LET’S TALK ABOUT TED
Allegations of sexual harassment at conference
SAN FRANCISCO Vancouver’s spring TED conference is the latest hot spot for sexual harassment allegations, conference organizers acknowledge.
At least five people, including a past main stage speaker, have told TED officials that they were harassed or groped during the organization’s flagship conference in Vancouver in April, according to interviews and email correspondence seen by the Washington Post.
When Gretchen Carlson, a former Fox News anchor who now campaigns against sexual harassment, took the stage at a TED event this month, she described 2017 as a tipping point in the fight against workplace misconduct.
Behind the scenes, TED owner Chris Anderson and other senior officials had been grappling with accusations for much of the year that their own conferences, famed for turning short speeches by leading figures into viral videos, had not been a safe place for women — and that the atmosphere of predatory male behaviour was getting worse.
The non-profit’s general counsel Nishat Ruiter said in an April email to TED’S senior leadership that she, too, had been “touched inappropriately but let it go.” She added she was finding it difficult to believe the issue was being “addressed by TED effectively. We are clearly not doing enough.”
In a statement to the Washington Post, TED acknowledged several incidents had occurred at the Vancouver conference and said it had taken action.
“We did hear from a small number of women attendees at TED 2017 about harassment. As a result, two men were immediately disinvited and won’t be returning,” TED said.
TED also said: “Creating a safe and welcoming environment is critical to the success of our conferences, and we have no tolerance for harassment of any kind. As soon as we heard there were issues at our conference in 2017 we took immediate action to address the specific allegations, then worked with leading experts to upgrade our code of conduct. Today we make the code of conduct extremely clear to all TED conference attendees, and encourage our community to report violations.”
In the decades since TED’S original owners got the idea of turning 18-minute talks by world leaders, chief executives, academics, artists and others into a business under the slogan “ideas worth spreading,” the conferences and spinoff events have become known as a meeting place for the global elite, particularly leaders in the technology industry. Anderson’s private foundation acquired TED in 2001.
The gatherings are regarded as a place where the likes of former Microsoft chief executive Bill Gates, scientist Richard Dawkins, and former vice-president Al Gore could be encountered in the hallways, and the organization’s talks have been watched online more than 1 billion times worldwide.
Most people pay $10,000 to attend and must apply for tickets.
The Washington Post reviewed email exchanges among senior TED officials at the time of the April conference, sparked by a complaint by a longtime attendee, who complained of sexual harassment and being offered “every drug known to man.” The problem was so bad that the woman decided to pack her bags and leave, telling Anderson that it would be her last TED conference.
Anderson forwarded the complaint to his leadership team, saying, “I don’t want to overstate what’s here (until we can find more) but I do think we’ll need to think seriously about what more we can do.”
Nilofer Merchant, an author and former Apple executive whose 2013 TED talk received nearly 3 million views, said in an interview that sexual harassment is not a new problem for the TED conferences. “The same thing was happening five years ago. It’s still happening,” she said. “What’s different now is we’re sharing our stories.”
At the April conference, Merchant said a longtime attendee pressed his erection against her at a bar. She recalls mouthing to her friend who was nearby: Help me.
“In this awkward moment, you’re trying not to make it an issue,” she said in an interview. “I’m trying to spend my time at TED, which I paid $10,000 to attend, talking to people about ideas and not worry about the guy with his boner pressed against me.”
Merchant said she saw the same man approach two of her friends, who were talking to a TED newcomer in her early twenties, and say, “Oh, three black women together. What should I do with that?”
She reported the incidents to Ted officials. She said she was only told Thursday that the man she had reported had been banned.
The accusations against TED come at a time when allegations of sexual harassment and abuse by powerful men are roiling Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and the U.S. Congress.
The heightened awareness of sexual misconduct in the workplace and other professional settings was sparked in part by Carlson, who reached a $20 million settlement with Fox in 2016 after suing her old boss Roger Ailes for sexual harassment.
“Right now is the tipping point,” Carlson said at the TEDWomen conference in New Orleans this month, choking up at points throughout her 14-minute speech. “We are watching history happen. More and more women are coming forward and saying, ‘Enough is enough.’”
The conversation between the leadership of TED in April was set off by an email from Brooke Hammerling, the founder of Brew Media Relations.
On April 27, as the annual conference was underway in Vancouver, she wrote an email to Anderson, saying she had felt “fearful as a female” at the event and had decided to leave a day early.
“This is my last TED,” she wrote, according to the messages viewed by the Washington Post.