• Sexual harassment wasn’t established as a legal concept until the 1970s, when two cases brought by African-American women against their male bosses forced the courts to confront the issue.
• During the 1990s, major cases were filed against Wall Street banks and brokerage firms, such as Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch, which paid out multimillion-dollar settlements.
• Silicon Valley has, in many ways, replaced Wall Street as the country’s nexus of money and power.
• Latest 2016 stats: only 7% of the partners in venture-capital firms were women and just 2% of venture-capital funding went to female founders.
  • Almost half the women who get tech jobs eventually leave the field, more than double the percentage of men who do so.

Arianna Huffington on companies needing to reassess their values:

“This includes rejecting the cult of the top performer, which tolerates otherwise unacceptable behavior, and instead building a culture that functions as the company’s immune system: surfacing cases of abuse and identifying toxic elements as fast as possible, and then quickly rejecting them.”

“So if you believe that you’re a meritocracy, and that your meritocracy results in you being disproportionately and overwhelmingly white and Asian male, then you believe that any tinkering with how you recruit, assign, promote, and retain people is somehow, quote-unquote, lowering the bar.” […] tech has been unwilling to acknowledge that it is “unintentionally a rigged system.”

A pattern in the tech world that mirrored the Al Capone case: predatory sexual behavior was often accompanied by other infractions.

“People who engage in sexual harassment or assault are also likely to steal, plagiarize, embezzle, engage in overt racism, or otherwise harm their business,” Aurora and Honeywell wrote. “All of these behaviors are the actions of someone who feels entitled to other people’s property—regardless of whether it’s someone else’s ideas, work, money, or body. Another common factor was the desire to dominate and control other people.”

[With] entitlement, the same personality flaw says, ‘I am more important than all other people.’

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/11/20/the-tech-industrys-gender-discrimination-problem