Brotopia Page 13
UNWANTED ADVANCES, 24/7
When I asked if anyone in the room wanted to share a “Susan Fowler” type of experience, Laura Holmes, senior product manager at Google, was the first to speak up. She hesitated as she started to tell the story, as if gathering courage, then continued in a steady tone.
It was the summer of 2008, just as a new wave of tech companies, including Uber and Airbnb, was about to take off. Holmes, then a computer science student at Stanford, got an internship at a hot new photo-app start-up in San Francisco named Cooliris. One evening, she and her co-workers went out for drinks at the Ruby Skye nightclub. Around 2:00 a.m., Holmes informed one of the male engineers that she was about to go home. Apparently, he had had too much to drink. “He was about six foot three, and he told me I was not going to leave,” Holmes recalled. “He put his hand around my neck and tried to choke me.”
As Holmes recounted this story, there were a few gasps from the women in the living room and then silence. This wasn’t some sick joke, Holmes went on; this man was angry. Fear overtook her. “I immediately burst into tears,” Holmes remembered. A bystander intervened, and the man’s grip was broken. Holmes never told anyone else at the company about it. As is common among Silicon Valley start-ups, Holmes said Cooliris did not have a human resources department. Instead, she buried that moment and went back to work the next day. It was the most dramatic, but far from the only offensive, incident to occur during her internship.
Sexist behavior often comes from the top, and in Holmes’s telling that was the case at Cooliris, where the young CEO, Soujanya Bhumkar, gave the entire staff copies of the Kama Sutra, an illustrated guide to sexual positions. Holmes said Bhumkar would often joke, “Thank God we don’t have an HR team,” a phrase that other employees at the company took up and repeated. One day, Bhumkar also passed out toothbrushes imprinted with the company’s core metrics. “He said, ‘So you can think about our metrics when you wake up in the morning,’” Holmes recalled. “And he made a joke that he would print them on condoms so we could think about them at night.” Bhumkar then held up a three-pack of condoms, though he never did pass them out. I reached out to Bhumkar several times for his reaction to these comments, but he did not respond.
Holmes, who hoped to become a product manager at Cooliris, was told to make special efforts to build alliances with the engineers, so she scheduled some collegial lunches. While she was walking to the restaurant with one particular engineer, things got very uncomfortable.
“He said, ‘I’m offensive, I bet I can offend you,’” Holmes remembered. Because she was “trying to be one of the bros,” she decided to play along. “He gets close to my face and says, ‘You’re so fucking dumb, and you don’t know shit. The only thing you’re good for is being taken out to the back parking lot and being raped.’” Yep, she told him, that sure was offensive.
“It was only the two of us. I was thinking that ‘oh, this is what the industry is like. This is bad. I didn’t sign up for this, but I guess I better get used to it,’” Holmes said. “Things were pretty atrocious, and I could have filed a lawsuit . . . But at the age of twenty-three, I didn’t want to be the whistle-blower; I didn’t want to be defined by this.” Her tone was almost apologetic, but as she looked around the room, it was clear that no one present was going to second-guess the difficult decision she had made. No ambitious, hardworking woman wants to be defined or thwarted by a few boneheaded men they have little choice but to work with.
Holmes’s story broke the ice. For the next three hours, each woman told her tale.
Chou spoke up next, describing her experience as an intern at Google in 2007. “I was hit on every other day,” Chou said. “One person, eleven years my senior, that I had to work on a project with asked me, ‘Do you want to go watch a movie in the conference room? We’ll close the doors, turn out the lights, and pull the blinds.’” He even made her a T-shirt with his name on it and left it on her desk.
“People didn’t take me seriously,” Chou said. “I just felt like I was kind of their pet intern and that I wasn’t there to actually get anything done.” She said another male intern once told her she looked tense and offered her a massage, adding that the massage would be better if she lay down.
While Chou didn’t complain at the time, those experiences built her resolve to see that the industry changed. In 2013, when she was an engineer at Pinterest, she attended the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing and heard Sheryl Sandberg speak. “Sheryl was talking, and she had one line about how the numbers of women in tech were dropping precipitously. I just thought, ‘Who has any numbers? How do you know they are dropping? No one has any numbers.’” In that moment, Chou realized that it was crazy for this data-driven industry not to track and publicly release such statistics. And she felt it was time to hold companies accountable.
After the conference, Chou wrote a Medium essay demanding that top tech firms release statistics on the gender breakdown of their employees. With her employer’s permission, Chou revealed the percentage of Pinterest’s engineers who were women (12 percent at that time), putting the pressure on other tech companies to keep the ball rolling. Like Fowler’s post, Chou’s essay became the talk of the Valley. It took some time, but most of the major tech companies ponied up. In 2014, Apple, Google, and Facebook revealed their diversity data, and, unsurprisingly, the picture was dismal. Not only were women outnumbered, but in the most critical and most senior positions they were grossly outnumbered. The women who do work at these companies are generally more junior, a trend that preserves an old boys’ club power dynamic that often works against the young women’s advancement.
