Have you ever been around a group of all women and heard what they say?

(I'm male but) I have and let's just say, there's a female "locker room" as well just down the hall from ours.

And the women in this locker room regularly pressure their juniors into having sex with them? I don't get the equivalence here.

Sure, women talk dirty too, rather less of them are guilty of sexual coercion and assault then their male counterparts, I would hazard

If you're aware of harassment and assault of women, please contact the appropriate authorities. It's not normal and you shouldn't accept it as such.

At the workplace, the supposed appropriate authority is Human Resources. The obvious problem with this is that since Human Resources' role is literally to treat the humans at or attempting to be in, the company as resources, during a case of sexual harassment their systematically correct behavior is to weigh the assessed value of all parties involved, predict the value deltas for each possible way to resolve the case, and implement the resolution with the predicted net highest value to the company.

Apparently we cannot agree that it is not normal, because you claimed that, optimistically, half of men are like that, with a more "realistic" estimate of 80%. The point is that, if the numbers are that bad in your experience, then you do have a very not normal experience.

> if the numbers are that bad in your experience, then you do have a very not normal experience.

That would be good news. But I fear that it isn't. Here's an experiment for you: ask the women you are close to in your life if they've been raped or assaulted. The answers may surprise you. If you feel brave ask someone who spent time in an orphanage or jail or some other place where they have little access to representation and are at the mercy of people that have power over them.

>ask the women you are close to in your life if they've been raped or assaulted. The answers may surprise you.

That is not the number under dispute. There are two fundamentally different theories about what is going on: 1) Most men sexually assault women, or 2) A minority of men sexual assault a large number of women. Based on statistics of victims, it is impossible to distinguish between these two scenarios. However, understanding which scenario we are in is vitally important to forming our response. You seem to believe that we are in scenario 1.

I will admit, I do not have any evidence handy that we are in scenario 2, because it is not a proposal I have ever seen seriously suggested. However, you have presented no evidence that we are in scenerio 1, which seems to be the less believable situation. Until such evidence is presented, I will continue to believe that it is a minority of men that cause a majority of sexual assault [0].

[0] Yes, not all sexual assualt is by males, but I am reasonably confident that it is enough that this general statement holds.

> You seem to believe that we are in scenario 1.

What I've seen professionally makes me believe this, definitely. And that view is consistent across 30 years in the industry with stints in various sub-branches of IT and/or fields that require IT services (which is pretty much anything nowadays).

Let me reprhase this in a more direct way so there is no misunderstanding:

I have yet to see a female friendly company in IT.

If you know of such companies it would be nice to list them.

If there is such a thing I would love to be surprised, I suspect that it is going to be the ones run by women, but they are rare enough that I have not had much exposure to them.

>I have yet to see a female friendly company in IT.

This is a very different claim than what you made above. Even within a company, a minority of people can cause a majority of the problems. Indeed, for any toxic behavior I can think of, it only takes one employee to take down a team, and the problem often spreads beyond that team. I see no reason to believe sexual assault is any different.

Again, the question of if we are in situation 1 or 2 is vitally important. If we are in situation 1, then we are looking at a generational struggle to change men's attitudes towards women. Essentially, we need to wait for the old guard to die off, then wait for the new guard to die off, then hope that our actions made the new-new guard behave respectably.

If we are in situation 2, then the above solution is almost useless. Instead, we are facing a managerial problem where we fail to root out the bad actors. As with any other toxic behavior, this can cause them to contaminate the entire environment. Of course, in this context, "manager" does not only refer to the managers of companies, but also the "managers" of social communities. Effectively, in this scenario, the problem description is not so much that too many people rape, but rather that we are ineffective at dealing with those who do.

I strongly believe this is a societal problem, not a 'women in tech' problem, though it is quite probably a fact that women in tech have it somewhat harder than women in society on average but judging by who run the worlds corporations and who make the worlds laws it's probably a safe bet that that gap is smaller than it seems just because we happen to look at the world through a filter shaped by technology.

"I'm not going to do anything about the sexual harassment that I'm aware of, I don't have the time".

Seriously, what the fuck. If you don't care enough to do anything, at least have the decency to stop hand wringing about it on the internet.

You're being silly.

If every time I hear about a woman being harassed I would get myself mixed up in the case I don't think I'd have many friends left. Just in the last year alone one of my female friends was raped in her own home and if she wanted me to do something I'm pretty sure she'd be more than willing to ask, all I can do instead is to be there when she wants to talk about it.

What bothers me is that people seem to think this stuff is rare.

What I can do - and do - is when something is happening around me and I'm aware of it when it is happening to step in, but after the fact if you are not a party to something then you are not going to help matters if you on your own without the consent of the victim approach the authorities, and you also don't have the right to take matters in your own hands.

So seriously, what the fuck, realize that if you are not in any way shape or form a party to an event that you may not have the right - and definitely do not have an obligation - to approach the authorities.

I'd like to apologize for the misunderstanding, I said what I said because of the phrasing in your original post "[...] based on what I see and hear around me when no women are within earshot."

Protection is useful before and during some action. In the few cases that I was a witness I definitely stepped in and did something about it, but in most cases you only hear about things long after they've happened (in many cases years afterwards).

So you will 'never stop trying', but tell me, how often have you been there when it happened? For me those instances are a small fraction of the number of cases that I'm aware of and I suspect that the whole reason this number is so low is because of how these things play out, see the linked article here: mr. McClure did not bother to harass her until he'd isolated her. Who would stop him other than the woman?

Could be due to the location. Might be different in different countries. In the places I have worked (always women in the team, startup and more enterprise-world), I never seen sexism happen apart from once.

Of course there is the problem that it could be hidden (IMs or whatnot). Hence my optimism :-)