Silicon Valley Women, in Cultural Shift, Frankly Describe Sexual Harassment

Re:Silicon Valley Women, in Cultural Shift, Frankly Describe... by ubernostrum on Saturday July 01, 2017 @03:25AM (#14675867)

So if, say, 1,000 men got completely unsolicited propositions, groping, etc. and one man "dated up" at a company with women in high leadership positions, would you argue that those problems are exactly equally important and exactly equally serious and make sure to post comments about how incredibly important it is to ensure some balanced coverage and make sure everyone knows that it's not just solely a one-sided issue? Would you make sure to imply that anyone who focused on the much more common case was "justifying questionable behavior"? And try to drag the topic away from the common case?

Do you also do this in discussions of any other topic whatsoever? Whenever someone posts something about HTTP, do you make sure to post comments about Gopher and present it as being just as important?

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Re:Silicon Valley Women, in Cultural Shift, Frankly Describe... by curun1r on Saturday July 01, 2017 @09:00AM (#14676921)

I'm not trying to say they're equal problems. I'm trying to say that the one problem contributes to the other. In your example, the one man who dated up creates that possibility in the mind of the groper in those other 1,000 incidents. It's like the 1 super lotto winner among the millions who bought tickets. The event doesn't have to be likely for people to think that they might get lucky...people generally suck at estimating risk/reward. If there are zero winners, no one buys tickets, but since someone wins, millions play.

In the same way, if those advances were never successful, these men would quickly get the message and stop playing. But that doesn't seem to be the case since it's still happening way too frequently. If we want to stop this problem, we need to figure out how to get the message through that even in the cases where the advances were welcomed, they still did something wrong. And that requires more than just laying into those unfortunate few that are unlucky enough to do this kind of thing to women brave enough to come forward. It will require calling out those instances where the advances were welcomed.

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Re:Silicon Valley Women, in Cultural Shift, Frankly Describe... by tripzilch on Saturday July 01, 2017 @11:45AM (#14677567)

This is a pretty good argument, or way of looking at it, which I almost dismissed simply because of the hostile tone you state it.

In particular, the last paragraph you could have done without. These discussions already get heated enough, IMO.

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