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Comment by femto113 | Hacker News Reader

Over 20% of female founders are experiencing harassment or coercion and the response is to implement a reporting system to identify serial offenders? This is absurdly inadequate, does nothing to prevent harassment, and leaves the burden on the victims rather than the perpetrators. It should be incumbent on YC to ensure that before any angel or VC is given access to any founders that they are screened for such behavior, including a background check for incidents that happened before they got involved in YC. Anything less is just posturing.

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I think the idea is to get founders to report while minimizing exposure to retaliation for the founder. In the same way that a female founder should not be harassed, she should also not be required to martyr her company for the greater good of erasing this behavior.

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.

I'll happily burn all my karma standing up for the idea that the victims of sexual harassment don't bear the responsibility for fixing it. Imagine that 20% of founders were getting straight up scammed by fake angels and VCs--would you suggest the founders need some way to report that anonymously? Or would you perhaps say that YC should do a better job of screening out fake investors? This is not the victims fault, it is not their problem, and it should not be on them to fix it. YC has both power and responsibility here and they are choosing not to exercise either.

It's a chicken and egg thing. You don't have a known problem until you have victims.

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.

Even before this survey I would assert harassment in this context was a well-known problem.

_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.

Of course victims should not have to bear the responsibility, yet it's an unfortunate state of affairs that we must rely on victims in order to bring justice and awareness.

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.

> we must rely on victims in order to bring justice and awareness

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.

> Imagine that 20% of founders were getting straight up scammed by fake angels and VCs--would you suggest the founders need some way to report that anonymously?

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.

But how do you conduct a background check without a database of reports from people who have experienced harassment?

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.

There's an entire industry of companies that perform background checks, this is not a novel problem. You can also require potential investors to sign a contract that they've never committed harassment, list any times they've been accused of harassment, entered into a confidential settlement, etc. with some significant penalty if they're caught lying.

Unless that "significant penalty" includes somehow removing that VC from the company's cap table without harming the company, then the cure might be worse than the disease.

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.

The point is to screen out these people before they get to the investment stage. The scenario you describe is as likely (or even more likely) to happen with the system YC just put in place, since it will take at least two reports to trigger any consequences.

Unfortunately, in many cases, those VCs are already on the cap tables of founders that could report. So it's a problem.

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.

As an aside, it really pisses me off to see your comments getting downvoted here. You're saying valuable, important things.

This is what a hostile environment looks like, guys.

> and leaves the burden on the victims rather than the perpetrators

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?

> Accusations are easy to make.

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.

> This is absurdly inadequate, does nothing to prevent harassment,

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.

* “Did not want to endanger my company’s funding prospects”

* “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?

It's reactive rather than proactive, so yes, I view it as posturing. YC already controls access to the founders, they can leverage that to make sure that founders are kept safe. This concept is not unprecedented: I can't even chaperone a field trip at my own kids school without taking a sexual misconduct training class and signing a statement that I've never been convicted of a sex crime. YC can and should require the same sort of thing from their investors.

Other than the invitation list to demo day, YC doesn't "control access" to founders. Founders run their own companies. They get on planes and go to conferences and meet customers and investors and potential employees. YC gives them information, but they make their own decisions.

The kind of people that make great founders wouldn't sign up for having their access to anyone controlled.

> ...they are screened for such behavior, including a background check for incidents that happened before they got involved in YC

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.

Sure, but I don't see that as an argument against doing them. Even with an imperfect process I expect at least some people with a history of harassment would be deterred from even applying. If the potential penalties for lying about your past or committing harassment are sufficiently significant (i.e. exclusion from future YC events) it would incentivize VC firms to police their own employees and partners, and send only their best behaved to founder events.

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