SILICONVALLEY’S DIRTY LITTLE SECRET: THEWAY IT TREATS WOMEN
More workers are telling stories of harassment, lesser pay, stalled careers
When former Uber engineer Susan Fowler went public with sexual harassment and discrimination allegations last month, social media erupted with shock and dismay.
But many women were far from surprised. Silicon Valley’s dirty little secret: Women throughout the male- dominated tech sector have stories just like hers. Stories of harassment, lesser pay and stalled careers. Stories of management turning a blind eye.
“This is at all tech companies,” says Ellen Pao, who unsuccessfully sued venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers for sexual discrimination. “It may not be as bad as this ( Uber), but this is the culture of tech.”
And, since Fowler went public with her charges, more women are hiring lawyers, according to Pao. “It will be interesting to see how the companies respond,” she said.
For the tech industry, gender inequity has been hard to solve. Employment lawyers say women from the tech industry have been walking through their doors for years with sexual harassment and discrimination complaints.
And they are not just complaints against start- up companies with young managers and loose policies. Facebook, Microsoft and Twitter also have faced lawsuits over their treatment of women.
Attorney Kelly Dermody, head of the employment practice at Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein, which is representing women suing Microsoft for gender discrimination, says she gets calls every week from women in the tech industry.
“It’s not abating,” says David Lowe, partner with Rudy, Exelrod, Zieff & Lowe, whose firm represented Pao. “You would think by now that these sorts of harassment issues would not come up as often, that people would be more knowledgeable, more sensitive, more trained. But the publicity from these cases has not made a dent in the number of cases we have seen.”
Six out of 10 women working in Silicon Valley experience unwanted sexual advances, according to the Elephant in the Valley survey of more than 200 women released last year. About two- thirds of these women said these advances were from a superior, and 66% said they felt excluded in tech because of their gender.
Women use the latest apps and gadgets in equal, if not greater, numbers. And they outnumber men at the top schools and in the workforce. But they are in noticeably short supply in Silicon Valley.
Fowler’s Uber saga — which she titled “Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber”— bears that out, featuring stories of being sexually propositioned by her boss on her first day of work; of being told by HR that her complaints would go nowhere because her boss was a prized employee; of being left with choices that included putting up with his advances and accepting a bad evaluation or moving departments.
Thursday, she tweeted that she had hired an attorney.