
Sexual Harassment Inc: How the #MeToo movement is sparking a wave of startups - rbanffy
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-leadership/wp/2018/01/05/sexual-harassment-inc-how-the-metoo-movement-is-sparking-a-wave-of-startups/?utm_term=.5f193f3946e7
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istorical
My first thought was that there might be some sort of risk of a conflict of
competing interests between justice and the profit-seeking motive. And because
having an aggressive sales/marketing team trying to draw in more customers
might encourage false accusations.

But then I realized I was reacting emotionally and that many law firms already
have to advertise and sell themselves and I'm applying some sort of cognitive
bias to startups that I'm not applying to the law profession.

Which actually caused me to have a more interesting realization: the notion of
being a tech entrepreneur is new enough that I think it lacks some sort of
slowly built cultural trust in the ethics/morals/impartiality of the
profession.

People kind of trust doctors, (some) lawyers, judges to be above any sort of
greed or profit-seeking immoral actions.

But I don't think there's any trust at all that startups will "do the right
thing".

Obviously big business and corporations have proven to have a poor track
record with labor rights, environmental protections, etc.

But does the Silicon Valley startup deserve the same distrust? Or should it be
given more of the benefit of the doubt?

I'm not sure. But it's interesting that we're so quick to jump to mob
mentality distrust of tech.

Maybe the reason we trust law or medicine is their codified ethics - for
lawyers it's the law itself and for medicine it's hundreds of years of
cultural tradition and teaching and the Hippocratic oath. And many people and
organizations have proposed an equivalent for scientists and engineers.

But I somehow think the pace of change and cultural values we have today make
it much more difficult to really foster that sort of occupational "culture",
at least in the tech world.

