4 ms·
It's easy to miss the point with the bearkskin rug thing. It's worth spelling out: a workplace which tolerates sexual harassment (senior supervisor known to pro
by pnmahoney 14y ago
It's easy to miss the point with the bearkskin rug thing. It's worth spelling out: a workplace which tolerates sexual harassment (senior supervisor known to proposition all the women at the company), or forces its female employees to go through backchannels to deal with sex-driven workplace hostility?
It's less that the 'employees weren't nice people' and more that this employee was powerless to reign in patterns of offensive/illegal/errant behavior.
Still it wouldn't be so necessary to focus on, _except_ for all the crap being thrown in here to accept/defend it.
- walrus 14y agoThanks. After reading your comment and rereading the article, I agree with your interpretation (but I can't stand the author's presentation). It's too bad that the author chose to put the "male" spin on things[1][2][3][4]. I found that offensive enough to distract me from understanding the main point of the article on my first read. (Also, the bearskin part was far-fetched. As another commenter here said: unless there was more context involved, she was probably reading into that too much.) [1] "[...]young, plain-looking guys in T-shirts, gazing at their screens, seemed startled—if not displeased—to see a strange new woman in the office." [2] "[...]it seemed like the kind of thing that suburban boys from Harvard would think was urban and cool." [3] "[...]or the unrepentantly boyish company culture that it represented[...]" [4] "As Mark wrote on his business card with boyish hubris[...]"