Have you ever had a conversation where you so ANGRY afterwards that you wanted to scream, shout, or throw something?
That’s how I felt when I hung up the phone.
The young woman I had been speaking to is a computer engineer and an immigrant.
She had attended graduate school in the US, and found what seemed on paper like a great job. That job turned out to be in a toxic work environment.
It was so bad that she quit (a few months before I met her), but not before she had internalized the idea that the harassment she experienced was HER fault.
She had tried to report it to HR and was told she was overreacting. It kept on happening.
She tried to report it to a leader in her firm, where she was asked what she was doing to cause it. It kept happening.
One of the most unsettling parts of this to me is that it wasn’t happening in a bubble, or even in private. When the perpetrators found out she was trying to report them, and the harassment escalated.
Feeling outraged on her behalf yet?
She took charge and quit that work environment (and is now happily employed elsewhere), but her story is far from isolated.
Following that call (the third of this type I’d received in the last month), I channeled my own outrage into research on just how prevalent harassment of women in STEM still is. Those statistics are sobering, and you can read the article I wrote on my Medium blog by clicking below.
