Tinder Sexual Harassment Suit Sheds (More) Light on Silicon Valley's Chauvinistic Culture

Published: Jul 03, 2014

Topics: Finance Technology Workplace Issues

Your top career-related news of the week:

Tinder’s misogynistic side.
It’s not exactly news that Silicon Valley is about as female friendly as a Wall Street trading floor. But a sexual harassment suit brought by a former Tinder executive is shedding a ton of fluorescent light onto the extent of the chauvinism and misogyny that occurs behind start-up closed doors (and on tech firm employees’ Instagram accounts). “Whitney Wolfe, the former vice-president of marketing for the dating app, said Justin Mateen, the chief marketing officer, called her a ‘whore’ and that Sean Rad, the CEO, ignored the abuse when she complained. Tinder's parent company, IAC, has suspended Mateen pending an investigation, but that did little to contain accusations that Silicon Valley was a frathouse culture hostile not just to women but also black people, Latinos and those over a certain age.”

See Dick Fire. See Dick Hire.
Twitter’s in a bit of a tight spot. The company’s having trouble expanding. And if you can’t expand, you die. Which means Dick Costolo, Twitter’s CEO, has been replacing “virtually every crucial executive at the company in the last few months … The chief operating officer? Gone. The head of product? Out. The top engineer? Fired.” And his latest hire comes from Wall Street, specifically that old squid of the night, Goldman Sachs. “On Tuesday, Mr. Costolo again spun the revolving door, bringing in Anthony J. Noto, the star Goldman Sachs banker who helped Twitter sell its initial stock offering last fall, as the chief financial officer of the microblogging company. While Mr. Noto is respected on Wall Street, he probably will not be much help with Twitter’s fundamental problem: how to make a niche service, with its quirky abbreviations like RT and MT and endless flow of 140-character text messages, into something that appeals to the masses.”

The 10-second resume.
The days of rewriting resumes and crafting cover letters could soon be over. “Sober Lane, which is opening a new Dublin location in July, is only accepting applications through Snapchat, the app that allows users to send impermanent pictures and videos to their friends. The pub’s owner, Ernest Cantillon, tells me he has already received about 2,000 Snapchats since he started accepting them Friday morning. Cantillon said he had never heard of another company or restaurant using Snapchat like this.” Could this be the future for other industries (other than the Irish pub sector)? If so, take some tips from this Snapchatter on how to impress your future employers.

Can women have it all? Nope, says Nooyi.
This is not exacty encouraging to working mothers with designs on the C-suite, but you have to respect Nooyi’s candor. In a recent interview over at the Aspen Ideas Festival, this is what the PepsiCo chief said when asked whether she thought women could have it all: “I just don't think so. We pretend we have it all. We pretend we can have it all. My husband and I have been married for 34 years. And we have two daughters. And every day you have to make a decision about whether you are going to be a wife or a mother, in fact many times during the day you have to make those decisions. And you have to co-opt a lot of people to help you. We co-opted our families to help us. We plan our lives meticulously so we can be decent parents. But if you ask our daughters, I'm not sure they will say that I've been a good mom.”

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