I was wondering a related question, which is whether or not there is a higher, similar, or lower incidence of sexual harassment in "technology" firms than other firms of similar size (number of employees, annual revenue).
It is not uncommon for people who work together, to get romantically involved in spite of advice against such relationships. But I don't see anything specifically 'tech' related that would make this more or less likely. Hence the question.
It is not uncommon for people who work together, to get romantically involved in spite of advice against such relationships
Is there any correlation between long work-weeks and romantic relationships between employees? Have any studies been done of this?
I'm reminded of Philip Greenspun's "How To Make Your Software Engineers Work 80 Hours A Week" article [1] about ArsDigita where he got his employees to work crazy hours while he was dating one of his employees. That's the part that was most offensive to me when I first read it years ago ("girlfriend for me but not for thee"). Other parts offend me more these days, but I'm still wondering if a good policy against sexual harassment is to make sure your employees have time outside of work to find someone to copulate with.
There is a strong correlation between romantic involvement and shared stressful experiences. Its a movie trope but there have also been studies done. The last one I read about was in Scientific American in the late 90's/early 2000's. You can check 'romantic relationships and stress' on scholar.google.com and find lots of hits.
There is also a correlation between having an excuse to be close together and opportunity. This apparently got pretty bad for Microsoft employees on the road such that the company issued guidelines. But I don't know if corporate was any more or less affected.
Call me cynical, but when I read all the comments on sites like this and others about these lawsuits in the tech industry, it leads me to believe that a lot of writers and editors somewhere are not idiots -- they're digging these things up and feeding them to us.
That didn't answer your question, I know. My point is that there are tons of tech companies. It can certainly appear to be a tremendous surge when in fact it's just a small extra effort made in reporting cases. Without a statistical survey we can't be sure.
We can be sure about the economics of creating content, though.
With this kind of visceral reaction, it's a publisher's dream. Not only can you report the allegation, then you can report the reply, then the comments from the community, then the play-by-play action in court, etc. Just gauge how much effort to put into it by how many pageviews you're pulling. Newspaper 101 stuff.
Call me naive, but when harrassment this egregious is exposed at a well-known tech company, I don't feel the need to stroke my chin and wonder if there's a media conspiracy to make it appear worse than it is. I don't even know how this could be made to look worse than it is. What possible spin could a publisher put on this that is not already present in the allegation and evidence?
I mean, it's well known but not well established - I highly doubt there's much sexual harassment in a typical corporate environment with an HR department.
Well, I'm not sure I agree that not much harassment goes on in more established companies, but you're absolutely right that at least they're more likely to have procedures in place for dealing with it.
This is why I'm astonished to see such strenuous effort go into confecting explanations why there might not really be a problem in startup culture. You've got young, inexperienced founders and a tendency to dispense with formal HR practises in favour of "cultural fit" - the ingredients are all there for horrible abuses of power, and yet when said abuses inevitably surface, there's an almost desperate effort to hand-wave them away as isolated incidents. It's bewildering, it really is.
Model View Culture have been publishing some superb work in this area, most relevantly in this article:
One, the nerd/geek stereotype where those of us more interested in high tech are supposed to have worse social skills; this would lead to more defective attempts at starting relationships, and to more of the relationships that do happen going bad.
Two, the inherent necessary hubris of startup culture and the noise around "10x" or "rock-star" or "A-player" etc programmers, the apparent canonization of people like Jobs and Zuckerberg; the resulting pervasive sense of entitlement and superiority would also not make for healthy relationships.
It is not uncommon for people who work together, to get romantically involved in spite of advice against such relationships. But I don't see anything specifically 'tech' related that would make this more or less likely. Hence the question.