
An open letter to Silicon Valley, from a woman in tech - DinahDavis
https://medium.com/code-like-a-girl/an-open-letter-to-silicon-valley-from-a-woman-in-tech-43d813962bdd#.oko58a8un
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integrii
I think a lot of the joking around is taken as serious threat by some people.
Gender and ethnicity play into that I'm sure. When most people are male, they
get used to harassing each other for fun. It's possible that by giving you lip
they were trying to bring you into that fold.

What bothers you could legitimately be funny and fun to them. They don't
understand getting so offended.

They also could have been asses. I wasn't there. However, if they were real
asses, you should have had something so horrible they did that you could just
go get them fired. Sounds like nothing that serious happened.

You're probably in a bit of a culture shock and making things worse than they
are. The worst thing I read was someone demanding they pay the bill for lunch
right?

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a_puppy
It sounds like there's a problem with the incentive structure for the company.
Ideally, the threat of a lawsuit should incentivize the company to address the
problem; but the HR department acted as though addressing the problem would
_increase_ its legal liability. But I don't know enough about sexual
harassment law to understand what causes this. Maybe addressing the problem
would mean acknowledging it exists, and acknowledging it exists would make it
harder to defend against a lawsuit? Would it be possible to reform the laws
around sexual harassment so that the HR department actually has incentives to
side with victims?

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DinahDavis
That is a great point!

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itnAAnti
Wow! Great article, thanks for sharing such a personal and challenging story.
I wish I could upvote more than once.

[edit: thanks for sharing mainly directed at original author, but thanks to
Dinah as well for posting it here!]

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DinahDavis
Thanks so much. The author has been very brave! I am very proud of her.

