Videogames, the Me Too movement, Alec Holowka, Jeremy Soule

Games
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This thread made me remember we had a new law that broadens sexual harassment penalties and criminalizes work-related abuses of power (so, not only bosses and colleagues , but commercial partners as well) and has potential penalties for companies who do not address it or try to prevent it.
I don’t know how well enforcement is going, but I can to say that, despite all the protests and complaints, not only is the country still here, but it’s still fairly sexist.

Somewhat in answer to your question, you can do more.

EDIT: this also came about with some influence from the far away metoo movement, so it’s doing something good.

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No disagreement here.

I’m mostly commenting in the context of the thread, which seems to have started largely in response to incidents where influential people in industry were using that influence to coerce young women into having sex with them.

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I’m not sure that we have a meeting of the minds on exactly what constitutes “sexual assault.” By my reckoning, that would be rape or attempted rape, and I would indeed think that is properly addressed by police and prosecutors. Are you using a looser definition?

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As of right now, I’d say the class is males accused of sexual misconduct. Here’s an example where the individual was not named, yet was still condemned and fired from jobs:

The writer used this description of what she considered sexual assault:

I was quickly pressured to take an on-camera job at his company I didn’t want (I do not like to work for my significant others), because he insinuated I would be ungrateful to not accept it. Scared to upset him, I accepted the job, but I refused payment for my work, feeling uncomfortable about the whole thing (though the lovely folks at his company eventually forced me to take a check). By this time, like I said, I was terrified to piss him off- so I did what he said.

…Including let him sexually assault me . Regularly. I was expected to be ready for him when he came home from work.

How did this happen? At the beginning of our relationship, I was quite ill often due to my diet, something I’ll get to in a bit. One night he initiated, and I said, “I’m so sorry, can we not tonight? I’m feeling really sick.” He responded, “I just want to remind you, the reason my last relationship didn’t work out was because of the lack of sex.” It was a veiled threat. I succumbed.

It appears Hardwick survived this, but he has been clearly damaged. Did he in fact sexually assault the author? I’m not confident that it would meet any legal definition. She’s alleging assault due to what she considered his compelling her have sex through innuendo and implication. Were this a legal process, it would be difficult to show that such internal processes on her part were perceivable, or intentional, on the part of Hardwick. At the very least it’s messy and ambiguous.

Take a look at this thread, there’s a general consensus that false or overstated claims of sexual misconduct are so extremely unlikely that the accused should be regarded as having done what was claimed, period. For some folks, what the author alleged to be sexual assault is indeed sexual assault for all purposes as far as they are concerned. I can’t quite make that leap.

I’m sure that my noticing that this consensus exists will be regarded as irrefutable proof of wishing horrible things on all women, so if that was your goal, well played. As far as it goes, I think I’ve said my piece, so thank you to the folks that were civil and see you in another thread.

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I’d say it’s a reversal of some degree of power and that makes some uncomfortable as the social mores and norms are shifting. Sexual improprieties and abuse have gone largely unpunished and unchecked in previous decades. Very little accountability for men in power. Now the balance has shifted ever so slightly and there is a wringing of hands and sudden concerns of injustice. There potentially are some false accusations that have had a real world impact on some men, yet to so intensely worry about and focus on those injustices (which so far seem statistically insignificant) ignores the context and history of the prior imbalance of power and the millions of sexual actions of misconduct that have preceded to and continue to exist at this moment.

The data and statistics don’t quite favor those more worried about false accusations at this juncture in time.

Further, when accusations are put forth on a public medium like Twitter that exposes the accuser to the same mob actions as the accused so it isn’t quite the unidirectional pressure that some may try to present it as.

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Not sudden on my part, Mr. Ark, I assure you. Lifelong, and for all parties involved. Would not have it any other way.

And now I’m really done.

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Just in case anyone is actually curious the term sexual assault is not defined to mean rape or attempted rape only by pretty much… anyone or any legit group. Rape can be a type of sexual assault but not the only one, depending on the group, but it’s not the limiting factor. Consent is usually the key not penetration or attempted penetration.

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You might as well be making fart noises with your mouth. Guys like RickH can’t hear it.

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Nearly all of the claims in the document share a similar pattern. An employee would raise a concern internally to HR or their manager. After the employee reported the issue, they say they faced indirect punishment: negative performance reviews, demotions, or being dropped from desirable projects. In several cases, employees wrote that HR investigations dragged on for weeks or months without a conclusion, and meanwhile they were forced to continue working with their alleged harassers.

One employee reported in the document that when they told their manager that a senior colleague was sexually harassing them, the manager allegedly said that they were “overreacting.” After subsequently opening an investigation with HR, the employee said their manager punished them for speaking out by denying them a promotion nomination from their peers. And after HR eventually found evidence that the employee had been harassed and retaliated against, the employee said they only offered “coaching” to their alleged harasser and manager, and allowed them both to continue working at Google.

