[InclinedPlane]

Every indication has always been that this was the problem with tech and how women are treated in it (and many other fields). They are constantly having to prove themselves, they are constantly denigrated by their coworkers and colleagues, they are routinely made to feel unsafe through sexual harassment of varying severity. Overall they're just treated like second class citizens in the field. And that results in women leaving the field routinely and at basically every transitional step, that's why you see a continual diminishment in the representation of women in the field as you go towards greater positions of seniority and authority. It's not that women can't hack it, that they can't do the work, they just get tired of being shit on constantly and they go somewhere else to make their life better.

And yet for years and years and years the constant refrain from the establishment has always been "nah, it must be that women are just bad at this job" or "nah, it must be a pipeline problem". Nobody wants to look themselves in the face and ask whether or not they are part of the problem. Either through not taking women seriously in the workplace, always questioning the work and fitness of women in a way that men don't experience, or allowing a hostile work environment where sexual harassment happens and everyone just sweeps it under the rug or looks the other way.

Women have been telling each other these stories about what it was like to work in tech for decades, and they've been telling anyone, including guys, who would listen for years and years as well. Why has it taken so much work for people to actually pay attention?

[forapurpose]

> Every indication has always been that this was the problem with tech ...

I agree completely, and it's incredible that so many people with exceptional critical thinking skills could dismiss the universal, consistent reports of the witnesses to these events, in favor of the analysis of people who have no experience at all - themselves and other men. And that includes me: WTF was I thinking? Everyone who experienced these things said the same thing, people who had no direct experience said otherwise, and I believed the latter? If everyone in Honolulu said the grass in Hawaii is dewy in the mornings, and everyone in Ohio said it isn't - why would you even ask the Ohioans?

The same applies to the treatment of African-Americans by law enforcement. African-Americans have been talking about it for generations, the same stories over time and across the U.S. Why did it take videos for me to believe it?

My guess is that it comes from accepting social norms of the people around me, and dismissing people I didn't interact with. The solution, IMHO, is interacting with people outside your group and people telling their stories, as they did in this article. If you want to know what's really happening on issues like these, forget all your theories - just ask and listen (and zip it). The most ardent theories suddenly become insubstantial in the face of evidence.

[reuven]

Maybe it's because I'm in Israel, where I'd like to think that things are better than the US (although I'm far from sure that's true).

Maybe it's because I'm self employed, so I don't have regular "colleagues" to tell me these things.

Mybe it's because I (and other men) didn't make it clear that we were willing to listen, although I sure hope not.

For whatever reason, I believed that sexual harassment is occasional. Not as pervasive, and not as constant as the growing number of stories has made clear.

The more stories we hear, the better (I think) things will be. So keep telling these stories.

[edanm]

For what it's worth (I'm in Israel too), I also recently gained a new perspective on the problem of sexual harassment, though not specifically in the hi-tech industry. This was a few years before the #MeToo movement.

In my case, it was because I had a frank conversation with a female friend, where she told me a few typical stories. Things like her sitting on the bus, and the guy next to her will suddenly start touching her, or trying to kiss her. With her giving absolutely no sign of interest and not knowing the person beforehand (she's actually gay). And similar stories in other situations.

She said it happened to her about 10 times already. This is the kind of clear-cut sexual harassment which I naively thought was rare, but apparently is so common, that it's just shrugged off as a nuisance in many cases. It completely changed my perspective on just how common this is for women, even if I believe only a minority of men act in this way.