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Comment by mattmaroon | Hacker News Reader

I'm sorry but this is insane. I guess I can only speak to the segment of the tech industry I've been exposed to, but a woman would not be labelled a liability for reporting a rape or an assault, unless maybe it turned out to be false, in which case that's no different than any other industry. I am sure workplace rape and assault happens in every industry, unfortunately, but I've seen no evidence it's more common or accepted in tech than anywhere else. It's certainly not systematized or condoned. I can't believe Google (for whom she has worked) has any more lenient of a policy on sexual harassment or assault than any other Fortune 500.

And if it were this bad, why would she fear being ostracized? If my options were to stay in an industry and be repeatedly harassed, beaten, and raped, or switch careers, I don't think it'd be a tough call.

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If you look through the comments here and in other similar threads you'll see numerous variations on the "what wait? just leave." It's an understandable but wrong response to these situations. It shifts the problem from the perpetrator to the victim. It's similar to asking women to be covered from head to toe so that they can't somehow tempt males. The onus isn't on the male to control his desires it's on the female to ensure that his desires are not aroused. So if rape and sexual harassment is happening at a workplace don't blame the victim for not leaving blame the perpetrator for bringing that into the workplace.

Perhaps I'll give another perspective. A coworker had sexual harassment problems with one of our managers, and eventually she left the company. I cross checked, and the other managers knew about it but didn't do anything. I also left the company.

A place where abusing a coworker is OK is just a bad place to work. You might not be the target of the abuse at that time, but you'll get shafted for any other reason on any other subject (e.g. raises, project assignments, perks...).

Basically if it's just one bad apple, you should get help outing the problem. If most of the company is fucked up, you'll have to decide if you really want to stay there, and for me more often than not it's not worth it. Leaving a job can be seen as a privilege, but if you're actually getting regular abuse, it might as well be the only sane choice.

You unwittingly fall into an enclosure filled with angry chimpanzees.

A crowd gathers, and shouts "Leave the enclosure, climb out, there's a ladder!"

Another crowd gathers and shouts at the first crowd "Shut up. Stop blaming the victim!"

Which crowd has your best interests at heart?

Yeah except the ladder leads directly into the shark tank. (Unemployment, retaliation from your rapist, damage to your reputation/resume)

Tech companies are staffed with humans, not angry chimpanzees; this analogy is stupid.

I'll help you out here:

You unwittingly fall into an enclosure filled with angry chimpanzees.

Some of the chimpanzees are guarding a ladder. You can't see where it leads.

You notice other people have fallen into the enclosure too. They help you stand up and remind you that the chimps suck.

Who has your best interests at heart?

Why leave? Report those issues. The real question is why just let it slide and then write a blog about it.

Rape is not something you should just let people get away with and move on with your life

I want to do something more with my life than make sure some asshole gets what they deserve. I want my life to be about more than that.

One way I think males can better relate is to consider bullying. There'd be no bullying in school if every single time it happened a child went to the authorities, was taken seriously, the perpetrator was punished and there was no backlash on the victim. Yet we know that many kids put up with a fair degree of bullying because going to the Principal completely changes the game. They fear overt or subtle retribution and social ostracizing. They become defined by everybody at school as the dude who was a victim _and_ went to the authorities and got other people in trouble. So it's no wonder that many incidents of bullying (and sexual harassment) are not reported. Only when the stigma goes away will it happen.

So you should just accept it?

This is a complex situation made up of multiple inputs that in turn denies you the simply answer you wish for.

Oh, I'm certainly not blaming the victim. But I believe people have a responsibility to protect themselves. Not just a right, a responsibility. Fool me once, shame on you, etc.

If you are raped and do nothing about it, you're certainly not deserving of being raped again by the same guy. He's still a monster. But when it happens you've been a party to it. And you definitely can't complain that the company or industry you work for is sitting idly by and allowing it if you never reported it to them in the first place.

Now if you did report it and nothing happened, that's a problem. I can't imagine what I'd do if an employee came to me with that, and thankfully I've never had to, but I promise you it wouldn't be nothing.

I don't think there's a particular reason to believe this is significantly worse in tech than it is elsewhere (although if this I'm wrong, I'd definitely appreciate being corrected on this). But there are a few things I'd say:

- Tech has this particular weird cultural self-view that we all see ourselves and each other as middle-school nerds emerging victorious, as people who got past the bullies and the ills of "normal people" society, as people who were friendless (and dateless) in school but have found our own little environment now where we can be accepted as we are. So there's a tendency to think that we're not capable of the same sort of awfulness, and that we're better people than the other industries. There's a tendency, subconsciously, to think that if someone's saying something bad about any of our people, they're no better than our middle school bullies. We need to get over that and admit that the tech industry is like any other industry.

