>During the recruiting process, Mr. McClure, a founder of 500 Startups and an investor, sent her a Facebook message that read in part, “I was getting confused figuring out whether to hire you or hit on you.”
One would think having the phrases "hire you" and "hit on you" in the same sentence when communicating with someone undergoing recruitment at your company would be reason enough to take pause for a moment, and maybe ponder why PR suicide seems like a good idea.
>Mr. Canter, in an interview, said that Ms. Dent “came on strong to me, asking for help” and that she had used her sexuality publicly. He said he disliked her ideas so he behaved the way he did to make her go away.
???
>Lindsay Meyer, an entrepreneur in San Francisco, said Mr. Caldbeck put $25,000 of his own money into her fitness start-up in 2015. That gave Mr. Caldbeck reason to constantly text her; in those messages, reviewed by The Times, he asked if she was attracted to him and why she would rather be with her boyfriend than him. At times, he groped and kissed her, she said.
That one's just downright pathological creepy in the extreme.
I think cringe is the wrong word. We cringe when we watch The Office and see people make social mistakes without meaning to. These are not unwitting social mistakes. This is people being assholes because they know they can get away with it.
Furthermore, not having met any of these people but speculating based on my experience, I would guess that their motivations go beyond just looking for sex and knowing that one time in twenty it will work. I think they also enjoy the nineteen out of twenty who are repulsed and insulted but don't -- correction, hopefully, didn't -- think they could afford to call them on their bullshit. Very few people are genuinely indifferent to putting someone through an experience like that, but it's very common for people to enjoy it. Those are the people we call bullies, whether their acts are criminal or not. I'm sure the people described in the article took care to stay on the right side of the law, but reading this I can't help hoping that they made mistakes.
I know many people like that, and no, they don't derive an enjoyable power trip out of being rejected at all. Theybdon't know they can get away with it. They don't know that they are doing it. These people are rarely evil and predatory. They usually genuinely believe that the behavior they are exhibiting is desireable. They think that this is how the game is played, and these things are a form of peacocking. They think confidence is attractive, flattery is wanted, and that women are constantly searching for signals of an Alpha.
They also think they're exceptional. They don't understand boundaries, and they don't understand that women have to deal with that shit from other guys who also think that, everywhere they go. Whether it be cat calls at the grocery store or advances at work.
I don't know Sacca or McClure, and from their writing and the way they project themselves, I don't think they seem like the type of people I care to spend time around, but it's pretty clear that this is a bad combination of arrogance and ignorance rather than malice. I had to stop reading Sacca's post after the 5th page of him talking about how great he is, but it sounds like he definitely had his Come To Jesus moment and is genuinely remorseful and working on not being an ass. That's a far better outcome than premature ostracization. Save that for the Bill Cosbys.
In order to make progress, I think it is important to recognize this distinction. There are no doubt some actual predators out there, but they need to be dealt with very differently than the dumbasses. I say that in part as a recovering dumbass myself, and as someone who faced accusations of malice and manipulation (in matters completely unrelated to women) when that was absolutely not the case. Hanlon's Razor and all.
I think you're pretty close to 100% correct here. My one addition would be that with our level of connectedness, it would require an insane amount of self control for an individual (male) to be of the mindset 'I take the things I want at work' and not have slip ups of the sort we're seeing here (inappropriate messages etc.)
Because this disclaimer seems necessary in posts like this, I am in no way condoning his actions or the actions of people like this. However, it certainly seems like we're looking at an interesting area where the personality characteristics required to be successful may be orthogonal to 21st century social norms. (Venture capital.) I'd argue that another similar area is war fighting, and that this could be a plausible explanation (not excuse) for why sexual harassment can be so high in those areas as well.
Your comment is totally inappropriate, not to mention ridiculous, and essentially amounts to a silly personal attack. No rational reading of anything he wrote could possibly suggest that he does or condones that. In fact you'd have to entirely ignore the sentence where he specifically says the opposite. Comments like this make it very difficult to have important discussions about these topics.
At the same time, your “boys will be boys” attitude makes it hard to take you seriously as well. How do we actually get this behavior to stop when there are so many out there saying we shouldn’t call it out or there shouldn’t be consequences for it because they are “ignorant” of what they’re doing? On top of that, I don’t buy that ignorance argument for a second; they know exactly what they are doing.
If you got "boys will be boys" out of what I said, you obviously didn't read very far. Feel free to read the whole post and make half an effort to see what I was saying. I also didn't say there shouldn't be consequences.
Not that it matters much, you've already wrongly assumed how these people work. You're free to do that, but if you don't understand what motivates someone's behavior, your efforts to improve your own situation or that of your allies is doomed to be counterproductive.
I got it out of what appears to be an unwillingness to hold these people accountable for their actions. All throughout this thread, including from you, I see an unwillingness to condemn these actions, and really, a call for a complete lack of real consequences. I see a lot of “Well, we can’t actually punish them; that’d be counterproductive.” Counterproductive to what? Actual punishment is how you send the message that these things are not acceptable. If someone can do these things, and when called out just say, “I’m sorry I got caught”, then the message is that no one really cares if this happens.
But then there's the argument of the banality of evil. We spend a lot of time thinking about the black swans of evilness, but I'd argue a lot more damage is done on aggregate by mundane shittiness.
They also think they're exceptional. They don't understand boundaries, and they don't understand that women have to deal with that shit from other guys who also think that
I know many people like that, and no, they don't derive an enjoyable power trip out of being rejected at all. Theybdon't know they can get away with it. They don't know that they are doing it. These people are rarely evil and predatory. They usually genuinely believe that the behavior they are exhibiting is desirable.
Basically, power corrupts. Being a boss, an investor, or an employer comes with power. Just having the cachet of being involved with startups carries a certain small amount of power in itself. Combine this corruption with the powerful instincts around sex and mating, and really bad things can happen.
I'm probably going to be attacked for this, but I really wish women would be overt and name such things. (Here, I'm talking about workplace norms in CA in general, not any of the specific situations of women named in the NYT article.) As it is, there are so many provisions for deniability, being second guessed, and not overtly saying "I'm not interested" that it really muddies the waters. I think it would help if women just said, "No. I'm sorry, but I don't think of you this way." or, "No, sorry, but I think I should keep business and personal matters separate." Wasn't clear and direct communication part and parcel of the "no means no" message in the first place? By creating norms where women think it's dangerous to just come out and say no, it's like we're creating an operating assumption where any man who might hear "no" has to be considered some kind of unstable potential attacker. To me, this is the sort of "fainting couch" feminism that regards women as only potential victims who can't stand up for themselves and who must be protected by others. To say the overt "no" -- to directly say what you want and mean -- is to claim agency as an adult. It's a chance for the refused to show acceptance. It's a chance for every party involved to coexist as equals.
Disclosure, this comes to mind because of something that happened between me and a colleague of equal rank in a volunteer organization who went directly from "I don't think I can see a movie tonight" to "This situation is making me uncomfortable" with nothing in between. I just don't think this is suitable verbal behavior for supposedly rational adults. Okay, now you angry and misguided young "activists" come and lay on the aspersions that I'm some sort of morally deficient person.
> To me, this is the sort of "fainting couch" feminism that regards women as only potential victims who can't stand up for themselves and who must be protected by others.
It's not fainting couch feminism, it's pragmatic feminism. These interactions happen in a context where peoples' livelihoods, their hopes and dreams, are on the line. Are you going to expect them to jeopardize that by overtly calling someone out?
There is a reason we put the onus on men to not make unwanted advances instead of putting it on women to clearly reject them. It's costless to refrain from hitting on your coworkers/underlings/potential hires. In contrast, there is potentially a very high cost to a woman overtly rejecting an advance. At best, it results in hurt feelings and embarrassment in a superior/potential boss/potential investor. At worst, it can result in negative repercussions (a coworker badmouthing you as "a bitch," a hiring manager passing on your application, an investor passing on your idea).
If you consider yourself a decent person, why would you put someone else between a rock and a hard place like that? There are literally billions of women on the planet, and 99.99% don't work with you/for you.
I think the point that the parent commenter is missing, and you're not illustrating, is that women are very frequently propositioned in the workplace.
To stcredzero, he's innocuously asking a woman colleague of equal rank, who he has rapport with, out to a movie. He sees it as an opportunity to develop a relationship that could lead to a happy marriage. He doesn't get that many opportunities due to various reasons, so he's taking the chance he has.
She sees it as yet another colleague asking her out, when it's likely another male colleague asked her on a date that very morning, along with the dude on BART and one on the street as she walked to work.
The workplace should be focused on work, not another place where a woman has to be on guard.
People do form romantic relationships from working relationships. This should be approached with the utmost of care, because the workplace isn't the appropriate place.
The appropriate place is social events, with mutual friends; a Tinder date; a friendship struck at your local Linux Users Group meetup (you never know), etc.
>"The workplace should be focused on work, not another place where a woman has to be on guard."
I don't think there is consensus on that view. Work wouldn't be my first choice for finding a suitable partner. But that doesn't mean that individuals that spend a lot of time together in a non-social context are magically excluded from behaving in a certain way for the sole benefit of female comfort. There is a clear difference between consensual actions here, and we mustn't infantilize women by making such blanket statements that essentially amount to us saying that women need an incredibly sterile and "safe" (from proposition) environment to work in.
You're shifting my argument into a strawman to bolster yours: nobody is credibly advocating infantilizing women.
I will help you with your reading comprehension:
> People do form romantic relationships from working relationships. This should be approached with the utmost of care, because the workplace isn't the appropriate place.
Since you strawman-ized my argument, I'll do the same to yours:
"When people tell me I can't hit on women at work, that's infantilizing them."
It's not fainting couch feminism, it's pragmatic feminism. These interactions happen in a context where peoples' livelihoods, their hopes and dreams, are on the line. Are you going to expect them to jeopardize that by overtly calling someone out?
I am a bit amazed that simply expressing your preferences when overtly asked is to be thought of as "calling someone out." If a coworker was to always pretend to agree with you on all matters of taste, I'd think of that person as spineless. Yet, most matters of taste are far less important than preferences of companionship.
At worst, it can result in negative repercussions
Nowadays, the phrase, "I don't feel comfortable with..." has negative repercussions in the same league.
If you consider yourself a decent person, why would you put someone else between a rock and a hard place like that? There are literally billions of women on the planet, and 99.99% don't work with you/for you.
If you read the thread, you will discover that no one was working for anyone, and this was for a volunteer organization outside of work.
> To say the overt "no" -- to directly say what you want and mean -- is to claim agency as an adult.
You're blaming women for not being "adult" enough in their response to juvenile male behavior. It is these men who should start acting like adults.
And how do you know the women didn't say no? The article notes that some of the women faced retribution after rebuffing men.
> Disclosure, this comes to mind because of something that happened between me and a colleague of equal rank in a volunteer organization who went directly from "I don't think I can see a movie tonight" to "This situation is making me uncomfortable" with nothing in between.
It sounds like you need to work on reading other peoples' comfort level with your behavior. In a professional setting the standard is very high for ensuring you are not making someone uncomfortable. Consider how a customer would feel if they walked in a store and, out of the blue, got hit on by staff that they had zero chemistry with. Who then the blames the customer for not being "adult" enough.
You're blaming women for not being "adult" enough in their response to juvenile male behavior. It is these men who should start acting like adults.
That's a ridiculous false dichotomy. When people own their preference and viewpoint, people respect them more. Men who act like juveniles should clearly act more adult. Fully grown women who act like they're timid middle-schoolers should also act more adult. It's the workplace where people communicate honestly and clearly that produces results when breaking new ground and dealing with subtle and complex trade-offs. (Again, this isn't a discussion of people or events in the article, but rather a general one.)
> Disclosure, this comes to mind because of something that happened between me and a colleague of equal rank in a volunteer organization who went directly from "I don't think I can see a movie tonight" to "This situation is making me uncomfortable" with nothing in between.
The problem here is you're not reading signals correctly. If someone says any variation of "I don't think..." that means they are not interested. If they are interested but just legitimately busy or whatever they will 100% suggest a time that will work or at least give you some kind of an in. Granted, there can be mixed signals and it's not always the easiest thing to figure out, but you have to just accept it for what it is. The truth is asking people out is hard, rejecting people is hard, and we have these little dances to save face.
You may or may not be morally deficient, but by demanding certain behaviours of women, you're being misogynistic. Many women have had the experience of being physically threatened, or threatened with career damage, by a man they refused directly and with sincere clarity, and have therefore learned to reject with a softer line that doesn't put them at risk of harm. Oh, and no-one cares if that wasn't you or how you behave. Your failure to comprehend demonstrates a lack of sophistication on your part. Don't blame women for your attribution error; help us fix the other men instead.
Saying no directly is uncomfortable - socially and potentially professionally. That's not because of "norms" but because of reality. Rejecting someone directly is socially awkward and potentially dangerous.
It's not the responsibility of the person being pursued to protect the pursuer. It's pretty straight forward: if you ask someone out several times, and they keep making up excuses, they're not interested. Stop asking.
> Rejecting someone directly is socially awkward and potentially dangerous.
Very much this. People who've been rejected (male or female) can definitely be vindictive, nasty, and just plain evil. :(
I'm guessing it comes from their feelings of hurt inside from the rejection given. Which (personally) indicates how badly I sucked with interpersonal skills when rejecting people in my younger years. eg I'm pretty direct with people, but had literally no tact when younger. Bad combo. Ugh.
I disagree. The robustness principle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle) or some permutation of it is used in virtually all communication systems and media channels. The burden is clearly on the sender of the message to be precise, not on the receiver to interpret a noisy message. I can't think of any situation, except for dating, where the burden is placed on the receiver.
It applies to human-to-human communication too. If a politician sends an ambiguous tweet, he or she will be blamed if the message is misunderstood. A marketing campaign can be accused of being racist even if the creators didn't intend it to be. If a worker doesn't understand a managers work orders, it is the managers fault -- not the workers, same thing with a student not understanding a professors lecture and so on.
It's how most communication works in just about all social situations, including dating, but even friends. Rarely does someone you want to be friends with say "Sorry, I don't want to spend time with you as a friend." They're just "busy."
> Disclosure, this comes to mind because of something that happened between me and a colleague of equal rank in a volunteer organization who went directly from "I don't think I can see a movie tonight" to "This situation is making me uncomfortable" with nothing in between.
Did you ask multiple times? This sounds like what could easily happen when someone won't take the initial "no," implicit or not, for an answer. Based on the rest of your comment, I expect so.
A few important points:
1. Repeated asking has been held to be sexual harassment, if repeated for long enough.
2. Here's a simple rule: ask once, and only once. She knows where you work. If she's interested, she'll ask for a rain check and get back to you.
> I just don't think this is suitable verbal behavior for supposedly rational adults
3. Rational adults understand and respond to signalling. They don't demand that all communication happen explicitly and on their terms, because they know that such demands are ineffective for all purposes, will not be heeded, and might make them social pariahs.
3. Rational adults understand and respond to signalling. They don't demand that all communication happen explicitly and on their terms, because they know that such demands are ineffective for all purposes, will not be heeded, and might make them social pariahs.
Which is why people behave that way in airplane cockpits and the bridges of submarines. (Actually, such behavior has gotten people killed in those contexts.)
If someone is insisting on an implicit level of signalling, they can be just as guilty of insisting foolishly as someone insisting on the explicit level. When implicit communications are demanded for 1) a higher stakes situation on the basis of 2) the supposed potential victim status of one party -- something is way out of whack. Not only is the safety of clear communications being abrogated, the danger being borne is skewed to just one party.
Beyond the level of the social white lie, if you're advocating deniability to "be safe" you're probably doing something dishonest on some level. Extending the mechanism of the social white lie to a situation where more is at stake is just foolish.
> Actually, such behavior has gotten people killed in those contexts.
Nobody is going to die if you can't date someone.
Again, I advocate a conservative approach to getting a date with a coworker. One request, declined for any reason, should be treated as a firm no absent explicit signals to the contrary (request for a rain check, some other sort of proactive, explicitly date-seeking behavior from the other party). Your odds of getting into trouble under this rule are so vanishingly small as to be nonexistent. If you choose some less conservative rule, including, apparently, whatever rule you've been following up to this point, your risks are higher.
Of course, there's also the issue of not wanting to make your woman coworkers uncomfortable. I would hope that would be something of intrinsic value to you, and that on this basis alone you might change your behavior after seeing its impact in the past. The fact that you're still arguing about this makes me doubt that you do value their comfort the way that I think you should. But I don't know how to tell you that you should care about other people in a way that's going to stick. :(
I think this is suitable behavior for adults, rational or otherwise. We're human and, especially when we're young, inexperienced, or anxious, we don't always navigate the boundaries cleanly. To be honest, I too was told something like that once upon a time – and yeah, you'd better believe I got the message! Hopefully you immediately stopped whatever behavior was making them uncomfortable and apologized.
To say the overt "no" -- to directly say what you want and mean -- is to claim agency as an adult.
We absolutely should encourage this, but let's not ignore that we need to build a culture that doesn't ostracize and attack people when they do this.
So far, we have HR departments that have an incentive to ignore, minimize or deflect these problems. We have a culture of employment that says that this is all part of dealing with a job in a tough industry. And we have internet trolls ready to harass people when they come out against this behavior.
The first part, of asserting yourself and claiming your agency, is extraordinarily important. But there's so much more to it. If someone is sexually harassed, and they hit a brick wall at every turn, the best case scenario is that they ditch the startup or tech industry and go to more established companies that actually have a solid culture and process in place. And that is an absolute loss for everyone, especially because the kind of person who can see everything weighed against them and still takes a stand is what the startup scene is supposed to be all about. We shouldn't punish or ignore those people.
We absolutely should encourage this, but let's not ignore that we need to build a culture that doesn't ostracize and attack people when they do this.
If a particular organizational culture isn't full of people who would be the level of jerk to attack someone for saying "no thanks" then how is it at all positive to teach half the people there to behave as if they will probably do that? That sounds to me like you're just creating fear where there should be none.
> Theybdon't know they can get away with it. They don't know that they are doing it. These people are rarely evil and predatory. They usually genuinely believe that the behavior they are exhibiting is desireable.
At a certain point, one has to believe that another's actions are evil, even if that evil is unwitting. One mustn't actively choose to be "evil and predatory" to be so in fact.
At a certain point, one has to believe that another's actions are evil, even if that evil is unwitting. One mustn't actively choose to be "evil and predatory" to be so in fact.
So something can become so horrible, that even a mistaken action should be defined as evil? Sorry, but that sounds wrong, and itself willfully vengeful. In that case, shouldn't we just do away with manslaughter and just say everyone who has killed someone is a murderer?
You're making a false equivalence; often, the distinction between murder and manslaughter is the lack of an actual _intent to kill_, not simply the presence of a mistaken belief that the killing would be welcomed as "a really alpha move".
Even in cases where intent isn't there, other factors (for example, hitting and killing someone while driving drunk or too far over the speed limit) can make an accidental killing murder.
I don't think that you can make the argument that any of the men in question did not intend to make sexual advances on these women.
To horribly misuse Aaron Sorkin:
Sam:
About a week ago I accidentally slept with a prostitute.
Toby:
Really?
Sam:
Yes.
Toby:
You accidentally slept with a prostitute.
Sam:
Call girl.
Toby:
Accidentally.
Sam:
Yes.
Toby:
I don't understand. Did you trip over something?
I'm trying to understand the intent of your reference. The scene you're referring to is when Sam finds out after he slept with the woman that she happened to be a prostitute. He didn't pay her as a prostitute. He met a nice woman and they spent the night together. Next morning he finds out she has a job that might get him in trouble.
How is that relevant to your point? It seems like the opposite of your point.
It popped into my head due to the linguistic disconnect - Sam is saying that he accidentally did something, but Toby is clarifying that, no, he did it on purpose; he just might not have been aware of the circumstances and potential consequences.
In other words, while it might be possible to "accidentally sexually harass" a person, there's much more involved than "did the harasser think they were harassing?"
Rather, it matters whether the person in question deliberately chose to perform the actions that compose harassment.
To use programming terminology, sexual harassment is an interface, not a class. One need not deliberately implement it if all the requirements are met.
> They don't understand boundaries, and they don't understand that women have to deal with that shit from other guys who also think that, everywhere they go.
At this level of lack of empathy and thought, I see no functional difference between malice and inability.
> There are no doubt some actual predators out there, but they need to be dealt with very differently than the dumbasses.
How so? Both need boundaries first and foremost. When they don't respect boundaries voluntarily, those need to be enforced, always preferably by the persons whose boundaries they are violating and every witness to it.
Beyond that there are the differences. With a dumbass, they may learn not to sting, with someone who got turned into a scorpion, you might have to always wear a glove when feeding them, forever. Which is okay, but it's not okay to leave out the glove because for some of those you're handling without gloves, they might stop stinging at some point.
Though I agree in that you should not label people as dumbass or scorpion before hand. Enforce boundaries, explain your reasoning and emotions firmly and repeatedly. As if to your little dumbass brother, theoretically a peer you love lots, but right now someone you put in their place because you love them and they just won't stop kicking dogs or hurting other kids or drinking bleach. This has to be true, this cannot be faked, you have to muster the love too, not just the anger; and even only some will be able to notice and believe that. It will trickle into some, completely wash over others -- but you can only find that out by doing it. This also implies giving everyone the chance(s).
But don't go by their words. Don't trust user input, treat all of it like potential exploits. Do what you have to do anyway, and in this case you can go "great, then you won't mind these changes, if you had this Come To Jesus moment. If that was just a bluff, you'll shit bricks, enjoy". Cooperation is very desirable and should always be welcome, but it is not required.
In my line of work, which involves authority positions, I see this sort of thing happen a lot (not most of the time, but regularly):
Junior female supervisee becomes romantically involved with male supervisor. It's consensual, not predatory at all. Two people working closely together in closely related positions (I'm not talking CEO-secretary here, I'm talking something more closely matched in rank). Female supervisee might even brag about it or something in informal circles. It's obvious that part of what is happening is that the woman is attracted to ambition, authority, power, etc., even if they don't acknowledge this openly at the time (after all, they are seeking this for themselves). Relationship goes south (not always, though, about as often as any relationship), and then female supervisee blames male supervisor for taking advantage of her, brainwashing her, etc. Maybe even accuse supervisor of sexual harassment.
What I'm seeing in the NY Times piece is not this. None of the people I'm talking about would ever just proposition a potential hire.
However, I think it increases the ambiguity about appropriate behavior. If women in these positions are actively encouraging relationships sometimes (and people hear about this, in sorts of open secret situations), then for people who are already confused, it becomes even more confusing.
My guess is these guys are hitting on women in the same way they might anywhere, without realizing the position of power they have. As you say, I think it's a matter of social sophistication more than anything else.
Then those guys you are talking about need to learn to behave better with responsibility. I am not saying this from a social justice/feminism viewpoint that many other commenters are, but from the point of view of leadership. If you're a man or a woman who gets involved with your subordinates, that's a failure of yours as a leader and it's unethical.
It's unethical, because the superior/subordinate relationship makes a romantic affair coercive even if nobody participating intends it to be.
It's a leadership failure because the superior should behave better than the subordinate as part of providing their leadership function. Yes, you could say the suborndinate started it or whatever, but the superior is supposed to know better than to get involved with that. If you don't want people to be confused, don't add to the confusion by dipping your pen in the company ink.
I think fits the US military's definition of Fraternization: A senior-subordinate relationship that is unduly familiar and does not respect differences in grade or rank. They are strictly forbidden, and while they do happen anyway, they are also regularly punished when discovered. A personal relationship between a direct supervisor and their subordinate would be considered inappropriate fraternization regardless of how close together the parties are in rank.
Fraternization is different from harassment. Among other things, consent is irrelevant. It also covers a broader scope than romantic relationships. The inappropriateness of the relationship comes from the disruption in the chains of command and responsibility, and the conflicts of interest that are inherent in the relationship.
I think that the military is correct in forbidding this kind of relationship, because of the effects you mentioned. It doesn't have to be confusing. It just needs to also be considered inappropriate by the organization.
Nope. Are you trying thay rape culture is a thing and dudes really need special courses on how to not be harassers? That does not describe or culture or majority of dudes in any way. Our culture is full of signals that harassment is wrong.
It is also quite unlikely that people who climb the ladder and successfully play "impress investors and people around" social skills game are so clueless magically when they are alone with women. Somehow they manage to be cluefull when acting like a peacock would harm their career.
I would believe claim about dumbass, if we would talk about dude down in the basement that insulted CEO last week. Then yeah, he is clueless. But in cases here, it is really too much benefit of doubt.
Not everyone who likes to take advantage of other person (including when genders are reversed) is clueless.
Majority of men including those on the spectrum are not like that. When you claim that this is normal misunderstanding, you throw shadow on them too.
I have witnessed at least 3 people that were in a manager position and had unacceptable behavior. What lawnchair_larry described matches almost perfectly my perception of them.
One of them would casually explain in conversations the software he had written to crawl dating website. We was very open with things such as the mirror above his bed, sharing pictures of it. Before leaving the company at last, he had received multiple sanctions including an interdiction to get too close to some women who had worked with him.
Had I not met those people, I would be unable to believe that they exist.
My theory is that they are bold, assertive and have no shame. They don't "play" with people; people like them. They seduce managers and investors. They try to do the same with coworkers.
