a man, he is stronger. And he will get sued because he will get accused of harassment. If he loses - he loses from a woman. "Got beat by a girl" - have you heard that phrase? Do you have any idea how impossible it would be for a male to live in a world ridiculed in this kind of way?
So how can a study establish that at all - if men won't even admit due to pride even at study time? But just in case - do you happen to have any of this "plethora" of studies? Are you sure? People have been sure about many things that are right and then their minds are blown by scientific discoveries.
So please, think, provide evidence and please, consider men as human beings as well - we are not so different from women after all.
Founders will be able to use Callisto to securely store the identities of perpetrators of sexual coercion and assault. These identities will be encrypted in a way that not even the Callisto team can view. If multiple founders name the same perpetrator, they will be referred to an attorney who can then decrypt the founder’s contact info and reach out to provide them with free advice on their options for coming forward, including the option to share information with other victims of the same perpetrator."
-------------------
Collusion between witnesses can derail a court case. The best way to prevent charges of collusion is to limit communication between witnesses. This system absolutely should put an attorney in touch with the founders to build a case, but it should not put them in touch with each other. At least, not until after pressing legal charges is ruled out.
I doubt it is a single bad actor, but I bet its highly asymmetric, since most offenders are likely serial offenders.
TL;DR, of the men asked a series of questions about sexual misbehavior that met legal definitions of attempted / completed rape but did not use the “r” word, 6-13% admitted to at least one offense, and 50% of those across both studies were repeat perpetrators with an average of 6 offenses each (and a median of 3, so there were some who were super-offenders).
The studies cited only looked at male perpetrators, an obvious limitation, but I think the work is really relevant nonetheless.
Otherwise, how would you explain why this happens? Logically, the women to whom something happened would say something. But statistics show that most don’t, or that most only communicate to close friends, despite stats from the original article.
So we know that incidents are rampant. We also know that most men don’t know this, as represented by the surprise at this article as evidenced in this thread.
We can only deduce that there is an emergent dynamic that actively discourages women from speaking up and encourages/allows these offenders to continue. This might look like bias by men that men are blind to. This might look like messages that discourage women. It’s only logical that men wouldn’t be able to see this and that men would have huge blind spots around sexual harassment issues.
(And of course, this is what women have been saying continuously — if only men would listen.)
Although the specific form of harassment may be sexual, fundamentally it isn't about sex. It's about abuse of power.
To be clear, I am 100% behind all efforts to reduce harassment in all forms, and I am aware that the % of female founders who have experienced harassment is higher than males. But I guarantee that the male % is greater than 0, and it would be constructive to have these perspectives included in future work.
Is there any data on how many of the angels and VC's have a background engineering, math, sciences vs. law, business and others?
It seems to be that correlation requires more than just, he's a guy, he get's more. She's a women she gets sexually harassed, she get's less. In one of the US offices I worked in I kept getting a lot of shit from some colleagues and a middle manage who's wife was one of the first employees and highly influentual. A year after I left, an ex colleague tells me that a good friend of that lady, also a lady, that didn't like me told everyone I talked shit about her breasts. Germany, half a year in, turns out the girls in the company are talking about my cute ass.
Is the difference that they did it behind my back, besides proactively? Can power dynamics really be boiled down to a plain men vs. women? Nothing about demographics, social context, history etc.?
Are we saying that Elizabeth Holmes is treated the same as some no name immigrant female founder? Or a random no name immigrant male founder even?
We don’t need to indulge outsiders trying to make a quick buck off our community if they don’t leave toxic behaviors at the door.
They're all problems. Racism and sexism are bad but the others should get more scrutiny as well. I know that classism and "place-ism" (favoritism or discrimination based on region of origin) are fairly big things in the US.
(1) There are VCs that are female friendly from the get go, rather than as an afterthought, for instance http://www.karmijnkapitaal.nl/
(2) What is also interesting to research is what the difference is in capital raised for what %age of equity vs teams consisting of all-males.
(3) The study started off with a self-selected group, which might affect the results either way, it would be good to repeat it across a larger number of subjects chosen at random.
