I deeply, and with all moral conviction i can muster - detest people who have so much power they can abuse it, while i having no power and no chance to abuse it, at least get the chance to redocrate my inability and envy as moral outrage and principles. That is detestable. Very.
Silicon Valley Women, in Cultural Shift, Frankly Describe Sexual Harassment
721–730 of 882 posts
Re: Silicon Valley Women, in Cultural Shift, Frankly Describe Sexual Harassment
#722Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh. You're one of those people: "I'm automatically attracted to beautiful [women]—I just start kissing them. It's like a magnet. Just kiss. I don't even wait. And when you're a star they let you do it. You can do anything ... Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything."
Your comment is totally inappropriate, not to mention ridiculous, and essentially amounts to a silly personal attack. No rational reading of anything he wrote could possibly suggest that he does or condones that. In fact you'd have to entirely ignore the sentence where he specifically says the opposite. Comments like this make it very difficult to have important discussions about these topics.
At the same time, your “boys will be boys” attitude makes it hard to take you seriously as well. How do we actually get this behavior to stop when there are so many out there saying we shouldn’t call it out or there shouldn’t be consequences for it because they are “ignorant” of what they’re doing? On top of that, I don’t buy that ignorance argument for a second; they know exactly what they are doing.
Re: Silicon Valley Women, in Cultural Shift, Frankly Describe Sexual Harassment
#723Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow is there a lot to unpack here, and this really is a poor medium for it so I'll try and cut to the crux of the issue: Is there consent? If you're not sure, don't do it. And so a follow-up: do you think a VC pitch by someone of the opposite gender represents consent to making a sexual advance?
Of course, there's a lot there because it simply ain't as simple as: "Do you sexually harass?" or "Do you have consent?" Such statements underestimate the untold complexities pretty much all social interaction are based on. That's why solutions to these problems are not as simple as some people like to pretend. Nobody really likes talking to each other bluntly, everything always has to be implied or "said trough the…
And yet I'll bet you would never feel comfortable implementing your proposed direct approach in a workplace environment. Or most environments. Because it would make people uncomfortable.
So maybe analyze that feeling. Because the reason you don't have a relationship is not because you can't casually sexually harass women.
Re: Silicon Valley Women, in Cultural Shift, Frankly Describe Sexual Harassment
#724If this is what happens in Silicon Valley, I wonder what happens in Wall St firms.
...men on WS go after models not nerdy looking chicks interested in math and finance? :)
Re: Silicon Valley Women, in Cultural Shift, Frankly Describe Sexual Harassment
#725Re: Silicon Valley Women, in Cultural Shift, Frankly Describe Sexual Harassment
#726Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any VC whose reaction to this is "oh I guess I should avoid taking meetings with women because I just can't know what goof will cause me to get sued" is probably already making some women uncomfortable. If you cannot understand how _stupidly easy_ it is to have a completely non-sexual, non-harassing conversation with a member of the opposite sex, you most definitely should read up on some stuff. I mean this in the mo…
Sales at my company is female dominated, I'm in building next door so I run into them all the time, I just treat them as any other member of staff, politely but otherwise as an amorphous blob. I don't socialise with work mates outside of work events either, lines get crossed when you do in a alcohol orientated culture like mine. It's worked fine for me for 19 years employed. Had one female former colleague assume I w…
Great list. Its interesting how good ideas for how to conduct yourself in a business environment will naturally exclude creepy and/or harassing behavior AND will also leave far less room and opportunity for false accusations to take root.
Its not foolproof by any stretch, but it's excellent risk management on multiple fronts.
Re: Silicon Valley Women, in Cultural Shift, Frankly Describe Sexual Harassment
#727Earlier quoted context omitted.
> How do we get out of this dead end? It's a chicken and egg problem. The biggest systemic factor is the absurd gender ratio, but if the consequences of that are self-reinforcing then the status quo remains. Many people have the instinct to turn to anti-harassment policies and enforcement, but that's like trying to fight cancer with aspirin. It might help a little bit but it's no cure no matter how much you use, and…
One obvious step is that we need to do what we do in every other subject: force all children to learn enough tech to figure out whether they are good at it or not by making it a required class. When schools do that, they find that tons of girls excel at programming, but probably never would have tried it if it hadn't been mandatory. Dealing with harassment in the industry is also key, but even if that was eliminated…
"Throwing money" at cultural problems basically never, ever works.
Re: Silicon Valley Women, in Cultural Shift, Frankly Describe Sexual Harassment
#728Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Theybdon't know they can get away with it. They don't know that they are doing it. These people are rarely evil and predatory. They usually genuinely believe that the behavior they are exhibiting is desireable. At a certain point, one has to believe that another's actions are evil, even if that evil is unwitting. One mustn't actively choose to be "evil and predatory" to be so in fact.
At a certain point, one has to believe that another's actions are evil, even if that evil is unwitting. One mustn't actively choose to be "evil and predatory" to be so in fact. So something can become so horrible, that even a mistaken action should be defined as evil? Sorry, but that sounds wrong, and itself willfully vengeful. In that case, shouldn't we just do away with manslaughter and just say everyone who has ki…
At some point, the “mistake” ceases to be believable as a mistake.
Re: Silicon Valley Women, in Cultural Shift, Frankly Describe Sexual Harassment
#729Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't see any sign that "complete social ostracism" is the actual outcome here, or even a plausible outcome.
His reputation is in ruins. It remains to be seen whether anybody will do business with him. Both of those combined equals social ostracism, so we should at least be sure it's warranted.
This sounds remarkably like the sort of sky-is-falling rhetoric I heard on this website when Brendan Eich was pushed out of Mozilla. He's now the CEO of a of a two-year-old startup with $7M in funding. I'd love to have my reputation ruined in the way Brendan Eich's was!
It is technically true that it remains to be seen whether anybody will do business with him, but I strongly suspect they will. For the purpose of accurately testing this hypothesis, note that he already retired from both Lowercase Capital and Shark Tank a couple months ago: https://lowercasecapital.com/2017/04/26/hanging-up-my-spurs/
There are a couple of projects listed there (Zach Braff's new ABC show, his new podcast, some different form of investing): we can see if those come to fruition.
Re: Silicon Valley Women, in Cultural Shift, Frankly Describe Sexual Harassment
#730I wonder how ubiquitous this behavior is? And how often it applies to reversed gender and same-sex scenarios as well? Do general demographics play a role? In any given male or female dominated industry, is the less dominant gender more likely to experience harassment?
Many people I know (both female and male) have been come onto in a work environment by someone they are not interested in, or experienced an inappropriate scenario or comment, or experienced unwanted flirting or propositions. I think most people simply don't talk about it outside of their friend or social group.