- On a different and simpler note, tech is our industry. I don't have nearly as much say about the culture of, say, big law firms or furniture design studios, than I do about the culture of companies where I work and where I might consider working.

Regarding Google, did you see this discussion, which was on the HN home page yesterday? https://plus.google.com/+KellyEllis/posts/L4wawXpNt25

I find it doubtful that tech is worse than, for example, the finance industry (with its rich history of decadence and debauchery). I also find it "interesting" that the tech industry seems to have replaced the finance industry (whose shenanigans put the West into recession) as the focus of media critique.

So your own coworkers suffer, and your response is, I find it doubtful that we terrorize women more than others?

So what if that's true? Is the important story here how we've become victims of the media?

Also, software is one of the very few (only?) industries where women participation has been dropping steadily[1], so I find it likely that the situation in tech is worse than in finance (they've had years to learn). Besides, it is Silicon Valley that likes to wave the false flag of meritocracy.

[1]: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-wom...

Our coworkers suffer, but so do the people I know who work in completely different industries.

I have no idea how the tech industry compares to other industries in terms of treatment of women. What I can say for certain is that we do not have the amazing complaints of cocaine fueled parties filled with hookers that seem to regularly emerge from the world of finance.

> cocaine fueled parties filled with hookers that seem to regularly emerge from the world of finance.

Your finance industry stereotypes are about 30 years out of date. Wall Street is way less flagrant about their excess these days.

Meanwhile, in tech... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titstare

>Your finance industry stereotypes are about 30 years out of date.

Not as blatant as the "golden age", perhaps, but it seems "hookers and blow" still figure in the lifestyle. A former hedge fund trader published a book a couple years ago detailing how his company (within the last decade) plied clients with prostitutes and a wide array of illegal narcotics:

http://nypost.com/2013/05/30/former-hedge-fund-titan-bares-a...

Then there's the BofA banker who, last December, was found to have gone off the rails, from continual partying, and killed two sex workers:

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-11-02/bofa-banker-arreste...

The first sentence of your second link:

> The excesses of 1980s New York investment banking as captured best (and with just a dose of hyperbole) by Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho may be long gone in the US...

The first link I provided is about a book by an insider that details these excesses occurring in the 2000s.

According to one tip the SEC received in 2007 about Galleon: "Prostitution is rampant for executives visiting Galleon. You will find that the Super Bowl parties for the executives, paid for by Galleon Group, include prostitutes and other forms of illegal entertainment."

> I also find it "interesting" that the tech industry seems to have replaced the finance industry (whose shenanigans put the West into recession) as the focus of media critique.

Guess who's the next group of rich people thinking their bubble's never going to pop?

Who?

It's gone :/

Ironically, while google web search _thinks_ it has that URL in it's cache... the google cache is completely unable to quote with the JS-heavy Google Plus, so it isn't.

But I guess the author took it down on purpose. It is not hard to guess why, based on the nature of _this_ comment thread.

> but a woman would not be labelled a liability for reporting a rape or an assault, unless maybe it turned out to be false

This is the crux of the matter and where most men run into trouble with this whole discussion.

Let's say she comes forward and accuses a coworker of rape. The coworker denies the allegations and says she's lying to punish him for some work-related disagrement, or because he turned her down for a date or something. She doesn't have any recordings or physical proof. It's just her word against his.

Now what?? Well if you want to get a sense of what typically happens, take a look at this thread, in which multiple men are spending thousands of words debating the fine points of what exactly is bad enough to count as "rape", and why didn't she just quit, etc.

Basically: when there is not solid proof, guys tend to stick up for each other--and there are way way more guys in tech than women.

That's why she would fear being ostracized.

> unless maybe it turned out to be false

I'm assuming most of the people who have been sexually assaulted have no proof of the incident. So while it wouldn't necessarily "turn out to be false," there's a definite risk of people thinking that she was making the whole incident up for attention/out of spite/to get the other guy fired, etc. I think that's where the author's fear is coming from.

I don't know that it is more common in tech because I have only worked in tech. Does that make it OK in tech if it happens everywhere else too? Would that make you want to fix it any less if you knew it was wrong that it happened everywhere?

It's your word against her's. She has been exposed to the internals of many instances of abuse, either by being the victim or talking to the victims as a woman, so I will be believing her over you -- why shouldn't I?

> a woman would not be labelled a liability for reporting a rape or an assault

Well, but that's the problem. She's not saying she will be labelled a liability, but that the environment she works in makes her fear that she would.

As sexism is all about power[1], this is how power works. It's not only in the written rules, but in the atmosphere. Those in the position of less power feel afraid to take advantage of the law/rules, because they're afraid this will somehow be used against them, whether this is what will actually happen or not. You see this not only among women in tech, but among groups that have for a long time been on the receiving end of law enforcement when it comes to calling the police. This fear that the rules won't work in your favor is a great demonstration of how power works.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_(social_and_political)

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