Why sexual harassment is under-reported in the Indian tech industry

Full disclosure: Mahesh Murthy owns one per cent share in Newslaundry.

American film producer Harvey Weinstein’s expulsion from the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences after more than 50 women alleged he had raped or sexually harassed them has inspired more women to tell their stories, leading to the ouster of men from positions of power across sectors, including media, entertainment and politics.

The movement has also grown strong in Silicon Valley. On November 13, Steve Jurvetson, founding partner of Draper Fisher Juverston, a leading venture capital firm, and board member of Tesla and SpaceX, resigned amid allegations of sexual misconduct.

Earlier, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick; Mike Cagney, CEO of the $4 billion fin-tech startup, Social Finance; and David McClure, founder of early-stage venture fund 500 Startups (which has nearly 60 investments in India) were among the ones shown the door.

But the same can’t be said about the Indian startup ecosystem.

Indian-tech startup ecosystem: Ignorant or immune?

On January 4, Mumbai Police registered a sexual harassment case against Mahesh Murthy, an Indian venture capital investor, for “stalking” and “outraging the modesty” of a woman. The complaint was registered following an intervention by the National Commission for Women and a statement by the complainant. This isn’t the first allegation against Murthy, who was arrested by the Mumbai Police in a sexual harassment case on February 9, 2018. Murthy is currently out on anticipatory bail. But, unlike in the US, Murthy continues to remain a managing partner at Seedfund Advisors LLP.

The story about Murthy’s sexual misconduct was earlier reported by Pankaj Mishra of Factor Daily on April 21, 2017. Mishra had also done a follow-up story a week later, on April 28. In response to one such story, Murthy published his response to the allegations, here.

In 2002, a technology businessman and former Infosys director, Phaneesh Murthy, was also accused of sexual harassment by his secretary, Reka Maximovitch. Phaneesh faced similar allegations while working with an American IT firm in 2013. While there was a $3 million out-of-court settlement in the Infosys case, he was sacked in the latter.

More recently, other Indian startups such as The Viral Fever and ScoopWhoop have been in the news for alleged cases of sexual harassment.  

These examples aren’t a testament to the veracity of the charges. That’s for the courts to decide. What the allegations exhibit is the difference in the way in which such cases are addressed in the Indian ecosystem. It also indicates that very few women actually speak up. In other words, sexual harassment is often under-reported.

“This is understandable, as we often lack the confidence in the organisation to handle such an issue comprehensively, and fear retaliation,” wrote Vani Kola, managing director at Kalaari Capital, a $650 million early-stage venture capital fund, in her blog. Kola also emphasised that the problem (sexual harassment in the workplace) is more “pervasive” and is simply not limited to startups.

Adding to why sexual harassment goes under-reported, Kola wrote, “It is also a matter where one can be easily judged by the broader community and last but not the least it might lead to missing out on future promotions or eventually being forced to quit the company.”

While Kola is right, there is an underbelly of the India startup ecosystem that needs to be addressed—female representation (rather the lack of it), which, in turn, is a reason why women don’t speak up.

Sharing her insights about why women in the Indian tech/VC ecosystem are not speaking up, Abi Aryan, founder of Delegano, an early-stage artificial intelligence startup, and director of Women Who Code’s Delhi chapter, told Newslaundry: “There hasn’t been a strong voice shouting for female entrepreneurs in the tech/VC [venture capital] sector due to a lack of understanding of how VC/angel investors work.” Adding to her reasons, Aryan said, it is because “there are in general a lot less female entrepreneurs than male entrepreneurs.” This, in turn, makes it more difficult for women to come forward.

Aryan’s comments ring true in the current Indian landscape. Sample the founding bodies of the startups that made it to NASSCOM’s Emerge 10 Awards 2017, the awardees are primarily India’s most innovative emerging software product companies.

Of the 23 founders on the Emerge 10 startups list, only two are women—Swati Samaddar of IndiQus and Aparna Sharma of Minjar, both Bengaluru-based startups. This means that among NASSCOM’s top 10 software product companies’ founders, less than 10 per cent are females.

This is only reflective of the larger startup landscape in India. According to YourStory’s survey of the 670 startups that got funded in 2016, only 17 per cent of the startups’ founding team had any female representation. The numbers are worse in startups with women-only founder(s). Out of the 670, there are only 21 such startups — barely 3 per cent.

According to a larger survey by Crunchbase, a leading open data platform for the startup community, which collated data of 43,008 global companies, as of 2017 only 15.8 per cent of the 43,000+ companies had any female founder representation.

The Past

But this wasn’t always the case. At least not in the Silicon Valley. According to an NPR podcast, The Forgotten Female Programmers Who Created Modern Tech, it was women who created programmes for one of the world’s first fully electronic general-purpose computers as well as the earliest program language, COBOL. This was before computer education had reached India.

As the use of home computers became more common, around the same time that Steve Jobs and Bill Gates started appearing in the media, the number of women—who accounted for nearly 37 per cent of undergraduates in computer science in 1984-85—began to drop. This was because men were more likely to use a computer at home than women.

By 2010-2011 only 17.6 per cent of computer science students were women. According to a Fortune report, in 2013, 26 per cent of computing professionals were women—better than 2010 but still lower than 35 per cent that women accounted for in the 1990s.