"Before leaving the company at last, he had received multiple sanctions including an interdiction to get too close to some women who had worked with him."
That sounds quite far away. He did not get info after first two and still honestly does not understand his behavior is not welcome? I mean, if you get the note from HR that you are not allowed to approach person x anymore, then maybe the seducing strategy does not work? Then again, people are not all that rational in general.
dudes really need special courses on how to not be harassers?
Given the many first-hand accounts of ordinary everyday harassment and men who flat-out do not seem to understand what is and isn't inappropriate, or what the words "no" or "I'm not interested" or "leave me alone" mean, yes, it does seem there is a significant population for whom this type of basic education is absolutely and vitally necessary.
Think of it like driver licensing -- many people, probably most adults, are, with a few lessons, perfectly capable of safely operating a car in most situations. And would seek out those lessons (whether paid from a professional teacher, or informally from an experienced friend or family member) regardless of whether they were required. But enough people wouldn't that we have to force every single person who wants to drive to obtain a license through a process that involves examination of their knowledge of driving and traffic rules.
So "teach about how not to harass/teach about consent/etc." should not be interpreted as "this person is calling out 100% of all men alive as well as me, personally and directly, out of blind hate", but rather as "just like driver licensing, there are enough assholes out there who ruin things that we probably need to make sure people are taught this".
Also, mandatory teaching/training ensures that nobody can pull a "well I didn't think that was wrong" excuse -- if people are taught what is and isn't acceptable, and there's a record of them being taught it, then they know it's wrong and we know they know.
I agree that this education is "absolutely and vitally necessary", however I disagree with you that this education is "basic" or that it should be relegated to just subset of the population.
Knowing how to communicate with people who are different from you, knowing how to disagree with another without insulting them, knowing how to check sexual desires in inappropriate settings, knowing when you are operating from a position of power rather than influence ... these are often not at all obvious, they are learned.
I didn't say "it should be relegated to just [a] subset of the population". I said a justification for imposing it universally is to observe a subset of the population and come to the conclusion that yes, this is needed.
Actually what we need is a huge corrective in media, the stuff feminists complain about all the time.
e.g. bell hooks' film stuff, The Bechdel Test, Anita Sarkeesian's work, etc.
This problem forms in large part because men are too attached to media that reinforces notions of women as secondary people, objects, and reward trophies.
The problem is that people's empathy with women going through harassment abruptly stops when they themselves are implicated in some manner.
>"Actually what we need is a huge corrective in media, the stuff feminists complain about all the time. [...]This problem forms in large part because men are too attached to media that reinforces notions of women as secondary people, objects, and reward trophies."
Yes, let's make it a thought crime to think of women as "secondary people, objects and reward trophies" and punish them for thinking it, instead of punishing actual physical criminal behavior. Let's ban and burn books because we don't like the type of behavior they "create" in males.
Stopped reading at "rape culture". Nothing I said has anything to do with rape (except Bill Cosby, who was mentioned specifically to emphasize that these comments don't apply to cases like that), and neither of the individuals involved have been accused of rape or anything resembling rape so I don't know why you'd bring that up.
I didn't neglect it, but I did delete it from my reply for the same reason you got flagged down, and thought I could make my point without adding that triggering distraction.
If we replace the word "asshole" with "criminals", few except a couple of hardline conservatives would assume that one's destiny in life is being a criminal from the day you are born. Instead, as far as I understand most research, lots of external factors play a major role here.
That probably is exactly the same here. These men have been socially conditioned to be assholes. Which, in my eyes, means that there actually should be room for some empathy. Which doesn't mean excusing their behavior, but it means understanding that despite their power and money, they are like every other human being the product of their environment and culture.
And this culture is a joint product of every single member of it.
Mark Manson wrote an insightful essay about this, titled "What's the problem with men". Tl;dr: "We unfairly objectify women in society for their beauty and sex appeal. Similarly, we unfairly objectify men for their professional success and aggression."
I wonder how many people in power or have strong influence are psychopaths or sociopaths. I've had the misfortune to observe a psychopath in the workplace and in this case they touch people a lot. They touch people of the opposite sex more than same sex but they touch a lot of people. I wonder what is being said behind closed doors.
I have friend who is an employment lawyer. When I first asked her what she does she said "I keep old white men out of trouble". How sad.
Statistics have shown for a while now that psychopaths or sociopaths are drawn to positions of power and are therefor overrepresented in those positions.
On the other hand, excessive power (== money) often brings the worst out of us, as power appeals to our (sick/immature) need to dominate those around us (on a personal or even global scale). Domination can act like a drug. And once the brain is hooked on that drug, it's hard to go clean again.
Excessive power (== money) takes a lot of maturity to be handled ethically. Obviously, a lot of people fail hard.
Which is why our society should fight any type of inequality until it's completely gone.
> Which is why our society should fight any type of inequality until it's completely gone.
I don't think this actually follows from the prior premises you put forth. If I'm the 10x programmer, do I need to have my performance handicapped because some psychopaths exist somewhere in the world? That's a kind of inequality which I would argue isn't relevant.
This reminds me strongly the usual stories from Hollywood, the big music industry and even medical world.
We in IT are definitely not alone dealing with this bullcrap. I wonder why there's no more "unmasking" in these other sectors. Maybe the victims don't want to risk being unofficially blacklisted?
I think the article goes to certain lengths to explain that but yes that is certainly one part of it. I think another one, speaking as a minority, is simply one of not standing out too much. When most of your coworkers are a certain race and gender, one feels a greater impetus not to stand out too much simply because of that (i.e. gender, race etc.) but because of one's efforts, work ethic etc.
Did you read the linked article? People believe there's a gender problem in tech because there is a gender problem in tech. These stories are pervasive. I'd encourage you to ask a woman who's been in the industry and while of they've ever been treated unfairly.
Women are almost exactly half of the workforce in the US, but hold only 25% of the jobs in computing. So that would imply the industry is worse than average. And the trend is going the wrong way: women were a much bigger presence in tech 20 years ago. IMHO, stories like the ones in this article are very common and are a major reason why. And that hurts everyone who works in tech.
Moreover, the fact that other industries may also have a gender problem in no way excuses what's going on in the linked article.
I guess I don't know what "major industries" people are talking about. For example, earlier in the thread Hollywood and finance are mentioned -- but these are definitely industries with a long history of law suits in this area.
With regards to "...ask a woman..." and "...the fact that other industries may also have a gender problem..." -- neither of these remarks have anything to do with what I said. I have some doubts about the claim posted earlier, to the effect that tech is worse than other "major industries", because I have never seen anything to back that up -- but two wrongs do not make a right and I never said anything like that.
To support these ideas I guess I would like to know, what are these major industries and what are the axes of comparison?
If this kind of factual scrutiny seems wrong in the face of the present emergency, I have to ask you: when would it ever be right?
The simple math I cited is not enough? You agree that women make up less than half the tech workforce even though they're half of working adults, right?
Why is it important to know how tech ranks against other industries anyway? How is that actionable information? Is the point to be able to claim "it's not our problem"? I don't think that's a useful line of thought. Even if tech were above average (and, again, it isn't) that doesn't in any way excuse the behavior in the NYT article.
> This is people being assholes because they know they can get away with it.
> I would guess that their motivations go beyond just looking for sex and knowing that one time in twenty it will work.
> Those are the people we call bullies, whether their acts are criminal or not.
Spot on, sadly a much overlooked and ignored fact.
While "sexism" certainly feeds into that, it's not the actual problem, the problem being that "assholes" often end up being very successful people because they can easily force their will upon others, regardless of gender.
These are ruthless personalities and their success is often build upon exactly that ruthlessness.
Why should the silicon valley vc ecosystem be exempt from that dynamic? It seems it ain't: https://www.saastr.com/are-silicon-valley-venture-capitalist...
As a male, on the short end of that naturally existing power dynamic, you are flat out of luck because you can't point at your gender and generate drama to monetize on or take whole companies down, instead you are lumped up into a big sack as part of the supposedly "systematic problem" by labeling it a "male dominated culture", taking every male person into a quasi sippenhaft trough guild by gender association in the "fight against sexism".
As somebody who considers himself a somewhat decent person, this whole tone in the discourse is getting rather tiresome because this also creates quite an oppressive environment for people who merely want to find a relationship partner. I feel guilty just thinking about approaching women on the street, I've rebuffed advances by female coworkers because that's not considered "appropriate", I don't want to approach that nice cashier in the supermarket because I fear I might bother her/creep her out. And because I've always been rather awkward with social situations, the outcome is quite predictable: I've been single for these last 10 years, while constantly being told how much of an asshole I'm for having been born with a dick.
If the people who aren't supposed to be targeted think they're targeted, and the people who are supposed to be targeted don't care, then maybe something has gone wrong with the discourse.
Simple counter-question: How do you define "sexual harassment"?
Because that's the actual issue these days. Behavior that used to be "normal" and lead to people getting to know each other is considered "harassment" these days.
One of it's points being that a big draw for many women is how they like being "admired" by so many men on Tinder in the same way they used to appreciate being catcalled: "Es ist dieses dauerhafte Umgarntwerden, das den Reiz ausmacht. Wie früher das Hinterherpfeifen oder Zuzwinkern.
So what's the message here? What is a single male supposed to do in such an enviornment? Some women like the catcalling, others consider it harassment.
Meaning: The saver option is not to catcall, but that also results in vastly reduced chances of getting to know any woman at all.
Especially when the "competition" does not bother at all and just keeps on catcalling and thus actually ends up getting to know new people, while you sit in your misery alone thinking "Well, at least I didn't harass anybody.." hell of a good time!
Then there is online dating, which has it's own slew of massive issues as a single male. Competition is extra fierce because on these platforms quite often men outnumber women 2:1 or worse. There you might not be called out for harassing that quickly, but there you need a harassing like behavior to be actually successful. You need to be somewhat dishonest about yourself in your presentation, you need to approach/contact as many women as possible (while disregarding their plight of getting spammed), to increase your chances for a successful reply and meeting.
All these are things "we" are supposed not to do, yet they seem like the only viable tactic to any measurable "success".
Nobody is gonna start a relationship with me because I'm just such a nice guy who didn't come on to her, those are exactly the kind of signals that keep you in the notorious "friend zone" for all eternity, but those are the kind of signals that are seemingly expected from males in any and all situations or else you might be considered a "creep" or a "harasser".
This get's even worse when culture actually adapts. Not too long ago a common complaint would be how "Men always feign romantic interest to get sex", true enough. Now increasingly men (and some women) have become more pragmatic about this and state their intentions in quite a blunt way and guess what? That can quite easily also be interpreted as "sexual harassment" when somebody comes on to you with "I'd like to have sex with you".
So what's a single guy to do? Especially when you are also lucky enough to be on the spectrum and have a hard enough time parsing social situations already, this constant ambiguity makes it an impossibility to improve my understanding about social interactions and dynamics, literally paralyzing me.
I'm in my mid-30's and I've given up any intend to actively look for a partner because I don't want to inconvenience anybody with my failed approaches or end up being seen as some kind of "creep" who "harasses" people and makes them feel uncomfortable, when that's actually the exact opposite of my intensions.
Maybe English is not your native language ? (it isn't mine BTW :) Catcalling has never been acceptable behavior, and, in my experience, does not increase anybody's chances of meeting new people. Catcalling is not flirting.
As to how to meet women (take this advise with a mountain of salt, was never a ladies man, have been married for 20 years and never cheated, so haven't flirted in 20 years :), play the odds; join groups that do stuff that interest you, get in a position to meet women, and meet them as people first, make friends and then relationships might develop; (and if not, you have more friends, and had fun doing whatever you were doing). That is, don't go to meetups (or pokemon tournaments, or the church choir, or ...) to hook up, go there because you want to be there, and, chances are, if you meet enough women you will find your match.
Of course, there's a lot there because it simply ain't as simple as:
"Do you sexually harass?" or "Do you have consent?"
Such statements underestimate the untold complexities pretty much all social interaction are based on.
That's why solutions to these problems are not as simple as some people like to pretend. Nobody really likes talking to each other bluntly, everything always has to be implied or "said trough the flower", leaving way too much room for ambiguity and as such misunderstandings that keep on going on as nobody wants to be the guy/gal angering the elephant in the room.
About your VC pitch question: Really depends on the type of sexual advance. While I don't practice it personally I don't see anything wrong with somebody telling another person "I consider you very attractive, do you want to have a good time with me?", it's a given that some people might not be as classy with their choice of words.
Yet it's quite direct, it's to the point and thus doesn't leave much room for misinterpretation or waste anybody's time with ambiguity.
As such I don't see why anybody would need consent for asking, first and foremost it's just a question and not an insult, order or the "objectification" of somebody.
It's another story if with "sexual advances" you mean something like groping, uninvited kissing or any other uncalled for body contact. Needless to say, that's a no-go and nobody ever claimed otherwise.
And yet I'll bet you would never feel comfortable implementing your proposed direct approach in a workplace environment. Or most environments. Because it would make people uncomfortable.
So maybe analyze that feeling. Because the reason you don't have a relationship is not because you can't casually sexually harass women.
Different people consider different things "uncomfortable" during different times. It's an emotion, that's why there are no objective clear cut standards for "what to say without making anybody uncomfortable", it's dynamic just like many societal norms are.
The reason I don't practice the direct approach myself is that, as I've already mentioned, I'm just not interested in casual sex and I'm rather introverted. The irony being: Guys who actually practice it, are more likely to end up in relationships.
Using the direct approach for getting into a relationship, which I have tried, quite often just ends up being seen as the epitome of creepiness and results in ridicule and shaming.
> So maybe analyze that feeling.
I "analyze feelings" pretty much constantly, even over needless memories way in the past. The issue being that you can't look into other peoples heads to analyze their "feelings", as to not to offend them with something you might say or do.
> Because the reason you don't have a relationship is not because you can't casually sexually harass women.
That's never what I argued for and you putting my statements so much out of context, to make me look like something I ain't, just reenforces my original point.
It'd be easier if people would just accept there's two common definitions of sexism going around and define their terms first, rather than beating each other over the head with "well, actually..."
Academic sexism: pervasive attitudes that tend to favor masculine-coded genders over feminine-coded genders. People who adhere to this definition with religious fervor tend to ignore or explain away sexisms against masculine-coded genders (perceived or self-identified).
Colloquial sexism: being a jerk to someone because of their gender. People who adhere to this definition with religious fervor tend to ignore or explain away sexisms against feminine-coded genders (perceived or self-identified).
Both are valid, but they're focusing on different things. Sometimes assholes are just assholes. Sometimes they know they can get away with it because of pervasive attitudes. It's hard to say who has it worse because no one believes anyone when they report, so statistics are notoriously unreliable.
Now what freshly contrieved linguistic contraption is this? Just say "male" and "female", or "men" and "women", no need to obey the latest gender studies fad.
> This is people being assholes because they know they can get away with it.
The sentiment among many men working in the tech industry is that you can get crucified for making even a small compliment to a female. This idea of invulnerability would only be common among top executives and others who wield high amounts of power.
People aren't archetypes or labels;
that's too black & white, un-nuanced thinking. Psychological and sociological reseach proved most people act however they're expected to within a given power dynamic circumstance, except for a few outliers which will go their own way, for anti- or pro-community.
This wrong "bad apples" analogy as it applies to police or genocide perpetrators also is dangerous because it's simply untrue. Well meaning people will commit atrocities if directed to by a superior authority figure; the Stanford Prison experiment and the Milgram experiments underscore this.
Instead, there must be social and business pressures brought to bear to prevent emboldened behavior with accountability.
If there is boundaryless
affluenza anarchy, spoiled brats will overtly behave however they wish. If there are consequences, the behavior will be reduced and become covert. There must be constant vigilance on the part of those
stakeholders to enforce consistent accountability for professional/personal behavior.
Yes. It is a slow, slow decline into the kind of behavior described in the article that could have been stopped or mitigated at any point along the way but wasn't. Not necessarily in terms of how someone is deep down, but in terms of their understanding of how they can/should interact with people around them.
Rather than refuse to understand how someone could have gotten there, let's try to understand the assumptions they made along the way. Then rather than pretending we're unaffected by the culture around us, let's see if we share some of those assumptions. If we want to fix things rather than be blindsided by them, these are at least the first steps.
People must be responsible for their actions, even if an environment influenced their decisions. Yes, to fix the issue, there needs to be larger societal change. But individual perpetrators need punishment as well.
There are two reasons for this. First, punishment of the "bad apples" deters others in the future, and brings about the larger societal change. Second, as a basic principal of a free society, people must be held accountable for their actions.
Sorry but no. The two experiments you cite are ancient and riddled with holes, they are red flags for any psychologist worth their salt. The people described in this article are sexist assholes, plain and simple. You can argue all about how the environment they grew up in made them that way, but not that that's not what they are.
Milgram's experiment has been replicated several time, even in several cultures. Good to know social psychology researchers are not "worth their salt"
And yeah, actually, your culture and socialization is a big part of what you are. You can blame them, but refusing to try and understand how they became assholes means nothing will change.
>Nope. These people are being assholes because they ARE assholes.
To be fair, even an asshole may show some restraint when they have a clear understanding of consequences. Thinking their money buys them immunity from consequence is an enabler as they don't believe they have the slightest need for this kind of rational self-interest.
You are both right, an asshole is an asshole as you suggest, but even so, assholes are worse when they think they won't face consequences as the poster your replied to implied.
I think it's important to distinguish that these aren't people who are necessarily assholes to everyone. They have plenty of friends and acquaintances who would never believe they'd do something like this. And others who upon hearing it, would've assumed it was a harmless misunderstanding.
I think one of the larger problems that society is struggling with is the idea that two different people can be in very similar proximity, interact with the same people and yet one can have to suffer through radically different (and horrible) treatment.
The reason I believe this is so difficult, is the other person legitimately think "I know that person, I know that place, I've gone through that and I've never seen anything remotely close to that." And reasonably conclude that it didn't happen. It's difficult to accept that there is an entire world that they don't ever experience.
But we all need a find a way to account for this, because too many people go through beimg mistreated and their concerns are simply dismissed.
It matters because it creates a situation where one set of people have an awful experience with someone, and another set all say "well, in my experience he's perfectly nice and would certainly never do something like that..."
I suppose the fact that they are assholes in one situation but behave respectably in another is what makes this discrimination? If they were assholes to everyone then....
I think it is an interesting thing I see with successful people that they often attribute too much of there success to their personalities and too little to luck and circumstances. This makes them believe their own bullshit about how great they are, and how bad other people are.
Because the people who have only witnessed them being "nice" are less likely to hold them accountable when hearing of their terrible behavior with others.
Intellectual consistency would require acknowledging the systematic repression of women in western history (not being able to vote, etc), and thus, the effects of what is still a patriarchial culture as often as not.
In other words, your argument attempts to ignore simple historical facts which you can verify easily on Wikipedia.
Where did I ignore that? I called their behavior reprehensible. I'm just saying that it's unlikely the behavior exists in a vacuum and that things are never as black and white as they're made out to be.
Historical oppression doesn't justify questionable behavior. I've seen many instances where women have "dated up" to help their careers. I even saw one instance where a female director dated the CTO and later the CFO to have someone to support her coke habit. Just calling out the men will never truly fix the problem. We need to be giving a consistent message to both sexes. These types of relationships (and expectations of relationships) are not acceptable under any circumstances. Because if it's wrong for men to pressure women but it's okay for women to pursue those men, then there can always be the hope in the back of the man's mind that maybe it's possible.
So if, say, 1,000 men got completely unsolicited propositions, groping, etc. and one man "dated up" at a company with women in high leadership positions, would you argue that those problems are exactly equally important and exactly equally serious and make sure to post comments about how incredibly important it is to ensure some balanced coverage and make sure everyone knows that it's not just solely a one-sided issue? Would you make sure to imply that anyone who focused on the much more common case was "justifying questionable behavior"? And try to drag the topic away from the common case?
Do you also do this in discussions of any other topic whatsoever? Whenever someone posts something about HTTP, do you make sure to post comments about Gopher and present it as being just as important?
I'm not trying to say they're equal problems. I'm trying to say that the one problem contributes to the other. In your example, the one man who dated up creates that possibility in the mind of the groper in those other 1,000 incidents. It's like the 1 super lotto winner among the millions who bought tickets. The event doesn't have to be likely for people to think that they might get lucky...people generally suck at estimating risk/reward. If there are zero winners, no one buys tickets, but since someone wins, millions play.
In the same way, if those advances were never successful, these men would quickly get the message and stop playing. But that doesn't seem to be the case since it's still happening way too frequently. If we want to stop this problem, we need to figure out how to get the message through that even in the cases where the advances were welcomed, they still did something wrong. And that requires more than just laying into those unfortunate few that are unlucky enough to do this kind of thing to women brave enough to come forward. It will require calling out those instances where the advances were welcomed.
I disagree. It's quite possible the behavior was completely unsolicited and uninvited. Things are sometimes exactly as wrong as they appear to be. To assume otherwise, with no evidence other than your own anecdotal experience, is... well, pretty much sexist!
This article, and this conversation is about one pathology. You bring up a different one and say "we should treat them equally!" - that's not very different from the "all lives matter" bullshit.
Sexism and discrimination of women in tech industry is a massive problem.
What you described probably exists in some cases, but is not a) related to the problem at hand and b) orders of magnitude less profound.
By bringing it up here and trying to tie those two together you're devaluating the severity of the problem at hand in the same way as if you went to an article about rape and started talking about those promiscous people who like sex.
Those pathetic douchebags were not "primed" by any experiences with women "dating up". They were primed, trained, protected and covered up by the shitty patriarchal society we live in. And it's worth tackling that problem without attempting to dilute it in "maybe she wanted it" sauce.
The other pathology is relevant because it contributes to the first one. It's not about equal exposure for the sake of equality, but relevant to understanding how shit works and how to deal with it.
Trying to see it from a cultural perspective, how common is it that female character "dates up" in books, TV and movies (and in particular, those targeting a female audience)?
Thinking back at the show Grey's Anatomy, ABC's highest-rated drama show, got a female lead, and was among the top 10 shows in the US. A recent joke the character made was that all of them married their bosses. While fictional, culture impacts perception regarding behavior and in turns causes behavior.
Everyone keeps mistaking my meaning. I'm not trying to excuse the behavior or say that it's okay. I've repeatedly condemned it. But we need to decide what we want as a result of bringing this kind of behavior out into the open. Do we want to punish and ostracize the guilty or do we want to minimize the occurrence of this behavior going forward? If it's the former, then by all means get out your pitchforks and we can condemn these men as fundamentally flawed human beings and women can continue to be subjected to this BS. But if it's the latter, then we really need to approach it from a more empathetic position. We need to understand the thought processes of these men to understand why they thought the behavior was in any way acceptable.
I see a lot of the vilification in these threads, but very little effort towards trying to understand. Chalking it up to "patriarchal society" may be fine from the standpoint of PC talking points, but it is intellectually lazy and just makes the situation more adversarial rather than one where we can come together and figure out the best ways to avoid this happening in the future. We want to make sure that the men who are in a position to abuse women like this learn why the behavior is wrong and not the steps to avoid (sms/fb/etc messages) getting caught.
This is why both pathologies are relevant. I'm not trying to blame the women who try to use their sexuality to their advantage or even those that engage in consensual relationships with men in a position of power. But because those instances exist and these men have likely witnessed them personally, even if they're rare, they create the possibility in the minds of these men. It's an exploration of the thought process that led them to act in this way. Perhaps it's not what these men were thinking...it's just my projection, but no one has presented any argument or any other substantive possibility. They've just, like you, overreacted and sought to distort what I was trying to say because it didn't match the outrage and need for vengeance that they feel.
> or do we want to minimize the occurrence of this behavior going forward?
False equivalence. I would imagine if VCs and investors get the message that if they hit on women they'll be fired, they'll stop doing it.
> I'm not trying to blame the women who try to use their sexuality to their advantage or even those that engage in consensual relationships with men in a position of power. But because those instances exist and these men have likely witnessed them personally, even if they're rare, they create the possibility in the minds of these men.
Okay, so to combat this "pathology", we'll say, "If you engage sexually with someone who approached you in a professional context, consensually or otherwise, you're fired". Seems easy enough, and that takes care of the problem.
> I would imagine if VCs and investors get the message that if they hit on women they'll be fired, they'll stop doing it.
You imagine wrong. Instead, they'll learn how to do it without getting caught. Lesson one comes from these incidents. Don't leave an electronic or paper trail. It's much less likely these women would have come forward if they hadn't had electronic records of chat sessions to back up their assertions.
If you only treat the symptoms of the problem, it will keep returning in different forms. You need to address the root of the problem and your over-simplified view of the issue will never allow you to do that.
In theory, there could be an intelligent psychological model that analyzes a male VC's brain and provides thoughtful suggestions to them to dissuade them from this behavior right before it occurs. While that's a nice thought, it's incredibly unrealistic.
The far more practical approach is to catch the bad guys over and over again, make examples of them and mete out punishment. That's how criminal deterrence works in every other field. No reason to make an exception here.
>> But because those instances exist and these men have likely witnessed them personally, even if they're rare, they create the possibility in the minds of these men
There was never any suggestion that any of the men in the article observed some
woman "dating up" and as a consequence of that felt justified to grope or send
inappropriate messages to the women in the article.
