Stories pouring forth on sexual harassment

Creating an avalanche isn’t easy. You need many complicated natural factors to interact in the right way at the right moment. Yet once the snow starts crashing, it’s unstoppable — and that’s pretty much what happened with sexual harassment in Silicon Valley over the past two weeks.

Uber’s chief executive, Travis Kalanick, is out after investors demanded his resignation over a list of issues including a horrific workplace culture where sexual harassment and discrimination were allegedly commonplace. Binary Capital, a venture firm, will wind down after a number of women spoke on the record claiming wildly inappropriate behavior they said they’d experienced from partner Justin Caldbeck.

Dave McClure, founder of the prominent incubator 500 Startups, is out after media reports that he harassed and allegedly assaulted women who worked at the firm or were in the process of applying to work there. Another partner at 500 Startups, Elizabeth Yin, resigned out of disgust with what she described as the firm’s “lack of transparency and propagation of misinformation.”

At Tesla, AJ Vandermeyden, an engineer, has publicly accused the company of firing her after she complained about sexual harassment and discrimination.

Amidst all of the headline-grabbing resignations, there’s been a steady drumbeat of women from all over the technology industry telling their stories of unwanted advances, inappropriate comments, and aggressive retaliation in the event of complaints.

This is not a new story. Women who work outside the home have been bringing sexual harassment and gender discrimination cases before the courts, at great personal expense, since the late 1970s.

Nor is this story limited to Silicon Valley. In any industry dominated by men — whether it’s academia, construction, finance or journalism — you’ll find many, many similar stories from the women who work there.

There’s a numbing sameness to the cycle, especially since the brave women who dare to bring cases to court are raked over the coals reputationally, but rarely granted favorable judgments in return.

Most women either quit or settle out of court. I understand why they make these choices. It allows them to preserve their own sanity. But it costs the rest of us the potential of their contributions, and it allows predators the right to continue roaming.

So perhaps what’s new about the past month is the fact that women didn’t need to drag everything into court.

Instead, they were simply brave enough to speak up. For once, this was powerful enough to be the final factor — the slight puff of wind on the softening slope — that caused the current avalanche. Why now? The time was certainly right. Everyone knows the current incarnation of Silicon Valley is no meritocracy. Young women, especially, have no interest in the aggressive bro culture at places like Uber; they’re annoyed by the major companies’ pathetic annual diversity reports showing that all of them, from Google on down, have no intention of employing anyone beyond the usual demographic of white and Asian males age 25 to 40.

Facing harassment in their workplaces, they may have felt unsure about how to handle it. That’s where someone like Ellen Pao made a big difference.

Pao may have lost her 2015 discrimination case against venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, but she won a different kind of recognition: Many of the women who have come forward in recent days have mentioned her name. By putting herself through the grueling nature of a public trial, she’s clearly helped many, many other women recognize their responsibility to them to stop this kind of behavior for themselves as well as others.

(The national climate may have inspired them, too. Many women are still furious at the election of a genital-grabber-in-chief. And where better to fight against this behavior than in one’s own life?)

But probably the most important reason the avalanche happened is a very simple one: The women spoke up en masse.

Solidarity matters. It’s easy to tear down the credibility of one woman. It’s a lot harder when it’s half a dozen women — the number who spoke to tech news website the Information for the June 22 story about Caldbeck. A June 30 story in the New York Times relied on reports from more than two dozen women.

It’s still coming. The women tech reporters I know have told me they have full voice and email in-boxes. They’re combing through a flood of testimony.

So if there are more high-profile leadership changes in the coming weeks or months, they’ve certainly been a long time coming. All the valley needed was a shift in the air.

Solidarity matters. It’s easy to tear down the credibility of one woman. It’s a lot harder when it’s half a dozen women.