Dating in the Tech Office

In Silicon Valley people will actually fight with you if you tell them that dating inside of the office is a bad idea. Having sexual and romantic relationships with co-workers, subordinates, whatever — and yes, including with alllllll the power dynamics in place — is considered normal and healthy and good. And also something that the men are entitled to. 

I have actually lost several people in my life over conflict about this… that is how hard people hold to this norm, that they are willing to sacrifice close personal relationships to maintain the male’s ability to get free pussy without even having to leave the office! After all, the pursuit of pussy would take a lot of time away from the valuable male software engineer. He is being provided with gourmet meals, laundry service, massage and baristas at the opulent guinea pig cage, so he will Build More and become a 10x Engineer; yet the hunt for pussy poses a major distraction issue. 

If you want your engineers working round the clock in the office, you can’t have them wasting all their time on dating apps, the courting ritual, spending time in session with sex workers, having someone in their lives who will want them at home. I have worked at startups where the average number of days off per year was 6. And I’m not fucking around — the data science team came up with that and the whole company congratulated ourselves on how hard we were working. 

This obvious massive labor exploitation poses a threat to any healthy relationship, to say nothing of children. Much better if we can just… keep it in the office. 

And yes, this does bring a much darker tenor to the “representation” of women in tech, when so many of them, weird, end up in sexual and romantic “relationships” or often, highly coercive relationships with co-workers, higher ups, and other people in the industry; women are providing sexual services to the company via this mechanism, and it will not surprise you at all to know that the outcome for the woman dating in the office is often extremely bad; the risk to her is far, far greater than to the man, which the HR organization and the executive team, as well as the other employees, will back again and again, including in predatory NDA agreements that have often covered up the rampant sexual abuse at tech offices. And the whole office — mainly compromised of his identical buddies — often comes together in forcing the woman out of the company should a problem arise. 

While the NDA is the method through which much of this has been buried, and a way for the girl to get away with at least some compensation — it is actually fear which binds women in these environments. It is, from a very basic  level, not safe for women to date in these environments, regardless of any other factor, than that the entire culture, the apparatus and the rest of her co-workers, are inherently on his side, aligned with him. This gets into the disposability of women in the venture capital ecology, into the systemic misogyny and wealth inequality, but the material effect is that a woman dating in this environment is facing an entire machine to keep her in line. It is not possible, at a very fundamental level, to have purely consensual relationships without coercion; because the mechanisms of this coercion are foundational in the venture capital operating model. To whit, women ofter say they feel that they had no other choice but than to date a man who asked, lest her career be ruined; had no choice to stay in the relationship but to face office reprisal; had no way to speak out and get help when the relationship became toxic and started poisoning her work, because she could lose her job… and truly we can list 100 other ways that even without knowing any other details of the people involved in the relationship, we know that structurally, the woman is getting set up. 

You also have this very basic economic thing happening where the money she is getting, her money, is now tied up in the same place as her partner, someone she slept with/is sleeping with etc; she now has both a huge part of her personal life and her ability to support herself financially, all wrapped up in this same narrow and specific structure that is stacked against her. And where there is thus the risk and inevitability that changes in the relationship could affect her money — such as her leaving the company after a break-up, because lord knows HE is not going to and is also not going to give up the chance to torture her at work — or for the very normal and expected thing, that people would prefer not to work with their exes, and that in particular, we might imagine that a breakup would make working with that person particularly painful. 

Due to even THIS inevitability alone, the woman is incentivized NOT to break up with him, because, as she sees it, she will have to get another job or suffer in the office, etc. And in these situations, you might see something where the couple is living together and working together, and if she were to put an end, or he were, her living situation, economic situation, AND partner situation could end or be severely affected at the same time. These are just inherently coercive forces that don’t require any examination of “specifics” as it establishes the context for these relationships as coercive; there is no way for these relationships with these parameters, to be non-coercive. 