The men in the article themselves did not even try to portray their alleged
actions as justifiable, or excuseable by association with any other past
behaviour. They either admitted their behaviour was wrong or denied they ever
behaved in this manner.
And yet, here you are relating a story about a woman you once saw "dating up" to
try and explain those men's behaviour as something else than a simple mistake
that should not be repeated.
How is this useful, exactly? In what way does it contribute, besides changing
the subject and trying to shift the blame on the people who, in the article,
were reportedly subjected to undeniably inappropriate behaviour?
No it shouldn't. What he is saying is just fine if people would take the time to actually read it.
It's not even that people are disagreeing, it's that they see a trigger word and stop reading, then launch into a straw man attack. I see that frequently in these "social justice" threads.
>> But because those instances exist and these men have likely witnessed them personally, even if they're rare, they create the possibility in the minds of these men
Btw, this does not compute. Those instances are "rare" but those men have "likely" witnessed them? When something is rare, most are unlikely to witness it.
Welcome to the law of large numbers. Winning the lottery is a rare event--more than one in a million. A hard drive failure is a rare event--most drives can have trillions of successful reads and writes before they fail. Yet we've all seen the people holding up those oversized checks and who among us has never had a hard drive fail on us?
These guys see hundreds of pitches. There's hundreds of VCs in the valley. Something can be rare--less than one in a hundred and still be likely. Rare for a single instance can be likely and expected across a large number of instances.
There's a bit of confusion here with "the law of large numbers". People do win
the lottery, but because it's very rare, only very few people do so. Hard drives
may fail if they remain in use over a very long time, but only a few drives will
remain so.
Accordingly, the "law of large numbers" as you report it, means that either only
a handful of those hundreds of VCs in SV have witnessed inappropriate pitch
behaviour, or this inappropriate pitch behaviour is not rare.
Regardless of the exact quantities, it remains true that an event is either
unlikely to be witnessed, or it is not rare. That an event will be witnessed
even though it is rare doesn't mean that it will be witnessed often.
The law of large numbers doesn't say that rare things happen often, is what I'm
saying. Because that would be an oxymoron, not a paradox (which that "law" is meant
to illustrate).
> Intellectual consistency would require acknowledging the systematic repression of women in western history (not being able to vote, etc), and thus, the effects of what is still a patriarchial culture as often as not.
Actually I'd say that dismissing a reasonable point about interactions between individual people using a narrow interpretation of history to establish a non-standard epistemology is the greater intellectual mistake.
In other words, that women couldn't vote 100 years ago says absolutely nothing about whether a venture capitalist abused his relationship with a client or whether a potential client tried to use sexuality for a competitive advantage.
I was always wondering why it is not appropriate to watch the skirt of a woman when I find it nice. Do not get me wrong, I come from a family of feminists, happily married with kids.
But I am also pragmatic : when I wear a nice costume, it is too show off. When going outside, I know I will be surrounded by people who will watch me.
If I wear a flamboyant shirt, I cannot be upset that people are watching me. I find this normal. I will not find normal someone complaining or even getting in contact with me because of that (though, why not?) but watching, even intensely, is OK.
If I do not want to be seen I wear jeans and a blue t-shirt.
This is why I do not agree (including with my wife and mother) that women who wear nice, revealing things do this "for themselves". They do not. Le any other animal, we show how good we are. But we are evolved animals and this do not mean "take me", something people (mostly men) forget.
In short : watching someone who decided to exhibit is absolutely fine. Anything else is crossing the line.
Perhaps their intention is to look attractive to someone they know, and you’re not part of the intended audience. That doesn’t mean you can’t look, but watching “intensely” is likely to make some people very uncomfortable and you should be respectful enough to not do it if you’re not sure it’s welcome.
Men need to work hard to jail those assholes, here's why: They are the reason why men are described as generally threatening, discrediting and imposing huge constraints in advance on all men who show proper social restraint and respect for women.
While I get and understand your sentiment, the problem is that being an asshole and a creep isn't illegal in itself. If some male VC groped a female founder in the course of trying to set up a funding deal, then sure, press charges and make it right, but texting a founder "Why are you still with your boyfriend/partner/girlfriend? We should go out for drinks, I'm so much better than him" is just wrong, but not criminal.
As much as I would like to see punishment for clearly abusive and shitty behavior like this article describes, 90% of the time it comes down to character profiles as this thread explains. Even if it found its way into court, the defense would almost certainly try to be framed as a misunderstanding. Instead of punishing and potentially ruining lives for what is sounding like thought-crime, lets just get men off the pedestal and put them on the same goddamned level as women. A woman shouldn't have to defend her reputation for not being slutty if she gets groped, assaulted or raped, and more importantly shouldn't have to fear retaliation for accusing someone of being not just an asshole, but a dangerous asshole.
Men aren't going to be on the front line of this for the same reason white people aren't on the front line of combating racism [0]: even if we don't do awful things one side effect of which is to reinforce privilege, we still benefit from that privilege. A woman seeking funding has to worry about all the things a man seeking funding has to worry about, plus she has to deal with being pressured into sex. That's not great for society, but it is an advantage for men.
[0] as a white man, it is my privilege to make sweeping statements about whites and men b^)
I wonder how many innocent people we'll end up condemning with this posture. It's not like history lacks any examples that demonstrates that this is exactly what happens when you get tough and prosecutorial. You're pretty much sanctioning a pitchfork and torch attitude and that evolves into mobs that are often wrong.
These days it feels like we've learn nothing from stories like the Scarlet Letter that describe a time from our history where we treated women how you now propose that we treat men. Neither gender deserves this.
> You're pretty much sanctioning a pitchfork and torch attitude and that evolves into mobs that are often wrong.
What you are seeing is the decline of rational and logical thinking. No one wants to think critically anymore, because smart phones reduce available cognitive resources.
So you end up in situations where an inflammatory, poorly researched article emotionally hijacks the brain of a person who would have normally been capable of rational thinking.
I'm not saying that's the case here, but there are numerous cases where outrage porn has ruined the lives of innocent people.
Then why does their behavior disproportionately affect women, who have less power to complain about their behavior? If this were entirely an aspect of their character or personality they'd be an asshole to everyone equally, not opportunistically take advantage of people who have less ability to stop them.
I think they often are. But you don't hear about it, because almost no one cares about males at the bottom of the social ladder. At the bottom, men are "valued" (for a lack of a better word) even less than women.
Or perhaps being an asshole to someone in the mailroom because you didn't like the way round a letter was put on your table is not in the same scale of things as trying to coerce someone to have sex with you
>Then why does their behavior disproportionately affect women
I'm sure they use their positions of power in many different ways that affect both men and women, but their sexual advances obviously target women because most of them are straight.
Part of poor character is picking on people from a position of power, when they have something you want. Part of poor character is putting your urges ahead of your empathy.
Generally, when guys get screwed over by a terrible VCs it's "well they're a terrible vc ... you know them." But when it's by women "they crossed this boundry? I'm shocked!"
> These people are assholes because they know they can get away with it.
So yes, openly bigoted people are assholes. But if they knew their bigotry wouldn't fly, they would at least not be open about it and not be assholes to people.
>women, who have less power to complain about their behavior
The exact opposite is true. Almost nobody would take a man who complains about sexual harassment seriously. Just look at the night and day difference in response to teacher student abuse when the student is a guy or a girl.
I do not understand what world people live in where constant special concern is twisted into a lack of it. I mean, I do, in so far as it's just benevolent sexism masquerading as equality, but I can't wrap my head around those people considering themselves rational.
They act that way because the other person is in a vulnerable position. Most of them will shrink pretty fast when confronted by someone who is not. So they are "selective assholes" so to speak.
The problem is that this sort of hierarchy rewards two abilitys- sliming and kicking - and (if you are good at that) upholding and extending hierarchys.
>These people are being assholes because they ARE assholes.
Never attribute to rational decision making what can be attributed to rotten character.
This kind of thinking is even worse than what they did, because it crystalizes them into some of their decisions and deprives them of being human.
While their acts are bullying, harassment, etc., this characterization is not that different to labelling a race inferior (or attributing some other characteristic as an unshakeable part of it). Only instead of a race it does that to a person (or a number of persons) based on past behavior.
People change, people can behave like assholes in one instance and be sweet and caring in another, and tons of other distinctions.
In the end, this type of thinking is what condemns those convicted in the US to inhuman treatment -- the belief that they are incorrigible because of something they did, and as thus deserve only hell.
High functioning sociopaths. A person can be an asshole and not know it. A sociopath knows they're not acting within acceptable social norms and hides it. These investors are sociopaths. An asshole will make a comment and not deny it. A sociopath will try to twist it into a seemingly logical action ie "I was just trying to get rid of her because I didn't like her idea." By that logic who knows how many Jehovah's witnesses this person groped and/or fucked.
That's actually a medical/psychiatric diagnosis. I don't really think it applies here (or maybe it does, I don't know, I only know that you can't just throw that casually at run-of-the mill creeps).
I believe OP was referring to the studied fact that leaders and business moguls tend to exhibit many more of the sociopathic check points than the ordinary person.
Right, you might call these people manipulative, but on a level where they can camouflage their behavior.
Bill Cosby for instance could possibly be considered one. His also seems more methodical. What's worse: 60 possible rapes spanning decades or 60 possible rapes spanning a year?
Life pro tip: just say them in a calm, explicit and direct manner that you are not interested in receiving their visits and information from them. They respect that. They might show up after a year or so, just to check out if this is the same family living under the number.
They're pretty organised and respectful in what they do, so polite and direct works best.
He touched someone's face once like eight years ago "in a way that made her feel uncomfortable". A stupid, asshole, casually sexist move? Yup. Worthy of being raked over the coals despite bending over backwards to make amends in the years since? Uhhh... no, not really.
Don't get me wrong. The other stories are really, really bad. Insanely evil, even. But the idea that Sacca's extremely minor dick move almost a decade ago deserves to be lumped in with the monstrous stories of serial stalking and sexual battery is pretty ludicrous. Makes me think the writer just wanted to shoehorn in a TV star to inflate the piece's reach.
He, himself, admits that this sort of behavior was a pattern. I don't think he has been or will be raked over the coals, because he seems to exhibit genuine remorse.
I respect him, but my sympathy isn't with him.
I'm sure it's deeply uncomfortable to be under this level of scrutiny and lumped in with people who have been caught doing things that seem skeezier. But you know what's worse? Not being a billionaire and trying to make a living in a world where people you need are more interested in having sex with you than your business value, or at the very least, are more than willing to tie one to the other.
"Seem skeezier"? We're talking about serial stalking, harassment, and sexual assault with multiple victims. Unless there are major facts we don't yet know, what Sacca did, even if part of a "pattern", pales in comparison.
And yet it's his face splashed over the "SEXUAL HARASSMENT SCANDAL" headlines, siphoning energy and criticism from the actual monsters, because he is a TV star so his being mentioned is more sensational.
Dave McClure is basically being given a slap on the wrist for obviously firing-worthy offenses. Would that happen if a celebrity wasn't taking the brunt of the press?
This is only the tip of the iceberg from what I've heard. He's rather well known in circles around Twitter for his harassment and there are several texts I've seen firsthand showing far worse harassment. He preemptively posted this not knowing what they'd disclose in the paper and I'll bet he's breathing easy now that it's "only" this face touch.
He could have left out a couple of the self congratulatory bits about how he's making a real difference, that's up to others. But other than that that post could have been a lot worse.
While I admit I cringed at a few little things, on balance I didn't find it creepy, and I think that assessment just adds to the feeling among many that it's easier to dodge the issue than to try to get involved.
Huh. Who would've thought that allowing wealthy frat bro types* to run amok, wield power over others, and construct cults of personality would engender a culture of sexism and abuse?
(* I'm not, of course, attempting to excuse any who may not fit this profile.)
Huh. Who would've thought that allowing wealthy frat bro types to run amok, wield power over others, and construct cults of personality would engender a culture of sexism and abuse?*
Power is a dangerous thing. This is why we must also be careful of the power in evidence-free accusations and abrogation of "innocent until guilty." Not saying that is necessarily happening here. However, such urging to "listen and believe" comes up when these topics are discussed. Women are no less corruptible by unchecked power than men.
> we must also be careful of the power in evidence-free accusations and abrogation of "innocent until guilty." Not saying that is necessarily happening here.
But you are strongly implying it. In a case where many of the men admitted their guilt, nonetheless. Your comment is just "men's rights" activist talking points.
That's fairly dismissive. He was asserting an unbiased approach at accusation. How is that a "men's rights" activist talking point? Are you suggesting that bias should exists against Y chromosomes?
This makes his assertion a politically motivated non sequitur.
Only if you incorrectly assume a particular intention on my part. However, if you take what I said at face value, it's simply a valid observation. I think it's one of the most important and fundamental observations to be made: that of the power dynamic. Feminism has much to say about such power dynamics. I think your bias is clearly showing.
That is like arguing "I'm just saying there should be equal rights for white people" on a post about white-on-black harassment because MLK Jr had "much to say about equality."
Taken in context it is an attempt to deny the imbalance of power that exists and which civil rights / feminism seek to dismantle.
That is like arguing "I'm just saying there should be equal rights for white people" on a post about white-on-black harassment because MLK Jr had "much to say about equality."
No, it's more like mentioning how people should be judged on the contents of their character, not the color of their skin. It's more like citing the importance of understanding the ideological basis of activism in the protection of individual rights and dignity. These are two points of great importance to MLK's activism where many of today's social justice activists are very weak.
Taken in context it is an attempt to deny the imbalance of power that exists and which civil rights / feminism seek to dismantle.
If you look at the greater historical context, you will find that overcompensation and tilting the playing field "the other way" doesn't produce greater social justice. However, I congratulate you for coming out and saying overtly that you are for creating an imbalance going "the other way." You thereby admit that you are not for a "level playing field" but rather an "equality of outcome."
I'd bet "equality of outcome" is a great way to run a startup! (/jk)
You've misrepresented the dismantling of sexism and racism as "tilting the playing field 'the other way'", a fabricated quote.
You've also utterly missed the point on MLK Jr. Using his words to suggest that racial oppression goes both ways on anything near the same level is a transparent attempt to deny the existence of white privilege. Popping up on threads about the oppression of women with non sequiturs about the oppression of men is exactly the same thing.
You've misrepresented the dismantling of sexism and racism as "tilting the playing field 'the other way'", a fabricated quote.
That's not a quote. That's putting three words in quotes. It's not really "the other way." It's really the same kind of injustice, hence "the other way" in quotes. What we have here is a fabricated charge.
MLK Jr. Using his words to suggest that racial oppression goes both ways on anything near the same level
Sorry, but where do I say that? I never said anything about the magnitude of oppression, and my argument doesn't require it. Please provide a quote, or you are putting words into someone's mouth? (Hint: you are putting words in someone's mouth!) Racial oppression doesn't have to go both ways at the same level to make artificial unfairness problematic.
Here's another hint: If you constantly have to willfully distort the other party's words to support your side of the argument, you might be in the wrong. On the other hand, my argument is made by your words and precisely the point you are trying to make.
Are you suggesting that bias should exists against Y chromosomes?
Many 2nd wave feminists are against such a bias. However, there are 3rd wave feminists who openly advocate this, even to the point of openly advocating the abrogation of innocent until proven guilty -- which is possible through the proceedings of non-judicial organizations (like school disciplinary systems) and by district attorneys in local jurisdictions in the US. Innocent until proven guilty isn't directly enshrined in the US constitution. It's inferred from some other parts of the constitution.
Heck no! That was the whole point of my saying, "Not saying that is necessarily happening here." Maybe I should've left out the necessarily.
Your comment is just "men's rights" activist talking points.
My point is a valid general observation about the power dynamics. One has to worry when valid general observations go unanswered by association with what some group says.
One has to marvel at the thought process that made Marc Canter offer that ludicrous excuse to defend his sexual harassment of Wendy Dent. Also amazing that he prioritizes disputing being her adviser, rather than the harassment allegations online [1][2][3]. The article has prompted more people to outline incidents with him: "Horrified but not surprised by Marc Canter's justification of his sexual harassment. He propositioned me for a threesome many times"[4]. Didn't matter how many times I said no or how awkward it was [5].
I've known Marc Canter for a long time, but I don't know anything about Ms. Dent or her interactions with Marc.
However, he has so many other highly effective behavioral techniques for making people go away, that it sounds pretty fishy that he would just happen to deploy that particular technique in that particular situation for that particular person.
If he dislikes your ideas, he'll usually simply tell you directly and loudly, not hit on you to make you go away.
So I have a hard time buying his explanation.
But I would not describe him as a rich powerful VC holding money and power over the women he harasses.
If what she says is true (which I don't know and he denies), he may be a sexist pig contributing to the toxic environment for women (which is wrong and should be called out and condemned), but he's certainly not in the same category as Dave McClure and Justin Caldbeck.
Absolutely! He's just not in such a disproportionate position of power over the women he harasses as Dave McClure and Justin Caldbeck are.
He has his white male privilege, magisterial facade, and all that, but not millions of dollars and an old boys investors network behind him. But that definitely doesn't excuse his behavior. And his explanation is bizarre.
Mhm. Yet, I'm not sure I'd trust the cops to do anything about it. Heck, it is hard enough with actual harrassment: Groping is even more difficult. We have a hard enough time doing decent things when folks are raped.
If the person is lucky enough to work in a large place, there is som
> One would think having the phrases "hire you" and "hit on you" in the same sentence when communicating with someone undergoing recruitment at your company would be reason enough to take pause for a moment
I don't know the exact situation here, but to be fair, if you were mostly flirting with someone and it was not a hiring situation, this would not be an unflattering thing to say - "hey, I like you and I think you are smart and capable". If in his mind they met as social acquaintances and in hers they met as business acquaintances, it's easy to see how it would seem reasonable to him and horrifying to her.
'adrienne, it looks like you've been hellbanned. I've vouched this post and your other post, but figured you should know so you're not just yelling into the void. When I've run across you I've consistently thought your positions were reasonable and from a group consistently both marginalized and ignored on HN, so I'm very surprised you're hellbanned.
What if the choice were "no investment or attention" versus "creepy attention and small investment"?
Entrepreneurs are so willing to sacrifice, and this should not be the situation, but what if it is? How many of us males would accept these types of advances in order to get our idea funded?
To think that we can remove power from sex is misguided. There were times during my startup that I would have wished for the attention, even as a straight male, if only because it was better than the nothingness that my idea lived in otherwise.
I am white and male and the misogyny I've observed in tech has annoyed me. If it annoys me it must be intolerable to women. I believe every word of it and I could tell a few stories of things I've seen.
I've seen a lot of other kinds of assholery too. Tech has an underbelly just like any other major industry. FWIW I've heard Hollywood and Wall St. are worse.
The one sexual harassment case I saw on Wall Street in the decade I worked there was dealt with viciously by HR, in favor of the victim.
My network informs me that similar efficiency exists across the Street. I'd encourage any women skeezed out by SV to apply for Wall Street jobs: more cash, less groping.
When I saw Wolf of Wall Street I couldn't believe the in office orgies shown. I was like "How don't people get sued". I brought that up with friends in finance and they basically said "oh the stories I could tell" and they were referring to their current jobs.
So apparently that does happen on Wall Street as well?
I'd question that. My wife is a former bond trader. At one point, the guys on her trading desk took her out to drinks, and one asked her, "So, are you still a virgin?" She was about 25 at the time.
Do you think tech doesn't have these problems? I suspect you're going to say that you've never personally seen it, but culture can vary a lot from desk to desk in finance.
Stereotypically, you have cash equities at one extreme and exotic derivatives at the other. Outside of banks, the culture at an HFT firm or quant hedge fund will be completely different from the culture on a "bro-y" bank desk.
Yes because tech is much more culturally diverse, with large amounts of immigrants and second generation children of immigrants. If you've ever worked at a large tech company, you would know that the average team is very quiet because of the cultural barriers. The few Americans on the team are very introverted and again have a slight cultural barrier even with each other because many of them are the children of immigrants. The frat % is undoubtedly much lower in tech (if it's even represented at all) compared to banking.
It's true I would never personally have seen it in tech, but I'll say that my wife has recounted this story to a number of my female friends with 10+ years of experience in tech, and their response is "Seriously? Wow."
While that's obviously not okay, I'd be hard pressed to come up with predominantly-male industry where that wouldn't happen once in a while. Over drinks with inhibitions lowered? Creeper's gonna creep.
Asking a woman who's 25 if she's still a virgin is a clearly loaded question - if she says yes then she's admitting to be inexperienced and should sleep with the the 'man' asking in order to learn the ways of the world, and if she says no then she's admitting that she's sexually active and therefore willing to sleep with a 'man' like the one asking the question.
Creepy assholes use this sort of tactic because they get off on making someone else feel bad. If you see it you really should call them out.
It's context. The scenario plays out differently in most peoples' heads if said to a 40-year old veteran of the industry vs. a 25-year-old new hire vs. a 19-year-old intern. I'd agree that it's inappropriate for all of them, but it's inappropriate in different ways.
I suppose there's more to this story than you're telling, because on the face of it - all I can say is people ask other people such questions over drinks, regardless of gender.
Paying someone for sex is not the same as harassing your coworkers. You're also extremely naive if you think this doesn't happen in every other sales heavy industry.
London just happens to have a large financial sector. I can assure you that the same thing happens in the oil, tech, and real estate industries for example.
If we're taking about anecdotes, I had a friend in college who was a sex worker and most of her customers were in tech.
"Sex worker" denotes consensual sex work, while "prostitution" includes human trafficking.
Also sex workers includes dancers in strip clubs, phone sex operators and adult magazine models none of which engage in the physical act of sex with others as part of their job:
Yeah, weaponized linguistics. The problem is, as any weapon, it can backfire.
General public doesn't give a rat's ass about jargon churned out by all those activists. And I'm absolutely not singling out sex workers here, SJWs tend to be the biggest offenders now.
If public familiarity with some subtle, nonobvious definition of "sex worker" is an important point of their strategy, they are probably doing it wrong. If they are getting collateral damage from the human trafficking propaganda, they can talk about "legal sex work" or whatever to cut themselves from it.
Activists overestimate familiarity with their jargon and ideas in the public. Firstly, because they live in echo chambers. Secondly, because virtue signalers amplify apparent popularity outside of the echo chambers too. It's a trap. Ask people who were sure that Trump will lose.
Its really amusing you have chosen to make up your own ridiculous term - "weaponized linguistics" yet you have a hard time accepting the rather mundane and intuitive term "sex worker." Even more laughable than your own made up term is your use of an esoteric acronym(and no, I don't know or even care what it means.)
Also I was not promoting the term or any agenda I was simply explaining the nature of the term to the OP because they asked. Maybe you should go back and read the context.
I don't have any problem accepting "sex worker". I think it's a fine and intuitive way to describe somebody doing, well, sex-related work. I only don't find it intuitive at all that it must necessarily be somebody working willingly. I think it's an assault on grammar rules and logic to insist that people believe so. Three others appear to agree with me, or at least upvoted that post for whatever reason.
The esoteric acronym is of minor relevance, feel free to disregard it if your time can be better spent than researching this issue.
Note that I took a great care to rant in third person ("they"). Nothing personal.
So, for example, let's say you're an activist and you use "SJW" with the general public. Is that an example of overestimating familiarity with your jargon?
I now feel compelled to explain myself. My use of it was only in a secondary remark, non important for the main point of my post. And I think somebody versed in the nuances of sex work advocacy may have heard of this concept too. If not, well, not much loss.
Interesting that you caught SJW and missed virtue signaling. This is more obscure I think and, admittedly, it was a part of my main point. So, from google:
the action or practice of publicly expressing opinions or sentiments intended to demonstrate one's good character or the moral correctness of one's position on a particular issue.
A bank I worked at in the mid 80's had one woman working on a floor in a fairly separate building away from the main building. That one woman had to endure pretty much constant harassment from two guys who were technically her superior and their boss didn't lift a finger to stop it.
I made a good bit of noise about it to HR and then she begged me to stop because she was afraid they'd let her go. The two guys that did this (Koert Borst and Jos Haarsma, I sincerely hope they read this, assuming they are still alive) were crossing so many lines in their behavior I lost count.
Fortunately I only worked in that department (systems administration) for about a year before landing a job at the computer center which was far away from the main offices. Assholes would be too friendly a term to describe those two, it was downright sadistic how they enjoyed harassing her until she cried.
This is a small thing, but I have multiple friends who routinely had Linkedin requests that resulted in date requests. Having to constantly reset professional relationships back to where they should be is something I, as a guy, have never had to deal with. This is the low tier stuff, and it's still, in my mind, totally unacceptable. There's bigger stuff I'm not comfortable talking about in an open forum. A couple of the people I have in mind have given up on the tech scene and moved on elsewhere.
Many 'successful' people who make it to ceo are more likely to be a psychopath according to the article. And I would describe these actions of the men who are more likely to be psychopath, not normal.
As a culture we are obsessed with psychopaths, but in reality there is nothing out of the ordinary about people who enjoy sadistically wielding power over others. You find them in every schoolyard. The difference between a psychopath and a bully is that bullies act in a way that increases their power and standing, so they are affected by (and can be constrained by) social and cultural norms, especially among adults. Our obsession with psychopaths (and the power fantasy it reflects) reinforces bullies' intuition that people secretly admire and envy their bad behavior.
