> * nor do I feel confident that reporting rape to our existing justice system would save me from further humiliation and other professional/personal consequences while providing safety*
Has there ever been any evidence that charging a person of power of any crime comes with protection from collateral professional/personal consequences ?
In my personal view, getting raped is enough violence that I wouldn't prioritise my professional or personal comfort over getting justice. I am also considering that if some place would refuse me a job because I got someone charged for a criminal offence, perhaps that's not a place I'd like to work for in the first place.
I understand that can feel idealistic, and some situations can be a lot more complex than that, especially when a whole industry is mainly filled with assholes in power positions. But I'd believe that making things clear (have a judge validate a claim for instance) can help to get away from overly abusive environments and alleviate the "he/she's just making stuff up" bullshit thrown around the victims.
"In my personal view, getting raped is enough violence that I wouldn't prioritise my professional or personal comfort over getting justice. I am also considering that if some place would refuse me a job because I got someone charged for a criminal offence, perhaps that's not a place I'd like to work for in the first place."
This kind of language is clearly coming from a place of privilege...someone who has never experienced a workplace that is overtly hostile to your gender, and where the alternatives ("not a place I'd like to work"; most people have to work somewhere) are slim because many workplaces are overtly hostile to your gender.
This is the danger of assuming that we (as males in an industry built by and for males) can actually offer useful advice or provide a path forward that fixes these problems.
This is not the conversation in which you solve women's problems in tech by telling them what you would do in their situation. This is the conversation where we listen to people who have actually experienced it. (And, yes, I'm a male speaking on this subject, offering advice. But, my advice is to listen to women about their real world experiences in our industry.)
I don't intend to tell anyone what to do nor to solve women's problems. I explained why I felt disconnected with a part of the article and had questions.
About the "women in XXX" part, I don't know if it's really a good way to put the problem. There is no simple way of putting it of course, but I think women face the same kind of problems in the fashion, movie, music, tv, press, politics, car, construction industry. Basically anywhere power massively concentrates in the hand of men I think.
If tech became a safe haven for women getting out of the other industries that could be great, but problems of women in tech could as well be solved from a more global perspective. Getting raped is awful in any industry, and I don't know if there is any solution that is only relevant to the tech fields.
Alright, if you insist on an explanation: In this particular comment, I had originally written "white, middle class, males", but then decided that wasn't useful specificity in this particular conversation. I deleted the adjectives and kept the subject noun untouched. I apologize for causing cognitive dissonance for you due to the difference. I assure it is not out of self-hatred, or any sort of intent to make men seem of a different species than women.
Sometimes it is useful, sometimes it is not. It's pretty obviously true that middle class white males often have the hardest time recognizing their privilege, as it is most easily invisible to us. I made it to middle age with almost zero awareness of my privilege, despite always considering myself anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-homophobia.
But, in this case, gender plays a dominant role and race is almost inconsequential; a few of the highest profile sexual harassment cases of the past couple of years in the tech and startup world have involved men of a variety of ethnicities and backgrounds. So, I corrected it before posting it.
I was trying to convey meaning without making it a fight over semantics or word choice. I genuinely did not intend to cause upset over my word choices; the content of my language I expected would elicit reactionary responses from folks who haven't quite confronted or even acknowledged their privilege.
So, again, I apologize for using the word "male" in a paragraph with "women". It was not intended to be a dog whistle for radical feminists or something, as it seems you believe it is. I was trying to communicate with the community that is a big part of my life, as best I know how.
> In my personal view, getting raped is enough violence
> that I wouldn't prioritise my professional or personal
> comfort over getting justice.
The brutal reality is that most people need to work because there are bills to pay.
It costs money to be alive, basically. You need food. You need shelter. You may have other people such as children that are depending on you.
Should a mother let her kids go hungry because she doesn't want to work in a sexually hostile environment?
That's the very real choice that a lot of people make on a daily basis. A lot of women simply deal with the degrading stuff because they need to get by, and/or perhaps because they hope to gradually change the system from within. Will you pay their bills if they take a stand for what's right and fight their employers?
If you can pick and choose your jobs and don't have to worry about any of the above: please understand that very few people enjoy such a luxury.
Has there ever been any evidence that charging a person of power of any crime comes with protection from collateral professional/personal consequences ?
This is the point. Societies with hierarchical organization will have different rules for favored and unfavored parties. Perhaps tech is worse than most industries, and that probably has something to do with gender ratios. Still, I wouldn't be shocked to hear of harassment in industries with ratios skewed the other way, like education or nursing. If your success is contingent on the approval of your boss, she or he will have a number of ways to injure you with no repercussions. We progress as a culture when we shrink that set of impune actions or shrink the number of interpersonal relations that give rise to such impunity.
Of course I don't imply that gender-based harassment and discrimination in tech is not a serious problem that we should solve. It is a specific and especially problematic subclass of a more general class of human dysfunction.
Has there ever been any evidence that charging a person of power of any crime comes with protection from collateral professional/personal consequences ?
In my personal view, getting raped is enough violence that I wouldn't prioritise my professional or personal comfort over getting justice. I am also considering that if some place would refuse me a job because I got someone charged for a criminal offence, perhaps that's not a place I'd like to work for in the first place.
I understand that can feel idealistic, and some situations can be a lot more complex than that, especially when a whole industry is mainly filled with assholes in power positions. But I'd believe that making things clear (have a judge validate a claim for instance) can help to get away from overly abusive environments and alleviate the "he/she's just making stuff up" bullshit thrown around the victims.