App on the way to help firms root out sexual harassment
Before the reckoning began, before a social-media hashtag shook loose years of abuse and media titans fell, Jessica Ladd’s inbox already overflowed with messages.
Venture capitalists, tech workers, women she knew from college and entrepreneurial circles all seemed to have arrived at the same idea: What if an app could help identify perpetrators of sexual assault and coercion in Silicon Valley? What if it could help victims report inappropriate behavior safely?
They reached out to Ladd, a San Francisco native, because she had built an app that does something similar on college campuses. Callisto, a 2-yearold social enterprise designed to help college students more easily report incidents of sexual assault, has been adopted by 13 colleges and universities, including the University of San Francisco and Stanford University.
Now, riding the #MeToo
wave of awareness and the need to do more to prevent sexual harassment and assault, Ladd and her colleagues are working on a new product for businesses that they hope will help victims report incidents in a safer, more effective way, and help companies identify patterns and repeat offenders.
Though the project is in its infancy, a pilot will be ready by summer, Ladd said.
It will not be the first app to attempt to address this issue — others including StopIt and Sonar have taken different approaches to stemming the problem, such as allowing anonymous reporting or sporadically polling employees about their colleagues — but it will be the first to offer a feature called offender matching, which its creators hope can prevent the kind of serial offenders who have been unmasked in the past several months.
“The #MeToo movement does feel different, because it’s getting so much attention — and, to some extent, it’s working — but it’s not very nuanced,” Ladd said. “It’s all sort of mob-justice-y, which is better than nothing, but it’s certainly not ideal. Most victims would rather not have to martyr themselves in this way to get people to take them seriously.”
In the time since Callisto launched, Ladd said, her company’s own statistics show that participating schools have noticed a marked decline in the amount of time it takes victims to report assaults — from 11 to four months after an incident — and an increase in administrators’ ability to identify repeat offenders.
Safeguards secure the privacy of victims, and the accused, until further action is taken. All communication is encrypted. Even Callisto’s victim-matching system, which alerts officials and victims if the same name is repeated as an alleged perpetrator, leaves the decision of how to proceed with victims and school administrators.
Getting colleges and universities on board has been grinding work. Never before had Ladd had people breaking down her door to try Callisto.
Then came the accusations against venture capitalist Justin Caldbeck, who resigned in June from Binary Capital, a firm he had started three years ago, after half a dozen women working in tech accused him of inappropriate advances.
“I was just flooded with emails, Facebook messages, phone calls, tweets, everything, asking if we could expand,” Ladd said. “I got cold LinkedIn messages from venture capitalists, from people who really have the means to make this happen for us, and I thought, ‘Wow.’ All these people, all on their own, made the connection.”
To many, it seemed clear that Caldbeck was just the tip of a tall, sordid iceberg. This year, more than half a dozen highprofile people in technology and venture capital have been publicly accused of sexual harassment and assault. For lesser-known individuals, the list is much longer.
One in 4 women who work in tech have been sexually harassed at work, according to a survey taken this year of more than 10,000 women at tech firms by Comparably, a startup that measures and tracks data on company culture and compensation. For female executives and engineers, that number rises to nearly a third.
Since Caldbeck stepped down, dozens of men in a wide range of industries have been implicated in sexual misconduct, ousted from their jobs and tried in the court of public opinion: politicians, actors, journalists, chefs, musicians, comedians.
“This moment is an opportunity that we need to move on quickly,” Ladd said. “We started to think about what it would look like to have a single site where any victim could write about what happened to them, get resources, find out who they can go to for help and connect with other victims who may have been hurt by the same person.”
In the college version of Callisto, students have the option to report an assault right away; record details in a time-stamped report and postpone a decision on submitting it; or keep a report on file indefinitely unless the alleged perpetrator resurfaces in someone else’s report.
That matching feature, which Ladd said distinguishes Callisto’s app, is meant to flag serial predators. Before an administrator is given any details about the incident reports, victims are contacted and asked what details they would like to share. Anonymous reporting is not allowed.
“The app very clearly lays out what your options are,” said Shanta Katipamula, 21, a junior at Stanford who helped bring Callisto to the school during her time in student government. “That’s never something I’ve seen made so clear for victims who may be dealing with a really traumatic experience.”
Though it’s too soon to say what the impact has been at Stanford, Katipamula said it has received wide-ranging support from students, whose council unanimously voted to bring it to the university.
“Last year was a particularly rough year to be at Stanford and be tuned into the subject of sexual violence,” she said, referring to ongoing discussion of high-profile sexual assault cases and an investigation into the university’s treatment of sexual assault complaints. “People saw this as a tangible way that we can ask Stanford to improve.”
Most colleges and universities have a structure in place to handle such reports. Private companies, particularly smaller firms, do not come with the same safeguards.
According to data from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, charges of sex discrimination — which includes harassment — make up nearly 30 percent of the complaints it receives annually. And in 2016, the federal agency received nearly 13,000 allegations of sexual harassment from American workers. Studies have shown that far more cases go unreported.
Every company is different. Some have human resources departments; some don’t. Some workers are contractors, others are salaried employees. Entrepreneurs work for themselves, but depend on funding and other assistance from powerful investors.
In a survey of more than 3,000 tech workers on the anonymous polling app Blind, 43 percent said they would not feel comfortable going to human resources to report sexual harassment.
To help protect user privacy, Ladd said, Callisto will allow users to log incident reports using only a verified work email address or proof of union membership. For ex-employees, the app may accept verification in the form of pay stubs or other employment documents.
“We need to make sure no one is submitting reports under a false name or contact information,” Ladd said. Otherwise, a serial assailant could, for example, log a fake complaint to see if he or she matched other reports in the system.
Callisto will launch a pilot for its new professional app in late spring. It will be invitation-only and focus on tech workers and venture capitalists, though Ladd said a full-scale rollout that will include other companies across industries will be made available shortly thereafter.
“The deck is really stacked against survivors, against anyone not in a position of power. We should all be supporting any method of improving that system — in the military, on (Capitol) Hill, in Silicon Valley, in a business setting,” Katipamula said. “It’s a huge step toward making the workplace a little more responsive and welcoming to women, to survivors.”