Marc Andreessen himself has talked about the major tech campuses as, paraphrasing, industry-wide “experiments” in getting young people specifically to work more, to “extend the college experience” so that are able to contribute more to work and need less time for play. And acknowledges that within this environment, young people tend to end up dating people who work on campus too. While I have seen some particularly disgusting defenses of coercive in-office relationships out of a16z, they share guilt across the entire industry, and particularly the tech giants, once startups in their formative early days at the campuses, who established much of this culture and has taken few steps to make this safer for women; after all, it is such fundamental pillars and such fundamental conditions, that to not only encourage this but actually ensure it by going to great lengths to keep the entire workforce living out their entire and every aspect of their lives in the context of the company. When you cut them off from everything else besides their jobs, give them coworkers as their friends, as their community, keep them there around the clock, collapse their worlds and force them to work ungodly hours, yes, they do start having relationships with their coworkers. And it is in THIS context that the office dating is unfolding. 

So it is important to notice that the foundation of sexual and romantic relationships in the office, is actually wrapped up in this overall notion of labor exploitation, and that the woman is herself being exploited as part of this system and used as part of it, as well as her potential mates (though this in no way negates the gender politics in the office). Google is the quintessential example of this environment, and I will recall you to Sergey Brin’s public affair with a young Google employee with whom he was working on a project, to show that the attitude and culture of dating in the office, extends up to the highest executives, who are in positions of great power and frequently date from within their employee base themselves.  After all, they can’t really say no, can they! LOL!!! 

There is this idea that it’s “natural” for in-office relationships to happen. “Because you see each other all the time”. Well first, I see people all the time who I do not date. But more relevantly, there is nothing “natural” about these environments and they are set up at numerous levels — from the physical campus itself, the confining company, the culture, and as targets — for women in these environments to end up sleeping and having relations with men in the office. 

 There is absolutely no way this math works out good, particularly when seated in environments of open misogyny in tech, something women have been documenting for 3 decades. Women are disparaged for dating in the industry at the same time that every eventuality in place serves them up on a platter to the men in the office. Meanwhile, men are seen as “winning.” It is the disparagement of women dating in the industry that keeps dating and sexual coercion in the office, covered up. 

Most women in the industry don’t talk openly about this, even in the backchannel, because of misogyny and slut shaming, and because it invites sexual leering that is commonly aimed at women in the industry; but it is incredibly common that women end up sleeping with MULTIPLE men in the office. These women feel they had been taken advantage of, used, powerless. If you were to tell people, “she slept with like, two men at the office”, people are going to say SHE is the problem, and not examine why multiple men in this office are putting her in this position, even though they know damn well that men in the office are constantly, constantly try to date and sleep with women in the office, to say nothing of the predators or abusers who find in this environment, the perfect backdrop. 

Did you know that when a new girl starts at the tech company, all of the men in the company talk about her body and make bets on who will get in her pants first? Or talk shit about her if her looks aren’t up to their liking? I’ve seen this happen repeatedly and had this confirmed by both men and women in the industry, that this is something that happens immediately in startups and tech offices, over and over again, pointing to the existence of the rush that starts immediately to collect romantically or sexually from her. The first few weeks in the office can actually be a pretty dangerous as she is brought out to bars to get hammered by the men in the office and they take advantage of her naiveté and the general anxiety around joining a new company, to proposition her. Based on my travels in this industry, it is extraordinarily common for women in the office to be propositioned within the first few weeks, and often sexual encounters occur at this time. 

One significant dynamic in play here is the issue of the extreme gender ratio in tech, where men are at least 80% of the company and generally 100% of the power in the company. The gender allegiance men have to each other in this environment is truly remarkable; and the situation that the woman is in from the second relations begin, is that the entire company is going to take his side if the relationship falls out. This is never even in question and one of 1,000 reasons that dating within the tech or startup office, is extremely dangerous for women, a huge contributor to their attrition from the field, and inherently coercive, if not outright qualifying as sexual violence in many situations. 

While 80% of the industry is men, in many VC-backed startups, the gender ratio is often even worse, as this is where key issues of wealth distribution and stake in the company (stock), are decided; the closer you get to venture capital itself, I.e. Away from tech giants and rather in the VC-funded startup, the worst the gender distribution gets, so that is how we end up with women-led startups getting only 2% of venture capital money. 

