It seems as if not a week goes by without some new story about sexism in the tech industry – startups, around-for-a-whilers, VC’s – you name it, women are coming forth to expose the harassment, the crude behavior. As someone who has worked in tech-ville for nearly 40 years, I can report that a lot of what’s being brought out is nothing new.
Models doing demos? Yawn…
I remember working one trade show, in NYC, that focused on technology for Wall Street.
Now, if you want to get the double whammy thing going, well, tech and Wall Street is something of a perfect, lurid storm. Boys will be boys, meet boys will be boys.
Anyway, at this one show, I remember a bunch of models working the floor wearing French maid outfits (baby doll length), complete with black sheer stockings and towering high heels. I believe they were working on behalf of British Telecom, and I believe that they were giving out boxes of Twinings English Breakfast tea. Right.
At another show – ultra techie, but not financial services related – I wanted to get a demo from a company we were going to partner with. I went to the booth, which was staffed by gorgeous young women in black cocktail dresses. I asked a couple of them about seeing a product demo, and was met with blank stares. Then I spied a woman who, while wearing a black dress, was wearing a frumpy black dress. No makeup. And sensible shoes. Bingo! She was the one person “manning” the booth when I dropped by who actually worked for the company and knew something about what they did.
So the demo dolllies are nothing new.
Neither are crude jokes and crude remarks. We used to just roll our eyes at this crap, or tell the guys to knock it off. There was one guy I worked with who was famous for staring at the breasts of any woman he was speaking with. We had a running joke with him, “These are our eyes”, we would tell him, pointing to our eyes, “these are our boobs. When you talk to someone, you look them in the eyes, not the boobs.” But women today – good for them – aren’t going to put up with the sort of behavior that we used to brush off.
Hard to imagine any women these days willing to work on a product – sold to Wall Street-ers, natch – that was called AutoBJ. I would begin every presentation with a declaration that I had heard everything there was to be heard about this unfortunate brand name. The same company had run an ad with an image shot from looking between the legs of a young hottie in a miniskirt. At yet another place I worked, where I was the only woman on the strategy team charged with figuring out how we were going to – ho-ho! – penetrate the financial services industry, I sat through a meeting at which one senior blowhard declared that the market was a prone woman, legs spread, awaiting our arrival. Bonus points because – ho-ho! – the company was name Wang.
Early on in my career, there were plenty of sexually charged situations at work. Sure, there was an occasional randy exec roaming around – at a holiday party, the president, while on the dance floor,asked a young and attractive colleague to go home with him. In his words, “You’d come home with me if I weren’t the president.” Her good riddance response was “If you weren’t the president, I wouldn’t be dancing with you.”
But most of the snap, crackle and pop in the air was because there were a ton of young single people at work, meeting other young single people. Without expending a scintilla of energy, I can come up with a good half-dozen couples who met their spouse at work in the first place I worked out of grad school.
But I have to say that I never came across anything like Upload, a Silicon Valley virtual reality (VR) startup that has been a VC darling, and recently settled with a female ex-employee who sued after being fired. Upload was a party-hearty environment. Models doing demos, liquor flowing.
The freewheeling atmosphere was not restricted to the evening hours. There was a “rampant sexual behavior and focus” in the Upload office that created “an unbearable environment,” a former employee, Elizabeth Scott, said in a lawsuit filed in May.
Ms. Scott said in her suit that the Upload office had a room with a bed “to encourage sexual intercourse at the workplace.” It was referred to as the kink room. Men who worked for the company were described in the suit as frequently talking about being so sexually aroused by female colleagues that it was impossible to concentrate.
When Ms. Scott, Upload’s digital media manager, complained about the hostile atmosphere and other issues in March with her supervisor, she was fired, the suit said. In a statement after the suit was filed, Upload said that “our employees are our greatest asset” and that “these allegations are entirely without merit.” (Source: NY Times)
Ah, but then they settled and apologized. Guess it was true that, as Ms. Scott alleged, she was once kicked out of her room in a house that Upload had rented for a conference so that the chief exec could use it for sex. And it wasn’t just hanky panky that was going on.
She said in the suit that she had other work, too: The women at Upload were required to do what were called “womanly tasks,” including cleaning up. They were also told to act like “mommies” to the men and help them with whatever they needed. The suit presented a portrait of a deeply entitled male culture, one that clashed with the fresh start VR seemed to offer the tech industry. But Ms. Scott’s suit was the second in the virtual reality industry in just a few months to present such an unwelcoming picture.
Well, no one had to tell us to act like mommies, but there was plenty of that back in the day. How many notes did we leave in the kitchen, in the conference rooms, that said “You mother doesn’t work here. Please pick up after yourself.”
But, of course, we’d end up throwing the coffee cups out and mopping off the tables.
And don’t get me going on who always ended up cleaning out the communal fridge…
Girls will be girls, I guess.
Maybe things were this bad way back when, and I just missed it because by the time I got into tech I was older (30-ish), wiser, and no one’s idea of a good-time girl. But I think that one of the reasons that it’s likely worse now is that so many of the young guys have been too busy with gaming, “social” media, online porn, and tech devices that they actually don’t know how to act around women. However nerdly and awkward the guys of my era were, once you got them to look you in the eyes and not the boobs, they were mostly fine.
At Upload, the kink room is now occupied by Anne Ahola Ward, a late thirties, married, no-nonsense looking woman who is Upload’s new COO. It’s
…now Ms. Ward’s office. There is no bed there. She has instituted mandatory anti-harassment training: a two-hour session led by an outside consultant. There is now a human resources department. People have formal job descriptions. And as a joke — but not quite — people in the office gave Ms. Ward a sheriff’s badge.
Am I ever happy to be out of the fray…
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