
A Backlash Builds Against Sexual Harassment in Silicon Valley - calvinlough
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/03/technology/silicon-valley-sexual-harassment.html
======
PLenz
The fact that a backlash against self-evidently disgusting behavior needs to
'build' is disturbing.

~~~
macspoofing
There are many facets to this backlash (if indeed there is one). At the most
fundamental level nobody disputes that women have a right to the same kind of
respect that men receive (including not being harassed), or that women have a
right to the same opportunities as men do.

But the devil is in the details. For example, there are a lot of insane ideas
thrown around as to how to fix the problem. There are people who argue
accusations of harassment should not only be taken seriously (which everyone
agrees with) but also be automatically taken as true regardless of their
veracity and verifiability, and with the the social, personal and professional
cost suffered by those accused being an irrelevant detail.

Second, is this is a Silicon Valley problem, or every-industry problem? How
are women treated in the NY Times newsroom compared to Google compared to GM?
This is always side-stepped or is treated in a sloppy manner. This sloppiness
is evident in the original NY Times article which profiled personal
experiences of a number of women in tech with no attempt to verify the claims
or set it in a wider context. In the most memorable example, Dave McClure was
outed by name in the article for asking one of the women out as she was
applying for a position of at his company. Unprofessional? Yes. Creepy? Yes.
But that crime relative to the public shaming in an international newspaper
read by millions, isn't justified. The irony of that specific case is that
there were more egregious examples of McClure's conduct that may actual
warrant this public shaming, but that would require some actual journalism.

~~~
throwaway478
Second all the points you made.

There are other unintended consequences that are also worrying. I'm a
bisexual/pansexual man and software engineer and the climate has become so
antagonistic between the sexes in the past few years that I personally feel a
massive relief whenever a professional setting is devoid of attractive women.
I feel no such concern with attractive men or unattractive people of any
gender. Even the most innocent interactions these days are liable be construed
as harassment, especially by those with a socialized victimhood-mentality.

The fact that accusations based on perceptions/interpretations of the accuser
involving situations and circumstances that are often highly ambiguous are
accepted as unassailable fact is highly troubling. There is no room for nuance
and misunderstanding anymore. The fear of public reprisal through shaming over
misunderstanding and ambiguity is very palpable and meets the criteria for a
hostile work environment.

Personally, I have the luck of being relatively attractive, but I have
concerns for less attractive male colleagues whose innocent interactions will
almost invariably be taken as creepy simply by virtue of being less
attractive. The precariousness of their situation is made worse when some of
these colleagues are on the aspie/autistic side of the spectrum and are often
wholly unaware of how their interactions may be misinterpreted. Engineering
used to be a safe haven for those on that end of the spectrum, where they
didn't have to worry about their inability to pick up on nuanced social cues
they don't possess the psychological skills to readily perceive in realtime so
they are aware of a potential transgression before they commit it.

Work environments designed and curated by neurotypicals is actively hostile to
those that are not neurotypical and we're witnessing the colonization of one
of few professional areas where those who are not-neurotypical could safely
operate. For all the talk of the value of diversity, cognitive diversity is
never ever considered or even a topic of conversation.

To be clear, I'm not excusing overt and unambiguous sexual harassment. I'm
merely making the point that human sexuality and human socialization are very
messy affairs and that most situations are hardly ever free of ambiguity and
misunderstanding. If we don't acknowledge that there often is a grey area, we
risk creating very hostile social spaces for those who don't have neurotypical
privilege and have little to no sexual capital to mitigate their interactions
from being considered "creepy" by default.

[http://www.mit.edu/~jcb/tact.html](http://www.mit.edu/~jcb/tact.html)

[http://ozarque.livejournal.com/176349.html](http://ozarque.livejournal.com/176349.html)

------
itbeho
Susan Fowler tweeted that Chris Sacca has been DMing her on Twitter, tring to
"manipulate" her to stop tweeting about him. This after his blog post claiming
to be changing his ways.

[https://twitter.com/susanthesquark/status/881198112923987968](https://twitter.com/susanthesquark/status/881198112923987968)

~~~
laser
Isn't such a statement without example a form of public manipulation? The NYT
article that got this going only said about Sacca, "At a mostly male tech
gathering in Las Vegas in 2009, Susan Wu, an entrepreneur and investor, said
that Mr. Sacca, an investor and former Google executive, touched her face
without her consent in a way that made her uncomfortable." And Sacca publicly
responded, "Yesterday, the New York Times wrote that, back in 2009, a woman I
knew well at the time accused me of touching her face at a mutual friend’s
party in Las Vegas. At the time, we had known each other for years, were in a
private party setting in Vegas, not a work event, with no investor-investee
relationship, we were not in business together, we didn’t work together in any
capacity, and I also wasn’t even a venture capitalist yet as I didn’t close my
first fund until May of 2010. There was no imbalance of power between us."

Given this, would a message to Susan Fowler, concerning tweets, "That's really
gross. And so many people praised him for it! Ew! No!" and "Wait, so: the day
before a story is published in the NYT about him being a creep, @sacca writes
a medium post about how much he's evolving" asking her to not continue
attacking him be necessarily unjustified?

A message that encourages her to direct her energy more constructively towards
the real perpetrators could be called manipulative, but if many would find
them agreeable, they'd never be posted by Susan, as they'd reveal her to be
acting manipulatively.

------
cbanek
One interesting thing to me is use of the word "outed" to refer to people who
commit sexual harassment:

> “Some men have the feeling that the conversation has turned into a witch
> hunt,” said Aileen Lee, a founder of Cowboy Ventures. “They’re asking when
> people will stop being outed.”

Now, when I think about being outed, it's definitely in an LGBT sense. But in
general, I feel when you are "outed" it's about something that might be bad,
but you can't change, and shouldn't really matter anyway. Some examples would
be being gay, previously being convicted with an unrelated crime, etc. Being
outed is usually bad, as it usually means that you're divulging information
that reflects poorly on the person who to a group who doesn't know it.

So what's the difference between being "outed" and being "called
out"/"reported"/etc? I'd say it's bad purpose/intent or harm to others. I
don't say I outed that meth dealer to the cops right?

I also recently saw this in a reply to a comment I made here on HN, about how
the commenter hopes people won't "out" those managers who don't feel it's
appropriate for members of the opposite sex to have 1:1's alone.

It's an interesting choice of words, and it does get the point across. But to
me, this sticks in my throat, because it seems like people are implicitly
saying it's okay to do these things, as long as nobody knows. Which seems to
be and have been the status quo.

------
Alex3917
Now that women can mostly route around the venture industry by doing
crowdfunding, have the demographics of teams that raise money changed
significantly? Already one of the biggest ICOs, Tezos, is run by a female
entrepreneur, and so is the upcoming AI Gang ICO, but I don't know of any
overall statistics.

I wonder to what extent, if any, these scandals are coming out now due to
things like AngelList and ERC-20 being viable-ish funding options.

