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A Backlash Builds Against Sexual Harassment in Silicon Valley
- esteves_ 9y agoAnd if that kills Silicon Valley?
- hyperliner 9y agoThe 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-vc-sept-2010 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.
- clarkevans 9y agoSlide 12 is creepy enough; 14 is over the top; 16 is perverted.
- synaesthesisx 9y agoIs this real? This seems like some sort of poor excuse for a joke.
- FLUX-YOU 9y agoEven removing the context of his resignation, his slides are a poor attempt to be funny and shocking and memorable. I'm pretty sure he was not a comedian. Things get weird when money is involved. It was probably tolerated in 2010 because of that. 2017 was the breaking point (Why it took 7 years to reach a breaking point is a dark mark for Silicon Valley)
- sametmax 9y agoYou assume a company should be all serious. There are way worse stuff in South Park, Monty Python or Naked Gun. The slide is just an attempt at being funny. It may not make you laught, you may find this humor borderline, you may want this should never happen in your company, but it's not shocking that they allowed this in there. What are shocking are sexist actions. Any agressive/unfair action toward somebody actually, this is not a gender issue. The dubious slide ? Meh.
- rf15 9y ago> You assume a company should be all serious. Except nothing about this is funny, and if you think it is, it only shows how detached you are from reality and humanity. It's like casual racism.
- sametmax 9y agoYou could say that for most TV, cinema and youtube. We don't all agree on what's funny and what's offensive.
- tnzn 9y agoUsually you should let those being offended decide wether or not it's offensive by definition though.
- sametmax 9y agoIt's always offensive to someone. Something is not offensive in absolute. It's offensive to x in context y and it matters to z because of w.
- tnzn 9y agoUsually you should let those being offended decide wether or not it's offensive by definition though.
- Insanity 9y agoBut those movies are clearly meant as comedy and everyone watching it knows that. Some comedians say things that are accepted because they are comedians and anyone repeating their jokes in public in a setting where it might be taken quite differently than as a joke might get into some trouble for doing so. I really do not see how the two compare..
- sametmax 9y agoYou assume a company should be all serious. There are way worse stuff in South Park, Monty Python or Naked Gun. The slide is just an attempt at being funny. It may not make you laught, you may find this humor borderline, you may want this should never happen in your company, but it's not shocking that they allowed this in there. What are shocking are sexist actions. Any agressive/unfair action toward somebody actually, this is not a gender issue. The dubious slide ? Meh.
- te_chris 9y agoDon't forget this clusterfuck from Mr. McClure http://gawker.com/5985094/tech-bros-google-sponsored-trip-to-india-turns-into-naked-beach-romp http://gawker.com/5985094/tech-bros-google-sponsored-trip-to...
- westoncb 9y agoWait, what? This is an article about some people who were planning on attending a trip organized by McClure, who showed up early, got drunk and naked, and then one guy (Jesse Thomas) took pics/videos of the other (Matt Monahan) and posted it online. How is that a clusterfuck 'from Mr. McClure'?
- macspoofing 9y agoThe slide-deck is from 2010. This was around the time when overtly sexual tones in conference talks started to become unacceptable. Attitudes change.
- Alex3917 9y agoNow 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.
- api 9y agoThere's a meme around that if you crowdfund the VC industry will see this as "negative signaling" and blackball you. I have wondered first of all if it's true. Good numbers are good numbers right? Is a VC going to pass on a great deal because they crowdfunded a prior round? Secondly if it is true it seems self serving protectionism, like taxi companies trying to scare you away from Uber and Lyft.
- PLenz 9y agoThe fact that a backlash against self-evidently disgusting behavior needs to 'build' is disturbing.
- rainbowmverse 9y agoPeople have different thresholds where the perceived (or real) danger of speaking out is low enough. For some people, they don't need any backup. For others, they need to see a lot of people talking about it. Most people are somewhere in the middle. The snowball takes a while to reach the bottom.
