Over the weekend, the viral Coldplay concert ‘kiss cam’ scandal united the internet through memes and analysis of such an “unlikely scenario”.
“The chances of your marriage and careers breaking down at a Coldplay concert are extremely low… but never zero”, is the phrase being repeated in front of photos of a tech company CEO and a Human Resources director, who were shocked to be caught cuddling at the concert.
Underneath the initial laughs, it’s fair to ask how “likely” an affair like this this really is, when we consider the fact that the company they work for has only one woman in its leadership team.
As pointed out by Editor in Chief of Forbes Australia Sarah O’Carroll, the tech company Astromoner’s only female leader is the very same HR director involved in the scandal, Kristin Cabot.
“Scandal often thrives in cultures where power goes unchecked – and when a CEO builds a leadership team with zero regard for balance at the table, you can safely bet accountability and integrity aren’t top of the old agenda…,” writes O’Carroll, pointing out that Andy Byron, Astronomers CEO at the time, had been complicit in this gender imbalance.
The male-dominated tech industry has long been known for fostering toxic workplace environments.
Back in 2014, Sergey Brin and Amanda Rosenberg shook up the tech world with their extramarital affair that ended in a big money marriage breakdown.
The face of the ill-fated Google Glass project, Rosenberg was only 27-years-old when an affair with Brin, a tech giant billionaire 13 years her senior, left her to receive a wake of abuse after making headlines. She detailed her “tumultuous relationship”, attempted suicide and mental health struggles in her book, That’s Mental: Painfully Funny Things That Drive Me Crazy about Being Mentally Ill.
“It’s never the men who get slut-shamed”, Rosenberg writes in regards to the affair fallout.
Another scandal highlighting the pervasive danger of unchecked power dynamics in the workplace happened in 2016, when a university investigation found that a young astrophysics professor had gotten away with “discriminatory and harassing” behavior toward two female graduate students.
At the California Institute of Technology, Christian Ott, a 38-year-old professor who had been granted tenure the year before, was placed on nine months of unpaid leave after it was revealed he fell in love with one of his graduate students and then fired her because of his feelings. Twenty-one months of intimate online chats, obtained by BuzzFeed News, confirmed that he confessed his actions to another female graduate student.
In tech, this kind of behaviour is not an isolated incident.
In 2018, US journalist Emily Cheng published Brotopia, about Silicon Valley’s notoriously male-dominated culture. The book explores how a lack of women in the tech industry contributes to workplaces “rife with discrimination and sexual harassment, where investors take meetings in hot tubs and network at sex parties”.
Another book of a similar realm, Uncanny Valley by former tech worker Anna Weiner details her time as a young woman in Silicon Valley, getting sucked into a world of toxic work culture despite her better judgement in the male-dominated space.
Along with lived experience, research points to a need for more women in tech leadership to add diversity of thought to the tech bro space.
Looking at board gender diversity specifically, research from 2022 found that nominating female directors can have a profound impact on a firm’s ethical culture. The study analysed US companies during the period of 2011-2021 to find that an increase of even just one female director is associated with a 21.81 per cent decrease in workplace sexual harassment and that firms with high board gender diversity synchronize the reduction in sexual harassment with improved social policies, such as those that better employee relations, health and safety, or diversity challenges.
Here in Australia, gender board diversity has long been a pervasive issue as well, with progress being made slowly. This year, the Board Diversity Index from Australian Institute of Company Directors, Watermark Search International and Deloitte showed that Nearly three-quarters of ASX300 boards are now made up by more than 30 per cent women but broader measures of diversity are stalling.
As the world grapples with pushback on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, the data shows workplace culture is reliant on progress in supporting women leaders.
It’s a harsh reality that forces us to question just how truly “unlikely” the Coldplay kiss cam incident was.
While Chris Martin’s innocent remark that the cuddly pair were with either “having an affair” or just “really shy” was nothing short of comical, the likelihood of such an affair and workplace culture coming from a company with a lack of gender diversity isn’t completely out of the norm.