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A Backlash Builds Against Sexual Harassment in Silicon Valley

by calvinlough on 7/4/17, 1:19 AM with 33 comments

• by PLenz on 7/4/17, 1:54 PM

  The fact that a backlash against self-evidently disgusting behavior needs to 'build' is disturbing.

• by itbeho on 7/4/17, 2:39 PM

  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

• by cbanek on 7/4/17, 8:15 PM

  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.

• by Alex3917 on 7/4/17, 1:36 PM

  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.

• by hyperliner on 7/4/17, 1:34 PM

  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-...

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

• by eevilspock on 7/4/17, 2:04 PM

  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.