I've seen a lot of other kinds of assholery too. Tech has an underbelly just like any other major industry. FWIW I've heard Hollywood and Wall St. are worse.
My network informs me that similar efficiency exists across the Street. I'd encourage any women skeezed out by SV to apply for Wall Street jobs: more cash, less groping.
So apparently that does happen on Wall Street as well?
Stereotypically, you have cash equities at one extreme and exotic derivatives at the other. Outside of banks, the culture at an HFT firm or quant hedge fund will be completely different from the culture on a "bro-y" bank desk.
Asking a woman who's 25 if she's still a virgin is a clearly loaded question - if she says yes then she's admitting to be inexperienced and should sleep with the the 'man' asking in order to learn the ways of the world, and if she says no then she's admitting that she's sexually active and therefore willing to sleep with a 'man' like the one asking the question.
Creepy assholes use this sort of tactic because they get off on making someone else feel bad. If you see it you really should call them out.
London just happens to have a large financial sector. I can assure you that the same thing happens in the oil, tech, and real estate industries for example.
If we're taking about anecdotes, I had a friend in college who was a sex worker and most of her customers were in tech.
What's wrong with a word 'prostitute'?
Also sex workers includes dancers in strip clubs, phone sex operators and adult magazine models none of which engage in the physical act of sex with others as part of their job:
https://rewire.news/article/2008/05/06/sex-work-trafficking-...
Wikipedia article on gulags refers to prisoners as "workers" several times.
General public doesn't give a rat's ass about jargon churned out by all those activists. And I'm absolutely not singling out sex workers here, SJWs tend to be the biggest offenders now.
If public familiarity with some subtle, nonobvious definition of "sex worker" is an important point of their strategy, they are probably doing it wrong. If they are getting collateral damage from the human trafficking propaganda, they can talk about "legal sex work" or whatever to cut themselves from it.
Activists overestimate familiarity with their jargon and ideas in the public. Firstly, because they live in echo chambers. Secondly, because virtue signalers amplify apparent popularity outside of the echo chambers too. It's a trap. Ask people who were sure that Trump will lose.
I now feel compelled to explain myself. My use of it was only in a secondary remark, non important for the main point of my post. And I think somebody versed in the nuances of sex work advocacy may have heard of this concept too. If not, well, not much loss.
Interesting that you caught SJW and missed virtue signaling. This is more obscure I think and, admittedly, it was a part of my main point. So, from google:
the action or practice of publicly expressing opinions or sentiments intended to demonstrate one's good character or the moral correctness of one's position on a particular issue.
Also I was not promoting the term or any agenda I was simply explaining the nature of the term to the OP because they asked. Maybe you should go back and read the context.
I don't have any problem accepting "sex worker". I think it's a fine and intuitive way to describe somebody doing, well, sex-related work. I only don't find it intuitive at all that it must necessarily be somebody working willingly. I think it's an assault on grammar rules and logic to insist that people believe so. Three others appear to agree with me, or at least upvoted that post for whatever reason.
The esoteric acronym is of minor relevance, feel free to disregard it if your time can be better spent than researching this issue.
Note that I took a great care to rant in third person ("they"). Nothing personal.
A bank I worked at in the mid 80's had one woman working on a floor in a fairly separate building away from the main building. That one woman had to endure pretty much constant harassment from two guys who were technically her superior and their boss didn't lift a finger to stop it.
I made a good bit of noise about it to HR and then she begged me to stop because she was afraid they'd let her go. The two guys that did this (Koert Borst and Jos Haarsma, I sincerely hope they read this, assuming they are still alive) were crossing so many lines in their behavior I lost count.
Fortunately I only worked in that department (systems administration) for about a year before landing a job at the computer center which was far away from the main offices. Assholes would be too friendly a term to describe those two, it was downright sadistic how they enjoyed harassing her until she cried.
One of the West Point/Sloan MBAs, Chip, showed his dick to a recruiter.
One of my lawyer friends had a hiring manager show his dick to her.
I've been in tech for a decade and haven't met anyone who has been exposed to a dick in person.