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>ask the women you are close to in your life if they've been raped or assaulted. The answers may surprise you. That is not the number under dispute. There are

>ask the women you are close to in your life if they've been raped or assaulted. The answers may surprise you. That is not the number under dispute. There are two fundamentally different theories about what is going on: 1) Most men sexually assault women, or 2) A minority of men sexual assault a large number of women. Based on statistics of victims, it is impossible to distinguish between these two scenarios. However, understanding which scenario we are in is vitally important to forming our response. You seem to believe that we are in scenario 1. I will admit, I do not have any evidence handy that we are in scenario 2, because it is not a proposal I have ever seen seriously suggested. However, you have presented no evidence that we are in scenerio 1, which seems to be the less believable situation. Until such evidence is presented, I will continue to believe that it is a minority of men that cause a majority of sexual assault [0]. [0] Yes, not all sexual assualt is by males, but I am reasonably confident that it is enough that this general statement holds.

jacquesm 9y ago
> You seem to believe that we are in scenario 1. What I've seen professionally makes me believe this, definitely. And that view is consistent across 30 years in the industry with stints in various sub-branches of IT and/or fields that require IT services (which is pretty much anything nowadays). Let me reprhase this in a more direct way so there is no misunderstanding: I have yet to see a female friendly company in IT. If you know of such companies it would be nice to list them. If there is such a thing I would love to be surprised, I suspect that it is going to be the ones run by women, but they are rare enough that I have not had much exposure to them.
- gizmo686 9y ago
  >I have yet to see a female friendly company in IT. This is a very different claim than what you made above. Even within a company, a minority of people can cause a majority of the problems. Indeed, for any toxic behavior I can think of, it only takes one employee to take down a team, and the problem often spreads beyond that team. I see no reason to believe sexual assault is any different. Again, the question of if we are in situation 1 or 2 is vitally important. If we are in situation 1, then we are looking at a generational struggle to change men's attitudes towards women. Essentially, we need to wait for the old guard to die off, then wait for the new guard to die off, then hope that our actions made the new-new guard behave respectably. If we are in situation 2, then the above solution is almost useless. Instead, we are facing a managerial problem where we fail to root out the bad actors. As with any other toxic behavior, this can cause them to contaminate the entire environment. Of course, in this context, "manager" does not only refer to the managers of companies, but also the "managers" of social communities. Effectively, in this scenario, the problem description is not so much that too many people rape, but rather that we are ineffective at dealing with those who do.
  - jacquesm 9y ago
    I strongly believe this is a societal problem, not a 'women in tech' problem, though it is quite probably a fact that women in tech have it somewhat harder than women in society on average but judging by who run the worlds corporations and who make the worlds laws it's probably a safe bet that that gap is smaller than it seems just because we happen to look at the world through a filter shaped by technology.

jacquesm 9y ago

> You seem to believe that we are in scenario 1. What I've seen professionally makes me believe this, definitely. And that view is consistent across 30 years in the industry with stints in various sub-branches of IT and/or fields that require IT services (which is pretty much anything nowadays). Let me reprhase this in a more direct way so there is no misunderstanding: I have yet to see a female friendly company in IT. If you know of such companies it would be nice to list them. If there is such a thing I would love to be surprised, I suspect that it is going to be the ones run by women, but they are rare enough that I have not had much exposure to them.

gizmo686 9y ago
>I have yet to see a female friendly company in IT. This is a very different claim than what you made above. Even within a company, a minority of people can cause a majority of the problems. Indeed, for any toxic behavior I can think of, it only takes one employee to take down a team, and the problem often spreads beyond that team. I see no reason to believe sexual assault is any different. Again, the question of if we are in situation 1 or 2 is vitally important. If we are in situation 1, then we are looking at a generational struggle to change men's attitudes towards women. Essentially, we need to wait for the old guard to die off, then wait for the new guard to die off, then hope that our actions made the new-new guard behave respectably. If we are in situation 2, then the above solution is almost useless. Instead, we are facing a managerial problem where we fail to root out the bad actors. As with any other toxic behavior, this can cause them to contaminate the entire environment. Of course, in this context, "manager" does not only refer to the managers of companies, but also the "managers" of social communities. Effectively, in this scenario, the problem description is not so much that too many people rape, but rather that we are ineffective at dealing with those who do.
- jacquesm 9y ago
  I strongly believe this is a societal problem, not a 'women in tech' problem, though it is quite probably a fact that women in tech have it somewhat harder than women in society on average but judging by who run the worlds corporations and who make the worlds laws it's probably a safe bet that that gap is smaller than it seems just because we happen to look at the world through a filter shaped by technology.