Sexual Harassment in Silicon Valley
&quot;Male founders have to run this emasculating gauntlet too, except that they can’t blame gender discrimination for how dirty they feel at the end of the day.&quot;<p>This is something I think about a lot. I am white &amp; I am male, so my race and gender are naturally things that I don&#x27;t think of very often (and I understand that constitutes a level of privilege). An exercise that I like to do sometimes is just imagine the situation I&#x27;m experiencing as if I was female, or as if I was black. If I&#x27;m in a meeting and everyone ignores what I&#x27;m saying, as a white male, there is no voice in the back of my head saying &quot;it&#x27;s because I&#x27;m female.&quot; If I don&#x27;t get a job, or the interviewer was condescending, there is no voice in my head saying &quot;it&#x27;s because I&#x27;m black.&quot; So I entertain these ideas every once in a while, and it&#x27;s actually amazing how many misfortunes I can quickly associate to being black or being female, that had I actually been black or female I would have ABSOLUTELY attributed to those features.<p>What makes this interesting is that my point isn&#x27;t to say that a female or person of color won&#x27;t actually have a different experience, and face real instances of racism and sexism...because they absolutely will. The thing that I DO find interesting is that they basically have no &quot;control&quot; experience by which to measure their victimhood. Once you&#x27;ve taken on the role of a victim, any number of injustices that are just part of human nature can be attributed to whatever you perceive as the source. The end result is a major overestimation of remaining institutional injustices, in my opinion, and the constant reinforcement of this victimhood status is largely responsible for continuing to plant this voice in the head of individuals that is constantly asking &quot;am I being treated this way because I&#x27;m ________.&quot;<p>The inverse is obviously true in that a white male is very likely to underestimate the injustices encountered by a black person or a female, but I find this to be much less interesting. The reason being that no person is very aware of the injustices we DON&#x27;T face, we are acutely aware of the injustices that we DO face. If a black man experiences a 15% increase in injustices vs a white man, the white man is likely underestimate the impact of those of the black man. The black man, however, can rightfully attribute those extra 15% to the fact that he his black, but there is no clear differentiator between those that were truly racial in nature vs those that would have been encountered regardless of race.