They pull similar tricks with college sexual assault statistics too. They don't ask "Have you been sexually assaulted?" Instead, they ask about a laundry list of scenarios. If you say that one of them happened, you're now a sexual assault victim, even if you don't agree and even if that incident never reached the threshold of illegality. A good analogy is regular assault, which legally includes verbal threatening language. Who hasn't had a heated argument with a friend or family member? But imagine if a survey counted you as an assault victim just for agreeing to the statement "someone has threatened me during a verbal altercation". The law is intentionally defined broadly but applied narrowly. Collecting statistics that count people as victims of violence, when they wouldn't even count themselves, is deceptive and dishonest. It's being done to justify kangaroo courts in colleges, and government mandates in private business.

Disclaimer: Just to preempt the easily offended, I obviously acknowledge that sexual and regular assaults are real crimes that happen way too often, but the statistics being thrown around are ridiculous.

> They don't ask "Have you been sexually assaulted?"

People have different definitions of sexual assault. Asking about specific scenarios is a way to control for those varying definitions, and it's a standard requirement of good survey design.

There may be problems with those surveys, but the solution is not to just ask, "Have you been sexually assaulted?"

Yes, but shouldn't you ask that question too? It's extremely relevant.

The law was written in the context of how it would be applied. It was not designed as a metric for sexual violence in our society. It was designed as the legal rules that judges, just one part of the process, must apply once a case is brought before them. And only then in the context of constitutional law and old common law like de minimis.

It that's true, it would be trivial to design a survey to get whatever sexual assault statistics that you want. Even after the survey has been taken, by having questions ambiguous, and then reclassify them as either sexual assault or not.

The solution is to look at the questions asked.

If you're asking loaded questions, you're getting loaded results. If the results in question are college sexual assault statistics and no one bothered to ask "have you been sexually assaulted" then that's what I would call loaded.

> But imagine if a survey counted you as an assault victim just for agreeing to the statement "someone has threatened me during a verbal altercation".

In England that could meet the threshold for common assault, which is an arrestable offence.

Yes, as I said, the law is defined broadly but applied more narrowly. There's always the question of degree, that's assessed by the victim (in deciding to pursue the issue), the prosecutor, the judge, and the jury. The legal principle is de minimis non curat lex ("the law does not concern itself with trifles").

But that's the point of crime surveys - you ask people what crimes they've experienced and count the results.

That's not because courts interpret the law narrowly, it's because crime is under reported, and under prosecuted.

Plenty of people get prosecuted, and convicted, for common assault that only involved verbal threats.

It also doesn't define what an "unwanted" advance is.

There's a stark difference between an inappropriate advance and an unwanted advance, and it generally comes down to whether or not the recipient has free agency to reject the advance without fear of reprisal in a power-imbalanced situation, workplace or otherwise.

TFA says:

>60% of women in Tech reported unwanted sexual advances.

>

> -- 65% of women who report unwanted sexual advances had received advances from a superior, with half receiving advances more than once

> -- 1 in 3 have felt afraid of their personal safety because of work related circumstances

(emphasis mine)

Power-imbalanced? Yes, for 39% of them, and 30% had some multiple times.

I agree that "unwanted advance" could mean someone asked me out and I didn't like them. I'll be honest, I don't deal with that problem myself because men aren't asked by women in our society, but I think you should define what you think draws the line between unwanted and inappropriate.

I couldn't find that info despite clicking around in "TFA". Thanks.

"24% of women in Tech reported inappropriate sexual advances" is a less scary headline.

It's still way too high, but when you also factor in the selection bias and poor methodology, I have a very hard time taking these numbers at face value.

As for "afraid of their personal safety", that's subjective enough -- and introduces significant response bias in the already selective audience -- to be useless.

Side complaint, it'd be awesome if they put id's on the tags for each subheading, so linking to each would be a pinch.

If the authors are reading this, consider that.

I agree.

And as you've demonstrated, it is always very easy to dismiss thousands of people's experiences as irrelevant in order to be comfortable with the status quo.

I'm just criticizing the methodology that supports the statement that 60 percent of women in tech experience unwanted sexual advances.

This kind of studies are indeed really difficult to make, it's a sensitive subject so not everyone is going to report it the same way, you need to find the right group of people, a sample large enough and compare with across industries which is even harder to do. So I'm convinced personally there's some problems with women in tech which is partially due to the low amount of women going into tech but I think that's really hard to quantify in real numbers.

why do you need to compare across industries, exactly? even if we found the same % in every industry we'd still need to take action.

The link seems to insist there is a problem with women in tech, even if the study is correct, it could just mean that women are not treated the same way in other industries either. It does not stop to take action indeed, I agree with that, I was just reacting to the study itself.