Tech’s Harassment Crisis Now Has an Arsenal of Smoking Guns
Four years after #Donglegate, we’re finally ready to believe women.
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Last year, Stefanie Johnson gathered 31 women to talk about how being attractive influences their experience at work. Johnson, a professor who studies unconscious bias at the University of Colorado Boulder, was especially interested in women who worked in masculine fields—like tech and academia. She expected to hear stories about condescending meetings and microaggressions. Instead, the women began spontaneously unleashing story after story about sexual harassment at work. Everyone had an experience, it seemed, and no one knew what to do about it. What they did know was that they definitely weren’t going to lodge a complaint.
“Most of the women seemed pretty shocked at the idea of reporting it,” says Johnson. “They would tell me, ‘That’s insane, why would you bother to report it? That’s career suicide.’”
Given that the high-powered women of Johnson’s study agreed that the best strategy was shutting up, the recent drumbeat of women reporting sexual harassment suggests that something new is in the air. In February, an epic post by Susan Fowler chronicled the repeated sexual harassment she endured while working as an engineer at Uber. Soon, more former Uber employees were coming forward with similarly horrifying stories. Then reporters unearthed a Tesla lawsuit in which a female engineer told a now-familiar tale of harassment. And the problems aren’t only the result of men: Earlier this week, New York Magazine reported that an employee of the period-underwear startup Thinx is filing a complaint against founder Miki Agrawal, alleging that she bred a culture of fear and sexual harassment.
These anecdotes paint a picture of a work culture run amok, with standards of acceptable behavior badly warped. But there’s another way of looking at this trend as a sign of progress. We are at last unearthing the dark commonalities of women’s experiences in Silicon Valley. As these women have gone public, they’re reaching what appears to be a receptive audience. Their audiences are angry, and ready to take action. That hasn’t always been true.
Just four years ago, the tech world bore witness to just how how ugly blowback can be and how quickly public response can spiral out of control. As it turns out, advancing public debate around social issues—whether in Silicon Valley or anywhere else — is never just about speaking out. It takes the perfect timing, and the perfect case.
Adria Richards was sitting in a ballroom at PyCon, a coding conference in Santa Clara, CA. Behind her, she overheard two men trading jokes. They were speaking loudly, she later wrote, and making sexual jokes using coder lingo: “I’d fork his repo” and “big dongle.” It was offensive, and it made her feel uncomfortable. So she reported them to the conference via Twitter:
Conference staff pulled the two men aside and talked to them. They left PyCon miffed. Then a few days later, one of the men, posting under the pseudonym “Hank,” popped up on Hacker News with a complaint. The tweet, he wrote, had gotten him fired. He was upset with Richards.
She had every right to report me to staff, and I defend her position. [But] as a result of the picture she took I was let go from my job today. Which sucks because I have three kids and I really liked that job. She gave me no warning, she smiled while she snapped the pic and sealed my fate.”
He didn’t blame Richards, in other words—but it would be just fine with him if others did.
That post launched an angry backlash against Richards. The opinions varied. In a post at Ars Technica, Ken Fischer called her response “a classic overreaction.” A surge of trolls threatened her, calling her names and ordering her off her feed. On 4Chan, hackers planned and launched a DDoS attack against Richards’s employer, SendGrid. The attack would only stop, they wrote, once SendGrid fired her.
Soon, the company complied. Richards was out of a job. In a statement, SendGrid CEO Jim Franklin said that the company supported Richards’s right to see harassment and call it out. They supported her feelings. They did not, however, like her vehicle.
“What we do not support is how she reported the conduct,” the statement read.
For months after her tweet, Richards couch-surfed. She was scared to stay in one place because she’d been doxxed and her address was all over the internet. Her feeds were filled with threats and images of her beheaded, or her face photoshopped onto the body of porn stars.
I’ve gathered these facts together from Richards’s writing. Richards herself did not want to participate in this article. When I reached her on her cell phone, she told me she’s trying to move on from what happened four years ago, and that she’s spent years trying to reclaim her name. She said she’s just trying to find a way to earn a living, and that “I don’t want to be the person where there’s a car accident on the side of the road and people sit and gawk.”
She also told me that over the years, she’s learned not to trust journalists. Period.
I can’t say I blame her. Search the web and Richards’s name is forever tied to PyCon 2013. As for the men whose picture she tweeted? It’s hard to even find their names. I had to trawl through LinkedIn’s job history, and some deep subreddit threads, just to send them a request for comment.
The writer Jon Ronson included a long section on Richards in his book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. In Ronson’s careful retelling, the one doing the shaming is clearly Richards. Over a meeting with Ronson at the San Francisco airport, Richards muses that some of the backlash against her was instigated by Hank. Ronson describes feeling appalled. “Later I felt bad that I hadn’t stuck up for him,” Ronson writes. Throughout the interlude, Ronson never reveals Hank’s real name.
Richards responded to the story by writing on a feminist blog: “I question, and we should all question, why a man losing his job due to his own life choices is a more important story to tell than a woman who, within 72 hours, became the target of a massive, organized harassment campaign that ended in her public firing.”
Good question.
There have always been women who spoke out, both in public and private channels, and often they’ve suffered as a result. In many ways, this latest wave is the exception rather than the rule. Y-Vonne Hutchinson, the executive director of ReadySet, a company that helps startups diversify their hiring, argues that a lot has changed in the last four years. Unfortunately for Richards, her story unspooled during a more naive time. “We could still believe that it wasn’t true,” Hutchinson reflects. “We could still give people and companies the benefit of the doubt and say that this is not a systemic issue.” We hadn’t yet come to terms with the fact that even “nice” guys like Bill Cosby, or powerful ones like Roger Ailes, could tally up dozens of victims; we didn’t have 250 women at Kay Jewelers all telling similar stories of being sexually harassed.
And perhaps most importantly, says Hutchinson, “now we have a president who says, ‘grab women by the pussy.’” The election, she believes, debunked a lot of our most comforting lies. “[It] pulled back the veil on a lot of myths that we’ve been telling ourselves to make ourselves feel better,” she says. “That we live in a post-racial sociality. That we live in a post-sexism society. That we live in a meritocracy.”
Against this backdrop, Susan Fowler’s case might be the most perfect case for a newly woke public to rally behind. She’s an accomplished engineer at a disgraced company with a bad-boy CEO who once joked that the ride-share service should be renamed “Boob-er.” And Fowler told her story from a position of strength, having landed in a new job and gathered a stunning array of well-documented anecdotes.
Have we come far enough to understand harassment when it comes in even a slightly messier form? Probably not. We’re still a long way from people being able to speak out without being prepared for consequences. The only way to be heard isn’t a stellar one. But at least we’re starting to listen.
