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Comment by asabjorn | Hacker News Reader

As a survivor I can say sexual assault is terrible. Before we make any conclusion on the numbers, 88/384=22.9% of the female founders responded and 32.5% were given the chance to participate. Is the sample representative of the whole? How were the 32.5% of female founders that were given a chance to respond selected? If this is a representative sample then this is a shockingly high percentage of unwanted sexual contact.

Also, I wonder if we can get a bit more detail on what situations these happened in and what exactly happened so that we can discuss other reasonable measures we can all participate in.

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The pool is 125, not 384.

> we helped Callisto send a survey to 125 of the 384 female founders

The pool of 125 was based on who signed up for an email list.

> Callisto chose to send the survey to the 125 founders who signed up for the YC female founder email list. They choose this group under the assumption that these founders would welcome being reached out to for the survey because they had signed up proactively to this email list.

There's certainly some room for sampling bias, but not nearly as much as you claim. I also strongly disagree that this is shocking: it's difficult to make good estimates, but various surveys are often in excess of 60% for women: http://www.statisticsviews.com/details/feature/10906109/Sexu...

20% is below a reasonable minimum estimate: https://fairygodboss.com/articles/sexual-harassment-statisti...

Now, this is a more specific survey, not just any sexual harassment, but these numbers should not be shocking. One of the core messages of the me-too movement is that these numbers should not be shocking, this is the reality, and ignorance of this can contribute to the problem.

It seems you are familiar with the topic, could you clarify what does it mean "unwanted sexual contact"? Does it have to include genitalia? Or an inappropriate touch? any unwanted physical contact? explicit words? inappropriate joke? inappropriate stare? something else?

Thanks. Still trying to figure out how the terms were defined in the survey to gain an understanding of what the experiences were. Do you know how the survey defined sexual overtures, sexual badgering, sexual coercion, quid-pro-quo and unwanted sexual contact? Does these terms mean different things in the survey? E.g is quid-pro-quo also sexual badgering? is unwanted sexual contact also sexual coercion?

Also, do you know if these experiences were when they were part of YC or anytime?

Even if "only" 20% of 32% of 384 people were assaulted, 18 people in this group assualted by educated, wealthy, powerful professionals, that's still horrifically high.

:-( I am sorry. I don’t know you, but you did not deserve to be sexually assaulted.

Thanks. It sucked for quite a while, but I’ve forgiven her at this point and I am trying to channel the energy to understand how these things come about so that I can help us all become part of the solution.

> [...]I’ve forgiven her[...]

So you were sexually assaulted by a female? Am I missing something?

Not sure why you're being downvoted, as assaults by females are probably much less common (but not any better). In any case, "her" might also be a gender-neutral form of "him", if I'm not mistaken.

I don't think I've ever seen "her" used as a gender-neutral pronoun outside of abstract examples in philosophy papers. GP almost certainly meant to say they were assaulted by a woman.

I'm honestly not sure i believe sexual assaults are way less common against men, although men may not recognize them as often. I've had several women behave towards me in ways that they would definitely call sexual assault if the roles were reversed.

as for the down votes, look what GP wrote:

> So you were sexually assaulted by a female? Am I missing something?

this is an incredibly blunt and rude question to ask a victim of sexual assault. it implies that the very notion of the assault even occurring is so baffling as to require double checking that the poster even meant what they said.

Thank you for the clarification, I am not a native English speaker as you can probably tell. :) The gender-neutral form I was talking about is the way unknown people are sometimes being referred to: "user should click on the button so she can access the hidden page".

I found GGP's comment an expression of surprise, though it does sound a bit blunt - but given the international audience of HN I try not to judge posters too harshly.

> I am not a native English speaker as you can probably tell

yeah, i figured. i hope my post did not come off too harshly.

> "user should click on the button so she can access the hidden page"

historically the masculine "he", "man", "mankind" has been used to refer to all people in english, but it's not quite gender-neutral. in the last fifty years or so, some authors have used "she" instead to be more inclusive, but best practice today is to use "they" when gender is not known. just FYI.

Thanks!

A wave of AMAB people in my circles came out with their own experiences after Terry Crews shared his. I think it's a lot more common, possibly to the point of parity.

It's a catch-22: it's assumed half the population can't experience it. They're strong (and will be assumed the agressor if they fight), all men want sex (not necessarily with women, or that woman), etc. There's a whole suite of victim blaming and denialist rhetoric to match what women deal with.

So there's no research, education, or advocacy, and the lack of data is used to justify not devoting resources. I've personally been propositioned and harassed in inappropriate ways. Underreporting is a known problem for women, but too few people apply the same logic that leads to that conclusion to other genders.

If anyone else was wondering "AMAB" seems to mean "Assigned Male At Birth". I had to look it up, and I figure I'm not the only one who didn't recognize the acronym.

Correct. It's a useful term because we have some shared experiences even if we go off in different directions gender-wise.

Everything I have seen suggests men are much, much less likely to report than women are. It's too stigmatizing for a man to admit to being a victim and there is vastly less support out there for male victims than for female ones.

One of the challenges that men who have been sexual assaulted by women meet. Is that their stories are not believed or rejected, because some people believe that, "women can't do that to men". The parent posters have a tone, that at least to me. Indicate he might agree with that, and I'm fairly sure that is why he is getting the downwotes.

Yes, correct. Many of my friends have experienced the same. The genders share the fact that we are flawed human beings.

Ok, but it is at least a lower bound on reports. At least 4/384=1% reported unwanted sexual contact, 15/384=3.9% quid pro quo and 19/384=4.9% sexual badgering. The real number would be higher if all responded and asked.

Were these experiences as part of YC or anytime?

Did the survey have a definition of the terms sexual badgering, quid pro quo and unwanted sexual contact that we can look at?

Do we know how many men have been accused? Basically, is this a general problem or are there some sexual predators causing most of these terrible experiences.

I would take the 22.9% as a reasonable lower bound from now on.

I agree that we can define a lower bound of reports for the questions asked, and the terms as defined by the survey.

The lower bounds are: At least 4/384=1% reported unwanted sexual contact, 15/384=3.9% quid pro quo and 19/384=4.9% sexual badgering. The real number would be higher if all female founders responded or were asked.

That's another way of looking at it. I do agree that the balance could shift either way but I suspect that the self selected group has a lower incidence of harassment because they already joined a support structure of sorts, which would allow them to keep each other posted about who to avoid. Of course that is just my belief.

It is hard to make assumptions. However, I would hope that there is a correlation between support structures we can and have put in place with a lower incidence rate.

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