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UploadVR Had a 'Kink Room,' Pressured Female Employees To 'Microdose,' Alleges Lawsuit (gizmodo.com)
The virtual-reality company UploadVR is being sued by the company's former Director of Digital and Social Media for rampant sexual harassment. According to Gizmodo, "the lawsuit alleges that the company's employees and founders created a hostile work environment in which sexual harassment, gender discrimination, and retaliation occurred on a regular basis." From the report: In the suit documents, the former Director of Digital and Social Media for UploadVR claims that the office environment was a "boy's club" that employees expressly referred to as a "boy's club." From the suit: "Specifically, the male employees of UploadVR, including Mason and Freeman, would discuss their sexual exploits in graphic detail at the workplace in front of Plaintiff and other female employees. For instance, UploadVR employee [name redacted]'s sex life was a frequent topic of conversation. The other male employees would talk about how he 'refuses to wear a condom' and 'has had sex with over 1000 people.'" The documents also claim that employees were engaged in Silicon Valley's hot new trend of "microdosing" and "using Marijuana in the office." When female employees didn't want to participate, they would be ostracized by the male employees and excluded from important meetings and lunches.
I left a place years ago because the guys were really creepy like that, and I'm a dude. At another place we had to ask the new parents to tone down the discussion of their children's potty training.
The company employees made sure it was a gender specific problem. They specifically referred to their office as a "boy's club". And then there is shit like this:
The founders and other employees are accused of speaking "sexually" about female employees right to their face, and one employee would, allegedly, talk about having "a boner" and going to the bathroom to "rub one out" in order to maintain focus. The suit clarifies that to mean "he was going to the restroom to masturbate."
and
A section describing how women were expected to do "womanly tasks" describes an environment that was cartoonishly sexist. Female employees were expected to clean up after events and parties, while men were not. The defendants allegedly told the plaintiff that women should be âoemommiesâ and help the men with whatever they needed.
From the sound of it they are royally fucked, because there are emails about STD test results and looking for docile women on their far eastern business trips. The "kink room" just sounds gross, and clearly they didn't take any HR advice as it would be an obvious form of sexual harassment for any gender.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Or hire only women. You can save up to 70% on salaries.
How nice of you to completely ignore talking about the female employees in a sexual manner right in front of them. They weren't just talking about their own sex life. Phrasing is the key, and your obvious attempt to gloss over the thing that's actually wrong shows what you really think people like you should be allowed to do.
And excluding workers from important meetings who didn't participate in the drugs is not merely laughing at them. It's actively preventing them from performing their job. And one of them was terminated for complaining about it. You obviously think it's okay to terminate people for complaining about behaviour then.
This can only ever be neutral if you straight up ignore the actual details.
Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
I am a man and wouldn't want to work there. I hate specious and or frivolous lawsuits but in this case hope they get maxed.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Yes, it is taking very small doses of various drugs like LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, MDA... (But not MDMA, which is not perceptible at microdose levels, according to Alexander Shulgin.) It's not that hard to keep the dose small, you just cut it up, same as a prescription pill.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Someone didn't read the entire article. They were way over the line.
Because if you read the article, it was clearly both very inappropriate and targeted behavior:
The founders and other employees are accused of speaking “sexually” about female employees right to their face, and one employee would, allegedly, talk about having “a boner” and going to the bathroom to “rub one out” in order to maintain focus.
Making unwanted sexual comments directly to someone is the textbook definition of sexual harassment. Masturbating on company time is just over the top.
If their director of social media is acting like a retarded frat boy and encouraging the same in others, he needs to go. If the company gets hit with a lawsuit because they couldn't figure that out on their own, well, too bad.
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
None of my friends have EVER acted like this when I have been around them. I have also not encountered this before at any company I have worked at.
Every business I have worked with would have had the offending employees get one warning and then be out the door the next time it happened. I can't even imagine any engineering company being okay with "microdosing". The liability alone would kill that idea.
Even when I have been in a group of only male masters or phd students we mostly talked about science, engineering, movies, games etc kind of topics but not sexual exploits.
This is reprehensible behavior and should not be tolerated.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
Which is why boys need adult supervision. Men, specifically, to set an example.
A man acts with dignity, self-restraint, and consideration for others. He doesn't do shit just because the people around him are doing it, and he doesn't pressure other people do things without a good reason.
If none of that sounds like any fun, feeling obligated to impress other guys with bullshit isn't any fun either. It's a bigger, more joyless burden than acting like a grownup, you just haven't figured that out yet.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I agree entirely. As a man I would not have wanted to work there either. I understand a certain amount of off-topic conversations at work but this is way outside what is okay.
If you discuss a new movie, tv, scientific study, etc at work that is fine so long as it does not take up too much time but not this kind of stuff.
In general I would also avoid politics and religion. :)
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
I was sexually assaulted as a 10 year old. When saying it to feminists they will repeatedly say "you are a man, it does not count".
Feminist here. I'm really sorry you had to go through that. I can tell you know, it absolutely does count. Sexual assault against males is a real problem, and one which we want to solve.
