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.
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.