“I was asked to accept this. I refused,” wrote the employee.

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I’ve said it before, and I will say it again: no matter what the employee handbook says or how excitedly an HR rep sounds when they visit, HR is not your friend. They’re not there to help you. They will handle simple things and simple problems, but they are there for management and leadership, not regular ole employees. As soon as it becomes a risk for management or the company, they’re going to see you as the enemy and act accordingly.

I was fortunate to have close friends to let me know this very early on in my career and unfortunate to see others not heed those words.

The only exception I would say is if you need the documentation, and that usually means some future legal efforts and not staying at the company by the end, which can also mean losing access to the industry as a whole when it’s all said and done. That was the reality of prior MeToo. Now it’s, well I guess uncertain.

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This might be the right time for my third story. It wasn’t IBM btw. That had a positive affect on my career. I did the work, got praise, and a personal apology for the behavior of the one guy which my manager and office mate prevented me from being affected by. For the times: Amazing! And that area was a good place for women in later decades I heard. They also tagged me as management material and I got somewhere between 8-12 offers from various IBM locations on graduation. So clearly positive. But I decided to stay and get my Masters, even though the asshole from story one was still actively stalking me.

So after another internship, this time at the graduate level, in industry, I decide not to finish my Ph.D. Since in tech its less needed, and the work I did at my second internship was also amazing stuff. No harassment there either. I got in at the ground floor of the US start up of a company you’d all recognize. My boss though, I came to learn disliked women. He never sexually harassed me. This was the place where, in a P&R thread I mentioned needed a male co-worker to present my idea since we couldn’t afford for the boss to kill the project because it was a woman’s idea. Really. Then, I got pregnant. Pregnant women working was right out in his mind. So before my due date he took all my work away. I had a “job” but nothing to do. Well, except maintaining one bit of instrumentation no one else was qualified to do … it managed radiation. So yep, he took all my work away except the project that required me to deal with radiation, while pregnant. Lab techs and I worked out a protocol, that child is now middle aged a mom herself … disaster averted.

That’s not the bad part. The disgusting part was when I went to HR. I came back to work two weeks after delivering, because coworkers phoned me they had been told they were keeping all my work permanently. Laws protecting pregnant women today didn’t exist then. So laws can help, with a caveat. I told HR about the projects and the radiation issue, and my boss responded with “she’s crazy”. So, they chose no action unless I submitted to a full psych eval. I figured WTH, so I did. I’m still I think four weeks postpartum? Thankfully was an uncomplicated delivery.

The person contracted to do the psych eval seemed to get more concerned the more she asked. After answering many questions about my background, situations and feelings she got angry. See, she was also a working mom. I was at the time dealing with a new baby, ran a farm as my night job, with all the stresses of that, and of course had the job stress. She wrote up her report to basically say I was quite well balanced and the only stress was the stress inflicted by my boss. And that while I was capable of handling it, that it alone, amounted to extreme stress. She made sure to email me a copy and point out my company was switching mental health providers, so she’d be free to testify when I sued.

When that report got back to HR, the response then to me was “What do you want?”. My answer was “my job, or an equivalent job, back”. I got the equivalent job, it was good and a new boss, he was great. Some of my work in that job was subsequently used in their TV ads even., as examples of cutting edge stuff. That guy, still there last I checked near retirement himself, may have been hit on some layoffs in last 5 years. They did note that he should not manage women in the future though.

My sister recently had some issues at a Tech College where she was teaching. The litmus test a woman in HR told her privately that they used was “Front Page” test. This was just before #MeToo. Basically, if it would look bad on the front page of the paper they could do something, since that was at least protecting the company. Hmm, also my niece wouldn’t work at Google after her internship there, I suspect that was why. She’s very good too. When my sister, younger than me so not retired, decided to go back to tech from teaching since again, why not get more pay and less harassing … her interview with a major networking hardware company asked her if she could work well as the only woman in a “dudebro” group. She could, and did. But she said ignoring the stream of mysogynistic comments on the intraoffice chat used to coordinate tasks was taxing at times. Her coworkers also all gamed. She doesn’t, so would ask me about terms. The gaming culture is bleeding out into the rest of tech.

That’s what it’s like being a woman in tech. HR is no help. Even they admit outside pressure is the only thing that will get results. Laws can help. My husband is a manager in tech now. He says today, messing with a pregnant woman the way that happened to me strikes fear of lawsuit and is avoided.

But if you are the woman who says “no” then fights the fallout, you still run the risk of being black-balled as a trouble maker. When the professor asked for sex not long after my 17th birthday, I was also effectively an orphan who had a truck they fixed themselves (was the farm truck from my childhood family’s farm, and I offered to take it from the people that had it instead of them towing it to the junkyard), and that was it. I had been sofa surfing a lot the year before while in college part time. By my sophomore year I had a dorm room, and was working three jobs, all tied to the university. Had I been suspended pending investigation, I would have lost my ability to support myself and the only safe place I had to sleep, as well as my place in the program. The girl that sat next to me said he did the same to her, and she was going to take his offer. One less class to study for in her schedule.