I don't know who you spoke to, but they don't really sound like mainstream feminists. There are some asshats who otherwise have broadly feminist views, even though they, for example, exclude trans women. Like any philosophy, there is no control over who believes it and no control over who calls themselves a feminist, but please understand that it is not mainstream feminist thinking to discount sexual assault of any kind.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I don't find your interest reprehensible. I find it reprehensible that this happened in a company setting. There is a large amount of peer pressure for people to just go along with something especially if their job is involved. Even if people are uncomfortable with something or are even disgusted by it they will often put up with it so they can keep their jobs and get promotions. This creates a hostile working environment and it is not acceptable.
If you want to talk like this then do it in a context where there is no coercive force on others present.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
Putting aside the harassment claims for a second, this sounds like what happens when you have an immature "executive team" running a company fueled by large VC investments. If a company's culture encourages a frathouse mentality, and its executives display that culture, that's exactly what regular employees will see and emulate. It goes down to the department level too - I've worked in IT departments for a number of companies, and there are always problem child departments, usually sales. Some salespeople are just walking sexual harassment lawsuits waiting to happen, and companies tend to turn a blind eye to it when they're "rockstar" salespeople. Working in software, there's just some guys you don't want to get paired with on customer visits because they're just embarrassing. Watching an overweight middle aged balding sales dude hitting on a customer's receptionist or female employees (unsuccessfully) is cringe-worthy.
I do think that years of anonymous online communication as a primary means of interaction does contribute to some of the problems. I'm a guy, and a very liberal laid-back one at that, but it would never occur to me to say or do anything unprofessional at work. I've mentioned on here in the past (and been raked over the coals for it) that people need to understand that free speech doesn't mean you can let whatever comes to your mind slip out. People need to learn impulse control, and not seeing the other person on the other end of your conversation emboldens people to say things they normally wouldn't. Look at any comments section on any online news outlet that uses Facebook logins - even with a person's name, picture and sometimes employment history written right out there, I have a hard time envisioning some people saying the things they say in a public setting.
What I think is funny is that this second tech bubble is playing out almost exactly the way the first one did. We're headed for the top -- products and services are getting wackier every day, there's a million copycats of every single idea trying to squeeze out the last few VC dollars in a space, and the investors are finally starting to shut off the money faucets. It's almost like 1999 never happened, and no one alive at that time has any memory of it. This is going to be one of many flame-out stories in the next 2 or 3 years.
Bullshit. I'm part of a "mixed company" club that shares a locker room on occasion. The conversation is by no means clean, but there's no bragging about sexual exploits or pressuring anyone into doing drugs. Why not? Because we have respect for each other and are there for a specific purpose that has nothing to do with sex and drugs. Some people drink, some people don't. Some people smoke, some people don't. Some people probably do drugs, but they keep that to themselves if they do and don't let it interfere with what we're doing. Some people are having sex with each other, same sex, opposite sex, whatever, but they do that on their own time and don't let it be a distraction. Nobody had to be told to act this way and there are no rules governing it beyond basic conduct when in public. You have to get along with a diverse group of people, often in challenging situations, so you don't act like a total prick. It's simple common sense.
The "boys' club" mentality is the aberration here. By removing all consequence in a "everything's acceptable because we're all guys" environment, you amplify the absolute worst in human behavior. And then you justify it with the "boys will be boys" defense, assuming that everyone is naturally like that. Except that situation self-selects the loudest and the meanest, forcing everyone else to either go along with it or leave. Because anyone who has a problem with it is told to shut up, ridiculed until they give in, or worse. The assholes are a vocal minority but look like the majority when you let them make the rules. And then that eventually extends beyond the "safe space" of the locker room or wherever into other aspects of these people's lives.
The point here isn't that boys and girls are the same, it's that everyone is different, regardless of whether they are boys or girls. And in that sense, they're all the same. In that they're not. But everyone should be treated the same, like they're worthy of dignity and respect. And that's not a fantasy; if it can happen in a coed locker room, we should be able to expect it from a workplace.
then it is absolutely wrong to write that "male" employees used the room, because they will have used it together with their female sexual partners. Which makes one suspect that this is not a men-harrassing-women problem, but more generally an entirely inappropriate, sexually-loaded work environment, with both men and women acting out in unprofessional ways.
The men who used the room did not necessarily have to bring female employees into the room. They could have used it with women who were not employees. And those women could have been acting quite professionally in their particular career.
I'm sorry but if you can talk about the game on the weekend or this funny youtube vid you saw you should be able to talk about sex. Just because a large population cringe up whenever they hear the word and like to pretend its a dirty disgusting thing they would never do doesn't make it more or less a legitimate thing to talk about.
The reason why it's not suitable to talk about in a work environment is because it makes most people feel uncomfortable. This isn't complicated. Get into the reasons why it's jusfied or not, but if the question is how to maintain a non hostile working environment, not permitting people to discuss things that make a large percent of the population cringe up is kind of obvious.
Incidentally, I don't mind talking about sex, but I sure as shit don't want to talk about you having sex, so in return, I won't talk about *me* having sex. This is not complicated stuff.
Unless you are going to white list some topics for the workplace and everything else is no go then you can't really tell people to talk to each other according to your sensibilities.
No, some topics are blacklisted around the office, because there are not that many that make for a hostile work environment. You're doing a lot of mental gymnastics to excuse some reasonable limits on behavior that the majority of the population agrees with.
"Old man yells at systemd"