> We believe in the power of diversity. We therefore invest in companies that are led by mixed management teams, consisting of a balanced combination of women and men.
They exclusively fund mixed-gender founding teams, which (I think) is unique.
I'd love to see the industry fixed but I have very little belief that that will happen. And a dominant safe haven would have the same effect as fixing the industry in the longer term, after all, an industry that is predatory and that marginalizes half the talentpool available is very much ripe for disruption.
Karmijn is doing fine, and they are promoting gender diverse management teams and founders, not just females.
It's important to make all spaces welcoming so people aren't boxed into spaces that subdue their potential by forcing them to work with people they don't mesh with just to be in an industry that suits their interests and talents.
I'm a male, my co-founder is a female.
We once went to a meeting with a VC (in San Francisco), and at the end he told us the story about why he didn't become a priest. Because when he was in an all-boys school, they always had one afternoon off per week. And they would go to the milkshake place and (and I'm quoting here) "everytime the girl working there turned around to stick the cups into the milkshake machine, her little butt would wiggle". He made this this butt grabbing motion with his hands.
And the way he told the story was exteremly unsettling, you could see his horniness through his words and the way he moved. Almost as if he was talking about a juicy steak he ate.
That story was 100% unrelated to our business or any other topic we were discussing. The worst part is, all 3 of us laughed. Only a minute after I realized that I should have said something.
The point of my story is that in that moment, I was almost in a shock-like state and didn't't know what to say. I was taken by surprise. My co-founder said that she felt super uncomfortable, and was happy that she wasn't in this room with him alone.
Not sure where I can report this, as Callisto seems for schools only?
Also, I wonder if we can get a bit more detail on what situations these happened in and what exactly happened so that we can discuss other reasonable measures we can all participate in.
Were these experiences as part of YC or anytime?
Did the survey have a definition of the terms sexual badgering, quid pro quo and unwanted sexual contact that we can look at?
Do we know how many men have been accused? Basically, is this a general problem or are there some sexual predators causing most of these terrible experiences.
> we helped Callisto send a survey to 125 of the 384 female founders
The pool of 125 was based on who signed up for an email list.
> Callisto chose to send the survey to the 125 founders who signed up for the YC female founder email list. They choose this group under the assumption that these founders would welcome being reached out to for the survey because they had signed up proactively to this email list.
There's certainly some room for sampling bias, but not nearly as much as you claim. I also strongly disagree that this is shocking: it's difficult to make good estimates, but various surveys are often in excess of 60% for women: http://www.statisticsviews.com/details/feature/10906109/Sexu...
20% is below a reasonable minimum estimate: https://fairygodboss.com/articles/sexual-harassment-statisti...
Now, this is a more specific survey, not just any sexual harassment, but these numbers should not be shocking. One of the core messages of the me-too movement is that these numbers should not be shocking, this is the reality, and ignorance of this can contribute to the problem.
Also, do you know if these experiences were when they were part of YC or anytime?
So you were sexually assaulted by a female? Am I missing something?
I'm honestly not sure i believe sexual assaults are way less common against men, although men may not recognize them as often. I've had several women behave towards me in ways that they would definitely call sexual assault if the roles were reversed.
as for the down votes, look what GP wrote:
> So you were sexually assaulted by a female? Am I missing something?
this is an incredibly blunt and rude question to ask a victim of sexual assault. it implies that the very notion of the assault even occurring is so baffling as to require double checking that the poster even meant what they said.
I found GGP's comment an expression of surprise, though it does sound a bit blunt - but given the international audience of HN I try not to judge posters too harshly.
yeah, i figured. i hope my post did not come off too harshly.
> "user should click on the button so she can access the hidden page"
historically the masculine "he", "man", "mankind" has been used to refer to all people in english, but it's not quite gender-neutral. in the last fifty years or so, some authors have used "she" instead to be more inclusive, but best practice today is to use "they" when gender is not known. just FYI.
