In late 2017, Cheryl Yeoh, a tech entrepreneur, and a group of female VCs were having dinner in San Francisco, when the conversation turned to sexual harassment. Months before, a spate of pieces in the media had detailed allegations of sexual harassment, bias and discrimination within the tech industry, and more specifically within venture capital firms.
Yeoh spoke out about her experience of being sexually assaulted on a trip to Malaysia. Of the ten women present at the dinner, half said they’d struggled with unwelcome advances and inappropriate behaviour, ranging from sexual propositions to bias within the workplace.
“People started to share their stories, and we realised that there were no policies, no one really knew what their rights were, or even what to do about it,” says Ginny Fahs, a software engineer at Uber, also present at that fateful dinner. “We thought, what if VC firms became more transparent, and those policies were out in the open?”
Yeoh, Fahs, and two other entrepreneurs, Tracy Chou and Andrea Coravos, set up #MovingForward an organisation dealing with harassment and discrimination, in March 2018. #MovingForward works with VC firms and funds to post their policies on harassment and discrimination on a publicly accessible page on #MovingForward’s website. They also work with the firms and funds involved on improving diversity and inclusion more generally – for instance, providing training on how to spot unconscious bias.
In 2018, #MovingForward launched its first branch in the US with 40 VC firms signing on from the get-go. Over the last year, more than 120 firms and funds have joined in. Today, #MovingForward is launching a new arm which deals with VC firms and funds in Europe, led by UK-based tech entrepreneurs Harriet Wright and Rosie Allott.
This branch will be looking to bring on more VC firms and funds within Europe specifically, in addition to helping them shape their policies on reporting harassment and bias, as well as diversity and inclusion. So far, 30 VC firms from around Europe have pledged to be involved – some of them have posted their policies publicly, while others are committing to making theirs available within the next 30 days.
The venture capital scene has always had a reputation for being a boys club, an industry in which women are loath of speaking out against discrimination and inappropriate behaviours for fear of jeopardising their careers. That started changing in 2015, when Ellen Pao filed a lawsuit against her ex-employer, the VC firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, alleging bias and harassment following a break-up with a coworker. (Pao lost the lawsuit.) It was one of the most high-profile cases exposing the problems of bias and harassment in Silicon Valley – but it was only in 2017, as movements around sexual harassment and abuse picked up steam in Hollywood and elsewhere, that women in VC began to go public with their experiences working in the tech industry.
The legal challenges and policies in Europe are different from how harassment is dealt with in the US. Within the UK, for instance, every firm is required by the Equality Act to have definitions of harassment and discrimination, which have to serve as the standard for employees behaviour. “Employment law protects within a firm, when it comes to discrimination or harassment, but it only protects the employees,” says Fahs. “There’s this piece in the legal puzzle that’s been missing – as those laws don’t protect third parties.”
Those third parties are the entrepreneurs, who need investors’ funding and professional guidance to grow their startups into fully fledged businesses. “We wanted a way for VC firms to outline how they operate, and what they see as discrimination and harassment,” says Wright. “That also helps them outline their ambitions around diversity, around inclusion – and how they work with entrepreneurs.”
There are also some key differences between the UK and the US in how the conversation around sexual harassment has played out, particularly within the tech scene. In the US, media outlets such as The New York Times and TechCrunch, as well as high-profile lawsuits, have brought the issue of gender discrimination and harassment to the fore, creating scandals that are hard to ignore.
“If you think about the culture in the US, particularly within Silicon Valley, there’s a bigger culture of litigation, and so many of the stories which are happening are potentially easier to call out, or pin down,” says Wright. “When I think about the experiences here [in Europe], it can be more subtle, but that doesn’t mean it’s not happening.” Wright came to #MovingForward as she was building Panopy, a startup that develops a tool for HR departments to ferret out unconscious bias. As she started to look for investment, she sometimes felt like she wasn’t being treated fairly – but she felt like she didn’t know where to turn.
Even as more investors have gotten on board with #MovingForward’s mission, taking the next steps to implement changes – either through company-wide meetings to discuss harassment, or by means of a comprehensive, legally enforceable document – has been more difficult. Change never comes quickly.
“There are plenty of people who do care, and who do want to see that positive impact,” says Wright. “But there’s a mindset that it’s not urgent enough, so you have to make a business case, and you have to emphasise that this process is just a good thing to do.”
“It’s also a learning opportunity,” she says. “Getting everyone aligned, telling people how they’ve defined these nebulous terms, giving people guidance will actually shift how they behave in the workplace in general.”
Even once a VC firm or fund has made the details of their policy publicly available, #MovingForward encourages them to ensure that the document is not missing crucial elements. One common blind spot has to do with the reporting contact (the person to be contacted in case of harassment). In many firms and funds, this is the same person who is in charge of dealing with diversity and inclusion, and it could feel as though one person has to keep the company in check, without a larger system of checks and balances.
“Being a reporting contact is a hard job, it requires a lot of training and some difficult confidentiality agreements too,” says Fahs. “We push firms to be thoughtful, rather than automatically assuming that a person of colour, or a woman, is the right person, and we encourage them to make sure there are two options for reporting.”
To make sure that firms are actively making decisions about their workplace culture – and thinking about the way they work – #MovingForward also provides guidance and more general suggestions about best practice.
In the UK, Entrepreneur First, an accelerator that builds startups from scratch by pairing promising individuals, resolved to partner with #MovingForward after one of the co-founders struggled to write their own policy on harassment. “I discovered that there isn’t a huge amount on best practice, and knowing where to begin it is a real challenge,” says Alice Bentinck, one of the co-founders of EF. “I found a document written by Ginny [Fahs], which outlined a clear process, and it gave [me] peace of mind that we were following best practice in the industry, too.”
While #MovingForward is expanding at a rapid rate, and its founders hope to launch in other continents too, it’s still a voluntary organisation. All of the ten women who have now taken on roles – from reaching out to VC firms and funds, to sorting out legal help – work for free, fitting in their roles at #MovingForward around full time jobs, either in startups or at large tech companies. “Next year, we’re going to be marketing this resource more proactively to entrepreneurs and to founders,” says Fahs. “[That's because] firms that have the motivation to take the steps, they just didn’t know what the steps looked like. And now we’ve defined that very clearly.”
It’s only been a year since #MovingForward was set up, but the women involved say they feel a tangible effect in their industry: more people are having conversations around gender and harassment in their industry, and trying to correct it. “This launch is hopefully a moment when more people sit up and know that this is a movement they should be part of,” says Fahs. “There are so many VC firms out there – and our goal is to work with every single one.”
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