Maybe that boss was right in a way. It is crazy to say “no”. But I don’t think that is the world we want. I know I don’t. Both IBM and the company in this story learned after the situation with me. Later this company got a local award for being a woman friendly place to work. Coworkers asked if I was mad, but instead I was encouraged. They had made progress. It can be done.

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Thanks so much for posting this. It’s both frustrating and encouraging, reading about what you went through, on one hand, and how times are changing and legal pressure can make a difference, on the other hand.

-Tom

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A very interesting and detailed story, @Hechicera.

Out of curiosity, a theoretical question you might not be able to answer, but it’s a thought experiment. If this incident (and others you mentioned upthread) had occurred today (that is, you were starting/in the middle of your career now), would you have written a detailed writeup on your grievances and sent it out via blog/social media?

I’m curious how much your approach would have changed in present day, after social media.

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You seem to have had some amazing, good and ill, experiences in the work world and beyond. Thank you for sharing.

We have someone who pulled out of the HR mess at my company, although I think it’s too late to avoid the backlash. Almost every woman will know who the gentleman is, without saying much, because he’s a known problem. It’s more sexism and not sexual attacks though want to clarify there, and that person whose HR attempt abruptly ended was told, point blank, that no one else has complained. Because of course people don’t. That’s career suicide.

Since then her reviews are nose-diving, her projects are over-analyzed… and he took a bastardized example of one of their encounters and used it as some sort of what if, hypothetical scenario for everyone to hear… not knowing that many of the women in the meeting were already aware of the situation and knew immediately that’s not something he read in a book or online… he’s using an uncomfortable scenario with another employee, with the person on the phone, to lecture the rest of us about that situation should it come up again. And it was not… really accurate.

I’ll be surprised if she last a couple, few years more if the punishment doesn’t ease up.

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“Nobody has ever complained about this before” is, I would imagine, the most common lie told by HR people. It’s how they discourage you from continuing with your complaint.

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There’s a bit if CYA in that as well. If they said, “Oh, you’re like the fourth person to complain about this,” there would definitely be some issues down the line.

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Thank you, @Hechicera for sharing your stories and insights! I hope things are improving compared when those events happened.

IMHO the MeToo movement is a big part of what’s needed to make things better because too often the status quo hasn’t worked.

At a previous job (not gaming but IT), I was technical trainer for new hires. Almost everyone was male, many of them guys in their 20s and often recently out of college. I remember telling some that “it’s OK to be a dude, it’s OK to be a bro, but don’t be a dudebro.”

When delivering training, it’s important to tailor guidance to your audience!

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Not without talking to a lawyer first. After that, it would depend on the lawyer’s advice.

I’m not a fan of social media. I think Facebook should, to use a dudebro abbreviation DIAF. My account is inactive. Twitter the same, no blog. These are active choices not retired people issues. Gossip and credibility is an issue. However, if a lawyer thought it was fine, I would allow others to describe my situation. Then you have at least the credibility of a witness. He said, she said is a big issue.

I think more laws on discrimination will help. The retaliation stage seems to all fall in discrimination legal area. Then a guy can ask, you can say “no” … and go on with your career. The thing I always wanted wasn’t punishment for the guys, I just wanted a job. I think we all still need to be aware that #metoo is for women who can afford lawyers or to walk away from a single job. Those that can’t afford the cost, in fees and lost wages, either leave or say “yes” still. I was unusual in that I did it the first time with no safety net. But I was young and more naive on the consequences.

And those laws and our existing ones must be enforced. That also means you must go to HR. Since failing to take that step often invalidates a lawsuit. However the arbitration clauses are a way companies are trying to protect themselves from employees who may go to a lawyer. Aren’t Riot Games employees doing that now? Also, many of these things are easier to fix with a diverse workplace to begin with, as already mentioned. Games is, from everything I hear, less diverse due to working conditions. I, later in my career, was a manager. Things like, having women housed separately from men, bothers me more than the other manager staying but being barred from managing women. In handling women as special cases you can make a management argument they are too expensive. In handling an abuser as a special case, you make it clear he is the one costing you money.

So, fight arbitration clauses, enforce existing laws, consider strengthening ones on discrimination, and fight for better working conditions in gaming are all areas I see worth attacking before looking at social media. Now going public, strategically, in pursuit of those goals can be part of the strategy. Half of those items are also one male workers benefit from too.

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Don’t you think the fact that Riot Games employees going public had a lot to do with them trying to address it at all at this point. I am under the impression people had asked for years before and got… nothing. Same with Uber, it’s not as if people didn’t try to deal with these issues internally, and then… they went public.

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Yes, I do! But I think they went public after talking to lawyers, as a group and singly.