Coming days after very scathing allegations about the corporate culture at Uber and the claims of numerous incidents of sexual harassment from a female ex-Uber engineer Square’s CFO speaks out about the “systemic problem” that exists in the tech industry. Square’s CFO Sarah Friar notes that there is a large problem with sexism in not just the tech industry, but also in other industries as well. She noted that at Square to counteract this issue there is a culture of inclusiveness that the company’s employees and its merchants who use their products are a part of. The lack of women in tech and the sexual harassment that happens has been a known issue for quite some time. Sexual harassment is not limited to the tech industry and I agree it is a systemic issue. My mother started her own construction company in the 1980s and faced sexual harassment even as a business owner from other companies’ workers when she first started. It is a problem that will change as more women enter certain fields, but will also require work from everybody to make sure that it does not occur.
Article link: http://www.cnbc.com/2017/02/22/square-cfo-sarah-friar-interview-sexism-in-tech-a-huge-problem.html
I read the uber engineer’s blog of her experience at Uber. It seemed sad that in this time and age, there is still issues like this places that should be setting an example to the rest of the world.
With all of the press and publicity that Sarah Friar has been getting for this sexism at Uber, as a cis-female, it is disheartening to see what the real world outside of our Santa Clara bubble holds for us. While this article doesn’t necessarily touch on FIS, it is still a very real social problem that coding or information systems management can’t solve. I agree with you that this a systemic problem – which goes into the discussion of why STEM is so automatically associated with men. When I think of technology, I think of men dressed in a t-shirt and a hoodie, somewhat along the lines of Mark Zuckerberg. There is no space for women because men keep pushing them out. I’m interested to see how Friar and Uber responds.