The import of the numbers that Chou had forced the industry to reveal was something that every woman in the group was familiar with. Because engineering teams are often made up of only a handful of people, there’s often just one woman, if that, on every team. These women are alone in large groups of men all day long, alone at company off sites and at social gatherings after hours. During our evening together, many of the women in my group reported being bombarded with sexual advances, no matter how hard they tried to convey that they were not available or not interested.
“You get sexual advances and people hitting on you 24/7,” said Ana Medina. “First of all, it’s emotionally draining because you have to be turning down people every damn time.” Then, if something goes wrong, especially while socializing outside the office, it’s difficult to report. “You can’t go to HR and say, ‘I was drinking with so-and-so, and this thing happened.’”
And employees in these companies spend a lot of time drinking. Medina confirmed Fowler’s account of Uber employees using and abusing alcohol. Uber, she said, provided kegs of beer on multiple floors. For a while, the kegs were open twenty-four hours a day; then the company started a new policy, locking the kegs until 6:00 p.m. But the rules were never too rigid, and sometimes the kegs would still be open the following morning. “We would start drinking in the office as early as 12:00 or 1:00 p.m.,” Medina said. “Teams had their own bars; people had their own bottles. Sometimes you’d start drinking from people’s own supply.” Managers were flexible, Medina added: “As long as your work was getting done, it didn’t matter where the fuck you were or how hungover you were or what you did that night . . . There were times we’d leave the office [midday] and just never come back.”
Medina admitted that she probably shouldn’t have been drinking during work hours, even if her team members were doing it and the culture condoned it. But she joined Uber as a software engineering intern when she was twenty-two, and few people make their best choices right out of college. Uber’s drinking culture “was free drinks and fun,” she said—except that during these benders with co-workers, she said, she was often subject to their sexual advances. “People were drunk and persistent, and a lot of the people were people I was close with as engineers. Having engineers come ask you if they can take you home or say they would
like to cuddle with you, that was the awkward part. I’m way too nice, and I let it slide on a daily basis.”
Many of the women pointed out that declining to drink with the boys is a double-edged sword. If women don’t participate, they’re seen as uptight and not team players. And they risk missing out on group-bonding time, which may cost them personal and political capital within the organization. If they do participate, they’re considered not serious and, worse, risk being sexualized or, as in Holmes’s case, even assaulted.
As the conversation continued, there were some moments of levity. The women lamented male engineers staring at their breasts during interviews or at their behinds when the women turned their backs to write code on a whiteboard (a standard practice in tech known as whiteboard coding). “I always worry they are looking at my butt, and try to dress as not sexual as possible,” said Kristen Beck, a researcher at IBM. “But then you’re turning your back. I know I’ve got a good booty but still.” A few women laughed. But, really, none of this was funny at all.
THE “ELEPHANT IN THE VALLEY”
Until recently, there hasn’t been any way to quantify the harassment, sexism, and amorphous “bro culture” in the tech industry. People could dismiss misogynistic stories like Susan Fowler’s as one-offs, exceptions and not the rule. But in 2016, a group of industry insiders, in conjunction with Stanford University, published a survey of women and their experiences at Silicon Valley workplaces. The “Elephant in the Valley” study (yes, that’s its real name) found that of the more than two hundred women respondents (most of them having had at least ten years’ experience), the vast majority—90 percent—reported witnessing sexist behavior at industry off sites and conferences. Sixty percent said they had personally been sexually harassed or received unwanted sexual advances, most of the time from a superior. Bear in mind, according to the study’s authors, 25 percent of the women surveyed were C-suite level; 11 percent were founders.
These women also reported the “little things”: 84 percent of those surveyed said they’d been called too aggressive at work; 66 percent have felt excluded from social or networking activities because of their gender; 59 percent felt they had not gotten the same opportunities as their male counterparts. Most said questions that should have been directed to them were asked of their male peers instead, and almost half have been asked to do lower-level tasks such as taking notes or ordering food, jobs that male colleagues are not asked to do.
In addition to these statistics, the “Elephant in the Valley” surveyors collected hundreds of heretofore unpublished anonymous stories they agreed to share with me. With the help of an incredibly patient researcher, I spent hours organizing these stories into categories that included “sexual harassment,” “porn use in office,” “bro culture,” “rape jokes,” and “assault.”
The data dump came in the form of a massive spreadsheet including around 250 accounts of women in tech. Their stories were an exhausting read, for both their volume and their emotional content. The largest number of complaints, by far, fell into my category of sexual harassment—inappropriate and unwanted come-ons by co-workers, bosses, or superiors. One woman working among a hundred male engineers reported being hit on repeatedly, with one engineer telling her, “If I was 20 years younger I would rock your world.” There are several reports of unwanted kisses and gropes, and even of men showing up at the homes of their female colleagues expecting some form of sex and refusing to leave when asked.
