Thinx Ex-Employee Accuses Miki Agrawal of Sexual Harassment

Okay this article is hilarious. Tremendous sympathy for the employees who were stuck there, but you really should read it yourself. I went in expecting some exaggeration and sensationalization of some dumb behavior in an attempt to show a female CEO what sort of lines a male CEO has to watch. No, this is way more along the lines of “female liberated version of Donald Trump.” Like the climax of the story is when the Board asks for people to volunteer concerns about working with the CEO… and almost every employee comes with stories, going over the time available for the meeting.

Which makes it sound like “activists or startup culture” is a bad fall-guy for this. There is a tyrannical boss with no sense of professional boundaries. They have the power to fire you, and also to set up status-shame where you live in fear of firing, or are denied bonuses which are a large part of your salary. They opposed creating an HR department and threatened to blacklist any quitters. They have their own sense of reality.

What the hell is anyone, even a culture, supposed to do? Life under them is just hellish, and the easiest way is to go along. It does not appear that most other employees actually thought Agrawal’s behavior was acceptable. There just was no other option.

Now, this is not to fault individual idiots like Agrawal. There will always be idiots. The problem is any capitalistic culture that thinks one person having this much power over other humans is acceptable.

I did not intend to blame any one factor. I tried to do the opposite, as this company has ALL the factors at work: Startup culture, using SJ language as a shield, a creepy pushy boss, peer pressure, all came together to reinforce a climate of fear.

There is the detached culture warrior idea that it’s okay when we do it, and you better not say anything because you hurt our side if you go public, combined with blurring of boundaries in activist circles, isolated startup culture, vesting cliffs, all the other power a CEO at a BigCo has.

This situations is the synthesis of the tyranny of the structureless with the SNAFU principle in hierarchical organisations.

It is atypical in its terribleness, but you can see the patterns in their purest form.

So this isn’t to pick at the theory too much, because your thoughts about how callout culture thrives (which I reblogged earlier) capture a legit phenomenon. But it’s important that we be rigorous in our applications of patterns, or otherwise we become the same as people going “conservative racism is a problem some places, therefore it’s the problem in all places that look similar.”

The dynamic that makes social-justice-liberalism so scary is not just that activists, or some self-serving people, say bad things (like “a woman boss can’t harass” or “there’s nothing a defendant could say that would matter”) but that people cooperate with these suppositions. After all, people also say just as cruel and dumb things from the right, or from even weirder more insular culture, but the difference is those perspectives don’t have power in our circles. It’s the reasonable people who give a pass to poor logic and meanness as long as its phrased appropriately, that make callouts into a culture.

In this case, from that article at least, no one was buying her defenses. To some degree she was groping in a way that would be harder for a man to get away with, but I think that sort of assumed non-sexualization among females was widespread before and outside any activist circles. And it did not take much more at all from Agrawal before her employees thought her behavior was inappropriate and hostile. There doesn’t seem to be any culture justifying this, just her spouting a lot of delusional defensive BS, and people going along with it because they had no job prospects and she was the hyperactive CEO. And other than a Board who could fire her, there wasn’t anything to stop her. The same sort of thing can replicate at any company that’s the private fiefdom of the president, and no one ever does stop it… till he ends up getting elected President.

Callout culture seems much more an issue where everyone is kind of involved in it, and ends up buying into fairly terrible beliefs just to keep going on. Like the disaster over at Amherst. There’s no one “crazy” person at the heart of those problems.

(Though the article claims Agrawal would be on a panel talking about the line between harmless and harassment at some conference. That would indeed be some toxic cultural effects, however I don’t see her anywhere on the website so I would imagine they cut her.)