During the last decade of my career as a union rep, the biggest challenge was trying to hang on to basic benefits that had been won years ago. In the beleaguered newspaper industry, that battle was all uphill. We reduced sick leave and vacation time. We froze pensions and scaled back medical insurance. The pain was aggravated by almost daily reports from the booming tech startups that were offering a smorgasbord of benefits to die for (here and here): one year of paid leave for new mothers and fathers, on-site child (and dog) care, acupuncture and improv classes, free meals, midday siestas in a “nap pod,” $4,000 in “baby cash” for employees with newborns, and unlimited paid vacations.
As accomplished as I was at making outrageous arguments with a straight face, I would have had a hard time staying in character while pounding the table over nap pods. Besides, our entire focus was on trying to maintain some semblance of medical insurance and a modest retirement plan. Those shiny tech benefits formed a cruel oasis in our desert of retrogressions. Based on recent developments, however, all that glitters in Silicon Valley employee relations is not, by any stretch of the imagination, gold. As Paul Harvey used to say, here’s the rest of the story:
Despite its cutting edge image, the tech industry is a bastion of sexual harassment, a throwback to the pre-Clarence-Thomas days when male supervisors didn’t differentiate between the workplace and a pick-up bar, five minutes before last call. According to Fortune Magazine, 60 percent of the female tech workforce say they have experienced unwanted sexual advances on the job, most of them from a superior. Some 39 percent of those women said they did not report the harassment out of fear it would hurt their careers.
Susan Fowler was not among that 39 percent. She recently quit her engineering job with Uber because of what she described as a culture of rampant sexual harassment. She described her experiences in a blog post that has managed to shed a glaring light on what had been a dirty little secret of tech employment. Fowler said her manager repeatedly asked her to have an affair. She went to Uber’s Human Resources Department where, to her astonishment, she was told that it was the guy’s first offense and they were not inclined to take any action beyond a warning. Fowler said she later learned that her manager had made similar overtures to several other female subordinates, all of whom had also gone to HR and gotten the same “first offense” line. More women have since come forward with related accusations against other managers. In a quick clean-up effort at damage control, Uber brought in former attorney general Eric Holder to help with a corporate-wide sexual harassment investigation.
This kind of predator conduct was common in most workplaces 30 years ago. It went hand-in-hand with a male-dominated hierarchy and the subservient role carved out for women workers. Sexual harassment is a large umbrella. It includes unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, lewd and offensive gender-based comments and related harassing behavior based on sex. All of that was perfectly legal until the late 1970s when federal courts, for the first time, ruled that the Civil Rights Act’s prohibition against sex discrimination covers sexual harassment. That led to seven-figure damages against employers who failed to protect their employees from sexual harassment.
All of a sudden, companies were adopting strict no-harassment policies and training supervisors to keep their hands and ribald thoughts to themselves. A lot of whining men stumbled through the 1980s, blathering to each other about how “a poor guy just doesn’t know what he can do or say these days”. By the mid 1990’s most of them had figured it out. That’s not to say sexual harassment came to an abrupt halt. It never left us, but the law and threat of punitive damages changed the workplace culture and dramatically slowed it down.
And then the tech boom hit, and it was the 1970s all over again. These nerdy, otherworldly digital gurus who redefined the workplace to make it fit a whole new approach to functionality, came programed with a manly way of thinking that had been outlawed 40 years ago. Since Susan Fowler blew the whistle on Uber, scores of women from other tech companies have come forward with their horror stories. Haana told the Guardian that her Silicon Valley manager put his hand up her shirt and groped her while they walked down the street after an off-site meeting. Joe told a leading tech blog that he witnessed a top executive repeatedly hit on and touch female staffers Joe supervised. Joe went with the women to report the incidents to the CEO but nothing was done.
Here’s how Wired.com described the culture of tech workplaces: “Kegerators, or at least well-stocked beer fridges, are standard fixtures at tech companies, right up there with ping-pong tables and beanbag chairs. Some, like GitHub and Yelp, even offer multiple brews on tap. Conferences and meetups are awash with free drinks.”
Clearly, this industry has carved out an alternative universe for a work environment, replacing the conventional office’s structure and rigidity with a party-like atmosphere that intentionally blurs the line between work and fun. Unfortunately, that’s not the only line being discarded. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act does not contain a sex discrimination exemption for cool, innovative tech companies. A word of caution to women seeking employment there: nap pods, child care and oodles of paid time off are worthless without a guarantee of a workplace free of discrimination and harassment. Sadly, such a venue seems to be a rarity in the tech industry.