This is a watershed moment in the VC industry. The dam has finally burst, and we're now seeing the establishment of a new norm in which women who are being harassed go public rather than feeling compelled to hide it. Expect to see many men who were operating under the old norms getting ousted.
Hopefully man on man abuse comes out as well. Sex abuse between all pairings / genders happens but there are not so many women VCs so it's unlikely that's going to come down here. But there are quite a few gay VCs.
My advice to everybody is keep meticulous notes and records of your interactions with others, regardless of gender. This is important to expose abuse and to expose lies.
I am a straight man who has experienced this personally. I can't give too many details without revealing who I am and who the VC was, but I can say the VC works at one of the largest corporate funds, and I was a bootstrapped founder at the time.
The rabbit hole now goes high up, as well as deep.
"In the months ahead, IGE hired more adults, a slew of VPs with decades of industry experience among them. The company also brought on a former Goldman Sachs investment banker named Stephen Bannon, whose mission was to land venture capital."
Wow, thank you for posting for that link! I just finished watching "An Open Secret" for the first time, and it chillingly corroborates most of what Fucked Company humorously presented in that South-Park style documentary, which is how I first heard about the story when Fucked Company covered it contemporaneously.
I only learned about about Steve Bannon's connection to Brock Pierce (who recently posted a Facebook photo of himself wearing a red "MAKE BITCOIN GREAT AGAIN" trucker's cap at Trump's Inaugural Lounge) when Mother Jones and Wired covered it during the last election. It looks like the "First Kid" is trying to work his way back into the White House.
And here's a a map of the rabbit warren: a timeline of the scandals that started at DEN, including Brock's attempts to whitewash his past and ongoing lawsuits around his online gold trading company IGE, which Steve Bannon was involved with, up to his election to the board of the Bitcoin Foundation and the resulting resignations:
DEN Sources:
A document-in-progress compiling firsthand reporting on DEN, Bitcoin, Brock Pierce and the Mike Egan / Bryan Singer lawsuit
You seem to have forgotten to post a link you intended...
The scary thing is that btc is likely the traffickers currency of choice these days. How traceable are btc transactions wrt what types of goods or services are supposedly purchased with btc?
Untraceable if you use a mixer. Why not blacklist coins that have been mixed? It's not hard to figure out whether a coin has been tumbled through e.g. bitcoinfog.
I think most of the resistance to this idea comes from people who've used Silk Road clones, most of which force you to mix your coins. But as bitcoin becomes more valuable and ransomware more prevalent, the argument that silk road is ethical and should therefore be able to function becomes less and less persuasive.
Blacklisting the coins would be easy: Exchanges simply close your account if you receive a large number of BTC that have been tumbled. It's easy to identify the coins and to easy to close the accounts while refunding the coins.
“Untraceable” is a strong promise and I'd be surprised if traffic analysis couldn't de-anonymize effectively with the investigatory resources which a nation-state can muster.
The other key thing is that Bitcoin fails open: if anyone anywhere ever makes a mistake or is subverted the blockchain is a public record of every transaction which is hard to deny and can never be purged. I'm not sure anyone has the operational competency to make assurances in that environment.
Blacklisting the coins would be easy: Exchanges simply close your account if you receive a large number of BTC that have been tumbled. It's easy to identify the coins and to easy to close the accounts while refunding the coins.
---
Seems like the future will be full of black-market banks and money laundering (as opposed to how its always been ;-) #PanamaPapers)
Is this the most difficultt financial problem: We don't want government watching every single move we make, yet we dont want criminals to be able to easily hide all their nefarious actions...
Where is the correct balance?
We have those who are supposedly the beacons of the tech future now being revealed as just as bad as others...
Faith in humanity is being assaulted a fair bit more than it had been in the last few decades...
I think I included most of the links I intended (some were repeats from the previous message but bore repeating in context, and the last one to the timeline has a lot of other fascinating links), but here is another interesting one from Buzzfeed about An Open Secret:
I don't get why you were downvoted. The documentary "An Open Secret" is quite accurate and confirms everything I ever heard about DEN, provides a whole lot of background information and first person interviews, and is consistent with the information in the lawsuits that Brock Pierce tried to cover up and suppress. The video tape that the kid they molested took of Rector's house with all the pills, the gun safe, and photocopies he made of all the documents, the email with discussions and photos of kids Pierce and Rector were grooming, and the audio tape of the confession about molesting the kid, were all very chilling and quit convincing. This is no "Pizzagate" conspiracy theory: it really happened and is very well documented by many consistent sources.
Oh yeah: I guess the Bannon links are worth repeating in this context too, because it's one of the most mind blowing parts of this whole story, now that he's running the country into the ground.
Here are the links about Steve Bannon (Wired published an article in 2008 before Steve Bannon was widely known as the real President of the United States who dresses as Death, then in 2016 Mother Jones pointed out the old Wired article, and then Wired published another article mentioning it):
Oh yeah #2: thanks to Richard Bartle and Wired, here is the the original Debonneville lawsuit complaint and the amended complaint that Brock Pierce illegitimately and unsuccessfully tried to suppress, which documents in great detail the lurid story of DEN, IGE, the Debonneville lawsuit, "Pierce's Great Cover Up", and discusses Steve Bannon's involvement.
30. Steve Bannon ("Bannon") was hired around March 2005 to head the effort of obtaining private equity investment into IGE and eventually take IGE public. All the shareholders wished to cash out on their respective equity in the wildly successful business. From March 2005 to February 2006, Bannon and Pierce's primary focus was on raising investment money for the company. Upon information and belief, during June and July of 2005, Pierce determined that, based on IGE's incredible success, IGE would be valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Upon information and belief, Pierce wanted more stock for his own account. Upon information and belief, Pierce developed a scheme whereby he could pressure Yantis into selling his shares of the company for a value far lower than what Pierce believe the stock would be valued once an investment into the company was achieved.
51. In late January of 2006 and throughout February of 2006, Pierce advised Debonneville that Rector was blackmailing Pierce. Pierce stated that Rector was threatening to involve IGE in litigation which would severely cripple the likelihood of closing the GS [Goldman Sachs] investment. Further, Rector was threatening protracted litigation that would harm IGE and kill any future investment potential. It is believed that this was a false statement made by Pierce in January 2006.
> I expect less VCs to take meetings with women, sadly.
Why? There's a really simple procedure that can solve these problems:
Don't hit on, feel-up, or try to have sex with people you're in a professional business relationship with. That goes double for people you hold power over (managers to employees, VCs to Founders, etc).
If you're really truly worried about false accusations then here's another fix you can have for free: record your meetings, texts, emails, and calls with founders and/or don't meet alone.
I expect smart VCs that are interested in making money (as opposed to lording it over others or using their position to get sex) will continue to take lots of meetings with women.
> If you're really truly worried about false accusations then here's another fix you can have for free: record your meetings, texts, emails, and calls with founders and/or don't meet alone.
It's not so easy. Bullshit accusations leaking on Twitter will be halfway to destroying your career before you even dig up the original recordings, and I doubt anyone will want to listen to your case anyway (if anything, they'll comb over your recordings with a tootbrush to prove you were guilty of this, and a bunch of other things). I too expect VCs to be less willing to expose themselves to such danger.
Do you know what amazes me about comments like yours? You don't have to agree with a course of action to accept the reality that certain things will happen.
> I expect smart VCs that are interested in making money ... will continue to take lots of meetings with women.
OK, so ON NET what do you expect to happen? Lets say I agree and the smart ones take the meetings, what about the dumb ones? Or the average ones? What is the net result of all those different levels of VCs? Less or more meetings for women?
Again, "You don't have to agree with a course of action to accept the reality that certain things will happen".
> "If you're really truly worried about false accusations then here's another fix you can have for free: record your meetings, texts, emails, and calls with founders and/or don't meet alone."
Well, there are two problems with that.
1 - It puts the burden of proof on the accused. I.E. it totally throws out of the window what has become a de facto human right and an universally established legal one in every democracy: "Innocent until proven guilty", into a: "Guilty until you can shows us some footage that proves you are not guilty" (which let's face it, it's basically impossible if the accuser is lying on purpose and knows how to do things).
2 - In America I think you are free to record other people interacting with you or in your office/home (perhaps some American can clarify this), but in many other countries, specially in most of EU, that's a crime. You can't go around recording people unless they are of public interest and in a public situation or they expressly consent to it.
It may or may not be legal to record conversations in the U.S. depending on the state, and depending on whether or not other people consent to being recorded. California has 2-party consent law when it comes to recording conversations. In other words, it's a crime to record a conversation with another person and not tell them: https://www.google.com/search?q=california+conversaion+recor....
(Law enforcement is exempt from this restriction, of course).
As has been pointed out, no one is suggesting non-consensual recording. Starting a meeting with, "do you mind if I record this?" is hardly alien.
As for burden of proof, I don't see it. It's like saying that asking people to lock their houses is a burden, when thieves are the criminals.
If you are a VC having a meeting with a founder, arrange for for more than 2 people to be there, such as a co-VC, a co-founder, a secretary, or whoever. Are business meetings with 3 people suddenly a human rights violation?
The burden argument seems really disingenuous given the context. This is a business meeting, not picking dinner with your friends, and the process is full of negotiation, records, and witnesses. Would anyone protest writing down terms or having a secretary at the meeting to avoid the chance of a contractual dispute later?
> "As for burden of proof, I don't see it. It's like saying that asking people to lock their houses is a burden, when thieves are the criminals."
This is surely the poorest analogy I've ever read in my all life, comparing a burglar trying to enter your house with someone falsely accusing you of something.
What about the burden of proof you don't see if you go casually dressed to shop in some fancy shop and they falsely accuse you of trying to shoplift and you - oh bummer - didn't record everything?
You also don't see any burden of proof on you if you go to some corrupt country and the police falsely stops you for speeding and you didn't record your all trip after the moment you got there (though luck, if you didn't record everything is because you surely did something wrong)? You don't see that burden of proof on you, right?
> I expect less VCs to take meetings with women, sadly.
Why? There's a really simple procedure that can solve these problems:
Don't hit on, feel-up, or try to have sex with people you're in a professional business relationship with. That goes double for people you hold power over (managers to employees, VCs to Founders, etc).
If you're really truly worried about false accusations then here's another fix you can have for free: record your meetings, texts, emails, and calls with founders and/or don't meet alone.
The previous comment didn't allude to illegal recording of conversations without consent. The suggestion was to ensure there was a record of all interactions.
If I'm a VC and I've scheduled a meeting at my office it is as simple as letting the party I'm meeting with know that I had planned on recording for my archives.
Nothing unusual or sketchy about the request, especially in a business setting.
Because VCs are all populated by serial harassers who now realize they can't get away with this crap?
Or are you saying these will be seen as false accusations and thus it'll scare off VCs who aren't run by mysogynist pieces of sh-t?
Because I'm not sure what the alternative is. If a VC is not in the habit of harassing women, they have nothing to fear. In fact, it'll give them an opportunity to court talented entrepreneurs driven away from the immoral part of the VC spectrum.
Everyone has plenty to fear. Any sexual harassment/rape accusations (no matter how untrue) are incredibly damaging, it's very biased towards the accuser.
The people who actually do this shit are scumbags, but there's plenty who will take advantage of this when things don't go their way, and reputation damage is worse than physical for a lot of people.
Sure, if you completely ignore the cultural context.
Rape and sexual assault (of women) is seen as one of the worst possible crimes[0] a man can commit in most Western societies[1]. These crimes are so heinous that even accusations are enough to destroy someone's career and social status, even if the accusations are dropped or proven false.
This is further complicated by these crimes generally being very difficult to prove without recorded evidence and eyewitnesses, creating a dilemma of either treating the accusation as fact (foregoing "innocent until proven guilty") or risking that a criminal can avoid consequences and may go on to repeat his crime. The media often favors the former, people close to the accused often prefer the latter, although even a disproven allegation can sow permanent doubt.
There aren't many crimes a VC could be falsely accused of that have the possibility of such dire consequences and such a low burden of proof.
[0]: The only crime I can think of that society treats as worse than sexual abuse of women is sexual abuse of children.
[1]: This isn't about the relative severity of legal punishments, or in any way a judgement on what crime is "less bad" than another, just how people (and the media) generally react to people being charged with these crimes.
Since the current president celebrates his past assaults on women with no consequences, and threatens his accusers, again with no consequences, and Cosby was recently freed, your thesis that mere accusations damage prominent men rings hollow. The exact opposite is true.
It is so damaging for the women involved (career, socially, and withstanding the barrage of slander, misogyny and distrust that they always seem to face) that it is very hard to step up and simply tell the truth, and you are part of the problem here, with your needless insinuations about false accusations and talk of a low burden of proof.
The cultural context is pretty much the exact opposite. The cultural context is that men with power tend to get away with sexual harassment of subordinates for years before anyone gets caught. Only when there is a mountain of evidence and a small army of accusers does the world actually believe them.
For all of the VCs described in this story - this was a pattern, corroborated by independent sources, and with details in writing. There is in fact a very high burden of proof before anyone even gets blasted in the mainstream media, let alone fired.
I think the distinction that can be made is that allegations of sexual abuse of women are less damaging in some cases than others. That the people in question were able to "get away with it" says more about how their character is generally perceived from the onset than about society in general.
It's true that society is ridiculously "tolerant" of gross misconduct of some people more than others but there are enough examples of lives being ruined by false allegations to validate my original point.
As a sibling comment pointed out, Trump was elected despite his "locker room talk" and multiple women alleging sexual abuse (plus the actual chauvinism he has displayed on numerous occasions). However I would wager that similar allegations would be far more damaging if leveled against someone like Sanders.
There's also the effect that successive allegations sometimes even reduce the credibility of the allegations because of suspected bandwagoning ("Oh, she just wants some of that attention to make herself interesting").
Humans are fickle and irrational, especially when in a group. Individuals tend to be treated differently but this tends to be more about social status than gender itself.
Donglegate wasn't about false accusations, though. It was about a woman publicly shaming two other attendees for what she considered inappropriate jokes in a public setting and then being caught in the blowback when other people were unhappy with how she handled the situation.
Her accusations were factual, although there was discussion about whether they were valid.
Also, the people who agree that her accusations were valid, are also likely the people who think that their behavior was indicative of them being serial harassers.
>The people getting in trouble right now are not the borderline cases of someone saying an awkward comment here or there.
>Also, the people who agree that her accusations were valid, are also likely the people who think that their behavior was indicative of them being serial harassers.
Which is completely unreasonable. Do you remember what she complained about them saying? Dongles and forking repos? They were discussing among themselves, it wasn't targeted at anyone, and any reasonable person wouldn't believe it was sexist.
And IMO the majority of people on the internet were supportive of the guy who got fired, and also thought it was bullshit.
The woman who started the whole drama received way worse retaliation from the Internet mob (which was partially deserved) and got fired as well, so it was tit for tat at least, although that of course doesn't fix the damages.
Are you suggesting the false sexual harassment / rape accusations never happen? I think there are some athletes from Duke who were subject to character assassination and would entirely disagree with you.
It is a significant number. For example in Hardvard campus 20% of the allegations were determined to be false[0]; but this is a controversial subject and the numbers all over the place[1] from state to state and even more from country to country but overall most quote numbers that are not an insignificant number.
You are placing normative (meaning "you should do") moral judgements on a descriptive (meaning "this will happen") moral statement.
My prediction isn't what SHOULD happen, but what I think WILL happen. My personal opinion on what is morally right? As I'm not a VC, utterly unimportant and redundant.
I think you're right. It's "unlawful" but handled civilly.
While looking up the relevant law, I looked through the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of sex and various other things, and discovered that there is an explicit exception written in to the law for members of the Communist Party. So you can totally discriminate against any commies who might try to work for you. Not really relevant here, but so weird I just had to share.
Jeez, the Cold War was a strange time. The exception seems especially weird since political party affiliation wasn't a protected class in the law to begin with. I guess that meant you legally could say, "We only hire non-Communists, regardless of sex/race/religion/...; and white Communist Jain men of Estonian origin."
I wonder if it was just a "safeguard" against members of CPUSA claiming their membership was a religious affiliation.
It sounds like it was an amendment introduced by a confused lawmaker who wanted to make sure the law wouldn't stop companies from firing Communists. The amendment was then accepted on the basis that it didn't make any difference (since as you note party affiliation isn't protected in the first place), so it wouldn't do any harm to include it.
Unfortunately I suspect you're right, at least in the shortish term. The culture in general does seem to be making progress in (fits and starts) this area, but it's gonna take a while.
this response would be as short lived as it is short sighted -- not taking into account that eventually.soon their bias would be measurable and again turn into ethical and PR nightmares for VC's that dont find a way to manage their male problem
Any VC whose reaction to this is "oh I guess I should avoid taking meetings with women because I just can't know what goof will cause me to get sued" is probably already making some women uncomfortable.
If you cannot understand how _stupidly easy_ it is to have a completely non-sexual, non-harassing conversation with a member of the opposite sex, you most definitely should read up on some stuff. I mean this in the most non-snarky way possible.
Wouldn't it be nice if half the population weren't completely turned off by the idea of talking to anyone in tech?
Sales at my company is female dominated, I'm in building next door so I run into them all the time, I just treat them as any other member of staff, politely but otherwise as an amorphous blob.
I don't socialise with work mates outside of work events either, lines get crossed when you do in a alcohol orientated culture like mine.
It's worked fine for me for 19 years employed.
Had one female former colleague assume I was gay because I never hit on her (and she was attractive).
Nope, just not interested in bollocking up a good work environment, it was interesting to watch the dynamic though.
My simple rules for work.
Treat everyone equally, small stuff matters, I went out for coffee and went and asked the cleaner if he wanted one, he looked surprised.
Don't gossip ever, just don't. Leave the conversation if someone else starts.
Be on time, meet deadlines, let boss know as soon as you know you won't.
Be professional, you might know a customer for years but they are still Mr Smith until they say 'call me Bob'.
When a boss makes what you think is a poor decision (business reasons, moral reasons etc) get it in writing.
Always send a recap email after meetings, misunderstandings cost less the earlier you catch them (much like bugs).
Great list. Its interesting how good ideas for how to conduct yourself in a business environment will naturally exclude creepy and/or harassing behavior AND will also leave far less room and opportunity for false accusations to take root.
Its not foolproof by any stretch, but it's excellent risk management on multiple fronts.
I've been working since I was 18 and in 19 years I've seen a lot, experience is learning from your own mistakes, wisdom is learning from other peoples.
It's really not that difficult to maintain a professional attitude, it's a skill like any other it's just the modern workplace isn't always conducive to it, frankly I'd prefer a more formal workplace than informal all things been equal.
The risk is that some go-getter will use a harassment thread as leverage over you. No matter how saintly are you, in the current culture nobody is going to believe you if you're a man accused of harassment - so why open yourself up for the possibility?
Maybe the best way to phrase this is "If there is mutual attraction." Plenty of people marry their co workers. And there are plenty of non creepy/harassing ways to figure out if someone else is interested.
That's a bit of a different scenario, though. The statement I objected to is sexist in at least one of these two ways: 1) it presumes that women appreciate these advances from men in positions of power simply because they're attractive (i.e. that harrassment is "forgiven by default" if it's done by an attractive guy) or, 2) women are vacuous and easily charmed by attractive men to the point where they don't recognize sexual harassment for what it is.
It probably isn't sexist to say that people appreciate advances from someone who is extremely attractive, as long as both are available and looking.
The problem is that it's inappropriate to express interest if you're in a position of power over someone, whether you're a man or a woman. I think you were saying that, but point #1 lacks that context.
(Assuming no supervisory relationship or other power imbalance,)
Make an introduction. Make your mild/budding interest in them clear enough. Ask them to do something that's clearly not work with you.
"Hey, want to get coffee sometime this weekend?"
You'll find out if there's preliminary interest or not. If they're interested but busy, they'll figure out how to make that distinction clear. If "sorry; I'm busy" is the entire answer, just assume they're not interested. You get one "free" chance here; make it fairly clear that you're interested; don't invite them out for a "team dinner" and then arrange for the rest of the team to not show up or other chicanery.
Unfortunately, it's not quite that easy. Sometimes it's not clear that you're asking them on a date. Ex. I've asked a professional associate out for drinks. I thought it was a date, she didn't, and she was offended when I tried to flirt a little. (I stopped once I realized she wasn't interested, but it could have been offensive.)
Personally, I've stopped ever pursuing anyone who works in the same industry due to the potential for weird dynamics, but it's sometimes not as cut-and-dry as people make it sound. Like the example with Chris Sacca, is flirting with someone at a conference a form of sexual harassment?
That chicanery happens when the man is insecure and thinks a woman won't go out with him unless it's a team dinner. If there's a magic potion to turn an insecure man to become more secure without the man doing stupid things and screwing up asking out women, you'd make trillions.
I'm not saying what sokoloff said is wrong (or doesn't work) but I'd not invite a woman (or a person) to coffee before getting a physical approval. This physical approval (eye contact + smile) is usually a certain indicator of interest. I'm talking about same level co-worker.
I'd not go with a co-worker that I have power on (like being the direct manager, or the VC). I can see many ways where the relationship can go awfully wrong.
There should be no one on one meetings for any plausible business venture. Both sides needs to have multiple players to protect all interest and keep discussions to the subject at hand.
I would suggest than anyone who does get into such meetings simply demand the presence of multiple persons. This isn't a buddy lending money to another.
Scenario with a female founder: "Listen, I want to meet you but as we have an at least one woman present policy for any meetings with female founders, adn all the female partners are booked for the next week, I'm afraid I can't meet you".
Vs with a male: "Hells yes I'd love to catch up for coffee, I love your idea. Unfortunately, it will just be me as everyone else is busy".
> One example was the Americans With Disabilities Act, and we told the story of a Los Angeles orthopedic surgeon named Andrew Brooks. When a deaf patient came to him for a consultation, he realized that the A.D.A. required him to hire a sign-language interpreter for each visit if that’s what the patient wanted. The interpreter would cost $120 an hour, with a two-hour minimum, and Brooks wouldn’t be reimbursed by the insurance company:
> That would mean laying out $240 to conduct an exam for which the woman’s insurance company would pay him $58 — a loss of more than $180 even before accounting for taxes and overhead.
I wonder how the tech will handle false accusations, though. The culture of "guilty until proven innocent" opens up avenues of abuse, which were, are, and will be used.
Usually those people are repeated offenders and once first victim comes out, other are encouraged to do so too. That would give claim more weight. False accusations are rare anyway, but I understand your concerns.
Wow, this seems terrible. For these women (and from the sounds of it, many more) to always have to second guess if an investor likes them for good business reasons or whether it's just because they're pretty.
To always dread meeting a new business contact, knowing there's a small but substantial chance he'll make some awkward comment.
Some thoughts:
1. Is this more common in silicon valley than elsewhere? (I've never seen any remotely similar male->female sexual harassment in the non-valley places I've worked)
2. Is this more common among high-powered people than low-powered people (seems definitely so)?
3. There's definitely a double standard here. I once worked (in tech) with a good looking former male model. There were many very suggestive comments made to him and about him, and they made him feel obviously uncomfortable. Of course, the women making these comments did so pretty openly and with humor, as female->male is not really considered wrong for sexual harassment.
4. Obviously some of these remarks are worse than others. But many people do end up dating and marrying their coworkers (Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, Phil Knight...). I think there is not a black-and-white line for suggestive comments to people you are connected with at work. The line is thick and grey, but wow do some of these guys not have any self-awareness.
I just want to elaborate on point #4. I chose those examples purposefully: Those three are all well-known business leaders who have dated or married their subordinates. Presumably, there was a point where Gates/Brin/Knight initiated or suggested to initiate romantic involvement.
If as it turns out the woman had not been interested, in retrospect, would the methods of initiation seem like sexual harassment? I believe it's very likely they might.
Again, there are clearly methods that are right and clearly some that are wrong. But I have a feeling the large grey area can be considered harassment if a woman turns out not to be interested, and adoringly recalled in a heart-warming wedding toast if they end up getting married.
If the women isn't interested, you stop. Seems like many men have a problem with rejection and accepting no, that's usually when it becomes creepy.
Had Gates asked his now SO out and she said no and then he politely went on his way like a respectful human being I really doubt anyone would cry sexual harassment.
I feel like this is much easier said than done. Emotions can be complex and fickle. Many books have been written about how to woo a potential mate. There have been tales of love potions for hundreds of years. The dating scene is filled with people who use subtle manipulative behaviour to score.
What I'm trying to say is that it can be very hard to know whether someone is interested. And the success of your wooing efforts determines -- retroactively -- their creep factor.
It's pretty easy to tell if someone is interested in you. It's when you ask them on a date, and they say yes.
If they say no, the respectful thing is to drop it.
Do the respectful thing. This is really uncomplicated. There aren't any "ifs" or "buts" after that. The notion that this is the time to start wooing is absurdly wrong. That's the time to know you've been rejected, and move on.
Accepting rejection, incidentally, seems like something many of these VCs have trained themselves to be terrible at professionally.
Haha. You'll want to read the story of what he actually did before making this assumption. If the names were redacted from the Bill and Melinda story, everyone here would be calling for his head.
I can't find anything other than that he awkwardly asked her out (after dating a number of Microsoft employees). Most of the recent stories read like sanitized rewrites of history.