It's a catch-22: it's assumed half the population can't experience it. They're strong (and will be assumed the agressor if they fight), all men want sex (not necessarily with women, or that woman), etc. There's a whole suite of victim blaming and denialist rhetoric to match what women deal with.
So there's no research, education, or advocacy, and the lack of data is used to justify not devoting resources. I've personally been propositioned and harassed in inappropriate ways. Underreporting is a known problem for women, but too few people apply the same logic that leads to that conclusion to other genders.
The lower bounds are: At least 4/384=1% reported unwanted sexual contact, 15/384=3.9% quid pro quo and 19/384=4.9% sexual badgering. The real number would be higher if all female founders responded or were asked.
I think this is a great thing for YC to be doing.
Generally, an attacker would probably not want to call attention to themselves. A sufficiently well-resourced adversary (I suppose) could hire people to spam the system with false accusations (possibly targeting similar peers so it looks like "hey, everyone in crypto/databases/... is being accused") but if the process of getting an account with this system isn't trivial (invite-only, verified email, etc) it wouldn't be easy.
Users of this product will be able to enter the identity of their perpetrator into the escrow. This data can only be decrypted by the Callisto Options Counselor (a lawyer), when another user enters the identity of the same perpetrator. If the perpetrator identities match, both users will be put in touch independently with the Options Counselor, who will connect them to each other (if appropriate) and help them determine their best path towards justice. The client relationships with the Op- tions Counselors are structured so that any client-counselor communications would be privileged.
edit: from https://www.projectcallisto.org/callisto-cryptographic-appro...
There are no legal implications from lying to a lawyer that are different than lying to a software developer or anyone else, at least not that I can think of. I suppose communication with lawyers is more likely to be in situations where lying has legal implications, such as in legal proceedings. But if you lie on the witness stand, the problem is not that you lied to the lawyer but that you lied to the court.
A perpeterator's accomplice files a report, triggering a process that leads to meeting an accuser. The accomplice then carefully unwinds and backs out the process, and leaks the accuser's identity to the perpetrator for use in other harassment or blackmail.
The real solution if YC wants to use their top-of-food-chain position is to name, shame, ban these investors from YC invites, and - most importantly - target their LPs. No need for a tech platform. I make no judgement as to whether that is appropriate or something YC wants to undertake.
For those women who do want to take a stand — and I understand why the majority don’t, there is a massively lopsided power dynamic between founders and investors — YC is providing resources (according to the article).
Edit: Also, maybe someday they’ll be in a position to name names, but right now it risks the anonyminity of those reporting. As an alum I hold YC to a high standard — its likely the most distinguished thing on my resume — and if they’re in the position to out the bad guys someday but don’t for political reasons, I’ll be just as mad as you are.
My point is that none of these stories seem like the kind of treatment I would like to promise to sexual assault victims. It makes me question the founders' motivations; it's a bit like naming a Messianic Jewish club "The Final Solution", except that of course 100% of the people who might consider joining a Messianic Jewish club already know what that phrase connotes.
If I’m attracted to someone and I want to date. How you can ask to go out without risk of being accused of sexual harassment?
This is not sarcastic question. This is especially important if you as a male is not very good at reading subtle social cues.
P.S. I really don't see why it got downvoted. There is no hidden message here.
The negative encounters get lots of loud attention, rightfully so. This author is making the point that women don't have to protest, speak up, or report all the totally normal, healthy encounters they have with men.
If you actually need to worry about something being considered sexually harrassing, you definitely need to reconsider how you approach women. It's really not that hard, I've dated numerous co-workers over the years and never had any fears over that or issues when we broke up. Be polite, not over bearing and be respectful. The time will either present itself to ask or it won't. If it goes your way, great. If it doesn't move on.
Think of it as social triage.
I also suspect that YC will take a man reporting a sexual assault as seriously as a woman. In my experience YC is open minded and egalitarian.
You don't fight sexist behavior with more sexist behavior. Just conduct the survey of everyone. Use demographics after the fact to establish trends, don't go into it with bias.
In other words: the methodology used here literally covers up sexual harassment. It's just a sex no one cares about.