“It is a big triangle,” said Geetha Kannan, AnitaB.org* India’s senior vice president, explaining the male-dominance in India’s tech sector. “You have the individual with ambitions and aspirations at one side of the triangle. Then there is the organisation that provides an inclusive environment. On the third side is a piece that any country on the eastern side of the world will struggle with—the society.” AnitaB.org is a global non-profit, founded by computer scientists Anita Borg and Telle Whitney, which focuses on recruiting, retaining, and advancing women in technology.

This societal piece puts a lot of pressure on the female as an individual, Kannan said.“You can be ambitious, you can have your husband’s/family’s support but the challenge will be the society. And being a community-driven culture, I think it will take a longer time for us to go beyond this,” she added.

The Present

Talking of the challenges she faced as a woman in tech, Delegano’s Abi Aryan said: “I think the challenges are the same for every founder irrespective of their gender i.e. building a great team, creating a product that solves some real problem in the market, understanding your customers and building a personal relationship with them.” But she wasn’t willing to “excuse herself just yet for being a woman in tech” and acknowledged the existence of gender bias in the system.

“The only part where things get a little tricky is while fundraising for your startup, especially as a single female founder,” she said. “It is a tough line. Investors, especially VCs, prefer a team with two or more co-founders so that there is always someone to take care of both the business as well as the tech and there is a little bias and doubts (based on person to person) about being a girl. But then hasn’t every founder been doubted or mocked when they started out?”

The “bias” that Aryan pointed at is an important part of a larger problem that deters women’s entry into the startup scene.

“In the Indian context, I think this is more of an overall economic, societal & corporate issue—of which the startup/investing segment is a subset,” said Arun Natarajan, founder of Chennai-based Venture Intelligence, a data analytics service provider that covers private equity, venture capitalists and mergers and acquisitions. “Like across sectors, there are more women entering the workplace in these sectors than in the previous generation. And, like with other sectors, women have challenges in staying at their career—especially after marriage and kids.”

Natarajan, also a member of The Indus Entrepreneurs’ governing council, was responding to an earlier question by this correspondent as to why there were fewer women in decision-making positions in VC firms, deep tech or the larger fin-tech sector. According to key findings in NASSCOM’s Spring 2017 survey, Women and IT Scorecard-India, women’s career progression was slower and women were concentrated at lower career levels.

With the demands of the tech sector—add to it the prejudice that Aryan mentioned, social impediments that Natarajan mentioned, demands of running a startup, male dominance, a bottom-up approach of career progression and poor retention of women in the workplace—very few women make it to the top. Thus, turning in-group favouritism during the hiring process in the favour of males.

A September 2017 Harvard Business School article titled ‘Why Employers Favor Men’ stated that employers were willing to hire a member of the lower-performing group if the employers shared the same gender or birth month. The article states: “When a woman was making the decision, women were hired 50 percent of the time, yet when a male employer was making the call, women had only a 40 percent chance of getting hired.” So with fewer women representatives making it to the top, the prospects of women getting hired for top positions also becomes bleak and the chance of women speaking up even more bleak.

Compounding the problem in India is the dismal non-compliance with the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013. According to a 2016 survey of 600 companies, including startups, by Complykaro, an end-to-end compliance service provider, less than 2 per cent of the companies were found to be fully compliant in practice.

Plus, there is the point that powerful men when accused of sexual assault, stand strong together. This sort of “bro-code” explained in a 2017 Vox piece would further deter women from reporting sexual harassment. This brings us to a point where Kola, Kannan and Natarajan are in agreement. The point being, that this culture of male-dominance, which is, in turn, hindering women’s participation and progression, exists across sectors.

The Future: Change

As bitter as reality sounds, we still have time to learn from the crises of the Silicon Valley and work towards sensitising Indian workplaces.

“When there are more women participating in the workforce, the organisation themselves will work towards having family-friendly policies,” said AnitaB.org’s Kannan, speaking of ways to address the challenges faced by women in tech.

We also need to fix the leaking pipeline of women entering the workforce, Kannan said. “This leaking pipeline is our single biggest worry,” she said adding that there is a need for women to step up and learn how to “market themselves”. Speaking of her interactions with women entrepreneurs, Kannan said one of the biggest challenges is the inability of women entrepreneurs to market their products. “They kept on asking us ‘Is there any way that you can help us market our products?’” This, in turn, reflects on their inability to market themselves, she added.  

Another way to improve is to look at proof-points of success.“Instances of women entrepreneurs/executives managing to “have it all” is also increasing and is obviously only serving to inspire the next generation,” Natarajan said.

Zia Mody of AZB & Partners and Vedika Bhandarkar of Water.org  illustrate this wonderfully, he said. “There are also various positive initiatives—including various government announcements and private sector examples such as the Saha Fund, a VC firm that invests only in startups with women founders—that should encourage more women to start up,” he said.

No doubt, progress has been made. Measures are being taken to improve retention of women in the tech space—startup, VC and IT companies—but what we need currently is not just compliance with law, but an overhaul of the ecosystem itself. This would include changes in HR processes, sensitisation about sexual harassment and a culture where a crisis is preemptively addressed rather than being swept under the carpet. And this would require not just men to change, but for women to step up as well.