But I did find this somewhat interesting 1995 history of the lengths they went to in order to protect their privacy:
He cornered her in the parking lot after watching her for several weeks and asked for her number. She said no, mentioning something about him not being spontaneous enough. She didn't give him her number.
An hour later he called her at home, having obtained her number through her personnel information, saying, "Is this spontaneous enough for you?"
This is the wealthy CEO talking to a junior new hire.
I can only imagine the mob if someone like Travis Kalanick did that.
According to the standard some posters here are advocating, that makes Bill an evil sociopathic predator that should have been shamed or even locked up for harassment.
Clearly, these simple Dos and Donts are not so simple. It turns out that he made the correct move, they fell in love, and are married to this day.
Had I been his wing man and he bounced that plan off of me, I'd have talked him out of it and said he was crazy. It makes you wonder if he was extremely socially retarded or extremely socially advanced. He took a risk and it worked out perfectly for both of them.
Yet we want to crucify the guy who joked about wanting to hit on someone in an interview. I don't think that was appropriate but I'd be lying if I said I could find where we are drawing the line between what Dave tried and what Bill tried.
A 34 year old CEO asking a newly hired 23 year old college grad out on a date sounds like sexual harassment to me even if it was just a one time thing.
It certainly raises some interesting quid-pro-quo questions. Every sexual harassment training I've attended has mentioned this as very dangerous territory, but not explicitly sexual harassment.
If a CEO asked a much younger employee out and it made her so uncomfortable that she quit would you still say that it wasn't sexual harassment? Once is still too much. And for all we know Melinda might have felt compelled to say yes to avoid retaliation and only later accepted it.
I think there is something of a disconnect for some men with changes in what is culturally acceptable when it comes to mating as well as holdovers from traditional structures.
There are definitely women out there who will ask guys out, but I'd wager, based on my own circumstantial and spotty experiential evidence in my culture, that it's men's responsibility to initiate has generally remained the case. I think guys who are less adept socially/are timid have difficulties resolving this facet of dating with the decreasing tolerance for overstepping boundaries--some dudes get wet feet because they realize they have to initiate but scare themselves out of it because, compounded with their inherent difficulties in socializing, they now build up this ridiculous fear-based narrative wherein their social clumsiness leads to misinterpretations which wind up screwing them way harder than a simple rejection.
This fear, of course, is unfounded. But I do think the mating initiator in most cultures, whether it be men or women, often relies on 'primal' methods in order to go after potential mates--aggressiveness, shows of power, confidence...When it comes to mating we really haven't moved far away from the schemes of any of our other animal brethren--yes we have money, cars, nice clothes, ambitions instead of colorful plummage, but things are otherwise the same--the old playbook. When you utilize this with restraint, all is well. When you let power go to your head and convince you that things are more animal than they really are and that this sort of behavior is always permissable you wind up like one of our lovely VCs here. That is still the case, and dating is of course nuanced--you have to utilize these peacock techniques but recognize a rebuff when you see one and cease your little dance. I think some guys fail to see the nuance and then read these stories correctly condemning jackasses for their behavior but lack the social understanding to realize this doesn't mean they should paralyze themselves out of asking others out, be afraid to initiate at all, or live under the tyranny of some ridiculous fear that if they so much as a approach a woman it will yield a lawsuit.
Men should learn to deal with rejection, but let's not pretend that they don't have the burden of initiating. I've literally never been asked out by a woman in my life.
I've been pretty successful with women in my life; whilst I was nerdy as a teenager things changed and I've since had a lot of luck with women.
In Europe, where I live, I have never been asked out by a woman that I can recall, despite having had plenty of girlfriends here and good relationships. Men always have to make the first move. The most extreme case of this was when I briefly dated a Russian woman. She had recently divorced with a young kid, and was incredibly beautiful - I couldn't believe my luck when we got together. But I kept asking her out on dates, we'd do a date, it'd be fantastic, and she'd go home the next morning ... without suggesting we meet up, or informing me of her plans, or even what she liked to do really. She'd just go home. At the time I figured she maybe just wanted some fun and didn't wish to begin another relationship so soon after ending her marriage. I took it as a hint that causal dating was fine but she didn't want me intruding on her family time. So eventually I stopped asking her out on dates. I was looking for something more serious and was hoping for her to suggest something she'd like to do instead of always waiting for me, but it wasn't happening. I found out later via mutual friends that she was quite upset when our dating stopped and she'd been hoping it'd get serious. Just that in Russian culture, men are expected to take the lead and tell the woman what's going to happen to a much greater degree than in my own culture, and I'd totally misread her.
However, in America, I've been asked out by women. It's a vastly more forthright culture where "sassy" women are lauded and "go getting" is seen as the way forward.
Given how international tech workplaces are, you're getting vastly different dating cultures and expectations mixed together on a daily basis, in an environment where many men don't get to meet many women. I work in tech but virtually all my dating has been with women I met outside of work. But my colleagues often don't have a social life outside of their colleagues.
That’s a very important aspect. If the difference between inappropriate harassment and the start of a sweet, romantic Pam-and-Jim-like story is the question of whether she‘s interested or not, we are in for a lot of grey area and uncertainty.
Bezos and MacKennzie met while working together at the New York City hedge fund D.E. Shaw.
In a Vogue interview, MacKenzie said Bezos was the first person she interviewed with at Shaw. She asked him out to lunch one day and they were engaged three months later. She was only 23 years old when they married.
“My office was next door to his, and all day long I listened to that fabulous laugh,” she told Vogue. “How could you not fall in love with that laugh?”
Replying to #1, I think you are likely to see this dynamic in any industry where there are huge power imbalances, especially in an industry with tons of aspirants and very few successes (no one wants to jeopardize their potential "big break"). For example, Hollywood is pretty famous for this type of behavior.
People are talking about "sexism in tech", but this case much more about "sexual harassment by the powerful."
It's a lot to do with the culture of entrepreneurship-- to do this stuff well requires taking a lot of risks without a lot of oversight. You can become fantastically successful doing it too, which comes with a whole host of other psychological dangers. And there is an obvious power imbalance at play. AND most critically, it's a culture that is very relationship based, where you don't want to burn bridges. It's not at all clear that the women that came forward, even now, are going to come out of it unscathed. Nobody's gonna come out against them now, but if they want to raise another round next year, who's gonna pick up the phone? I hope it isn't an issue, but if it were, there's no telling why your round didn't clear.
Also want to reply to #4. The thing that differentiates the sexual harassment in most of these cases is that there's a power imbalance. Being hit on becomes much scarier if declining might jeopardize your job or your startup's funding.
That's a fair point, but I chose those specific examples because there was a power imbalance. Brin was a co-founder of Google, where Amanda Rosenberg worked (dated for at least a bit). Bill Gates met his wife Melinda when she was a Microsoft employee (still married, 23 years).
And Phil Knight (founder of Nike) actually met his wife when she was a student in his accounting class (power imbalance #1). He then hired her at Nike (power imbalance #2) and eventually initiated a romantic relationship with her[1]. They're still married today, ~50 years later.
[1]This courtship, and the entire Phil Knight/ Nike story is told in his memoir, "Shoe Dog", which has 4.8 stars on Amazon, is highly recommended by Bill Gates, and is the best business book I've ever read.
Does that mean that powerful men should never hit on women?
A rich and powerful VC is almost always going to have more power than any woman he meets. Even if they're not actively raising money or trying to get a job, he's still a powerful man who could someday offer those things.
I'm not trying to be trite here, but I really do wonder what the line is. Even as a man, I certainly pay attention to my interactions with powerful men (investors, CEOs) despite not currently trying to get something from them. If they hit on a woman in that scenario, would it be harassment?
"A rich and powerful VC is almost always going to have more power than any woman he meets."
It means that he should be very careful in doing so, and in any case never do this in the course of his work - e.g: in the course of negotiating with entrepreneurs, or even co-workers.
I suspect that if this happened in a non work situation, it wouldn't gather this amount of outside attention. Would a tech VC, hitting on a TV anchor or an actress(say) be considered inappropriate, if he has nothing to do with the media business?
I genuinely don't know. But I suspect if he keeps his love life separate from work, things would get tremendously easier.I think "power imbalance" becomes a factor only when a working relationship is involved.
Still, interesting question. I think it behooves anyone who has significant money and/or power to be very careful in conducting their love lives.
My personal strategy is to avoid flirting with or hitting on anyone from the same industry entirely, but I think it's pretty restrictive. People want to have common interests with their partners, and both working in tech is a common interest so I can understand why people pursue it.
It's quite clear that hitting on a subordinate is unacceptable, but when you don't work together it's a lot less clear. Would flirting with someone at a conference party be harassment? What if you were from different companies, but at equal levels? What if you're a VC and she's an entrepreneur (but she hasn't mentioned raising money from you)?
"Would flirting with someone at a conference party be harassment? "
People have been evicted from conferences and lost their jobs for using 'inappropriate' language that some one passing by happened to hear.So yes, I would think this is a dangerous thing to do, and possibly a violation of the conference's code of conduct if it has one.
I made no comment on whether such things 'happen all the time' or not. They probably do (and remain potentially dangerous for the careers of people who do).
My point is that saying they're dangerous (and we shouldn't do them) is not really helpful, since humans being humans we'll likely still do it. Instead, I'd like to think of ways to reduce the harm and make the dynamics less problematic.
Like, in theory coworkers should never date but in practice that's impossible to enforce. So many companies instead enforce a ban on relationships down the chain of command, which is both workable and addresses the biggest power dynamic.
a.) I've worked elsewhere for ten years prior to moving to Silicon Valley and I've never seen anything like what is described in the NY Times article. Also, every company big enough to have a HR department that I worked at also required employees to watch sexual harassment training (how to recognize what not to do, not a how to) videos.
b.) The companies here in Silicon Valley that I worked for that were not startups also all had HR departments that required me to watch sexual harassment prevention training videos.
Expressing romantic attraction to someone can be fraught. One party or other usually has to make some sort of leap, and that leap has the potential to backfire.
So. This is why adults learn how to do two things:
- Thing 1: Read the other person. It's entirely possible to take actions that could lead to romance, but that also allow both parties the ability to gracefully back out. Normal people should accept when the other person gently signals disinterest and attempt to restore the previous relationship. So I can believe that someone could form a solid and real romantic relationship with a subordinate.
But:
- Thing 2: Some people are creepy assholes with shit-bag pick-up lines who clearly don't see or care to see the lines between work and romance. These people say things like: "I was getting confused figuring out whether to hire you or hit on you." Normal adults know that this is inappropriate and wildly uncomfortable (at best) for the target. It frankly feels like the actions of someone who has learned about women through Penthouse letters and porn (depending on their generation). It's like a pizza guy who thinks women opening their doors to pay for pizza are offering a sexual come-on.
Executive summary: Trying to establish a romantic relationship with anyone is tricky, especially if you're already in a position of power. But normal, respectful adults know how to do so in a way that doesn't ruin relationships, offend people, hurt people, or confuse business relationships. Generally they do this by not muddying existing relationships and by by giving the other person a graceful out.
1) 500Startups considered these issues to be serious enough to remove McClure from his role but didn't publicly disclose this. This meant that he presumably could continue to meet female founders and other WIT while still appearing to be in a position of power.
2) A number of LPs in 500 have stated that they were not told this change had happened and the reasons why. This suggests that 500 were trying to keep this as quiet as possible.
3) McClure continued to represent 500Startups in his official role after his apparent removal. A few weeks ago he was deeply involved in the launch of 500Melbourne in Australia.
4) Eight days ago Tsai tweeted "Binary Capital's Justin Caldbeck accused of unwanted sexual advances towards female founders. Where's the outrage?" while at the same time being fully aware that 500Startups was not disclosing McClure's behaviour.
500 Startups has done good work in the past on diversity but this appears to extend beyond McClure and they need to adopt full disclosure and address what from the outside could look like an attempt to cover-up inappropriate behaviour.
Regarding (1), the disclosure could border on defamation. While "truth" is an affirmative defense to defamation, in this situation it would involve providing internal emails, texts (not necessarily internal), testimonials -- and verifying them.
News flash: finance guys have predatory attitudes toward women.
OK, not news at all. VC is part of the finance industry. No, it's not "disruptive" or in opposition to that industry in any way. Just look at who's putting all that money in before it's doled back out to entrepreneurs. Look at who has the power to force someone like McClure out. Yep, just a differently decorated branch office of Wall Street.
VC partners hew to the norms of their own industry, not the industries they invest in. The finance industry is a notorious bastion of the old boys' club preying on everyone else, with much of the dirty work done by hyper-aggressive young bloods vying to be among the very few elevated into the inner circle as its older members die off. Of course VCs behave this way, just like TV/movie producers and all the other specialized branches of the finance industry. How could anyone have expected or believed otherwise?
McClure is a marketing guy. Yes, VC is a niche area of PE. But you don't overwrite 20 years of cultural influence from your main profession just like that.
For everyone who is wondering why these people act the way they do, the answer is that their actions work some of the time. Otherwise, why would they do it if they continually strike out?
What one person might see as harassment, another might see as an exciting "chase". I've known women who have had guys be very aggressive (it's a fine line) and they were quite taken by it.
This of course is not excusing the behavior whatsoever. If you lack the social skills to see when you've crossed the line, the best approach is avoid the behavior all together.
I don't think this is true in general. When people have a deeply ingrained notion of How X is Supposed to Work behavior can persist through a massive amount of evidence as to its ineffectiveness. Also just because you realize something isn't working doesn't mean you know what you need to alter to get something more effective. A lot of people who fall into the aggressive PUA-adjacent universe respond to their tactics not working by thinking "must have not been aggressive enough".
> For everyone who is wondering why these people act the way they do, the answer is that their actions work some of the time. Otherwise, why would they do it if they continually strike out?
Eehhhh... I don't buy that.
I think some guys just literally have no real idea to create romantic relationships. The best they can come up with is trying to leverage their financial power with shitty pick-up lines.
>Otherwise, why would they do it if they continually strike out?
lol, I know lots of guys who strike out every time. I suspect they repeat behavior because they don't know any better and it's low effort and low risk.
This also "worked" with Ms. Meyer who tolerated being groped, but not because she was "quite taken by it".
But I definitely see your point, though I'd argue that in this kind of position you should use different dating strategies if even at all.
These kind of power dynamics taken to an extreme are for me the biggest reason why incest has to be illegal.
Similar to a parent child relationship, you don't have any common ground for consent with your subordinate.
I give a lot of credit to women like Susan Fowler who were brave enough to speak out, with starting what feels a bit like a tidal wave. I hope we see similar light shone on institutionalized racism.
You'd rather say that she was sufficiently well connnected to make her voice heard. Even then she came public only after she had left the company and was employed elsewhere.
> You'd rather say that she was sufficiently well connnected to make her voice heard.
Most complaints of this nature damage the victim's career prospects and/or end up with loss of job/funding/etc. There is rarely evidence because the few who perpetrate this kind of behavior often deliberately avoid leaving evidence. They also rely on societal signals that most people don't believe it or don't care.
It isn't very hard to figure out. Every rape trial includes a huge segment on what the victim was wearing, as if that mattered. The message is clear: this is the way powerful people work, deal with it.
> Even then she came public only after she had left the company and was employed elsewhere
Indeed. Anyone who was old enough to understand the Clarence Thomas sexual harassment investigation can recall how much Anita Hill was dragged through the mud, despite having a compelling case.
I think the fact that Susan was not currently suing Uber was the primary reason why her story was believed by the general public. The critics who would howl "she's just trying to make false accusations for a payday" had no ammunition. Either that or things have dramatically changed for the better since the 90s.
I had always heard the constant murmur of sexual harassment happening in the Valley, but I was never sure if there was any merit to it. I anecdotally had never seen anything that would even come close to a situation like those described, so I kind of brushed it off.
But then articles like these come out. Wow. These are some of the kingpins of Silicon Valley shown sexually harassing with hard, factual evidence. I had no idea.
Aside, and not meant at you specifically, but: Next time you hear "a constant murmur" of harassment, racism, or other bad behaviour, _believe it_.
That constant murmur is the sound of a thousand stories like this that don't (yet) have the coordination to hit the pages of the NYT at the same time and become "credible". A month ago, there were dozens of female founders sitting on stories like this who were still afraid to go public. And they were afraid because good, decent people like you, who "had never seen anything like it" would "dismiss it out of hand" if they told.
(Obligatory disclaimers: You don't need to believe every story 100% unconditionally, but "a constant murmur" = "multiple corroborating sources" and should not be ignored. Also, I want to praise rather than criticise the parent comment, because acknowledging why we were ignoring these stories is a vital first step to not ignoring the next one we hear.)
While there's something to your comment, and I fully recognize I was in the wrong here, I would still have a really hard time believing in a constant murmur of bad behavior. Give credence enough to investigate and consider much more fully that I would have previously, absolutely, but I draw the line before "believe." Maybe that's just semantics.
Yep. What I'm saying we should learn from this, and Uber, and all the rest is that we should treat "a constant murmur" as much stronger evidence than we currently do. (Not necessarily a slam dunk - but, in Bayesian terms, it should shift your priors much more now than it would have before these stories came out.)
Edit: Although really, what stronger evidence will you ever get? I suppose you could get a personal account from someone you trust (but that's not something you're going to hear if you're in the habit of brushing off such stories - most commonly, "honey, are you sure you're not just misinterpreting him?"). Barring that, a constant stream of similar rumours is the only evidence of a problem like this you will ever hear - until there is a "Susan Fowler event". Update accordingly.
It certainly depends on your position relative to the person; but many people who are in a position to do something are also in a position to investigate -- they can take correspondingly stronger action, on the basis of an investigation.
For example, Teo had plenty of resources available to him, if he wanted to follow up on the rumors he had heard. He just chose not to do so.
The same is true at Uber: within the company there was a wealth of information available, and it was certainly feasible for Kalanick and many other people to look into the available complaints, emails, performance reviews and transcripts to determine if something was amiss.
It is true that people outside of Uber, and people not as well connected as Teo, would not have these resources available -- but then again, those people are not actually going to go into Uber and start firing people (for example), though they might refuse to associate with people they had heard rumors about.
When you say "we should treat 'a constant murmur' as much stronger evidence than we currently do.", I would ask you, evidence with regards to what? What would you do based on this kind of evidence?
It can't really be treated as "evidence". Maybe it's "probable cause" for looking into something -- but that's different in a couple of important ways:
* One needs real and credible evidence to carry through with depriving another person of any liberty or property.
* Probable cause never trumps or adds to evidence -- if you investigate and find nothing, that's it.
One of the most confusing and unfortunate memes of the past year is this "believe women" stuff, because it confuses strong suspicion with proof. If these cases show us anything, it's that there is plenty of real and credible evidence -- no need to go on intuition or suspicion.
In a court of law, personal testimony is evidence. It isn't necessarily compelling by itself, but the idea that it isn't evidence because you don't like it is not actually how the legal system (or culture) works.
A "constant murmur" isn't testimony. Testimony includes specifics like the people involved, the time and place of the incident, and what precisely happened. A murmur doesn't need any of that. Not the least, because no one goes on the record for a murmur.
...the idea that it isn't evidence because you don't
like it is not actually how the legal system (or
culture) works.
What does this have to do with whether I like it or not?
> Next time you hear "a constant murmur" of harassment, racism, or other bad behaviour, _believe it_.
Um, no?
There's a constant murmur of racism in SV companies. I haven't seen that at all. In fact, the opposite. Doesn't mean there's no racism, but I'd rather have actual examples before I buy into that line.
There's a constant murmur of ageism in tech companies. I haven't seen that either. Plenty of people over 40, over 50 in tech. Fewer over 60, but this is a newish field still.
I've managed to go some 20 years in tech without seeing hardly any guys openly hit on girls at work -- except a couple of cases where they're now married. So why should I just "_believe it_", before reading stories like these recent articles?
Believe it or not, there is stuff happening that you are not aware of.
If your first reaction to hearing such things is "Well I've never seen it, therefore it probably doesn't exist", maybe some self-reflection is in order.
Thanks for the tip. I didn't realize other stuff happens around me.
But still, there's lots of "constant murmurs" that don't pan out, and in many cases they're driven by agendas. It's easy to make or perpetuate claims when there's no attribution, no specific examples, etc. Just vague innuendos.
So if some vague innuendo is contrary to my personal experience, yeah I won't believe it as fact.
Kudos to these women for bringing VC sexism out of the realm of murmurs.
Sure, I'm not saying you should 100% believe everything you hear. Just that dismissing such things outright based on a lack of personal experience is also not the right way.
The poster above me said (and emphasized) that when there's constant murmurs, you should _believe it_. Very wrong. Keep an open mind, but don't "believe" it outright just yet.
Because these stories are an object demonstration that this sort of thing can be happening in a blatant, undeniable way - seriously, read those texts - and the men around can never see it. So, "never seeing it" isn't really strong evidence that isn't happening.
(Compare catcalls. Female friends I trust tell me this happens to them all the time. Around me? ~Never. But that's cause it happens when I'm not there. Extrapolate.)
I don't see any texts that people around me send each other privately, so as far as 1:1 private communication goes, yes I'll "never see it."
I'm not doubting the stories posted in these articles. But I'm not going to believe something just because there's a "constant murmur." There was also a constant murmur that Obama hated America, etc.
Your catcalls example is not a "murmur," it was people you know, telling you what happened to them. That's different.
because things happen outside your immediate circle? Like maybe you work at a better company than most?
For example, if on your team of 20 engineers you have 3 women, then your team is already above the national average.
It's for the same reason you can think there's systemic racism in the American policing system without thinking that your cousin is racist because they're a cop.
If you work at a tech-company, you might think, "oh, that happens at Uber, but not here".
It almost certainly does.
One of the easiest things men can do to help is collect those stories anonymously, curate them, and share them broadly. (For example: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-23/at-google...) Women shouldn't have to bear the brunt of the burden of making the majority believe them.
> Women shouldn't have to bear the brunt of the burden of making the majority believe them.
Accusers always bear the burden of providing evidence.
What people need to do is actually reserve their judgement. There's no need to choose sides when it's two people's words against each other.
For a victim, it's great to speak up, even with no evidence, in the event that there is a pattern and other may speak as well, like with what's happened with Bill Cosby. But if you have no evidence, people shouldn't just believe you but they also shouldn't call you a liar.
"Apologies" like Chris Sacca's [0] don't make you too hopeful.
Often I have committed as their first limited partner and encouraged them
to use my name and participation to attract other investment. I’ve
introduced them to my fund’s most loyal investors and made sure they have
had the opportunity to make their case rather than get lost in an inbox.
I’ve also connected them to our trusted service providers saving them the
time and frustration I experienced when trying to get my first fund off
the ground. Above all else, I’ve rolled up my sleeves and spent the time
mentoring many of them in how to approach the business itself and how to
navigate the inevitable challenges that arise.
Yea, that's what VCs do?
Just apologize and take a bit of time to rethink stuff, nobody's going to be reassured by lame platitudes.
"The billionaire who exploited his wealth and position to engage in and perpetuate consequences free garbage bro culture said sorry like 5 times, what more do you people want?"
It would be a good start if he came to this realization on his own, instead of right after being contacted by the New York Times going "Hey, we're going to publish a story about your sexual harassment, do you want to dispute this account".
People make mistakes. Sometimes those mistakes go back years, and sometimes a sudden traumatic event can snap someone out of the patterns of behavior they fell into.
The point is that it's probably a mistake to treat him the same way you'd treat certain kinds of felons. Part of that is to give him an opportunity to contribute in a positive way to the world, like everyone else. If he's genuine, then isn't there some way to do that?
I'd be a lot more inclined to believe that if the blog post weren't a bunch of "I am sorry for unwittingly participating in reinforcing systems of oppression" / "I am sorry for not calling out colleagues" / etc.
He knew exactly what the NYT article was going to say: they contacted him to see if he wanted to dispute it. If he were being genuine, he could have said "I did this thing, I apologize to the specific person I hurt". I'm absolutely giving him room to be genuine, he's just staying well out of that room.
> The point is that it's probably a mistake to treat him the same way you'd treat certain kinds of felons. Part of that is to give him an opportunity to contribute in a positive way to the world, like everyone else. If he's genuine, then isn't there some way to do that?
You could really make the same point for most felons, if you got to know them.
Crazy thing is, because I don't believe in punishment but prefer rehabilitation, I actually think that most felons deserve it more.
Remember that the USA is the land of the 98% free.
Also, like, I thought Silicon Valley was a meritocracy. And venture capital is literally a job where your social skills and business acumen, not your ability to write high-performance C or whatever, is the entirety of the job.
Isn't someone who is too stupid to realize they're harassing their business partners unqualified for the job?
Normally people have to do some penance before forgiveness, especially as the crimes grow more heinous. Continuing to live the rich and privileged life you were leading before, more or less untouched by the hand of justice, does not count for much in this dimension.
If nobody knows or nobody's willing to venture a guess, then we should at least acknowledge that complete social ostracism is a massive penalty. Are you sure the punishment fits the crime? It seems more likely that there's a reasonable middle ground, but maybe someone has a persuasive argument to the contrary.
His reputation is in ruins. It remains to be seen whether anybody will do business with him. Both of those combined equals social ostracism, so we should at least be sure it's warranted.
This sounds remarkably like the sort of sky-is-falling rhetoric I heard on this website when Brendan Eich was pushed out of Mozilla. He's now the CEO of a of a two-year-old startup with $7M in funding. I'd love to have my reputation ruined in the way Brendan Eich's was!
