This article has been imported from chorus.fm for discussion. All of the forum rules still apply. Katie Benner, writing for The New York Times: Their stories came out slowly, even hesitantly, at first. Then in a rush. One female entrepreneur recounted how she had been propositioned by a Silicon Valley venture capitalist while seeking a job with him, which she did not land after rebuffing him. Another showed the increasingly suggestive messages she had received from a start-up investor. And one chief executive described how she had faced numerous sexist comments from an investor while raising money for her online community website. Expand - View Original
What are articles like this doing on a site called AbsolutePUNK????? (lol j/k) A friend of mine from high school who now works in fintech up in the bay area wrote a Medium post detailing all the times she had been harassed, hit on, or put down for being a woman in tech while trying to pitch her company and ideas, particularly because she's Chinese–American. It's absolutely insane just how blunt the sexism can be (not that subtle sexism is any better), and about time (in fact, well overdue) that the dam broke on all these stories.
Most of these stories made my skin crawl. It's also quite far away from what I've seen too, having come through uni doing a STEM subject and working for two engineering based software firms. I used to do a portion of the interviews at my old place. If I'd have even made a comment about a woman's appearance in the interview, I'd have been hung out to dry (and rightly so). But then, I guess there was some accountability in what I did. I presume these investment guys don't have a manager or HR department to come down on them like a ton of bricks when they show themselves to be disgusting pigs.
The same disgusting culture exists in the long-established industries like law and finance as well. Just demonstrates that as much as the tech industry attempts to establish a brand distancing themselves from traditional streams of business, there's a lot of negative characteristics that continue to be pervasive in the business world.