[urbanautomaton]

Call me naive, but when harrassment this egregious is exposed at a well-known tech company, I don't feel the need to stroke my chin and wonder if there's a media conspiracy to make it appear worse than it is. I don't even know how this could be made to look worse than it is. What possible spin could a publisher put on this that is not already present in the allegation and evidence?

[shabadoop]

I mean, it's well known but not well established - I highly doubt there's much sexual harassment in a typical corporate environment with an HR department.

[urbanautomaton]

Well, I'm not sure I agree that not much harassment goes on in more established companies, but you're absolutely right that at least they're more likely to have procedures in place for dealing with it.

This is why I'm astonished to see such strenuous effort go into confecting explanations why there might not really be a problem in startup culture. You've got young, inexperienced founders and a tendency to dispense with formal HR practises in favour of "cultural fit" - the ingredients are all there for horrible abuses of power, and yet when said abuses inevitably surface, there's an almost desperate effort to hand-wave them away as isolated incidents. It's bewildering, it really is.

Model View Culture have been publishing some superb work in this area, most relevantly in this article:

http://modelviewculture.com/pieces/hr-antipatterns-at-startu...