{"id":1313,"date":"2017-09-11T08:00:40","date_gmt":"2017-09-11T12:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/annelitwin.com\/?p=1313"},"modified":"2017-09-11T08:00:40","modified_gmt":"2017-09-11T12:00:40","slug":"class-action-lawsuits-silicon-valley-can-benefit-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.annelitwin.com\/blog\/uncategorized\/class-action-lawsuits-silicon-valley-can-benefit-us\/","title":{"rendered":"How Class-action Lawsuits against Silicon Valley Can Benefit All of Us"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\tAnita Hill, an attorney and professor at Brandeis University, is one of my heroines. She had the courage in the early 1990s to accuse her ex-boss Clarence Thomas of inappropriate sexual behavior toward her when he was her supervisor. When she learned that he was nominated for a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court, she felt she had to testify to his lack of moral character during his confirmation hearings. She came forward and spoke the truth of her experience. While she was not able to stop his confirmation, she did give a voice and a name to the abusive behavior that women have always been subjected to by powerful men\u2014sexual harassment. Her testimony opened a door for women to work together with male allies to make the workplace safer and more inclusive for all women.\nRecently, Professor Hill weighed in on the revelations from Silicon Valley about gender discrimination and harassment in the technology industry<\/a>. She suggests that the industry will benefit from the interventions into sexism experienced by Wall Street in the 1990s\u2014massively expensive and successful class-action lawsuits that brought about industrywide change. Hill notes that \u201cwhile pay and promotion discrimination still exists [at Wall Street firms], more women on Wall Street are advancing in their careers to managing directorships and other leadership roles.\u201d\nHill points out that the letter released by a young male Google employee that claimed biological differences make women poorly suited to engineering revealed deep-seated sexist attitudes mirrored by recent incidents at Uber and other technology organizations. When a former female Uber employee wrote a blog about her experiences with Uber\u2019s toxic, male-dominated culture, other female coders and engineers came forward with allegations of sexism at Google, Tesla, Twitter, Microsoft, and Oracle, to name a few. Hill cites the following statistics as further evidence of widespread gender discrimination in the tech industry:\n\n\n