It is technically true that it remains to be seen whether anybody will do business with him, but I strongly suspect they will. For the purpose of accurately testing this hypothesis, note that he already retired from both Lowercase Capital and Shark Tank a couple months ago: https://lowercasecapital.com/2017/04/26/hanging-up-my-spurs/
There are a couple of projects listed there (Zach Braff's new ABC show, his new podcast, some different form of investing): we can see if those come to fruition.
Dragging my name into threads about harassment is lazy analogizing. Adding the post hoc, propter hoc fallacy (I got a CEO startup job and funding after being "pushed out", therefore because of that) is just dopey. I founded Brave, it was not just a job offered to me.
Nothing about my exit from Mozilla made fund-raising or building Brave easier than it would have been without my exit. If I had stayed at Mozilla and managed to sell the Brave plan internally (unlikely), I'd have had lots more funding and market power. What I've done has been achieved through careful planning, hard work, and help from the great team I recruited.
You can stop dragging my name into these kinds of HN threads now (two and counting!).
How is it that the old money industries of Wall Street and Hollywood, no vanguards of gender egalitarianism themselves, seem to have less flagrant sexual harassment issues? Do they keep them under wraps or are they just more mature by now?
They definitely do this WAY more in the music and entertainment industries. The women are probably just less empowered in that industry. The stories of men in power sleeping with young upstarts in the music industry is abundant. If I remember correctly, one of Lana Del Rey's songs (or maybe it was an interview), talked about kissing record label producer or executive or something.. and in her case she didn't have a problem with it specifically.
Here's a testimony on John F. Kennedy's sexism and drug use:
"The dark side of the man she calls "the Great Compartmentaliser", and who would identify himself on the telephone as "Michael Carter", was never far away. One day in the swimming pool, he decided that Dave Powers was looking "tense", and coerced Alford into giving the first friend a blow job. "I don't think the president thought I'd do it, but I'm ashamed to say that I did. The president silently watched." With sex, came drugs. Alford claims she was "the guinea pig" for the president's fascination with amyl nitrate – poppers."
The tech industry, for all it's faults and transgressions, is still a relatively progressive industry (emphasis on RELATIVE). "Old money industries" have been getting away with this type of behavior for decades, if not centuries. Women in those jobs probably see no point in reporting it or coming forward. Why would they? It's not going to make headlines that the secretary at Goldman Sachs gets propositioned for sex by top executives. She's just going to lose her job, in all likelihood.
So I would argue, it isn't that those industries have less flagrant sexual harassment. It's that you just don't hear about it. It doesn't make headlines.
I would say the tech industry is one of the few industries where a tight labor market means workers have power. When they have power, they are more likely to speak up about abuse and know that they will still be employable.
I'm not sure it's that they're more "progressive" but that seems to point in the right direction. My own thought is that tech has relatively more "white knights" and also relatively more people willing to look at their actions affecting the world, even if it's sometimes a distorted view of changing it with a milk startup or whatever. Letting these things slide creates an uglier world to live in, whereas in other industries there's probably acceptance of the way things are or just a sense of being able to switch industries.
Currently I wonder which side will end up dominating tech culture or if we'll remain at war. Some companies have to send out memos telling people to cut out the sex in the stairwells. Others just don't hire any women and try to make sure they're not discriminating in a way that's illegal (not that hard with "pipeline" arguments, at least for core tech positions). And then others have some balance, and make it work or result in drama like this story.
See Wolf of Wall St for most vivid example. I'll also add it's extremely common in sales all over the country. Especially telemarketing, phone sales, boiler rooms, and so on. A large number of women I've talked to over the years in those positions say it's crazy. That movie even brought flashbacks for at least one I talked to who told me of huge parties with barbeque, pools, drugs, and tabs for employees for beer and hotel rooms. I actually went to the first half of one of that company's parties at her invitation. Too crazy and too many hard drugs for me so I left. I've seen similar stuff at corporate offices of what you'd consider boring industries where on the executive or senior level they'd waste company money on parties with dates, secretaries, hookers or whatever. Nowhere near as extreme as the Wolf but same problems.
So, yeah, I have probably over a hundred anecdotes especially in sales but in general saying the right-leaning, ultra-capitalist areas have a lot of it nobody cares to report. Plus, it gets worse in "right to work" (aka fire without cause) states where there's limited job availability or the man/woman being harassed has been at company so long them not getting a reference can be held over them. Lots of reasons not to report.
There's sex at work, but there's also just many relationships that start or get set up at work and lead to marriage. Put men and women together in an environment that already cements a shared general interest and you're going to see that. People who treat every fellow employee the same as an amorphous blob are operating under a strange way of viewing the world.
Anecdotal, but I have friends that live/work in the industry in Hollywood and they claim it is rampant there. It's a husband/wife duo. She's hit on constantly. He's demeaned often with "Yo, your husbands a broke schmuck, I'm rich."
Look up Kesha. Look up Sony emails. Those are just what leaks.
The answer to your question, as other commenters are pointing out, is in the "seem". They seem to have less flagrant issues, but that's just appearances.
While tech still has a very long way to go, at least speaking up is becoming acceptable, and won't bar you from the industry for life. An Uber engineer who speaks up will never work for Uber again, but she can still find work in the industry (if she so desires). Someone who speaks up on Wall Street will be "marked" for life and never have the opportunity to work on Wall Street again.
You're absolutely correct about being "marked" on Wall Street.
Unlike tech, most professional services (banking/consulting/law), don't require particularly skill, but rather the right pedigree, connections, and social background.
Getting a job in IBD at a bulge bracket means years of striving: the right schools, the right social networks, the right way of "talking", the right "look". The rewards are massive: $100-200-300K bonuses even as a young analyst is the the norm. Loyalty, being able to "eat shit", etc are the traits most admired on the street. Being a "troublemaker" and speaking out against harassment (not even just sexual in nature, but just plain bullying/hazing) earns you the label as "weak" and out of a job. If you've been striving all your life for one of these coveted jobs, you can imagine the immense pressure to grit it out, collect your fat bonus, and drink, snort, and purchase-expensive-toys your stresses away.
Wall Street is a different animal all together, and in a lot of ways worse. Having lived on both coasts and experienced both types of people (and still working with both types of people) I can tell you first hand that Wall Street is far worse. There is just more easy money to cover stuff up.
One theory I've seen bounced around is that the more process and institution there is in an organization, the less opportunity there is for sexual harassment. When social interaction at the workplace is limited and formulaic, there's no leeway for someone to sexually harass colleagues. Thus staid megacorps have less of these problems than startups/tech companies. Whether this is true or not, I can't personally say, as I've never worked at the former.
For one - we conflate VC as being "tech" when it's simply just finance (i.e. Wall Street). VC's literally take money and put it into investment vehicles and generate profit from selling those investments. That's basically what Wall Street does.
> How is it that the old money industries of Wall Street and Hollywood, no vanguards of gender egalitarianism themselves, seem to have less flagrant sexual harassment issues? Do they keep them under wraps or are they just more mature by now?
Not quite Hollywood, but look e.g. to what's recently happening at Fox News for an industry where that's also pretty extreme...
LESS flagrant sexual harassment? Ohhhh noooooo. Tech has a ton of work to do and you'll hear no excuses about this behavior from me, but if you think it's worse in tech than in finance in particular you're mistaking "more newsworthy" with worse.
What is interesting is that there seem to have been a burst of articles in 2016, but nothing in 2017. The first three pages of google results above have almost only articles from 2016, and a few from 2012, 2013, etc.
Maybe sexism sells more when it happens in the tech world, but unfortunately, I think it's happening in every industry , especially where women are a minority.
Perhaps because techies are seen as holier than you types? Sexual harassment stories in churches are way juicer stories than about other organisations.
Old institutions in wall street have processes in place to follow up and lay off employees.
Banks keep records of all communications and emails. Whatever you said, it is not just stored and available for searching, it is also randomly inspected by annoying regulators and backed up in a bunker for the next 5 years.
Last but not least, they are not populated by 20 years old brogrammers.
Contrary to rest who says women are not empowered in other domains as much, I will say the reason is there is lesser liability for making the accusation. I think, by hollywood you mean actors, and the impact on the career can be big as the job period for a movie is short and does not completely dependent on looks and experience. Other than actors, the majority of hollywood, there are completely different dynamics(make up artist, graphics designer etc.). And for Wall Street it's clear. It's not under the wraps. I think general public sees them as sexist much more than coders.
Are you...are you really that naive? This is almost all a matter of media attention, which is all a matter of money. You also won't hear about discrimination at the upper reaches in the fashion industry because, guess what, those advertising dollars speak loudly.
Once the West Coast tech world starts paying into the scam you won't hear about sexual transgressions there any more than you do in the world of Wall Street or Hollywood which are, as you hint, 1000x worse. People are just now hearing about guys like Bill Cosby, but his behavior was standard issue.
This is simply incorrect. These other industries are just as bad, and widely understood to be so. I don't think you actually need to look very hard to find evidence of this.
One thing that does define a difference between SV and at least Wall Street is that fast growth startups tend not to have put proper HR processes in place fast enough, which can create an environment in which harassment is easier.
It's far more widespread in both those industries. It gets reported on every now and then, but literally no-one is surprised so those stories never get traction. It's expected, plain and simple.
Hardest-charging--gotta-make-it-big--screw-the-rules guys are not heading to Wall Street or Hollywood, but to the Valley. That's where all the money and action is.
Personally, I prioritize "A problem got solved" over "people are talking about problems." One thing I like about this article, the Uber situation, and so on is they're getting some results. The massive problem still remains and is the lede but that's another good one.
Saying anything, the women were warned, might lead to ostracism.
The problem is that women are already being ostracized. When you can't get hired or you can't get VC money or you can't get business connections because the only time men will talk to you is to hit on you, you are already basically dead in the water as a business person.
It's a chicken and egg problem. The biggest systemic factor is the absurd gender ratio, but if the consequences of that are self-reinforcing then the status quo remains.
Many people have the instinct to turn to anti-harassment policies and enforcement, but that's like trying to fight cancer with aspirin. It might help a little bit but it's no cure no matter how much you use, and too much will cause problems without solving any.
But "we need more women in tech" is just the problem statement. Nobody seems to actually know how to get there from here.
The biggest systemic factor is the absurd gender ratio
I grew up in Columbus, GA in the highly racist America Deep South. Blacks and whites each constitute roughly 49% of the population of Columbus, GA. This has failed to turn it into some kind of racial paradise. Also, from what I gather, black slaves on plantations often outnumbered the white owners and their family members.
I don't think gender ratio has a thing to do with it. Using that metric as justification for the problem amounts to excusing it.
Many people have the instinct to turn to anti-harassment policies and enforcement, but that's like trying to fight cancer with aspirin. It might help a little bit but it's no cure no matter how much you use, and too much will cause problems without solving any.
I do agree with this. This is not a path forward.
But "we need more women in tech" is just the problem statement.
I don't think we need more women in tech. We need to figure out how to treat the women already in tech like human beings instead of whoopi cushions. This needs to be done regardless of how many women there are. Waiting until we hit some quota is just excusing bad behavior in the here and now and that will tend to keep it alive.
Nobody seems to actually know how to get there from here.
Or maybe there are people who have some idea, but no one takes them very seriously. In part because not taking them seriously conveniently serves to keep sexism alive and well while looking totally innocent to most onlookers.
> I grew up in Columbus, GA in the highly racist America Deep South. Blacks and whites each constitute roughly 49% of the population of Columbus, GA. This has failed to turn it into some kind of racial paradise. Also, from what I gather, black slaves on plantations often outnumbered the white owners and their family members.
Race and sex are different. There is no biological imperative to couple off with someone of a different race, such that an imbalanced ratio creates aggressive competitive pressure over a limited supply of partners.
> I don't think gender ratio has a thing to do with it. Using that metric as justification for the problem amounts to excusing it.
It's completely fair to blame individuals for their misbehavior, but when you see misbehavior at scale, there is some systemic problem.
If admitting that the problem is bigger than just one person has the effect of excusing that person, that doesn't make it any less true.
Saying that gender imbalance in the industry is not really the problem in no way denies there is some systemic problem. I agree there is a systemic problem. But I believe gender imbalance is a symptom, not a cause.
> But "we need more women in tech" is just the problem statement. Nobody seems to actually know how to get there from here.
My wife and I are starting in our own tiny corner by volunteer teaching small age-appropriate and (hopefully) interesting topics in math, science, and engineering in K5, first, second, and third grade (as our kids go through those ages).
The first seeds of the gender disparity in tech are sown in pre-teen years, IMO. There are also some significant selection effects later on, but I think those are smaller in magnitude than the original "Daddy, what can I be when I grow up?" programming.
One obvious step is that we need to do what we do in every other subject: force all children to learn enough tech to figure out whether they are good at it or not by making it a required class. When schools do that, they find that tons of girls excel at programming, but probably never would have tried it if it hadn't been mandatory.
Dealing with harassment in the industry is also key, but even if that was eliminated completely it wouldn't close the gender gap that exists by the time kids graduate high school. And the educational bit is much more straightforward to implement, it just takes a lot of money to be thrown at the problem.
Forcing all children to go to school has been an answer for a few generations now, and even with the crappy imperfect education system that we have, it's paid off immensely. I'm merely suggesting that tech is now important enough to warrant inclusion in that curriculum as a way of making it slightly more relevant and less crappy.
Except in the cases where it does work astoundingly well to solve issues that would have been labeled cultural before they were improved, like raising literacy rates across all races (achieved by massively increasing investment in education). See https://ourworldindata.org/literacy/#historical-perspective for some idea how well that worked. A similar situation is AIDS prevention via safe sex education.
If a cultural problem has lack of exposure and education at its root, then it is very easy to throw money at that part of the problem and just fix it. Right now girls and underrepresented minorities are woefully underexposed to coding, and via education we can right that wrong directly even if we can't figure out how to fix the underlying cultural issues (which definitely exist, and have made white and Asian boys much more likely to have early exposure to CS).
I'll note that students tend to rate CS as their favorite academic subject (it's slightly below art and theater) when they are forced to take it, so "force" in this context is mostly just about getting them to take the first step. They love it once they start, so whether or not it will solve the gender imbalance problem, it's such a critical skill for the future economy that it seems irresponsible not to spend money on it and prepare people to participate in that economy, doubly so when students enjoy it so much.
That's not to say at all that the cultural components should be ignored, they're just so much deeper and more difficult to fix than this particular side effect, which is amenable to solution-by-education (which necessarily means throwing money around, since training teachers takes money).
This is a very sincere question: Where in your link does it show that literacy rose due to throwing money at the problem?
I am failing to find that assertion on the page you linke and that isn't my understanding at all of growing global trends in literacy, which are rooted in much more complex trends away from subsistence cultures and agriculturally based incomes. Furthermore, reading is a skill that is vastly different from the problem where talented educated women with ambitions cannot get their foot in the door because most men see them exclusively as sex objects. This is not solved at all by teaching women to code. Plenty of women code. They still face horrible problems due to sexism.
> And the rate of growth really climbed after the middle of the 20th century, when the expansion of basic education became a global priority. You can read more about the expansion of education systems around the world in our entry on Financing Education.
I don't know if that is proof of the statement or anything, but I don't think it's a particularly controversial claim to say that universal education impacts literacy.
As for the challenges women face as they try to enter industry, those are well established and real, for sure. They need to be fought viciously, and we are correct to spend a lot of time and money on those problems. I'd never deny that, it's extremely important to do that work and fight that fight, as this entire article and discussion proves.
But pre-industry, only 18% of CS majors are women, so the educational system has to be fixed as well, that's way too big of an early gap to hope it will magically close once the industry gets it's shit together. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.usnews.com/news/data-mine/a... has a good rundown of where the most valuable opportunities are (middle school is a big one) and how they should be addressed - it's not just about access, it's also about making sure that it's provided in a way that engages and targets young girls specifically, and making sure that more women are teaching these classes. Schools are a valuable point of leverage where you can affect preconceived notions about gender roles and career opportunities, and any effective program needs to break down those barriers. That requires a lot of curriculum design (the easy part) and retraining (the hard).
While you're right that plenty of women code, men outnumber them by 4:1 before they even face the challenges of industry. We need to throw everything we can at that, from every angle, and at every step in the pipeline, until we're much closer to 50/50. Educational interventions are straightforward and proven to work with fairly low cost at the early stages, so I can't imagine why we'd want to rule them out as being part of the solution. They're also massively helpful when addressing the racial imbalances, which are arguably even more vulnerable to asymmetric early exposure than the gender imbalance is (though that's a much bigger subject worthy of its own discussion).
"Going to war to preserve the peace is like fucking to preserve virginity."
Business connections don't happen by being aggressive, ugly and fighty. They are based on hard won trust. In a nutshell, the problem women face is that when men trust them and like them, their first, middle, last and only thought is often "I'd hit that!"
I'm having my own horrendous crisis today and not really up to trying to do this dance with you. I don't believe that rising literacy rates globally has anything at all to do with "throwing money at the problem." I don't think you and I are likely to reach any kind of agreement and, given my state of mind today, continuing this discussion with you is unlikely to go anyplace good at all.
Fair enough, I'm very sorry about the crisis and hope it works out okay.
I 100% agree with your calling out constant sexualization of women as a major problem that permeates the industry, so I don't think we're really that far apart. At least on my end any disagreement mostly centers on the role that education will play in mitigating the side effects, which is fine; even if it doesn't help as much as I hope it will, I'm still happy to see the progress that students make as a result of my work, and I can't blame anyone for being skeptical about the ultimate impact.
So no hard feelings, and I apologise if I came across as argumentative. It does occur to me in hindsight that especially in the context of this article, my comments could be construed as defensive of the industry status quo, since "it's the pipeline!" is too often used in that way. That's not what I intended at all, I'm sorry I failed to make that clear. I think we really are on the same side here in terms of goals, if not tactics.
Have women as your first few customers. Sell to Women initially. Only pitch to women VCs etc... When you get beyond a certain point hire men to deal with men you don't want to deal with.
First of all, MEN have the most money and power. You are literally telling me that the path to power is to limit myself to the dregs of society. Like that makes some kind of logical sense.
Second, the black community in the U.S. did this sort of thing. They had a thriving, well to do community in Greenwood, Oklahoma known as The Black Wall Street. The result: Whites burned it to the ground and then promptly began changing the laws in order to hamstring their ability to rebuild on the completely made up bullshit theory that their homes needed to meet a stricter fire code since it had burned to the ground. The ONLY reason it burned to the ground is because asshole whites set it on fucking fire.
So, no, this absolutely does not work. With a problem like this, you take the bull by the horns and address the root problem or it absolutely does NOT go away. You cannot tip toe around sexism, racism, etc. They are malignant forces that actively hunt down and target people. Politely avoiding them never, ever works.
You're basically describing affirmative action or quotas. They worked successfully in the Nordic countries to improve the gender ratios over there. The Navy did it with great success. Many companies do it including First Horizon that's near me which tries to stay half and half.
This can work but essentially you have to either make it law or convince the VC's to do it willingly. Those are big political problems that would take a lot of targeted work done right. If it can be done at all.
The problem with quotas is that it isn't that kind of problem.
It isn't predominantly that qualified women are applying and being turned away because of gender discrimination, it's that industry-wide the number of qualified women necessary for an even gender balance do not exist.
They went to school for teaching or medicine or real estate and the 17 year old girls deciding which college program to apply to are still doing the same thing.
Has anyone seen a policy on how to handle sexual harassment allegations in the work place? If it comes down to 'he says she says' do you fire someone even though you don't have evidence? Similarly, if you don't fire someone and new allegations come up later then it makes the employer look like they are an enabler.
A witness statement is evidence. Evidence isn't only things you can touch. A photograph isn't any more evidence than a witness statement is. A photograph isn't inherently more credible than a witness statement. You should consider the credibility of each piece of evidence regardless of what type of evidence it is.
A statement made by a trustworthy employee should be taken seriously, "he said she said" is not a valid excuse to not make hard decisions.
Sure but if it is denied by the other employee, you've got directly contradicting evidence. That's what "he said she said" is.
I suppose the right word is "hard evidence." And yes I would say a photograph is, in general, more credible than a witness statement.
I say this as someone who just went through a long trial (representing myself, while the other side had an attorney), with a lot of "he said she said", and where a tape recording (of a violent attack on me) and photographs (of bruises) made all the difference.
Recently the cases that have hit the news, have rarely been borderline grey areas.
If someone comes forward it is because they are being serially harassed, have documentation to back it up, and there are multiple other people who have also been victims.
He said she said situations will likely result in a warning or no action at all.
That's why I'd recommend people make recordings. The tough thing is, in California, it is illegal to record unless you have their permission, or if it is a felony in progress. (which it was in my case)
> If it comes down to 'he says she says' do you fire someone even though you don't have evidence?
If an employee of yours said they were raped by another employee, would you make them go to the hospital and get a rape kit before believing what they said?
If an employee of yours said they got mugged and lost their laptop, would you demand security camera footage before replacing it?
You should default to trusting your employees. You hired them! They are invested in the company, potentially with equity! Especially in at-will employment agreements, I think this should be much closer to "Management reserves the right to let go of anyone at any time for any reason" than the criminal standard of "beyond a reasonable doubt."
I totally agree with what you are saying as far as trusting your employees, but your examples are a little different; a better example would be "If an employee of yours says that another employee stole their laptop, would you demand security camera footage before firing the other employee?"
I think the key thing to do, as a manager, is to start by beliving the employee making the complaint. Don't tell them things like "Oh, you must have misinterpreted" or "was it really that bad" or "I am sure he didn't mean it".
You tell them you take their complain very seriously, that you are so sorry this happened to them, and that you will take action immediately. Then, you investigate. Shockingly, lots of harassers won't outright deny it if you ask them about specific behavior (don't come out and ask them if they sexually harassed, but ask them if they, for example, said these specific words that they are accused of saying); they won't lie because they don't think what they did was actually harassment, they think they were just flirting or being fun. You then take action, whether you need to fire the person, reprimand them, transfer them, demote them, etc.
If you don't do any validation, this will be noticed and you will encourage false reports as a means of settling unrelated personal scores.
That management reserves the right to dismiss for any reason doesn't mean that dismissing based on bare unconfirmed complaints is reasonable, either morally or from a business perspective.
Where are you working that you can reasonably imagine this happening? The risks of someone making this claim are so, so high, yet you believe someone would do this just to 'settle unrelated personal scores'?
> Where are you working that you can reasonably imagine this happening?
I'm working at a place where I can't imagine this happening because they, while taking harassment complaints very seriously, also take personnel actions very seriously and investigate before imposing permanent consequences, using other means to prevent furthering a problem during the investigation.
> The risks of someone making this claim are so, so high
If the company establishes a practice of firing without investigation, and the events are hard to disprove in a way which would sustain a defamation complaint by the falsely accused, the risks are near zero.
It happens. Allegations deserve investigation before punishment is doled out. Just because SV is doing an absolutely awful job at dealing with sexual harassment right now doesn't mean we need to swing hard the other direction and punish without proof.
You'd think we wouldn't need a security camera in our break room to stop people from stealing other people's food, but we do. People do all sorts of petty crap. If you expect rational behavior, you're going to be disappointed.
I envy that. I eat out or hide my food just because they won't put a camera in ours. Too much stuff stolen. I did get a thief once by putting a special ingredient in it then leaving it clearly marked with large letters and warning. They probably thought, "Screw him. He can't prove nothing." Jokes on him. :)
Just did it once, though. I put a lot of effort into avoiding harming innocent people. The bar is getting lower and people are often tired so someone might grab it thinking it was a sample or something. Just too tired to be smart or something. So, continuing to avoid the fridge except looking for any freebies company provides. :)
"Where are you working that you can reasonably imagine this happening?"
It's happened a bunch of times at my company just that I've seen personally. I'm not even talking the ones that did it to me. It's a "reputable," Fortune 100 company with diverse staff and plenty of turnover currently due to management. My part of it has maybe 100 people or so. There were also real cases of sexual harassment male-on-female and female-on-male mostly resolved by employees themselves without escalation. Younger people just being stupid with some coaching and strict warning. Those that were a bigger problem, such as smacking asses or continued harassment, get escalated to management who investigates them, gets witness testimony, and fires them if witness or camera confirmation is strong. I helped get rid of a long-timer recently where you hear stories with no evidence. He got transfered to a shitty job with more people around due to poor work ethic. This time, there were 2-3 witnesses to his behavior that escalated in his irritation and we got rid of him immediately.
So, it happens both ways in my company. The thousands of women I've talked to from tons of companies also told me both happen: sexual harassment; people using fake claims including sexual harassment as a tool. We call it the "he said, she said bullshit." Fortunately, my bosses cultivated a good team where we deal with little to none of that stuff. I mainly hear it from others acting as a witness for them or developing strategy for trouble-makers on occasion.
> If an employee of yours said they were raped by another employee, would you make them go to the hospital and get a rape kit before believing what they said?
And if the other employee said they didn't commit the rape, you should presumably believe them by default as well, right?
> "If an employee of yours said they were raped by another employee, would you make them go to the hospital and get a rape kit before believing what they said?"
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding your sentence, but are you advocating that you should fire the accused employee right away with no evidence other than the word of the accuser?