- twobyfour 9y agoIndeed. But it's a shame that speaking out has to be perceived as dangerous at all. And it's a shame that until now the tone of discussion has been sufficiently defensive and denialist that misbehavior has been perceived as acceptable and something certain people can get away with.
- macspoofing 9y agoThere are many facets to this backlash (if indeed there is one). At the most fundamental level nobody disputes that women have a right to the same kind of respect that men receive (including not being harassed), or that women have a right to the same opportunities as men do. But the devil is in the details. For example, there are a lot of insane ideas thrown around as to how to fix the problem. There are people who argue accusations of harassment should not only be taken seriously (which everyone agrees with) but also be automatically taken as true regardless of their veracity and verifiability, and with the the social, personal and professional cost suffered by those accused being an irrelevant detail. Second, is this is a Silicon Valley problem, or every-industry problem? How are women treated in the NY Times newsroom compared to Google compared to GM? This is always side-stepped or is treated in a sloppy manner. This sloppiness is evident in the original NY Times article which profiled personal experiences of a number of women in tech with no attempt to verify the claims or set it in a wider context. In the most memorable example, Dave McClure was outed by name in the article for asking one of the women out as she was applying for a position of at his company. Unprofessional? Yes. Creepy? Yes. But that crime relative to the public shaming in an international newspaper read by millions, isn't justified. The irony of that specific case is that there were more egregious examples of McClure's conduct that may actual warrant this public shaming, but that would require some actual journalism.
- eevilspock 9y agoI'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.
- naravara 9y agoCan't you just approximate the result by finding the most upvoted comments?
- eevilspock 9y agoHN doesn't expose vote counts
- Sacho 9y ago> 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. Can you clarify how exactly objectivity clashes with opinions on fairly subjective matters(e.g. sexism)? Is there an objective standard of sexism that was applied in a rigorous analysis of "SV culture"(whatever that is..) that HN users are being defensive about? Can you provide some examples to what you mean?
- twobyfour 9y agoWhat's necessarily subjective about sexism?
- macspoofing 9y agoLots. Interpretation of some specific event, action, or person as sexist (or not) can be very subjective. For example, if a woman applies for a job and is rejected, she may think it was due to sexism, whereas the interviewer may not.
- itbeho 9y agoSusan 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 https://twitter.com/susanthesquark/status/881198112923987968
- laser 9y agoIsn't such a statement without example a form of public manipulation? The NYT article that got this going only said about Sacca, "At a mostly male tech gathering in Las Vegas in 2009, Susan Wu, an entrepreneur and investor, said that Mr. Sacca, an investor and former Google executive, touched her face without her consent in a way that made her uncomfortable." And Sacca publicly responded, "Yesterday, the New York Times wrote that, back in 2009, a woman I knew well at the time accused me of touching her face at a mutual friend’s party in Las Vegas. At the time, we had known each other for years, were in a private party setting in Vegas, not a work event, with no investor-investee relationship, we were not in business together, we didn’t work together in any capacity, and I also wasn’t even a venture capitalist yet as I didn’t close my first fund until May of 2010. There was no imbalance of power between us." Given this, would a message to Susan Fowler, concerning tweets, "That's really gross. And so many people praised him for it! Ew! No!" and "Wait, so: the day before a story is published in the NYT about him being a creep, @sacca writes a medium post about how much he's evolving" asking her to not continue attacking him be necessarily unjustified? A message that encourages her to direct her energy more constructively towards the real perpetrators could be called manipulative, but if many would find them agreeable, they'd never be posted by Susan, as they'd reveal her to be acting manipulatively.
- macspoofing 9y agoHold on a second. You're making judgments about a situation you've only heard one side of. What is 'manipulation' in this context? Susan hasn't elaborated but wishes to convey that it is in some way nefarious. But is it? I'm sorry, I don't think it's fair to just pile on this individual for this with so little information, even if he was a dick in some other situation. // // I find myself playing a contrarian on these forums much more than I'd like to but this topic tends to have people dropping all semblance of nuance, and fairness.
- cbanek 9y agoOne 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.