Survey Shows Harassment Still a Factor for Women in Tech

The Mad Men are not as far behind us as we thought.

The Elephant In The Valley survey polled over 200 senior women in Silicon Valley, and found that 60 percent of them reported unwanted sexual advances at work.

Of that group, 65 percent said these advances were made by higher-ranking colleagues. Another 60 percent of those who had reported an incident were dissatisfied with the response.

An informal survey we ran on Twitter surfaced the same theme: 63 percent said they have experienced harassment in their workplace, according to combined results from two polls taken in June.

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Why the Numbers Are Hard to Fix

The detail that stands out in the survey is who the advances came from. When most harassment comes from more senior colleagues, reporting it means taking on someone with more power, more allies and more say over your career. That’s a big part of why so many incidents go unreported, and why dissatisfaction with how reports are handled matters as much as the harassment itself.

Small companies have an extra problem. Many startups have no dedicated HR team for years, so a complaint may go to a founder who is friends with the person accused, or who is the person accused. Without a clear process, even well-meaning companies can mishandle a report.

Mistreatment of women in the workplace is an economic as well as social problem because companies with women in the C-suite show better financial performance. When women are treated poorly in technology culture, they leave and don’t return to the industry.

Not that financial performance should be the first consideration in efforts to root out sexual harassment in the workplace.

What Happened Next: Uber and Google

Within a year of this survey, one account showed how these numbers play out inside a company. In February 2017, engineer Susan Fowler published a blog post about her year at Uber. She wrote that when she reported a manager who had propositioned her, she was told by both HR and upper management that it was “this man’s first offense” and that they wouldn’t feel comfortable giving him anything more than a warning. She later found other women had reported the same manager. She also wrote that the share of women in her part of the engineering organization fell from over 25% when she joined to less than 6%.

The post spread fast, and the fallout was enormous. By June 2017, Uber co-founder and CEO Travis Kalanick had stepped down, which The Guardian called “largely Fowler’s victory.”

Google was next. On November 1, 2018, thousands of Google employees walked out of offices from Tokyo to California, protesting the company’s handling of sexual misconduct allegations against senior executives. A week later, CEO Sundar Pichai told employees that Google would make arbitration optional for individual sexual harassment and sexual assault claims, and would share more detail about investigations and their outcomes.

The Law Changed, Too

Forced arbitration was one of the main targets of these protests. Many employment contracts required workers to settle disputes privately, through arbitration, rather than in court, which kept harassment claims out of public view.

In the United States, that changed for sexual harassment and assault claims with the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act, which became law on March 3, 2022. It lets people bringing those claims choose to go to court even if they signed an arbitration agreement.

Still, the situation isn’t completely bleak. Our poll about female founders and role models showed the largest proportion of respondents saying they could name at least two or three in the industry.

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The existence of role models can contribute to increasing female participation in the workplace.

What It Means for Startups

The years after this survey showed that harassment isn’t only a moral and legal risk. It can bring down a founder and change the course of a company. For startups, the practical steps are simple, and cheap compared with the cost of getting it wrong.

Write down how someone can report a problem, and make sure there’s a route that doesn’t go through the person’s own manager or a founder with a conflict. Take every report seriously and document what was done about it. Think twice before putting forced arbitration clauses in employment contracts. And remember that a company’s culture is set early: the habits formed with the first ten hires tend to last.