A new survey finds that sexual harassment is widespread in the tech industry, Vox reports.
The report, called "Elephant in the Valley," from venture capitalists, investors, marketers, and academics in the field, surveyed more than 200 women working primarily in the Bay Area or Silicon Valley as C-level executives, founders, or venture capitalists for both established and start-up firms. The survey, the report notes, came in response to conversations from around the time of former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao's gender discrimination suit against Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. The authors say that while they heard similar stories from other women in the field, they learned that men were shocked as to what going on and thus decided to gather data and stories.
According to the report, 60 percent of women in tech reported experiencing unwanted sexual advances, and 65 percent of those women had received those advances from a superior, often more than once.
In addition, 88 percent of the women surveyed said they'd experienced clients or colleagues addressing questions to their male peers that should've been posed to them, and 87 percent reported that male colleagues had made demeaning comments about them.
Vox notes that some of the incidents reported were subtle. "At Company X we had a joke that there were only two reviews for women — you are either too reticent or you are too bossy — no middle ground," one respondent says