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GENDER

Why Sexual Harassment Is More of a Problem in Venture Capital by Joan C. Williams

July 12, 2017

The only thing that surprises me about the

recent furor over sexual harassment by

Silicon Valley venture capitalists is that

people are surprised. We have been watching

these stories go viral for a long time. When I

give speeches in Silicon Valley about gender

bias, I can’t tell you how many times

female entrepreneurs have shared their

stories with me about being treated by

venture capitalists (VCs) as sexual

opportunities rather than investment

opportunities.

It’s ironic that my whole life lately seems to

be spent explaining why the college-

educated elite should not dismiss the

concerns of white working-class voters on

the grounds that those “rednecks” are sexist

and otherwise deplorable. Turns out elites

can be sexist, too.

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Sexual harassment is prevalent among VCs because of the hard-driving bro culture that

confuses the pursuit of money with the pursuit of masculinity. Work becomes a

masculinity contest (to borrow Jennifer Berdahl’s term) in which men become obsessed

with showing that theirs is the biggest — the biggest deal, the longest hours, the most

money. “Someone’s **** is always bigger,” remarked a businessman, about to take off on

his private plane, who spotted a Gulfstream V owned by a friend. When masculinity is the

metric of success, hitting on women is just another way to keep score.

Some Silicon Valley firms are turning to sexual harassment training as a solution. I’m not

discouraging that. But to be effective, initiatives need to focus not only on changing men’s

attitudes toward women but also on changing men’s attitudes toward themselves as men.

In many organizations, in Silicon Valley and elsewhere, a certain cowboy strain of

masculinity prevails, especially at the leadership level. “Loudership” is the term used by

one organization we’ve worked with.

Loudership not only excludes women; it’s a turnoff for talented men who’d rather be good

men than so-called “real” men. When sociology professor Michael Kimmel asked his

students what it means to be a real man, responses included being authoritative, taking

risks, and suppressing any kind of weakness. But when he asked students what it means to

be a good man, they mentioned qualities associated with gender-neutral decency, like

being honest and respectful of others.

The “real man” syndrome is a reflection of what psychologists call precarious manhood: the

view that masculinity has to be earned over and over again. Bro culture is often depicted

jocularly, but the endless game of zero-sum one-upmanship is not only off-putting for

most women; it’s also draining and humiliating for many men.

If Silicon Valley wants to eliminate sexual harassment, it needs to stop placing an

artificially high value on being a “real man” and instead insist that men — and women —

behave as decent, respectful human beings.

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The business benefits are real. Because “masters of the universe” are not what create

value. Work is — hard work, with a focus on productivity rather than masculine signaling.

Where work becomes a masculinity contest, sexual harassment isn’t the only downside.

Studies show that, on average, men’s confidence and appetite for risk are greater than

women’s. Typically this leads to handwringing about how we can make women more

confident and less risk averse. But often the real answer is how to get men to have a more

accurate view of their own abilities and make more-rational risk assessments. It’s to

replace loudership with real leadership.

If that’s the carrot, here’s the stick: Sexual harassment has become a flying, invisible buzz

saw that can abruptly cut down your career and hurt your company. If Travis Kalanick had

created a different kind of company culture, he might still be CEO of Uber. If some Fox

News executives and on-air personalities had run a different kind of organization, many

might still have their jobs.

Yet as sexual harassment has become riskier and riskier, harassers may find it even more

appealing. The risk is what makes it “fun.” The solution is to go more in-depth — much

more so than sexual harassment trainings typically do.

A recent experiment I performed at a major STEM organization provides an example. To

establish a baseline, we used our 10-minute Workplace Experiences Survey to measure

ambient levels of racial and gender bias. We then gave a 90-minute workshop, called “Bias

Interrupters for Managers,” that differs from most bias trainings in three ways. First,

instead of focusing abstractly on the “mind bugs” that drive cognitive bias, the workshop

pinpoints precisely how common biases play out in everyday workplace interactions.

Next, it describes the most common scenarios and asks people to come up with low-key

ways to interrupt bias that don’t require expending too much political capital. Finally, the

workshop describes how, at the same time that prescriptive stereotypes create gender

pressures on women to be modest and self-effacing, they create gender pressures on men

to be “real men” in ways that often penalize good men. We hypothesized that, taken

together, these approaches could solve a key dilemma most trainings run into: Accusing

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people of being biased just makes them defensive. The more common approach —

reassuring people that “everyone is biased” — is a very confusing message. Everybody is

biased but I shouldn’t be? How does that make sense?

When we did a follow-up survey, we found that women in this organization were less

likely to report implicit bias and reported an increased sense of belonging and intent to

stay. But the most interesting finding was that white men also reported an increased sense

of belonging. This is in sharp contrast to other approaches to diversity, such as corporate

diversity policies, which research has found often feel threatening to white men,

increasing their stress levels and harming their on-the-job performance even when they

ideologically support diversity goals.

Finally, a word about witches. It took just three days after the initial news story for the

New York Times to report: “Some men have the feeling that the conversation has turned

into a witch hunt.” Witchcraft allegations have long been used to undermine women’s

access to economic power: Carol Karlsen’s brilliant The Devil in the Shape of a Woman

documents how, just when land was becoming scarce in the American colonies, the

women most likely to be accused were those who either had property or stood to inherit it.

Demanding an end to sex discrimination is not evidence of witchcraft. Using “witch hunt”

in this context is further evidence of sexism.

So here’s the bad news. Forty years after the Supreme Court declared sexual harassment

illegal, it hasn’t become less common. But it has become a risky business: Sexual

harassment can become abruptly expensive. The question for businesses is, How much are

they willing to spend on masculinity at the expense of profits?

Joan C. Williams is a professor and the founding director of the Center for WorkLife Law

at the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law. Her newest book is White Working

Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America.