Harassment at Apple: A personal perspective

Honestly, having a third party involved has worked well. Sometimes, misunderstandings linger and fester, and then even the most innocuous things can be construed wrongly. A third party (a good manager is ideal) saying either "you're being too sensitive" or "no, they were out of line, i'll talk to them" helps. I don't know of anybody who's refused to iron out issues, and I firmly believe most people are decent enough to help.

But at the end of the day, you don't have to like everybody you work with, as long as there's respect from both parties. That's being professional. If respect isn't there, either you or your manager is going to have to make a call sooner or later. For better or worse, this is probably going to come down to team dynamics, as teams that work well together are very valuable. This might suck, but I've never seen racism or sexism being the dominant effect in a small team (I guess it helps if it's "just" a job to you. Normally, I'd simply start looking for a job elsewhere, but if I was at Apple, I'd want to stay there.

"Many valid incidents of harassment are dismissed/ignored, and many invalid/borderline incidents are punished unfairly, and therefore the current system sucks for everybody".

Which seems entirely possible.

On other hand - never in my career, I have seen HR truly standing up for the Employee. The goal is always to deflect and maintain plausible deniability. I have never read a single story on Internet that highlights those HR heroes we deserve.

> As a woman and minority in tech, I have also often felt like a lone barometer in gauging the importance of a lot of issues around gender, race and culture.

Starting the article about how you've always been a victim

> One day, one of my supervisors jumped to my defense at a team event, in an awkward display of sexism. The gesture was unnecessary, so I was taken aback

Your manager sees you floundering and tries to help you out

> However, a group of other male coworkers who resented the attention I received

Whaaaat??? Is this middle school? Okay, let's start dropping names.

> I started having major sleep disturbances, endocrine issues, and depressive symptoms (crying spells, anger outbursts, chronic fatigue, gastrointestinal problems)

This sounds extreme and possibly symptomatic of other psychological factors at play.

People here really should read up on what "relationship triangles" are. Most people a) can't recognize them when they occur, and b) don't realize how toxic and dysfunctional this relationship dynamic is. This must not become the new norm in the workplace, as there will be, as with any type of dysfunction, large human costs.

In an ideal world, people would assert themselves respectfully to the people causing undesired behavior (which OP admits she didn't do) and coworkers should empathically listen and adjust their behavior (which according to her also didn't happen). Both of those things should have happened; there are two reasons they didn't:

1) Most people are simply not mature enough to communicate like this. People don't get taught how to resolve conflict among each other and how to assert themselves respectfully. Most people don't know how to assert themselves, and instead blame, generalize ("you always do this"), and attack. And most people also can't empathically listen, and adapt their behavior, they might just refuse to change, or even feel slighted and seek "revenge". This is a complex problem, and the people treating it as a "women's issue" are presenting an almost pathetically oversimplified view.

2) Even if people dared assert themselves, they're afraid that the company would punish them for it. This also should be fixed, but it doesn't undermine the existence of the first point.

The real problem is that the vast majority of people have pretty poor communication skills, and nobody is willing to address this, instead opting to play political partisan games. Schools and the culture at large should teach effective communication, assertion and problem-solving skills, if we want to make any progress.