Harassment goes both ways. I have worked in Silicon Valley for 8 years. I have heard women managers and even a CEO say and do inappropriate things. Not only did the woman CEO say horrible things about her employees, she was also a bad CEO.
As I was trying to say in the techcrunch submission, without defending the real assholes, my honest takeout by the whole sexual harassment threshold in the bay area or the US in general is that you could never end up together or even married with a colleague in that paranoid atmosphere.
Which is exactly what I did where I live in Italy. Happily married and yes, after saying things to a colleague of mine that would have made me accused in the bay area.
I don't know if it is appropriate to say, but I think overt preference in hiring females is one of the biggest cause. Almost every tech company hire women with less qualifications to improve the the diversity. I know it is for the best, but in personal experience, it is very spoken thing between some males. Few interpret inside their head that the females are for them. I think it is evident even in snippets of this article: "I was getting confused figuring out whether to hire you or hit on you." It kind of means that she is not qualified to be hired, according to him, but.. I don't know, it is a complex relationship.
Regardless of intent, this contributes to the problem.
A lot of mentoring and networking happens on a 1:1 basis, and if men refuse to meet women 1:1 in situations where they would meet with other men, then women will lose out on career opportunities.
This. In taking a new role several years ago, I had selected a woman to be part of my new leadership team. I was counseled by a peer (of sorts) to never take a closed-door 1:1 meeting with her; that it was simply too risky.
How the hell am I supposed to run a department without ever having a closed-door 1:1 meeting with 1/4 of my leadership team? I ignored the warning and things of course played out just fine, but it did give me some pause that people would think that simply having a meeting would be too risky to consider.
I also think the same way. In my experience, most single guys can be divided into two categories, ones who have predatory attitudes for girls or the ones who has fear talking to females. Both are actually bad for the girls.
Your experience seems to be unique, because there are lots of single guys who don't have both. As if you stated that being single is a deviance at least.
Definitely. But what are you supposed to do? "Don't overstep boundaries", sure, but that's not a very practical advice. In this life you will overstep sometimes. Like bugs in code, it's unfortunate, but unavoidable.
I wouldn't risk my career for a man, so why should I risk it for a woman? The rational thing seems to be playing it safe.
"A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for." (John Shedd, but sidelong relevant to this thread was also cited several times by Grace Hopper in interviews).
If you take the apparent maximally safe course of action at every turn in life, you probably won't achieve much. It's risky to change jobs, to break up with your current partner, to start dating someone, to have kids, to buy a house, to change cities, to pick a college/major, to pick an initial career, to drive in the rain, to play recreational sports, to travel to a different country, to eat sushi, and 100s of other times in any given year.
If you are willing to do something important (and work-related) for a man that you are not willing to do for a woman, IMO, you should not be in a position of leadership.
"Avoiding this situation is why I never meet women 1:1 outside of conference rooms, yet Mike Pence was roundly mocked for doing this."
The easiest way to avoid this situation is by simply not behaving inappropriately around women, including not sexually harassing them. Otherwise, you appear to be saying that you can't prevent yourself from behaving inappropriately around women in one-on-one meetings, which would be problematic. The men cited in the article very clearly and deliberately overstepped boundaries, not by mistake.
I remember coming across a 2011 article on similar behavior by a New York investor, where I could not figure out whether the writers were condoning the behavior, in an almost fawning tone, or highlighting a problem.
http://observer.com/2011/11/charlie-odonnell-women-in-tech-d...
Isn't there an inherent culture among men that dates all the way back to middle school, high school, and college that somewhat sets the tone for inappropriate behavior later in life?
These kinds of behaviours happen a lot and begin at a very young age. And they seem to be okayed by nearly everyone then. Why don't these things stop before they begin? I almost feel sorry for the men in these stories because the rules seem to have changed on them at some point and nobody told them when.
Let's be clear! These actions are not ok in any work setting at any work level in any industry in any situation of diversity or lack thereof. Further, these actions are not ok in college, in high school, or middle school and in any area of education.
Today the focus is on the investment industry, but it happens everywhere, from the bar to restaurants to company meetings. And these articles need to do generalize the environment beyond startup valley. Everyone should be put on alert. Even bystanders.
I believe it's the changing culture that causes these problems in general. The rules and the culture are changing, and the pace at which different people adopt the changes and adapt to the new society is different. Unfortunately it doesn't happen in an instant, and culture gaps between people cause this sort of awkward situations where communications fail. Many traditions and social situations need adapting, like meeting new people, dating, workplace, family, friendship, all the stuff that involves genders, and it'll only happen in time.it's not that far back in time that women had to fight for suffrage.
I've known Marc Canter for almost two decades now. I've been to his house, out to dinner with him, in classes he's taught, and at startups he's been a part of. I have never once seen him hit on anyone. He's also not a particularly powerful person in silicon valley. He is very socially awkward, however.
I'd, personally, like to see the proof before I condemn the man.
I wonder how ubiquitous this behavior is? And how often it applies to reversed gender and same-sex scenarios as well? Do general demographics play a role? In any given male or female dominated industry, is the less dominant gender more likely to experience harassment?
Many people I know (both female and male) have been come onto in a work environment by someone they are not interested in, or experienced an inappropriate scenario or comment, or experienced unwanted flirting or propositions. I think most people simply don't talk about it outside of their friend or social group.
Wow, think for a second how hard is to be an entrepreneur. All the shit we have to deal with at so many different levels.
These women goes beyond that, literally putting everything on the line. Much respect.
I always knew women had an unfair disadvantage in this industry. But I never realized it was this bad. This is a whole different level then I imagined, and makes me want to throw up. On behalf of my gender (im a male if that wasnt obvious from my lack of awareness) I would like to sincerely apologise. Women, please keep telling us these stories. Please have the strength to "go public" with this information. It helped me realize the severity of the situation, hopefully it will spread.
As a man, I really value these clear, blunt accounts. It's like a bug report with details - here's what I need to know to identify the problem, and begin addressing it.
I would find it highly ironic if start up culture ends up adopting some variation of the "Mike Pence Rule" (which he got from Billy Graham) as a result of these incidents. Some of the comments sound like they suggesting similar things.
It takes such incredible bravery to call out this kind of behavior in a palce that can feel too much like an old boys club. I'm in awe of these women. From Susan Fowler to Niniane Wang to Leiti Hsu & Susan Ho to the ones in this article. I don't know any of them but they are the catalysts of progress. It's up to all of us to make sure this is a turning point for an industry that needs to do so much better.
About sexism - I think it's a problem of culture in general - it is not socially acceptable for a young lad to approach attractive lady and say "I'd like to mate with you".
(it requires courage, game, pre-frame...)
All these VCs and senior managers - they are in position of power - too bad their sexuality is so oppressed - they should get some training how to tactfully deal with it, how to tactfully approach potential partners and maybe introduce "get out of jail free card":
1) I know I'm in position of power
2) You know you are attractive
3) We both know it is inappropriate
4) But hey look, I like you, we could create a great team
5) Because I'm biased I won't be participating in the recruitment process
6) Your recruitment will be purely based on merit
7) If you want to date with me, that's great...
8) ...if not - I'll make sure my attitude won't affect you
9) And BTW I'm in a dating season now, so if you say "no" it's not big deal at all.
That's 9 bullet points, you can add 10th just because:
10) I respect you, if you feel offended for any reason that's OK too (it's OK to be not OK). I act with the highest degree of honesty, transparency and integrity. If you decide to report to TechCrunch remember to get my name right.
Too bad several of those things are impossible - "my attitude won't affect you" - "I won't be participating in the recruitment process" - "its not a big deal". Because emotion is involved, there will be fallout from a 'no' (or even a 'yes'). And because of #1, they can't just not participate. Somebody will ask their opinion, or even take their silence as an opinion.
There's a very good reason people in a position of power are strictly not to 'date' folks that work for them, or apply to work for them.
Douchebags are always one too many but Silicon Valley, like every other human environment based on ambition and greed, is surely not the safest / shiniest congregation on planet Earth?
> Lindsay Meyer, an entrepreneur in San Francisco, said Mr. Caldbeck put $25,000 of his own money into her fitness start-up in 2015. That gave Mr. Caldbeck reason to constantly text her; in those messages, reviewed by The Times, he asked if she was attracted to him and why she would rather be with her boyfriend than him. At times, he groped and kissed her, she said.
> “I felt like I had to tolerate it because this is the cost of being a nonwhite female founder,” said Ms. Meyer, who is Asian-American.
As abhorrent as Caldbeck's behavior was, what difference does being nonwhite make? It doesn't seem like white female founders don't get sexually harassed.
I believe Meyer was implying that while being a female founder is hard enough, her being a non-white minority makes it even more difficult due to racism.
Despite this aspect of the case, framing it as a problem of being "nonwhite" implies that Caldbeck's harassment extended to black or hispanic women for example, which it did not.
Have things become worse or is Seattle different? I saw none of this behavior during my tenure at Microsoft (1996-2000). Admittedly I am a dude, though a lifelong feminist.
There was an interview with Sara Lacy(sp?) from Pando where she says that it changed when the founder demographic changed. Before, it was either nerds, or older, experienced people from Intel, Cisco etc. Now, the "bros" are starting companies.
She credits The Social Network with being a self-fulfilling prophecy.
One thing that always makes me very sad is to see women working nearby top males in a company to look nowhere like normal women, but more like top models. Sometimes this happens just because a very beautiful woman is also very smart, but given the frequency of this thing I bet that there are cases of a conscious bias to select hot women. Now if you hire on purpose beautiful women that's a pretty good recipe for disasters.
Takes a lot of courage to do this. People that fight their employers can sometimes be seen a problematic during background checks and can be dismissed for BS reasons (or not providing a reason at all).
Here we are, a moment where history changes, but human nature doesn't.
It is true: these women are brave and correct in action. The men failed in their professional responsibilities. Silicon Valley has the advantage of being the keeper of a market where the individuals in the labor pool have greater rights than their counterparts in Hollywood and Wall Street (where similar ongoings are typically kept hush-hush).
Yet what will be the outcome? Will the men with money now be afraid to take a professional meeting with a woman for fear of their own desires OR for fear that something negative will come of it? If the risk of a meeting may now include the risk of a lawsuit / losing your position and reputation, the calculus doesn't work out.
This could lead to a strange dystopian outcome: segregated funnels. Women VCs / Male VCs - some overlap may occur, but most end up meeting with their own gender.
Or not. Just a thought experiment on incentives and outcomes. Most likely we'll go back to regularly scheduled programming in a few months time. Some folks get kicked out, and a new batch will be there to replace 'em.
Interesting to see if folks on HN have had the experience of being attracted to an interviewee/interviewer, or investee/investor, and how they dealt with it given the complexities involved.
Of course I have. I've also found waitresses or bartenders or other people attractive. If there wasn't a drive for sex programmed into us (as a species), we (as a species) probably would have been out-competed in evolution.
How you deal with it is by ignoring it when it would be inappropriate to act on it (or at most, treat as a pleasant-but-valueless part of your day).
Now (being married and holding very strict views on monogamy) it's perhaps even more clear/easier than when I was single, but even then it was clear that you don't hit on your waitress as an example. That easily extends to interviewees and subordinates at work or anywhere else where someone can't freely and without consequence say "Hey, maybe I'm flattered, but I'm definitely not interested."
(For full disclosure, I have dated colleagues before and know of and support intra-company romances where there is no supervisory relationship. You don't have to close your eyes and pretend you will never find anyone at work to be subjectively attractive. You just have to not ever be an asshole about it, and that's not that hard a goal.)
I don't understand the question "how they dealt with it."
You deal with it the same way you deal with being attracted to a married person. You ignore the attraction.
It seems to me that every decent person must have urges/desires which they are better off ignoring on a regular basis. Sexual or romantic attraction needn't be any different.
> Lindsay Meyer, an entrepreneur in San Francisco, said Mr. Caldbeck put $25,000 of his own money into her fitness start-up in 2015. That gave Mr. Caldbeck reason to constantly text her; in those messages, reviewed by The Times, he asked if she was attracted to him and why she would rather be with her boyfriend than him. At times, he groped and kissed her, she said.
Nice! Here's grade-A material for the 46. President of the United States of America /s
edit: added /s because it apparently wasn't obvious to some out there.
Further clarification: This is a sarcastic comment on the fact that the USA have a president who has publicly admitted to sexually harassing women. With that person at the helm of the nation, how can anyone be surprised by others behaving similarly?
This is a little off-topic so mods, please flag/move as needed. (Wasn't sure if I should make this an Ask HN or not).
I feel I may be a victim of a false accusation of sexual harassment. I am really not sure how to proceed at this point. I have not put up a fight for fear that I could loose my job (which may already be in the works at this point). Management has not used the term "sexual harassment", only the verbiage that "I have made a female employee feel uncomfortable".
As I am currently in a temporary internship position due to end in a few months, I am not so concerned about this job, but this experience has made me very concerned about being falsely accused in the future of sexual harassment or rape. Should I just avoid all interaction with women at work completely? How would I do this with a female boss? (refusing to meet with her in private?)
Do you know what comments made that woman uncomfortable? If not, have you asked management? Maybe it's not a false accusation at all (in fact they don't use the term sexual harassment, which is important), but a valuable lesson for your future, and for you in general.
Good idea! Thank you! Being this is an internship ending in a few months, I feel it might not be worth it, but definitely in the future, when a permanent position or clean criminal history may be at stake, I think a legal consultation would be appropriate. I just wonder, is there anything I can do to reduce such risk other than just being extremely cautious when speaking to women?
> a volunteer organization who went directly from "I don't think I can see a movie tonight" to "This situation is making me uncomfortable" with nothing in between.
She tried to tell you gently in the way girls are taught to reject men while still being nice to them. If you reject dude other way, some tend to t
get insulted anyway.
You did not get it, so she informed you flat out about how she really think about the situation. You got angry :).
Don't force us to walk super tight balancing act where being nice is too subtle, but telling it flat out is wrong and there are maybe two magical phrases (different for every guy) that are allowed. For one, not every girl has such super high social skills. For the other, there is no way to win in that situation.
You did not get it, so she informed you flat out about how she really think about the situation. You got angry :).
You weren't there, so you're clearly projecting. I didn't get angry. I got very anxious. I didn't say a word. My heart rate went up. I started picturing how my character was going to be impugned. Never did I say an angry word to her. As a matter of fact, we clarified the whole situation via email and we were later hanging out with friends at a convention party.
Now think how it would come across if you projected "you got mad" in a similar situation to a woman. It would strike me as somewhat jerky and transgressive.
Communications that are subtle and ambiguous are highly likely to be misinterpreted, and it is not reasonable to assume that the recipient reached the intended conclusion. Depending on what the above poster meant by escalating to "This situation is making me uncomfortable" I may or may not agree with the above commenter's statement that the person being approached acted irrationally.
If the person being approached followed up the ambiguous rejection with something along the lines of, "I don't want to go out with you, please do not approach me again" then that's a totally reasonable response; it's escalating from a soft "no" to a hard "no".
If the person being approach said something to the effect of, "you're harassing me with repeated advances after a rejection" then I'd consider that behavior to be irrational. The person who approached communicated denial in a very ambiguous manner that could easily be interpreted as asking for an alternate time to go out. It isn't rational to call a co-worker a harasser for asking somebody out after giving an ambiguous denial. Granted, if they continued to make approaches after giving an unambiguous denial, like the one written in the 2nd paragraph, then by all means this is harassment.
I assumed literal "you are making me uncomfortable" - I think it is best to go with what parent wrote. The "you're harassing me with repeated advances after a rejection" does not sound how real people talk.
I also think that saying whatever gets the person away is rational - through it might be rude in context. I mean, you assume that saying something insulting or exaggerated is irrational, but that is not how we judge rationality in other contexts.
My experience was that when collegues started bullshit (not harrasment but they had many jokes about women targeted at me), being nuanced and nice and "rational" did not made situation better. Just longer while they had fun and I definitely did not. Answering in hostile rude way right away turned out to work much better - issue largely ceased to exist.
I think that the expectation that women should be the nice one is what creates a lot of problems. It is teaching girls ineffective communication (which leaves them thinking only two options are HR or leave). People on the spectrum honestly don't get nice, people who test boundaries don't see nice as boundary and jerks find nice funny.
I really doubt you truly mean "whatever gets the person away is rational". Is it okay for me to call anyone who asks me out harassers in order to discourage subsequent approaches? There's a vast difference between a firm rejection and accusing a co-worker of a fire-able offense - potentially even a crime. If somebody is insulted by the former then the have their only their own insecurity to blame. On the other hand, even if no complaint to HR is made the latter statement is going to make people stress over the possibility of losing their job, potentially even facing legal repercussions.
> I think that the expectation that women should be the nice one is what creates a lot of problems. It is teaching girls ineffective communication (which leaves them thinking only two options are HR or leave). People on the spectrum honestly don't get nice, people who test boundaries don't see nice as boundary and jerks find nice funny.
This is essentially what I'm trying to say. The hesitation to unambiguously accept or reject advances and instead expect people to communicate indirectly by "reading the signs" is an inherently broken situation because it's inevitable that those ambiguous signs will be misinterpreted at some point.
> Is it okay for me to call anyone who asks me out harassers in order to discourage subsequent approaches?
The word harassment does not even appear in parent comment. Neither is HR. You added it to shift the topic which is an open and easy to see lie. "You are making me uncomfortable" and "fire him hr please" are not nearly the same.
For that matter, rational is different category then "fair". Unfair or even unethical dudes don't get to be called "irrational" (unless someone defend their harassment by calling them dumbass).
> This is essentially what I'm trying to say.
In this story she unambiguously informed him that he is making her uncomfortable. That is not even as open rejection as can be, but also feedback on what the reason for not continuing conversation is. You are extrapolating her rejection to entirely different things as words says. That is expecting her to walk the fine line, guess in advance how you re-interpret words and come up with answer perfectly tailored to your personality.
She tried nice as overwhelming majority of dudes would understand correctly, did not worked, she started to be direct. But she apparently should not be too direct.
> The word harassment does not even appear in parent comment. Neither is HR. You added it to shift the topic which is an open and easy to see lie. "You are making me uncomfortable" and "fire him hr please" are not nearly the same.
Please re-read my original comment in this chain, I'm dealing with two hypotheticals depending on what exactly is said.
> In this story she unambiguously informed him that he is making her uncomfortable. That is not even as open rejection as can be
If that's what occurred then this is the situation I describe in the 2nd paragraph, which I explicitly write is a reasonable thing to do.
> but also feedback on what the reason for not continuing conversation is.
Depending on what exactly is phrased it may also be feedback conveying "there is a good chance I am telling HR you're harassing me." Again, as per my original comment I'm describing my opinion of the situation depending on what exactly is said.
> You are extrapolating her rejection to entirely different things as words says. That is expecting her to walk the fine line, guess in advance how you re-interpret words and come up with answer perfectly tailored to your personality. She tried nice as overwhelming majority of dudes would understand correctly, did not worked, she started to be direct. But she apparently should not be too direct.
I am not expecting any line to be walked. She should not avoid trying to be too direct, but just the opposite. This whole problem likely arose because the first response was interpreted overly optimistically (thinking she wanted to see the movie on a different day, when she just wanted to say "no") and interpreted the second response overly pessimistically (thinking there's a good chance she was going to report him or her to HR, when she just wanted to say "no"). Again, indirect speaking is exactly what I'm attempting to dissuade because it creates situations such as these.
> Depending on what exactly is phrased it may also be feedback conveying "there is a good chance I am telling HR you're harassing me." Again, as per my original comment I'm describing my opinion of the situation depending on what exactly is said.
Well then, leave her alone.
However, she literally said "you are making me uncomfortable". That is neither threat nor rude. It is literally direct and honest communication.
You are not trying to dissuade indirect speaking, you are complaining that she started to talk directly when indirect failed.
And it invites him to try to make her feel comfortable until she freaks out and goes to HR or NYT. Sometimes it's better to just say no. You don't owe explanation to anyone.
Social politeness dictates we approach high intensity situations with some grace and tact. It really hurts to be rejected and it really hurts to do the rejection because the rejecter knows he or she is going to cause another human being who took a risk and put themselves out there to experience negative feelings. Only psychopaths enjoy rejecting people. So we say "little white lies" to make it easier on both parties. We say "I can't make it" instead of what we really feel, which is "you are very sexually unappealing to me." Part of "being polite" is understanding this and playing along.
BTW, if you have trouble with this sort of thing I recommend Miss Manners books and newspaper columns. They are both very informative and entertaining. Plus they make me feel good that I was not as bad as some people who write to her. I was raised by my parents who are truly evil people and are assholes to boot, so I never learned manners or proper behavior and I'd like to not be an asshole myself, so I needed help.
With few exceptions, I cannot work with a woman without thinking about having sex with her. It's not like I'm trying, it's more like the thought is a blinking red light and I can't help but look at the thought. Then I realize the thought is absurd, but it's already happened. This normally doesn't leak out, but for some women, I will give them "eyes" and usually feel bad about it afterwards. But that can be persistent, and for the woman, must be kind of creepy feeling.
I'd love for this to not be the case, but after years of it, I'm at a loss as to how a man changes this somewhat foundational part of the brain.
The women for whom I don't have that thought almost always follow remarkably strict professional conduct to a T. The equivalent for a man would be top-button done up and formal slacks every day, never smiling. I actually really like working with these women because it's kind of a relief.
It sounds like you may be suffering from a form of scrupulosity [0], a disorder in which you feel excessive guilt about moral or religious issues. In your case mostly moral. Fantasizing about having sex with women you work with and making eyes at them isn't really the same as what's going on in this article. Thoughts are just in your head, they don't affect the outside world unless you express them and "making eyes," unless you're intensely and persistently staring at them is unlikely to have the same effect as the actions in this story. You should cut yourself a bit more slack, you obviously care about not making women uncomfortable and from what you've described here I doubt you do make them uncomfortable.
If you're interested in reading more about this there's a great Atlantic article about Scott Aaronson going through something similar. [1]
>With few exceptions, I cannot work with a woman without thinking about having sex with her.
Its fine to think whatever you want, imagine murdering your boss, having sex with the coffee machine, whatever you want, that's happening in your brain, doesn't effect anyone else. It's a bit much for >every< girl though, that sounds like a deeper issue.
>This normally doesn't leak out, but for some women, I will give them "eyes" and usually feel bad about it afterwards. But that can be persistent, and for the woman, must be kind of creepy feeling.
Unless you are being creeper and staring like a weirdo all the time then I doubt they notice.
If you are being a creeper and staring 24/7, then you have deeper issues with restraint and politeness that need to be sorted out.
>I'm at a loss as to how a man changes this somewhat foundational part of the brain.
I think most guys can cope fine, I'd wager most guys have some racey thoughts about co-workers, but the difference between that and being creepy/unprofessional is that its in your brain and you keep it there. Restraint is kind of a "foundational" part of modern life.
> Its fine to think whatever you want, imagine murdering your boss, having sex with the coffee machine, whatever you want
I sometimes have brain farts where I imagine some bad/evil/wrong/painful thing done by me or to me and for a short moment feel almost like it's real. For example, today I thought about stabbing someone's eye with a teaspoon I was holding at the time. It's unpleasant. If I imagine something like that happening to me for longer periods, I probably wouldn't want it.
> Unless you are being creeper and staring like a weirdo all the time then I doubt they notice.
If OP says they notice, they notice. People notice almost everything but consciously act on almost nothing. Sometimes they don't like their own reactions and pretend not to see. One can fall into the trap of trying to find signs of non-noticing only to constantly keep seeing minuscule involuntary signs of noticing. Sometimes feeling like you creep others out makes you behave nervously and actually creep them out.
Maybe it's better to be open that these things happen but yet they absolutely don't communicate any will for serious real-world consequences. Or dunno, ask some psychologist.
A bit out of left field, but you might enjoy the book Every Man's Battle, written from a conservative Christian perspective, about exactly this problem. (The Christian man's problem with this inclination is that Jesus said, more or less, that making "eyes" at a woman is as sinful as actually committing adultery with her.)
As a not-particularly-conservative Christian, I kind of hated the book. Among other things it's got a sort of warped view of the problems with non-consensual interactions / objectifying women (there's one particular scene where there's a youth group leader and a member who's literally too young to consent, and the book puts more emphasis on the youth group leader being unfaithful to his wife than on him statutorily raping the kid). I also got the distinct feeling that I have this problem far less than any of the people in this book. But a number of friends have told me that they got a lot out of the book, so, maybe it'll resonate with you.
Acknowledge that reptilian instinct and then check it. Also, spend more time around women outside work. As friends, e.g. friends' wives, girlfriends or even just interesting women you meet.
I'm not a mind reader, but all men think this way to some degree. For myself, I don't possess a visual imagination, so the thoughts don't stick, but they do re-occur.
However, I also have no difficulty ensuring this doesn't interfere with my relationships with my co-workers. I know whatever ideas I have are just transient thoughts, and there will never be a point where acting on them is worth the damage I might do.
Of course, as a disclaimer, I telecommute, so I'm rarely in physical contact with the women I work with. I'm also a Buddhist, so I have a lot of practice letting my thoughts go.
The Westermarck effect attempts to explain why that is not a simple mental adjustment. It's a theory, but it states "people who live in close domestic proximity during the first few years of their lives become desensitized to sexual attraction." [1]
Maybe this is easier if you've had a sister. I never did. And I can't sit across the table from a skin-flashing admin assistant and think of her like my mom, who is in her 70s. It doesn't work.
