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Their stories came out slowly, even hesitantly, at first. Then in a rush.
One female entrepreneur recounted how she had been propositioned by a Silicon Valley venture capitalist while seeking a job with him, which she did not land after rebuffing him. Another showed the increasingly suggestive messages she had received from a start-up investor. And one chief executive described how she had faced numerous sexist comments from an investor while raising money for her online community website.
What happened afterward was often just as disturbing, the women told The New York Times. Many times, the investor's firms and colleagues ignored or played down what had happened when the situations were brought to their attention. Saying anything, the women were warned, might lead to ostracism.
Now some of these female entrepreneurs have decided to take that risk. More than two dozen women in the technology start-up industry spoke to The Times in recent days about being sexually harassed. Ten of them named the investors involved, often providing corroborating messages and emails, and pointed to high-profile venture capitalists such as Chris Sacca of Lowercase Capital and Dave McClure of 500 Startups, who did not dispute the accounts.
The disclosures came after the tech news site The Information reported that female entrepreneurs had been preyed upon by a venture capitalist, Justin Caldbeck of Binary Capital. The new accounts underscore how sexual harassment in the tech start-up ecosystem goes beyond one firm and is pervasive and ingrained. Now their speaking out suggests a cultural shift in Silicon Valley, where such predatory behavior had often been murmured about but rarely exposed.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday July 05 2017, @01:31PM
I've already stated that the job interview was very much out of line. But, business settings aren't entirely inappropiate, depending on exactly what your business relationship is. Asking my own secretary out is pretty much out of line in any code of ethics I've ever read or heard. Asking a secretary who doesn't work for me is far less out of line. She's not in my chain of command, she's fair game, so long as I don't try to use some form of coercion with her.
My employer has some guidelines on the issue. You MUST not hit on a subordinate. Almost everyone else is fair game - IF you inform the employer that you are establishing a relationship. That is, if I ask a coworker for a date, and she agrees, I have to tell HR about it. At which point, HR will take "appropriate" action. Move one of us to another shift, or to another plant, or to another position, if it appears that one or the other of us might benefit professionally from the relationship. Theoretically, this eliminates nepotism, but in practice, it only eliminates nepotism that HR doesn't approve of.
There are better, and there are worse guidelines to work by. At least my employer is aware of the potential, and has policies in place that protect them from liability. The grossest forms of sexual harassment are dealt with quite well. Lesser cases are dealt with pretty decently. Some shit probably slips between the cracks - in fact, I recall one case that did.
We hired a bunch of r̶e̶t̶a̶r̶d̶s̶ challenged for the summer. One of those challenged people was kinda insistent that one of the women should go out with him. He was pretty damned crude about it too - and HR was poised to pounce. Then, the chick in question decided that she LIKED this challenged individual, and agreed to go out with him. And, for whatever reason, HR allowed the two of them to work together on the same shift, on the same line all summer long.
Go figure . . .