The results would likely have reinforced the need for things like Callisto; their lack gives anyone opposed to this sort of thing ammunition to attack the concept without addressing it on its merits.
I always thought that investors might be looking for a date or something ... not quite professional ... but 'quid pro quo' ... my god man. Greasy.
This isn't 100% practical in the business world, but could be quite helpful, and valuable in its own right to avoid single-points of information failure in the business.
With modern technology, recording conversations (with the knowledge and consent of both parties) can be a practical alternative when humans are not available to accompany.
Am I reading this wrong, or does actually mean 1/6 women founders were asked to exchange sexual favors for investment?
Holy shit.
> encrypted in a way that not even the Callisto team can view.
> If multiple founders name the same perpetrator, they will be referred to an attorney who can then decrypt the founder’s contact info and reach out to provide them with free advice on...
What's stopping the Callisto team pretend to be an attorney? Attorneys can decrypt the founder's contact info.
The post mentions "19 founders" and then breaks it down into 18, 15, and 4. Is the "19" an error (I notice that's 15+4, perhaps it's missing the "18" group?), or can women be counted in multiple categories? If that's the case, it seems to me like the first category should include the second and third, so wouldn't that one be more than 19?
Some founders reported more than one incident.
This has to stop, we are going into territory of assuming guilt because someone said so. Women can be bad as well. I know it's unpopular to say this today. I get that the problem is huge and I'm not defending true harassers, but you are losing valuable justice principles here. Assuming someone is guilty because they are a certain gender (male in this case) or innocent because they are another (female) is as bad as any discrimination over the ages. Humans are good in overgeneralizing and sending this survey to women only is not scientific and it's not fair. Assuming things are true because someone says so has led us to bad paths in history. Let's have a talk about what is the correct way to find a solution to the problem because false accusations can ruin a life as well as not speaking up.
Kudos to YC for really making this a better environment for everyone.
I see that a thankful comment on this article is already flagged, so... seems like much has not changed.
The idea that it's unacceptable to criticise the culture of an area, and that people need to be protected from this idea, would be unthinkable on Startup News.
Reflecting on it, the way dang and others handle these things is right, if you have a point, you can make it without making an insulting generalization and characterization.
If you don't, at the end of the day, whatever point you try to make is wiped by the visceral response.
Removing all color from speech makes the world a very boring place.
Criticising bay area culture is not a 'slur' and saying that is more inflammatory than the original statement.
The rest of the internet figured out long ago that such behavior is actually pretty toxic, and is called "sealioning" [0][1]
[0] http://wondermark.com/1k62/
[1] footnotes. It's all civil if you have footnotes.
You don't solve a problem by pretending it doesn't exist.
This is a community site and the members of this community are responsible for their own behavior, including how they relate to the community. This is why there are user moderation tools like voting and flagging.
EDIT: A prime example is that this post is currently 5th on the HN front page and has roughly triple the points of the 3rd and 4th items on the front page in roughly half the time. That means this post is almost certainly being suppressed with flagging. Will the mods do anything to protect this post?
Edit in response to edit: Yes, moderators (me) turned off the flags on this post. Points can't be compared directly between stories because that's not how it works.
Once a story hits a certain vote threshold it probably needs a reprieve from some of the automated filtering mechanisms, at the very least. Disabling comments in response to flame wars would be much better than suppressing the story itself. Flagging seems good for fighting link spam, but a flagged story with many comments would suggest an intense (and not necessarily heated/flamey) discussion that has value and would naturally attract flags from people with an axe to grind.
Those alternatives should probably be advertised better than just that tiny link in the footer.
If you're only interested in YC news specifically, you can also subscribe to https://blog.ycombinator.com/feed/ . Most of the articles there don't ever make the front page, I think.
Here's another: if you had to turn off flagging on a story, turn off the comment-based heuristics at the same time.
Here's a third: rethink the comment-based heuristics, and consider what kinds of discussion you're trying to curtail.
IMO, that says more about tech forums and the tech community than it does about HN.
But don’t forget — it’s about making a better world, not winning at Hacker News. It sucks that your post got flagged, but you live to fight another day :-).
