Faith Restored: ARVR Women to host its first Restorative Justice Training at UC Berkeley
This weekend ARVR Women and Allies is hosting its first Restorative Justice training led by Julie Shackford-Bradley, Co-founder of the Restorative Justice Center at UC Berkeley.
ARVR Women’s RJ initiative is investigating how restorative justice can help the immersive tech industry set clear community expectations and improve transparency, fairness and ethical standards. We’re working with a small test group before we determine how we can expand trainings to our members and the industry at large.
When I began making 360 videos and organizing local virtual reality meetups in Berkeley three years ago, women were optimistic that VR would be different. Immersive tech, with its powerful ability to induce empathy, had to be a safe, equitable and inclusive industry from the beginning.
In the two years since VR headsets have been commercially available, the full picture of what the industry is truly like for women, both in the virtual and real world, is coming into focus.
Research firm The Extended Mind recently published their study, Virtual Harassment: The Social Experience of 600+ Regular Virtual Reality (VR) Users and found that “49% of women reported having experienced at least one instance of sexual harassment.” although, “harassment is not universally perceived as a problem.”
In March, Greenlight Insights and WXR Venture Fund reported that with more than $1.9 billion dollars raised by augmented and virtual reality startups in 2017, “only 7.7 percent of all venture funding deals went to female CEOs.”
Arguably one of the biggest failures of the industry to be better for women is last May’s sexual harassment and wrongful termination suit against UploadVR by their former social media director, Elizabeth Scott. Upload founders denied Scott’s claims as, “without merit”. The lawsuit gained widespread media attention and settled out of court, but little changed at the top.
The early online mobilization of women in VR produced influential community groups, opportunity and connection, but also tokenization, censorship and abuses of power that divided women and helped Upload quickly gain credibility.
A lack of women on their panels was the least of the SF startup’s blind spots. Months before the suit, women who raised concerns about Upload’s sexist techbro scene on a private forum for women were frequently challenged, sidelined, and put on an “apology list” sent to co-founder Will Mason.
In August of 2016 I got a “we are going to be doing even better in the future” message from Mason that I never requested because I trusted the wrong person. It should be obvious that women who have the courage to come forward deserve better than a spot on a secret apology list.
They deserve better than being told, “what’s done is done.”
Upload knew women were frustrated with their company long before Scott’s lawsuit. Women leaders knew, but instead of including women who came forward in a process of community accountability, some horded confidential information, and seemingly used it to advance their own position. I was labeled a troll and banned from the forum because I had the nerve to ask, “how many women were silenced?”
No one wants to know.
That was my introduction to the VR industry. It’s mired in controversy and ethical lapses by people who should know better as much as the rest of the tech industry and beyond. I wasn’t interested in the politics of being a woman in tech, but the politics are interested in me. Whatever the intentions of an apology list, the impact made me feel like a target, marked for exclusion.
I’m not allowed to be angry though. The weight is always on me to let it go and move on, to fix it, to collaborate and organize whether or not I have the tools or community support.
Funding is critical to drawing women into the industry, but I don’t want to be part of an industry that can’t hold itself accountable to its most vulnerable members. How can women entertain being VR users, let alone founders, if we don’t feel safe?
Despite the setbacks, and the very real onset of diversity fatigue, ARVR Women and Allies founded by Jodi Schiller and Iva Leon, restored my faith in the industry and the power of VR to bring people together. From the beginning they believed women like me who had nowhere to turn.
Working with their community, my feelings of isolation and despair transformed into compassion and service. I still struggled, but I wasn’t alone.
They invited me to be an admin of their group to experience the challenges of moderating the second largest immersive industry group for women on Facebook. We added an admin code of ethics so that our members know what they can expect from the leadership team and to help protect the group against conflicts of interest.
Community moderation is hard, and much of the time thankless work for no pay. No one is going to get things right all the time, but if we make mistakes or unintentionally cause harm, we should have the humility and strength of character to own up to it and work to repair the damage.
Through our Restorative Justice Initiative, ARVR Women is bringing together concerned members and industry leaders, starting with our test group, to examine three main themes that came out of our first RJ strategy session earlier this year:
A. How to respond to past or current cases of sexual harassment, other forms of misconduct or deception among people working in the VR/AR community. How can survivors or victims of cases of harm get justice, or repair, or some way of moving forward?
B. How to build or strengthen community agreements or guidelines among those who are working in VR/AR, to foster mutual respect, fairness, equity, honesty, freedom from sexual harassment, etc. And, can this be worked out within virtual or augmented spaces, or is it better to talk face-to-face, or both?
C. How to create community agreements for behavior within VR/AR experiences or encounters. How would that be monitored, and people held accountable in a restorative way?
We hope that by engaging in these questions we can, in the near term, understand what restorative justice is, how it could work in VR, expand the conversation, and share insights through our meetups and panel discussions. Over the long term, we want to identify social VR tools and develop immersive experiences that help individuals, organizers and leaders improve virtual and real-world relationships.
Accountability and transparency are essential to disrupting the status quo and supporting women who break their silence. Direct experience, and now important new data, confirms what many of us have known from the start: Virtual Reality is far from the inclusive utopia we’ve been dreaming about. Women continue leading the charge for a better, more inclusive industry with a renewed sense of purpose.
ARVR Women is dedicated to that work, and we invite you to participate.
If you would like to join a future RJ training or host a meetup, please let us know, we look forward to hearing from you.
ARVR Women and Allies is a group for women in the immersive tech industry that supports community connection, education and professional growth.