2%. 

No in-office dating anywhere near these fucking numbers is gonna be possible without huge fall-out to women. I have worked at VC-backed startups where there were 3 women in a company of over 60 men. You can see the problem here; over 60 men are looking at these three women and at least some portion of them is going to be trying to figure out how to fuck her. After all, she is a girl in the office and that is how she is treated. This unspoken assumption is a foundation of the startup gender politics. Which honestly could be studied forever and actually is important because these startups are in fact models of technology production under fascism; the misogyny was extreme, perverse, and frankly had the hint of mass murder of women (the death threats women received constantly across the industry), and we can document that in the very earliest days of the development of venture capital, we were seeing a particularly dangerous and perverse variant of misogyny, the presence of women in the system is marginalized almost to the point of non-existence by the time you get into the power center of the industry and women playing a very small role in the venture capital universe. It’s not just that were are there and marginalized; it’s that we are… not there at all. 

Several of the biggest and most devastating public attacks on women in tech — coming out of the conglomeration of hate groups from 4chan, 8chan, Reddit and HackerNews — involved in-office or industry dating or sexual abuse. GamerGate is the obvious example — though many outside the industry see tech and gaming as different industries, gaming is just a vertical of the industry much like artificial intelligence, crypto and other major categories. GamerGate was also about domestic violence and the retaliation against a woman game developer, who was shamed for having relationships in the industry and accused of sleeping her way into positive industry coverage; her ex-partner in this case leading the charges, caused a tidal wave of hive fascist violence against her. There was literally industry-wide reprisal against her because the hate groups perceived her as scorning an ex also from the industry, for “using” herself (as if that makes sense) to get somewhere in the industry, and so on. 

These are the same themes we see around industry and office dating in general — the entire crew has dude’s back, and will lead them into war with the woman on his orders. And the fact that all the dating that women do in the industry, or are accused of doing, means that she is seen as a gold digger/slut/sleeping her way to the top, etc; she is penalized for that which she is coerced into doing. The breakup also becomes the site of rupture from which the woman is attacked, pointing again to the fact that women end up feeling stuck in relationships for fear of reprisal. I once had an industry man tell me that if we broke up, he would ruin my career; I was working at my first real startup and so scared that I went to my mentor in the company and bawled my eyes out. Luckily, THAT guy was great and assured me not to worry. But years later, anther guy in the industry actually did retaliate against me in public for breaking up with him, dealing a very severe blow not only to my career but to my safety. 

 This has been documented at great length elsewhere but we find parallels in several other case studies from web 2.0. At Github, there was a woman whistleblower who came forward with her story of office sexual misconduct; Github employees then engineered a massive character attack on the whistleblower resulting in her being terrorized, doxxed, fleeing, and for a long time, significant impact on her employment, not to mention security, as she received many credible death threats. In another case that also resulted in swarm attacks, a woman blew the whistle about being raped by her boss at an industry event. He was a popular member of the community and the whole industry attacked her on his behalf when she came forward — highlighting once more how community support will violently rally in favor of the man even in the grossest cases of sexual violence. This was one of the scariest attacks I have ever seen, not necessarily because of the scale, but in how truly dark and sinister this was, and the brutality and inhumanity of doing this to someone who was literally raped at an industry conference. I don’t even have words for how horrible those days were, for her and for all women in tech who were being given yet another example of what would happen to them if they didn’t silently acquiesce to the sexual violence and exploitation of the industry. 

 In these instances there was massive trauma from THE ATTACKS ON HER BY THE *INDUSTRY ITSELF*, resulting in PTSD, and suicidality; in all cases the women highlighted the way that their communities took sides against them, victims of sometimes profound sexual violence, and the isolation and social rejection that was felt. In all cases the woman’s life was at risk and threatened, both directly in the attacks and also, because these attacks are designed to isolate the victim, humiliate her, torture her and scare her to the point that she will kill herself. 