I don't see a flagged comment like that. Could you link to it?
But maybe I'm fooling myself and it would've been flagged anyway.
Unfortunately, most of the time, this gets swept under the rug. This way, at least that background check will actually reveal information once the relevant data is collected.
Imagine the havoc that could be caused by a publicly shamed VC with a board seat and a 10% chunk of the company. And, as we learned from the tale of Peter Thiel and Gawker, one of the advantages of being a billionaire is you can afford to squander millions of dollars on petty vengeance.
Two reports triggering an exclusion from YC demos and rounds would be a strong incentive. But one report leading to an inquiry from YC might prevent incidents in the future, too, for fear of losing a key deal flow.
This is what a hostile environment looks like, guys.
Keep in mind that a large number of sexual assault victims at large don’t report for fear of retaliation. Sexual assault is a power-driven behavior.
YC does have some recourse for women who report but wish to remain anonymous, too. YC keeps track of the bad guys in the SV ecosystem and advises founders to avoid them. The have the capacity to reduce deal flow for these people and that does matter.
For what it’s worth, I also believe that victims of sexual assault deserve more and, as mentioned in the article, those women who want to fight that battle have supporting resources from YC. But for those who wish to be anonymous... what else is there to do?
Edit: I appreciate your enthusiasm and fervor for the topic. While I have some disagreement with your approach for the reasons mentioned above, I don’t feel like you deserve the downvotes you’re getting.
Providing a means for victims to report isn't dumping responsibility on them, it's enabling them to take action to prevent the behavior from happening.
_Only_ providing a means for them to report is _requiring_ them to take action to prevent the behavior from happening. I'm not arguing against a reporting system, I'm just saying it's not nearly enough, and I don't know how to describe not taking action until a victim reports when there are actions that could prevent the problem in the first place as anything other than dumping responsibility.
Not sure how YC would go about proactively screening away bad actors. Most of these people tend to be powerful/rich enough that they very likely are not on any lists to be weeded out from the get go.
Sure the (potential) victim shouldn't have to do anything and have a safe environment available, yet the mechanism for determining a group's sex-abuse-potential social credit/standing doesn't currently exist en-masse, neither would most of the population want a sex-assault-credit-score.
In your scenario, potential bad financial actors can be screened a la concrete behaviors. Did the VC write the check or not. Does the VC have the balance to show in their bank account. Are they in breach of contract? Even if there were bad financial actors, an anonymous list to report such behavior is not without merit. It could be a useful way to bring a class action to a bad actor without tipping off the bad actor from running away. Then the flip side is, "you are otherwise upstanding, but our list says you looked at a female in a creepy manner 10 years ago, so we don't want your investment."
In the case of sexual assault, there's varying degrees of behavior depending on context that may or may not constitute get-on-a-sexual-assault-list behavior. This grayness makes a list hard. Usually, egregious acts are easy to judge by. However, more subtle acts have a shroud of plausible deniability... "We were sort of seeing each other and a partner was unsure about a guy/girl, but decided to feel him/her out on some dates... and also he/she could make a vc intro didn't hurt..." How quid pro quo is this? It's perfectly plausible that the individual in my hypothetical situation is an upstanding person and truly was attracted and only made a single attempt at someone they liked, or it could be that this individual is a serial hit-on-potential-founders, but doesn't necessarily do enough to actually get charged with sexual assault/rape, but probably should be barred from being an investor.
The research does show that offenders tend to be repeat actors. Building such a list seems like the step in the right direction. The existence of the list itself does serves as a potential deterrent. It usually isn't until multiple victims come forward where the perpetrator does not have much anything to hide behind as a she-said/he-said debate. Thus potentially getting on the list is something perpetrators need to consider before acting badly.
The justice system is innocent until proven guilty, thus an actor must broach a line before they can be dealt with. Unfortunately, it's only the victims that do have the power to bring awareness to the existence of their perpetrators. Every resource we can dedicate to enabling victims is a step closer to where we should be going.
Victims aren't the only possible witnesses, reporting should be encouraged by anyone who observes (or learns indirectly of) inappropriate behavior.
