Comment by spaceseaman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by spaceseaman | Hacker News Reader

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I think they're trying to claim it's a pandemic in Silicon Valley culture, rather than a pandemic in business culture universally.

While I haven't seen many hard statistics on the matter, the cultural interpretation is definitely that SV has a hard time with women and minorities. Highly prominent examples in the news like Uber don't improve this image. Also the conversation around Google (regardless of your "stance") has been filled with vitriol lately.

While I'm still questioning where I stand amidst the Google stuff lately, it's pretty clear that there are some really screwed up people in this industry that legitimately think women can't do as well in this job (not saying Google was an example of this, it's just that story brought a lot of the roaches out from under the fridge).

Going by Google searches, it looks like the NYtimes has been writing a lot of stories about sexual harassment in SV. Some have been pretty click-baity opinion pieces, but overall I think their coverage has been quite good.

So my point is, this may not actually be a "pandemic" but SV is where this stuff is being talked about in context to. So it makes sense to frame the conversation as "Why is SV where all these stories are coming from anyways?"

(You could always just say that the "Fake Nytimes is just looking for clicks again" but I find that argument misses the forest for the trees.)

Pretty sure there are some really screwed up people in all industries. The first thing you need to control for is the male/female ratio.

If industry A has a 50/50 ratio and industry B 80/20, women in industry B will experience 4 times as much sexual harassment per person, even if the men in both industries are exactly as screwed up.

That makes some kind of sense but I'm not sure why it matters. If an 80/20 ratio magnifies the harassment problem by 4x (and, by the way, there's no guarantee the response is linear), then harassment will help reinforce the 80/20 ratio. And, anyways, either way: that's just a lot more sexual harassment.

Understanding problems always matter when trying to solve them.

If you think the problem is that industry B men are especially creepy, you'll try one set of solutions. If you think it's due to demography numbers, you try other ways.

Also, I guess I really like to understand the world...

But, again, the response to an increased proportion again isn't necessarily linear. That's an assumption you're making, but not questioning. It's easy to think of reasons why the response might be superlinear: for instance, the more sexual harassment exists, the more comfortable other men might get with stepping up to and crossing that line; similarly, the more men you have, the more trouble women might have reporting. And these things all feed back on each other.

(I think it's hard to come up with ways in which the response would be sublinear).

So it's easy to come up with straightforward scenarios in which you get both: the increase expected from demography, and a cohort of extra-creepy men sheltered by that demography.

> If industry A has a 50/50 ratio and industry B 80/20, women in industry B will experience 4 times as much sexual harassment per person.

Right, 4x of nearly 0 is still nearly 0. 4x of a problematic number is 4x as problematic. So your implicit argument, "even if men in both industries are exactly as screwed up" is a pivot point here.

Sexual harassment is illegal, unfair and unacceptable. Pretend for a moment (and I am pretending, I do not agree with this line of thinking) we agree with the biological essentialists and "men" are just more likely to go into software engineering. Given such a precondition, they actually have an obligation to be less "screwed up" than their counterparts in other more evenly distributed groups just to provide the same (legally and ethically mandated) standard of work to women.

So I don't see how your line of thinking is informative. Either SV doesn't meet the same standard as everyone else and needs to improve. OR, SV is naturally obligated to have a higher standard than everyone else just to be in compliance with the law and basic ethical requirements. Either way, we deserve censure as an industry.

If we genuinely believe in an industry based on merit and ethics, then either condition compels improved standards and expectations of conduct. So the outcome is the same, no matter what.

This doesn't really make sense, at least from how I've read your comment, once details come into play though. What does being 'less screwed up' actually look like at an individual level? Beyond not physically/verbally molesting my co-workers and not deceiving/resisting HR if there's an investigation into another co-worker's behavior I can only so much.

Exactly. If the boss is the one doing the harassing there's almost nothing you can do. I suppose you could be a witness for the harassment lawsuit. Actually attempting to police your boss is likely to just get you fired.

Well, you could start by supporting women and their opportunity in the field. You could corroborate and help report cases of sexual harassment. You could help predominantly male offices self-police on inappropriate workplace behavior (less talking about dicks, for example).

You can help establish salary baselines so women can identify unfair behavior.

Those are somewhat passive. If you want to be a net positive instead of just not a net negative in this equation, offering mentoring services to women in your field who may have had less opportunity than you is a good idea. Many organizations are eager to offer those opportunities but short of trustworthy professionals willing to donate time.

There is of course other simple things business owners can do. For example, not considering nursing rooms a luxury. Making time in people's schedules for child care (which affects many more women in the west than men, but still benefits men). There's also benefit leveling. For example, leveling paternity and maternity leave means that women are less "special" in these benefit packages, which helps prevent unfair punishment to them.

There really is quite a lot people can do.

A lot of these are good suggestions but they seem more like management level decisions than decisions that fall on the broader category of 'everyone in SV' which is what it seemed like you were discussing when you talked about SV bearing the responsibility.

Corroborating cases of sexual harassment is definitely something everyone can and should do but that's hardly a passive activity with the same being true for self-policing. On the other hand, things like mentoring require a non-trivial amount of labor that seems unfair to call morally obligatory and everything you listed under the business owner section isn't really possible for non-owners.

That's not to say everything is fine the way it is obviously, but lumping everyone together implies an equal capacity for action when most of the highest impact actions you mentioned require authority that the majority of employees don't have.

The majority of my suggestions are for the rank and file.

But, lots of engineering types end up with direct or indirect power in management.

The ones with direct power probably seized it with the support of their company's mechanized infantry.

golfclap

You're assuming it's engineering, but many of these articles are about VC and finance firms. The news just globs them all together under the banner of "Silicon Valley".

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