On Sexism in the Tech Industry, and Why We’re Blind to It

On Sexism in the Tech Industry, and Why We’re Blind to It 

If you are male, in the tech industry, and are baffled by the fact that you don’t see the extremely inappropriate behavior that your female colleagues are complaining about, consider that if you are in a Google engineering org, there are eight to twelve times as many men as women. To get a baseline approximation of ambient workplace hostility, take a few counterfactuals:

(A) That workplace social graphs are randomly distributed, with no nonrandom siloing by gender;

(B) That all inappropriate work behavior is initiated by men and directed at women, and;

(C) That any given woman is as likely as any other to be targeted, and;

(D) That all harassment happens in a setting where exactly one randomly selected person is well-positioned to observe. 

Think back to the most inappropriate thing you’ve seen this year. Under these assumptions, that happens to each woman engineer at Google, every month. The most inappropriate thing you’ve seen in the past twelve years (for many of you, “your entire career”) happens to each woman engineer at Google every year.

There are lots of ways in which this could be off: unusual concentrations of women in particular organizations; same-gender sexual harassment; preferential targeting; lack or excess of witnesses. Any or all of these might be true. But there is no reason to expect that a completely naive baseline (viz., “occurrence of sexual harassment at precisely the level I observe”) is anything close to true.