The fact that you use the term "skin-flashing" here is a little concerning. Perhaps it was just meant as a shorthand for attractive woman, because otherwise you've taken a woman's choice of dress and behaviour and made them part of your neurosis. Unless of course she is giving you the Basic Instinct treatment (is that too old a reference for this site?), in which case I'm entirely out of advice for you.
You were talking about disliking equality movements in the West. I was adding that it's happening in China and other Asian nations too. So that leaves you with... the Middle East and Africa?
You talk about putting women in executive and engineering positions, ableton talks about the belief that sexual behaviors are a cultural construct and can and should be eliminated or bent arbitrarily to social progressives' desires.
The former can be achieved without the latter - just jail people who dare to discriminate against women, problem solved. Soviets managed to implement this even in Muslim states, go figure.
The latter is how the former is being attempted in the West and some are skeptical.
Why do you keep talking about other countries? I wasn't comparing the west to any other country.
Men and women are different. Women have decided that they don't want to be women any more. The results have been disastrous. Families are falling apart today. 60% of people in prison come from home without dad. We have more money than ever, and less happiness. People are so silly. They confuse money and power with happiness. Incidentally all the divorce that comes thanks to women actually leads to more poverty. (2/3 of divorces among college educated come from women)
Most people have been thoroughly brainwashed. There are only a rare few like Neo who the programming just doesn't quite work for.
I can't really stop, but a valuable question is, should I? The women who have worked with me have succeeded and been promoted to successful managerial roles more than those who have worked for my other male colleagues. Who would be served by an attempt to change my thoughts?
You think that the women you've worked with have been promoted . . . because you were fantasizing about them instead of engaging with them? Not, for e.g., maybe because they were more capable than average?
IMO, you should seek therapy. You sound like you need it more than most.
How incredibly odd, it is almost as though we are, perhaps, driven by biological imperative to find members of the other sex attractive. I'll just let myself out with these crazy conspiracy theories.
In seriousness, I'm pointing out the absurdity of being so surprised that this kind of thing still exists. We are fighting one of the most fundamental drives of not only the human race, but [non asexual] life itself.
You should talk to a therapist. It will affect your career sooner or later, if it hasn't already. You better get help on how to control these thoughts, and more importantly your actions, especially if you sometimes give "eyes" to your coworkers.
I vehemently disagree with that. While I do not know your gender or sexual orientation, I can assume that at some point you've looked at another person and been attracted to them. This can't be controlled because our species' success (before the modern medicine era) is due to our ability to reproduce. I don't see a problem with looking at someone. If it gets to the point of creepily staring for long periods of time, or wanting to act on his thoughts, then he has good reason to see a therapist, but being able to see that someone is attractive while also not wanting to have sex with them is completely normal. I'm a guy and I acknowledge that many of my platonic female friends are very attractive, but I don't want to have sex with them in the same way that I would a wife or girlfriend.
> If it gets to the point of creepily staring for long periods of time, or wanting to act on his thoughts, then he has good reason to see a therapist,
This is what he said, that's why I suggested a therapist. He constantly thinks about having sex with his female coworkers, and the ones that he feels the most attracted to he will give "eyes" to. Then he feels guilty afterwards. These are abnormal reactions. I wasn't talking about YOU, I was talking about HIM.
If you can't get your work done without thinking about having sex with your coworkers, you need to see a therapist.
Ah, it looks like we interpreted his words differently, and I misunderstood what you meant. I assumed that
>I cannot work with a woman without thinking about having sex with her.
meant that he can still get work done with women, but he thinks about having sex with them.
I should also clarify my point "that many of my platonic female friends are very attractive, but I don't want to have sex with them." I'm not saying that the thought never crosses my mind, just that it's not an issue.
About your last sentence, if I apply it to my situation, the first part is true. There has never been a time where I've been with them, but the thought has never crossed my mind, but I value our friendship, so I have no reason to try to act on that. I believe your point is that coworkers are more of an issue than friends in a situation like this, and I completely agree with that, but I just don't think it's necessary to see a therapist until he does anything more than occasionally staring.
He seems obsessed with the problem and and can't cope with the guilt of his own thoughts, he should see a therapist to learn about how to deal with that. To say someone to see a therapist is not an insult! It's mental health, it's fine!
Yes, this is it, I think. I knew this guy, many years ago, who bragged about walking up to random women, and asking if they'd like to have sex. He said that he got slapped a lot, but also had lots of sex. I think that he was just BSing, but who knows?
I don't see the relevance. Asking a random stranger for sex is certainly outside of our normal social conventions, but this is not the same as using your power and position to coerce someone into having sex with you.
Nowadays it's called "daygame". Controversial topic because on one hand you have many "hobbyists" who are serious about it and optimize for success and avoiding getting slapped, on the other hand you have losers (real story) who touch strangers on the street thinking it will get them laid.
I hope this becomes more and more common, leading to actual protections against it, and not the "We're totally serious about combating harassment and sexism, this time, for reals" response that it seems has the the norm for the past several years.
I deeply, and with all moral conviction i can muster - detest people who have so much power they can abuse it, while i having no power and no chance to abuse it, at least get the chance to redocrate my inability and envy as moral outrage and principles. That is detestable. Very.
As femboner said, there's whole companies in public relations and image management dedicated to doing stuff like that. Plus individuals with a great representation for misrepresenting stories. Spin doctors I believe they're called.
This is silly. Don't reduce me to some risk averse weakling because I'm not willing to put my neck out for strangers for little to no reward. If you're like that, and you regularly go to Africa to help people, more power to you. I'm not. Most people are not.
No good leader is taking unnecessary risks. In fact, if you study history, taking unnecessary risks has been the downfall of many otherwise great leaders
That's a very subjective definition of unnecessary risk. Clearly there are potential rewards (ev+ if you're into poker or ai) in starting your own company.
Helping a stranger get promoted? At the risk of ending your career (a massive loss for most people)? With the only reward being feeling good for Doing The Right Thing (tm)? Not so much
Okay then. It took you a while, and a few unnecessary (ho ho ho) downvotes of my posts but we finally agree: The smart move for any male leader is to never spend any 1on1 time with female subordinates, and unfortunately ignore how that might affect her career
How you reach that conclusion and seem to claim that to be an inevitable/logical chain of reasoning is literally beyond my understanding. I started this subthread with the claim that an interesting life is full of risks and that leaders must be willing to take risks that do not have any obvious selfish benefit.
For the record, I have not downvoted a single one of your posts. (You can't downvote posts that are in reply to one of your own anyway, but I haven't downvoted any others either.)
Clearly the valley has no problem with social isolated tech-types rising to power- and not advancing socially. Sorry, this is not just a moral problem- its the problem of a socially self isolating caste coming by rise to power back into human contact and then abusing it.
We've banned this account for trolling. If you don't want to be banned on HN, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and promise to follow the rules in the future.
Single-purpose accounts (which this one appears to be, given its history) are not allowed here, especially not for an ideological agenda about a divisive topic. We have therefore banned this account. If you don't want to be banned on HN, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you want to use the site as intended, i.e. for intellectual curiosity, not political battle.
I certainly agree pop culture teaches men the chase but
I've never known any who does that. What does your friend tell them after they begin their relationship and the other person thinks it's an affair? Does she then break up with her imaginary boyfriend?
It looks like your account has been abusing HN by using it primarily for ideological battle. We ban accounts that do that, so please stop; it's not what this site is for.
Do you think it's enjoyable to be in the public eye for telling on someone? Surely you're aware that people who blow the whistle are often blackballed.
>So, this shit happens whenever the aggressive, scheming women (or men) see a way to get more for themselves at some seemingly-vulnerable man's (or woman's) expense.
These are people with personality disorders (especially Borderline), who can thrive in environments where incessant lying, gaslighting, and life-ruining accusations are rewarded . The current system lets the people with the least morals float to the top, regardless of their gender. I don't know how to deal with borderlines in situations like this, but it's wrong for people to simply pretend they don't exist.
I've noticed people on HN never really want to discuss why people like the Uber CEO are sexist, and how people like that should be handled (aside from just firing them and forgetting that they exist). Learning about personality disorders can help you understand lots of behavior that was previously unexplainable or baffling, and perhaps even teach you something about yourself if you realize that you have one. The more time I spend in tech, the more I think that the rate of occurrence for them is much higher than in the general population.
I really wish greater awareness of personality disorders was espoused in tech, and that Americans in general took mental health more seriously. I think you could begin to fix a lot of problems that get talked about here by simply having people go to therapy. It wouldn't be a quick fix and it's not guaranteed, but it's better than nothing.
I've noticed people on HN never really want to discuss why people like the Uber CEO are sexist
I don't think it's fair to characterize Travis as sexist without backing it up with evidence. Travis isn't equal to Uber, and I respect him as an entrepreneur. (Maybe I missed an article claiming he was personally involved in some misconduct, though.)
One anecdote that appears occasionally is about an email that Travis sent to the company in 2013, when the company had a few hundred employees:
"Do not have sex with another employee UNLESS a) you have asked that person for that privilege and they have responded with an emphatic ‘YES! I will have sex with you’ AND b) the two (or more) of you do not work in the same chain of command. Yes, that means that Travis will be celibate on this trip,"
Its nature is interpreted as evidence Travis is sexist by some HN commenters.
For what it's worth, I've given that incident a bit of thought. He was speaking to a group of 400 people. Unless we're of the opinion that under no circumstances is it ok for one coworker to have sex with another, establishing clear guidelines seems appropriate. The comment about himself seems more tongue in cheek given the overall tone of the rest of the email: https://pastebin.com/RZJkzQd6
In general, it seems more productive to reserve outrage for those who take advantage of employees or founders by using their position of power.
Sorry, maybe I worded that poorly, but I don't personally believe he's sexist, in fact I don't really know anything about him aside from what I've seen on HN and couldn't really give my opinion one way or the other. I was just making a note on the HN discussions regarding that topic (him being sexist).
Now I'm curious what line of work you're in where you find yourself in these conflicts so frequently. I've heard one off stories like that, but outside of politics, never heard of an environment where this is a regular occurrence.
> Due to the risk, I naturally didn't try to get a date with anyone when I was in leadership positions... despite much, much temptation since they were impressive inside & out.
When you write things like that, phrased like that, it's not surprising in the slightest that multiple women have thought you were harassing them.
My guess is that you come off as a creep. I'm sure you don't mean to but I don't believe psychopathic schemers are common enough that anyone could ever be accused numerous times without some real cause for it.
I think building a policy based on the possible existence of a vanishingly small group of bad actors is a great way to make excuses for avoiding solving real problems...
I'm not saying that it's right to lump people together like that and BPDs in particular don't take well talking shit about them.
However, some people with mental issues in some situations really pull off lies and deception which blow most people's minds. I've been in situations where people in charge wouldn't believe some things happening right under their nose because those things were simply too bold and, well, insane. And because people are easily manipulated into forming good opinions about others and apparently don't like learning they have been wrong.
You're conflating two different things: if 1.6% of the population has BPD that still doesn't tell you that 100% of them are untreated and spending their time and credibility making false accusations, or that those wouldn't fall apart fairly quickly. That might happen on TV but most real people with mental illnesses spend time trying to minimize their impact on others, not act like the bad guy in a police procedural.
I'd like to think that I know how to recognize, avoid, and, if needed, placate those bad actors now. I'm not sure why you're trying to frame my concern as if it were directly applied to me, i.e. I'm worried that I'm going to be a target or victim.
> You are saying there is a chance a bad actor might abuse a social dynamic in which you are the less powerful participant?
When the commenter said that, they were humorously turning the hypothetical BPD scenario on its head. The commenter was making a comparison to the original sexual harassment topic, where a bad actor (VC executive) abused a social dynamic (sexually harassing women founders) in which the aggrieved were the less powerful participant (needing to raise money to fund their businesses).
The comment points out the parallels between your fear of men being taken advantage of by BPD-afflicted women, and the far more likely event of a male superior abusing power over a female subordinate.
On another note, it seems like you have a strong personal experience with a woman diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder. I think that this traumatic experience has made you more sensitive to the risks of this happening to others. I understand how you must feel. I don't think the risk is as high or is as catastrophic in a business situation, if a company adheres to the law and conducts thorough investigations of personnel accusations.
I don't actually know of any good external resources for defining "derail" in this context. I learned about the concept through work, and didn't want to just blatantly copy-and-paste that document into HN.
I did about five minutes of Google searching. Pointers would be appreciated.
Your comments border on bigotry. People don't want to engage with someone who has a closed mind.
Pretty much everything you've said about borderline PD is fucking nonsense. There's no point responding to someone who so clearly demonstrates they don't know what they're talking about. None of the stuff you've mentioned has any link to borderline personality disorder.
If you're going to use mental health diagnoses you should 1) use the right one and 2) probably just not.
In general when you find yourself saying stuff like "the Jews did it" or "Asians can't drive" or "black people can't swim" or "borderlines ..." You should probably not bother.
People with BPD experience significant stigma. Not just from the general population but from health professionals, including mental health professionals too.
But it's off topic. You're trying to make the conversation be about something else—I assume in a completely well-intentioned way, but this isn't the place for it.
> I'd really like to sincerely ask if you've had a run-in with it yet.
reply
Yes, I've met many people with borderline personality disorder.
I helped the English NHS create their KUF (Knowledge and Understanding Framework) for borderline personality disorder; I campaign for services to better meet the needs of people with BPD.
What you're saying is ignorant bollocks.
False accusations are not more common among people with BPD, and false accusations are rare.
We are way off the cliff of inappropriate conversations when we're:
* Attributing mental health conditions to hypothetical strangers
* Insinuating other commenters on HN have mental health conditions
* Impugning entire groups of people based on hypothetical mental health conditions.
That's before we reach the fact that the only reason we're talking about this particular mental health condition was the hypothetical that strangers, who we know nothing about, would be reporting sexual harassment incidents falsely because they might be suffering from that condition.
This is way past uncivil and inappropriate and we can't be having threads here that look like this, something I'm so sure of that I'll say so despite having no formal authority to do so.
You should feel free, where you're comfortable, to talk about your own struggles with mental health.
You should never be talking about someone else's. That's "taboo" for good reason. Threads where that happen invariably turn into insidious attacks not just on everyone purported to have whatever condition we're discussing, but, really, on everyone with mental health concerns of any sort.
I have no doubt you'll be able to generate 5 more paragraphs about how I've somehow missed some important aspect of what you're trying to say. Please, don't. I think Dan was right when he suggested you take a breath before continuing on this thread. Your posts are being flagged off the site for good reason.
Sorry, I assumed that a thread being detached for being off-topic meant that the off-topic discussion could continue. I'll stop if that's not the case and will take note accordingly. I'd appreciate a lift of the posting time limit too. I'll just play safe and avoid any sort of contentious posting going forward. Argument isn't the main reason I come to HN, after all.
> I'm seriously tired of this woe-is-me-I'm-a-prisoner-of-my-own-creation narrative.
> Right now? I'm being emotionally abused in my current job by a woman. How can I protest? How can I not come off like an asshole for pointing such a thing out? There's no right answer, so go ahead and say it.
You've been a good community member and I'm sure what you're feeling is for good reason, but you can't post like this to HN. Especially not in a major thread about a divisive topic.
I don't want to ban you because I'm sure this is temporary and we've all gone on tilt sometimes. So instead, I'm going to moderate a couple of your comments in addition to the one that was flag-killed above. If after a day or two you're sure you want them to stay up, email us at hn@ycombinator.com and we'll restore them.
Dude, what the fuck? Her having picture of herself showing cleavage is totally irrelevant. Dressing attractively does not make it ok to be harassed.
Secondly, saying "don't hit on women who come asking for funding or professional consolutation" in no way means "you can't date or hit on professional women".... you just can't do it TO THE WOMEN WHO ARE ASKING YOU FOR PROFESSIONAL HELP. You can flirt and do your thing if you meet a professional woman in a social situation, just not when you are interacting with them in a business context.
You can even date co-workers (I am married to a woman I met at work), but 1) you can't be in a position of power over them and 2) You have to be EXTREMELY careful in how you approach them. You do NOT start off with texts about sex or sexual things. You don't send anything sexual until you are way into your relationship. You would start with something like 'hey, would you like to grab a drink after work', and then if they say no, you stop IMMEDIATELY AND NEVER ASK AGAIN.
>Just kind of musing on a concern I've heard from a lot of people in and mostly outside that field just talking about rules where men can never hit on or anything close women who are professionals.
Then why do couples often say they met at work?
If you're an investor, meeting someone for the first or second time, and someone asks you for money, and you hit on them, you're an utter asshole and moron. Yes, even if someone was dressed in a way that exposed cleavage.
It's not remotely appropriate, professional, or even decent to hit on someone at the place and time that Cantor did.
If you already have a steady, mutual friendship (or other positive relationship) with someone you work with, or are in a casual setting that people go to with the intent of hitting on people or being hit on, then, sure, things can work differently. But that's extremely distant from what occurred here. Someone asking something from you in a professional capacity does not ever want "wanna fuck?" as the answer.
There is a legal, and ethical difference between meeting and dating a co-worker, and hitting on someone who you have power over.
The former is, assuming everyone is OK with it, fine. The latter is illegal as hell, and even if everyone is OK with it at the time, will expose you to litigation. Don't do it.
Wow. Is this satirical? This is disgusting - you are part and parcel of the rampant sexism the women in the article are speaking out against.
> That she might use sex appeal to her advantage is believable since many hard-working artists do. Just use every natural or acquired gift you have.
You're evaluating whether or not you think somebody's claim of harassment is true based on whether or not you think they are attractive. Does that mean that you would disregard allegations by somebody you found homely? We should assess claims of harassment based on the testimony provided not your personal assessment of somebody's attractiveness.
> That said, I'd probably not do it as a venture capitalist helping her get funding just because of the liability. I might end up in a news article or something.
The reason to avoid making women seeking funding feel uncomfortable is to avoid making women seeking funding feel uncomfortable. It's not so that you avoid bad PR.
> If I did it, there'd be a brick wall between the two with me testing her interest up front. She can tell me what she's comfortable with taking me up on personal/professional interests anywhere from zero (dont work with me) to both.
There should be zero personal or romantic engagement by the part of a VC with an entrepreneur where the first interaction is skewed by the power dynamic. A consensual and equal relationship is impossible when one party controls the financial and social prospects of the other.
> Then, there seems to be an expectation that successful or professional men never show interest in any women who are skilled professionals or founders in favor of... lesser women in clubs, churches, or something?
It's possible for men to interact with women in social contexts, not just in professional ones.
> Telling me I must sacrifice all potential for a date or resulting relationship with such incredible women just because they're founders or something with nothing in return... while they can mostly do whatever they want... seems a bit arbitrary, unfair and lots of missed potential.
Women do not exist in the world solely for you to date. Again, if there exists an asymmetrical power dynamic there is no possibility of a consensual equal relationship. If somebody asked you out while holding a gun to your head would you feel comfortable turning them down? You might protest at the metaphor, but being able to deny somebody resources they desperately need can be just as threatening.
> Also, every one I've heard from reported witnessing a varying chunk of those women would hit on or flit with men they liked who were professionals doing their job. They said that was OK since they initiated.
Are you sure that in every instance the women are expressing romantic interest? Or are they merely being friendly, and being misinterpreted. That is a trope that comes up often - men think they are being hit on but nothing of the sort is happening.
I think this needs to stop, at least for this article, in HN. If this is about discrimination/mansplaining, I would have supported you. But things written in this article is correct and is bad for not only females but for the organisation as well.
I'm sorry, I've seen absolutely no evidence that "almost all of them" were hoax hate crimes and I don't think you're capable of producing credible proof to this effect.
The technology industry is seen as progressive and cutting edge, therefore stories about sexism have more impact because they challenge a larger gap between perception and reality - "everyone knows" that finance is sexist.
I'm not sure I completely understand the rest of your point, but I object to the idea that promoting women's rights is against the interest of men. Just society arguments aside, there is a basic economic argument about the talent that is being overlooked by pushing women out with sexism.
Promoting and educating everyone of their rights is very important and essential to the function of a civil society.
You're absolutely right that tech gets the beatdown because it is new. It is much more difficult for people to complain about their conditions in older industries without finding themselves unable to find another job in the same industry.
The Tech industry, especially in Silicon Valley has the friendliest working environments. Why do news papers make it seem as if sexism is so rampant in the Valley? Why would a girl want to become an engineer if all she sees are stories about how badly women are treated in Silicon Valley?
It's an explosive combination of socially maladjusted nerds who suddenly ended up in positions of power in a location/industry with rather few women for them to influence with that authority + a new wave of progressive women trying to break into a male dominated space.
It's going to be a rickety ride for sure.
On a personal note, part of me was refusing to believe that someone like the partner at Binary was even possible in this day and age, I had never run into this myself and concluded this must have been a caricature at best. I must admit I was wrong to assume that, turns out those people are real. Hopefully there are very few of them, but I might have to change my mind on that one too soon.
> socially maladjusted nerds who suddenly ended up in positions of power
A lot of people who are socially awkward when they're young work hard to overcome it. Some just naturally grow out of it.
But some find a "trick" to avoid having to overcome it.
The trick is simple: be an asshole. Being an asshole doesn't require any actual social skills, and very few people will challenge you. Most people just go along to get along since they don't want to risk the social cost or spend the energy to raise the issue. It's a great way to superficially escape social awkwardness without having to actually work at it.
Let's use this opportunity to clean out the stink. Including the fact that https://www.linkedin.com/in/jsmarr/ made Friendster (somewhat) popular by taking users registrations to hack into other user accounts.
Register your email and password here: Now we will use your registration details on the major sites to scrape all the data we can. Huge violation that Joseph Smarr has never answered for.
How much of this is actually illegal? In workplaces you have legal recourse but in this situation it doesn't seem like there's anything you can do except blast their name out there for everyone to see.
The groping is probably illegal independent of workplace context, the stuff done in hiring is as illegal as if it was done during employment, much of rest is probably not illegal.
I'm not commenting on the ethics of this, but the woman who was "groped" stated that she consented to it. I know this may seem distasteful, but whether she allows the kissing/groping because she's attracted to him or because she just needs his help, it's still consent in my mind:
"I felt like I had to tolerate it because this is the cost of being a nonwhite female founder,"
I really hope that stories like this will let us stop blaming specific companies like Uber and accept that this is a problem with our industry. We're never going to be able to fix this as long as we keep sticking our heads in the sand and pretending it's not a systemic issue.
As with all corporate evils, it will require leadership from the top down establishing clear standards of behavior with strong enforcement. Simultaneously, external pressure via media, lawsuits, and missing key talent can be applied on companies not doing it or reinforcing those half-assing it.
Not sure I agree- because investors aren't in the same category as employers, it's harder for a founder to get any sort of justice for discrimination or harassment. AFAIK, the bar for a lawsuit is much higher.
Also, most of these firms aren't huge organizations- they're small management teams with a couple partners and associates / analysts. From what I can tell on Crunchbase, Binary Capital was just Justin Caldbeck and Jonathan Theo before it imploded.
HN Women. I am a male and I am genuinely curious. Is the following SH or does the position of power the person holds make it SH or does the environment (workplace) make it SH.
"“I was getting confused figuring out whether to hire you or hit on you.”"
A bit worrying that this is ambiguous, but I would say that it is largely because of the position of power. Like someone mentioned earlier, "hire" and "hit on" should never be in the same sentence.
And as a common courtesy I believe people shouldn't be hitting on their co-workers in the workplace in the first place. That makes everyone uncomfortable.
I'm not a woman, but I feel the line is a bit blurry depending on the scenario. If it's genuinely unclear what this person is coming to you for, then I think this is a reasonable message to send. If you're already half way through hiring somebody, then it's clearly inappropriate.
Not propositioning people you're attracted to is a sure way to be alone in life; I tend to think it's fine as long as it doesn't interfere with your professional obligations.
PSA: If you are an honest man who manages or works with women in any capacity, please keep complete audio records of your time at work. File storage is cheap, a false charge will cost you your livelihood and damage the reputation of your entire industry. If you live in a jurisdiction which requires more than one present party to consent to recording, run for your life.
P.S. not at all insinuating that the accusations here are necessarily false.
Just realized it's illegal in California, what a sorry and oppressive place California is. Most of the wonders in California appear to be natural, and stand in spite of human intervention rather than because of it.
>During the recruiting process, Mr. McClure, a founder of 500 Startups and an investor, sent her a Facebook message that read in part, “I was getting confused figuring out whether to hire you or hit on you.”
One would think having the phrases "hire you" and "hit on you" in the same sentence when communicating with someone undergoing recruitment at your company would be reason enough to take pause for a moment, and maybe ponder why PR suicide seems like a good idea.
>Mr. Canter, in an interview, said that Ms. Dent “came on strong to me, asking for help” and that she had used her sexuality publicly. He said he disliked her ideas so he behaved the way he did to make her go away.
???
>Lindsay Meyer, an entrepreneur in San Francisco, said Mr. Caldbeck put $25,000 of his own money into her fitness start-up in 2015. That gave Mr. Caldbeck reason to constantly text her; in those messages, reviewed by The Times, he asked if she was attracted to him and why she would rather be with her boyfriend than him. At times, he groped and kissed her, she said.
That one's just downright pathological creepy in the extreme.