Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/06/30/the-truth-about-sexual-harassm.html
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Scuttled OFF twitter?! Have they learned nothing from our buffoon-in-chief? When claims are made against one, one must buckle down and tweet not just once or twice but innumerable tirades til the cries of the harmed are drowned in one’s own wailings and flailings.
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how much money would i bet that some dark enlightenment type would love to call the male actions contained in these reports ‘disrupting PC culture’?
maybe not as much some VC would have bet on juicero.
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I don’t know anything about harassment. I do know that the ceiling in tech is a hard one.
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More and more I fear trump does represent the kind of nation we have become. If we don’t want Resistance to be futile then we should consider it mandatory.
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More often than not, people in controlling positions in the finance world are sociopaths (that’s how they got there, trampling everyone in their way).
Now some women (far from the majority, I expect) tell us the same sub-humans try and leverage their control of the purse to gain sexual favors.
And that should be a surprise because…?
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Totally outside of Orangeaid Orangatan, before he was a gleam in the eye of our national nightmare, tech was a place letting women like my wife get only so far before slapping them down hard and chasing them out.
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I’m from Silicon Ally. NYC eats punks like this.
Many venture capitalists are predatory dicks. Film at 11.
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Just venture? Maybe they just have more direct opportunities.
May I ask which area of tech your wife worked in?
I’ve tended to work in boring old financial services rather than “cutting edge”, and I have to say that the gender/racial diversity of the tech workforce and managers seems reasonable. (Maybe 80% non-white, 40% women in Toronto).
The sad fact is having a small, close-knit company with a specific corporate culture seems (at least to my observation) to be much more of a barrier to women and minorities. A geek culture may be fun for us geeks, but it excludes the 98% of the work-force who weren’t raised (or aren’t particularly interested in) that culture.
Dull and mostly colourless seems to work best for diversity.
Start-ups, internet and otherwise.
The solution is to develop enabling tech that negates the issue. It will come, driven by money. The question is only how quickly.
You lost me.
You’re saying that the glass ceiling in technology that actually often pushes women out the door can be “enabled” away by technology?
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My last full-time job in IT (this was 2000-2002): The guy next to me in the IT department was using the goatse pic as wallpaper , the guy across the room from me watched porn during his lunch hour, and the other guy in the room told me that my knowledge of computers meant nothing because “no one thinks some chick know anything about technology.”
I never thought that this was harassment because I ran into this in nearly every tech job I held. Before that was a half-dozen years as a mechanic & body shop worker, and although the garage had the mandatory Snap-on calendar and the guys made filthy and inappropriate jokes, once they saw competence they treated me decently. Not so much in IT; they saw my competence as a threat to their manhood.
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My wife worked on the business side. It too was about like you describe it but also throw in some institutional pressures and asshole CEOs.
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Because I think it is important to provide other perspectives: I work in IT, and have for 20 years. I’ve worked for four major employers: one state government, one in the Natural Gas industry, one in Retail (as a home office employee), and as a government contractor.
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About half of my department has been women at each employer. Half of my managers have been women. While traditionally African-Americans have been underrepresented, Asian Americans (and straight up Asians) have been slightly over represented. Of the four employers, three have had women in the CEO spot. Currently, my manager and director are women, my director is Asian, and my CIO is African American. (And all of them are there because they are damn fine leaders, anyone who says otherwise will have my contempt.)
All I am saying is - please, please- there are other areas to have an IT career in, and I hope that everyone who is interested in a career in IT knows that there are places for you. These jerkwads are not the only game in town!
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That’s the norm in this society and it’s sad.
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For example, if the majority of coding becomes automated, coders become obsolete. With fewer individuals in a given culture, there is less mass to support any given bias in that culture, so female leadership becomes less of a fought-against status.
This is all well and good, but this shouldn’t be about there existing some safe areas for women to work in, but about there being no parts, of the IT industry or in society in general, which are safe for misogyny.
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