Off-color remarks and sexual jokes were also a common theme in these accounts. Apparently, at tech firms, comments and jokes about sexual behavior, Viagra, porn, and even rape seem to fit right in. One woman reported, “I was walking with some male colleagues around the office at lunch, and when we found ourselves in a remote area of the building with a sketchy old door, one of them said, jokingly, ‘Quick! Grab her legs, let’s rape her!’” Many women had also had the uncomfortable experience of seeing male co-workers watch porn while at work and hearing them rate women in the office based on sexual attractiveness.
According to the stories, things often get really dicey at company off sites or social events. One woman said her company’s designated happy-hour location was Hooters, where she listened to her boss complain about his wife. There are tales of strip clubs, of course, accounts of uncomfortable come-ons whispered into women’s ears at parties, and one report of being groped in a hot tub at a company retreat. Many women felt they had no choice but to participate in these events and one reported that “only those who would party and drink excessively with the CEO on Friday nights would get promoted.”
After reading dozens of the anonymous “Elephant in the Valley” stories, I noted that the women spoke in a surprising tone: more exasperated than outraged. Like the dozen women I had gathered in my living room, they were tired of the toxic culture they worked in and tired of having to explain it to those who somehow managed to ignore it. It is because of their endurance and courage, I believe, that we have reached a cultural tipping point. From here on out, ignorance of the problem can only be willful. Reactions like “Gosh, I didn’t know this was going on” and “Is it really that bad?” are simply no longer credible. Or acceptable.
TO SUE OR NOT TO SUE
San Francisco employment lawyer Therese Lawless has taken on hundreds of discrimination cases in Silicon Valley; in 2015, she joined the legal team representing investor Ellen Pao in her lawsuit against the storied venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Lawless has represented plaintiffs in a variety of industries but says tech is among the worst offenders. The stress I felt after reading through all the “Elephant in the Valley” stories was nothing compared with what this lawyer endures daily.
Lawless is ethically bound not to share any specifics, but she did reveal the broad strokes of a few frightening examples from the tech industry. One client was sexually assaulted in the bushes at a company off site by a married colleague. In another instance, a man showed up at a female colleague’s hotel room. He said, “Just five minutes, five minutes. I just want five minutes.” When she refused to have sex with him, he began to masturbate in front of her. Generally, Lawless said, her cases involve “individuals of power using their power over women to get them to get involved with them, promising them things.”
Her clients, Lawless added, almost always have trepidations about moving forward with lawsuits: “Women are often afraid to speak out because they’re single, or they’re supporting a family and they are fearful that if they speak out, they will be marred for life, have a scarlet letter, and never be employed anywhere. Women don’t want to be the poster child.”
Many of the women who consult Lawless decide, in the end, not to go public, even if they have the makings of a successful criminal case. The woman assaulted in the bushes, for example, decided not to pursue legal action out of a mixture of embarrassment and fear of backlash at work. Lawless often has to tell clients that prosecutors are reluctant to take “he said, she said” cases that they don’t think they can win. She’s seen prosecutors drop cases even when there was DNA evidence and signs of physical abuse.
Civil litigation is more successful, on average, but it is no sure thing. Often abusers will settle the complaints without a public trial on the condition that the court documents be sealed and that participants not talk publicly about the accusation. The legal term for this court-imposed silence is perhaps the most unfortunate in all of jurisprudence: the “gag rule.” Silicon Valley companies routinely ask employees to sign nondisclosure and nondisparagement agreements as part of employment contracts or settlements, meaning that women can face legal action if they speak out. Stories of harassment and discrimination live on in whispers or are simply never told.
Lawless proudly told me of one case she litigated where the abuser was fired and the female victim stayed in her job, though admitted such an outcome is rare.
What made the difference in the case you won? I asked.
SURVIVING ALL THE “LITTLE THINGS”
One of the women at my home that Sunday evening had a unique perspective: Lydia Fernandez has seen the tech industry from both a man’s perspective and a woman’s, because she is transgender. I had first met Fernandez in 2011 when she was an intern with Code2040, a program that helps recruit blacks and Latinx to Silicon Valley and places them at established tech companies. At the time, Fernandez presented as male. It wasn’t until 2014, just before she took a permanent job at Uber, that she came out as transgender and changed her name to Lydia.
Given that Fernandez had begun her career being seen as a man, she was particularly sensitive to what she called the “little things” she had to put up with, now that she was seen as a woman. The difference in how she was treated was “night and day,” she told the group, then rendered her verdict: “I’ve sat on both sides of this table; this game is rigged.”