Tor's Jacob Appelbaum steps down after sexual mistreatment allegations

Tor browser changed the way we accessed the Internet. Mainly, by giving us access to a whole new side of the web popularly known as the dark web. Now, Tor is in the news after one of its prominent developers stepped down, following allegations of sexual mistreatment. While this may come across surprising to many, the employees at Tor are apparently not surprised. A statement made on an official blog post on 4 June states, “These types of allegations were not entirely new to everybody at Tor; they were consistent with rumors some of us had been hearing for some time.”

The vaguely worded statement goes on to explain that the most recent allegations are more serious than any rumour they might have heard in the past. They also went a step further, encouraging people with information to step forward. They promise that the matter would be treated seriously and with sensitivity; but this leaves the lingering question in one’s mind.

Just how seriously do we take women in tech?

This comes to light while the case of Reddit’s former CEO Ellen Pao is still fresh in our memory. In a case of gender discrimination filed by Pao against Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, her story was taken apart, piece by piece. Recode  reports that the defense responded by presenting contradictions in Pao’s story from when she filed the lawsuit in 2012 and now, and putting Pao through an uncomfortable retelling of her relationship with Ajit Nazre, her co-worker at the time, and when exactly a consensual relationship turned non-consensual. This is nowhere close to the level of sensitivity that the jury members should have displayed while taking into account, the consideration that at the time of this trial, that one of the firm’s venture capitalists John Doerr did nothing with a list of concerns from women at Kleiner Perkins.

Going a step further, Fortune.com, earlier this year, came up with an article about a Silicon Valley survey that was prompted by this trial titled  The Elephant in the Valley . Some of the findings of this survey were quite surprising. The survey includes just over 200 women—most of whom have at least 10 years of tech experience—sourced from the networks of the authors of the survey. The vast majority of respondents now work in the Bay Area of San Francisco and more than 70 percent have kids and are at least 40 years old. Their workplaces vary from startups to the tech giants like Apple and Google.

The report of the survey covers a range of topics, from sexual harassment to unconscious bias to gender-based exclusion. It was found that a whopping 60 percent of the women who participated reported experiencing unwanted sexual advances. Of those, 65 percent said that at least one advance came from a superior.

88 percent of the respondents have claimed that they’ve watched a client or co-worker ask a male colleague a question that should have been addressed to them. More than 80 percent said that they’ve dealt with demeaning comments from male colleagues. 75 percent  were asked about family life, marital status and children in interviews and 40 percent felt the need to speak less about their family to be taken more seriously.

The report also had a section that invited women to contribute firsthand reports of harassment that they faced. Though the veracity of these stories is yet to be proved, it seems clear that gender equality in tech is something that seriously needs to be relooked at.