> Not sure how YC would go about proactively screening away bad actors
The same way any organization screens away bad actors: required training courses, background checks, clear, written codes of conduct with careful monitoring.
> The research does show that offenders tend to be repeat actors.
Which strongly suggests that a single report should be enough to trigger an investigation.
I'd suggest that they should report it publicly, dammit, and name and shame the perpetrator, with their own name attached and the allegation backed by the weight of any reputation they may have. All of which they would probably do. The near-total impotence of men - and by implication, male-dominated industries - to do anything at all about sexual harassment of women comes from the fact that this is for some reason seen as an unthinkable response when it comes to sexual misconduct directed at women.
These survey results point to 4 women being sexually assaulted and 15 founders either being asked to prostitute themselves for investment or something worse. Yet we have not a single name of a responsible party, nor a single account of their actions. We men are repeatedly told that it is our job to prevent harassment of women, and that we have the power to do so. How? What possible power can we have to do anything about perpetrators if their victims universally refuse to tell us who they are or what they have done? The blame for society's failure to protect future victims lies on the victims who stay silent, not on men; it is impossible for us to respond to incidents that everyone involved refuses to tell us about.
How do you think an (alleged) perpetrator is supposed to prove that something did not happen prior to even having details on what has happened? Also in the case of a 'he said/she said' what do you think should happen?
Accusations are easy to make. Also noting that behavior is not static. What one person interprets as 'harassment' is not the same as someone else. Also there is harassment of a non sexual nature within the sexes. Is that not important? Or only if it's 'sexual' in some way of coercion does it matter?
You're saying this despite the article talking about a survey in which only 19 of 384 female YC founders said they "experienced one or more inappropriate incidents by angels or VCs". And only a subset of those actually reported those incidents. The data does not seem to support the assertion that "accusations are easy to make". And there's plenty of known history that contradicts it as well, e.g. Paula Jones and Juanita Broaddrick, the U.S. womens gymnastics team, etc.
Considering that the nature of the response is going to be different if 20% of VCs are hitting on 100% of woman that walks though the door versus if 100% of VCs are hitting on 20% of women that walk through the door I think trying to get additional information is a good first step.
>and leaves the burden on the victims rather than the perpetrators
What do you expect the perpetrators to do? Admit to it? If you are wronged it's on you to report it because whoever wronged you won't. This is how the world works in every other context.
>including a background check for incidents that happened before they got involved in YC.
How do you define what is background check worthy? This is a hard problem. Criminal conviction is probably too high of a bar. "I was at this party 35yr ago back in high school and I swear this dude groped me, nobody else remembers this" is probably too low of a bar.
However a background check may not initially uncover anything because many of these incidences happen in private and due to the power dynamics many of the victims don't report it publicly.
* “I was afraid of the consequences for my ability to get future funding.”
* “VCs would penalize women for coming forward by icing them out of social and professional situations and denying them funding opportunities, meaning the bad behavior rarely got outed.”
You're saying that Callisto does not address any of those issues, that it's merely posturing?
The kind of people that make great founders wouldn't sign up for having their access to anyone controlled.
Anyone aware of similar efforts to survey the male founders?
I once worked for a startup where the female CEO did a few things that got close to the line. Not illegal or immoral, but enough to make me wonder if a similar female leader in a similar situation would cross the line towards her male employees.
They could've simply involved the male population as-well, but for reasons unknown, chose not to.
Imagine the mid-level manager, the run-of-the-mill coder, the cafeteria worker, the janitor? Many of those people can't afford to lose their job and have less power protect their careers. And theoretically they may be more likely to be victims: Men distinguish based on physical attraction for these purposes, not status, and they may see these women as more vulnerable and therefore as easier targets. Are you going to try to sexually coerce the VP at Airbnb or the caterer's junior assistant?
You know what the perpetrators say: 'Do you know who I am?' 'It will be your word against mine. Nobody will believe you.' 'You'll never work again.'
Those people need a Callisto too - they need one far more (and maybe Callisto already does that).