To the point of the role of inducing suicidality via attacks on women in tech: in one of many, many such attacks on me that I endured in the last bubble — due to my political work — anonymous and troll accounts had left me once more suicidal and in fear of my life, and on discovering my mental health problems, this mob sent literally thousands of tweets to me telling me to kill myself, with graphics at times, depicting me hanging from a street lamp. They very much wanted me to kill myself and again this is happening as a result of and within the context of an industry and these companies — this is literally the work environment and a part of the field, that these attacks are happening. 

An important note about how we look at misogyny in the field — this was about putting women’s lives in danger. It was far beyond a salary discrepancy, “unconscious bias”, even sexist remarks. It was “we are going to kill you for this.” The message was not “women aren’t good at computers”, it was: we will fucking kill you. You are in DANGER. And that is a huge element of the radical technofacism in tech that we see in these attacks, which also happened at smaller but not necessarily less ruinous scales, to women all over the industry, even if the attack came only from her immediate colleagues. The model for humiliating, suppressing, abandoning and threatening, is shown in an exploded manner in mass attacks, but its the same ones that are playing out in the dynamics of the startup office all the time. 

Obviously these cases stand as public demonstrations of what happens to women who speak out; it is entrenched and defended, the culture of dating — and raping — in the office and industry. Men benefit from this culture extraordinarily as they get sex, girlfriends, care, and so on. For some time in the last bubble there was a big focus on emotional labor in the office, and I always read it as a thin veil for this other and perhaps less specious reality, where women in the workplace are providing sexual labor, romantic labor and intimacy labor of many kinds, often to multiple men in the office. 

Then there’s the booze issue. You’ve got a party with 60 drunk men, and there’s 8 women in it. Let’s use the information we have from multiple college studies, which show that between 4-16% of college men admit in confidential surveys, to rape or attempted rape. So first of all in this environment of the “extended college campus” you know that you at least have a few rapists on hand, anywhere from 2 to 9, and there’s 8 women there. And there’s booze, the drug most used in sexual assault and which is also used to initiate inappropriate relationships. 

One thing about working as a woman in tech is that there is booze fucking everywhereeeee and that if you are a woman you are likely to end up beyond plastered, as the men around you — your bosses, co-workers, partners, customers, event organizers — will be aggressively pouring liquor onto you at all turns. The girls are always encouraged and even bullied into extremely heavy drinking, which makes them vulnerable. Turning down shots is not something a lot of these people are willing to let you do and the environment encourages everyone to get plastered… women are just pushed the hardest. 

This is how many women find themselves in compromised relationships with the people they work with, including and especially people in some position of power over them. The whole system and the entire culture must be maintained by the silence of women, leading to a thriving “backchannel” among women in tech and allies to warn each other about bad actors in the community, and an inability to fight this systemically. Keeping us down and quiet is a huge priority in order to allow this to continue. 

 I had several male programmers tell me, independently of each other, that DefCon, the edgiest hacker/security conference, was too dangerous for women, and one of them just openly told me I would get raped if I went there. At one of the companies I worked at, it was almost all men, and so they set up a cabin retreat for the entire engineering team to go. Because there was only one woman on the team, they decided it wouldn’t be safe for her to go. Wow. But also the right call.

I have also heard numerous stories of women being drugged at company events. The conference circuit definitely has a dark underbelly and the things that happen to girls at some of these events, is I think the deeper heart of conversations about “emotional labor”, a nod to all that we do that is not compensated, and in this case, all that happens to us and that we cannot talk openly about. How do you start a conversation with “Well, I got passed around my office like an appetizer plate”? It requires admitting these sexual and romantic relationships which women are encouraged in, and yet are easily used to ruin her career, reputation and stability. People were bullied and made fun of for using “emotional labor” as terminology, but for many women, that was also the only way TO, even obliquely, broach this in the tech public square. 

In conclusion, these are incredibly sexually and romantically coercive environments, and at every level, the system is working to serve up the girls in the industry to men as sexual and romantic favors, to secure sexual and romantic performance from women, to keep them from being able to leave their partners without broad reprisal, to keep them silent about the abuses that happen, and to retaliate against them for exercising autonomy and speech. The world of sexual and romantic violence in tech, has taken a significant back seat to careerist concerns like salary amounts and representation, but it is here in the material and at the site of violence that we must begin.