~~~
api
There's a meme around that if you crowdfund the VC industry will see this as
"negative signaling" and blackball you.

I have wondered first of all if it's true. Good numbers are good numbers
right? Is a VC going to pass on a great deal because they crowdfunded a prior
round?

Secondly if it is true it seems self serving protectionism, like taxi
companies trying to scare you away from Uber and Lyft.

------
hyperliner
The biggest issue here is not that Dave is a creep and that he has been let
go.

The biggest issue is that the leaders of this 500 Startups organization let
this go on for years without taking action.

Who are the people who let their organization's logo and name appear in this
guy's slides together with the words "GET YOU LAID (=SEX)"?

[https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/dmc500hats/how-to-
pitch-a-...](https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/dmc500hats/how-to-pitch-a-vc-
sept-2010)

It does not matter if they are men or women. THEY ARE COMPLICIT in this mess.

~~~
sametmax
You assume a company should be all serious. There are way worse stuff in South
Park, Monty Python or Naked Gun. The slide is just an attempt at being funny.
It may not make you laught, you may find this humor borderline, you may want
this should never happen in your company, but it's not shocking that they
allowed this in there.

What are shocking are sexist actions. Any agressive/unfair action toward
somebody actually, this is not a gender issue.

The dubious slide ?

Meh.

~~~
Insanity
But those movies are clearly meant as comedy and everyone watching it knows
that.

Some comedians say things that are accepted because they are comedians and
anyone repeating their jokes in public in a setting where it might be taken
quite differently than as a joke might get into some trouble for doing so.

I really do not see how the two compare..

~~~
sametmax
If I watch this slide, I'm not going to take it to the letter. Only an idiot
would. "bigger is better" ? You take that phrase seriously in a corporate
slide ? It's clearly an attempt to humor. I get you don't find that funny. I
just don't get how shocked everyone is.

The US elected a president that "grab them by the pussy". You have real
problems. Those slides are not.

------
eevilspock
I'd love it if someone with the skills could do a sentiment analysis of all
the comments under SV sexism/sexual harassment articles posted to HN, and
quantify the amount of denialism versus recognition there is, as well as graph
whether there is at least a downward trend in denialism, whether the tipping
point mentioned in the article is happening.

On this topic I've been disappointed in HN more often than not. HN users pride
themselves on objectivity, but sadly much of it is ditched in favor of
defensiveness (or the other dismissive reactions mentioned in the article)
when SV culture is put under a critical microscope.

~~~
Sacho
> HN users pride themselves on objectivity, but sadly much of it is ditched in
> favor of defensiveness (or the other dismissive reactions mentioned in the
> article) when SV culture is put under a critical microscope.

Can you clarify how exactly objectivity clashes with opinions on fairly
subjective matters(e.g. sexism)? Is there an objective standard of sexism that
was applied in a rigorous analysis of "SV culture"(whatever that is..) that HN
users are being defensive about? Can you provide some examples to what you
mean?

~~~
twobyfour
What's necessarily subjective about sexism?

~~~
Sacho
I had two objections to parent's point, so forgive me for ranting on a bit
here.

The strict definition of sexism is a mindset, and the only way to reliably
determine that mindset is to have a mind-reading device. That means that
almost every time we evaluate sexism, we use a heuristic, and choosing which
heuristics to apply is necessarily subjective. For example, I find most of the
sexism controversies do not have clear indicators of sexism, but I acknowledge
that I applied my own opinion to determine those, and opinions can differ.

Since the strict definition of sexism is difficult to apply, it's also
possible to use an operative definition and still remain objective. If we
could agree to a set of heuristics, a set of measurable actions through which
we can objectively determine that something is "sexism", then we could use
that to make our judgement calls. However, I don't see such a standard
proposed and agreed upon - in fact, the reason the issue is so controversial
is that it seems there is very little "standard" about sexism that we agree
on, and opinions about it have a lot of variance. I think it's normal for HN
users to then express skepticism and criticize an ad-hoc application of rules
to slap a label on someone when we can't agree on what that label means.

This is why I was looking for an objective standard to replace the dictionary
definition of the word, which HN users agreed upon and then failed to apply
when "SV culture" was put under a microscope.

EDIT: reduced repetition and improved wording.

