The post concerns Yuval Peres, a principal researcher in the Microsoft Theory Group [update Dec. 26, 2018: YP is no longer employed at Microsoft] and a former colleague of mine at UC Berkeley. Below is a copy of an email sent yesterday to numerous theory of computer science professors worldwide, and published on the Stanford Theory Seminar List. It corroborates information I heard about Yuval Peres a number of years ago when I was a mathematics professor at UC Berkeley. At the time I was asked to keep the information I heard confidential, and I did so because the person who discussed it with me was, understandably, afraid of retaliation. Now I wonder to what extent my silence allowed his harassment of women to continue unabated. I also wonder when the leaders of the statistics department at UC Berkeley, where Peres used to work, and where Terry Speed was a professor emeritus before I reported him, will end their culture of silence.
Hello all,
This is an email composed by Irit Dinur, Oded Goldreich and me. The purpose of this email is to share with you concerns that we had regarding the unethical behavior of Yuval Peres. The behavior we are referring to includes several recent incidents from the past few years, on top of the two “big” cases of sexual harassment that led to severe sanctions against him by his employer, Microsoft, and to the termination of his connections with the University of Washington. Together with two colleagues who are highly regarded and trusted by us, we have first and second-hand testimonies (by people we trust without a shed of doubt) of at least five additional cases of him approaching junior female scientists, some of them students, with offers of intimate nature, behavior that has caused its victims quite a bit of distress since these offers were “insistent”. While the examples that we encountered from the last few years do not fall under the category of sexual harassment from a legal point of view, they certainly caused great discomfort to the victims, who were young female scientists, putting them in a highly awkward situation, and creating an atmosphere that they’d rather avoid (i.e., they would rather miss a conference or a lecture than risk being subjected to repeated intimate offers by him). We wish to stress that his aggressive advances toward young women, usually with no previous friendly connections with him, puts them in a vulnerable position of fearing to cross a senior scientist who might have an impact on their career, which is at a fragile stage. We believe that the questions of whether or not Yuval Peres intended to make them uncomfortable, and whether or not he would or could actually harm their scientific status are irrelevant; the fact is that the victims felt very stressed to a point that they’d rather miss professional events than risk encountering the same situation again. Needless to say, it is the responsibility of senior members of our community to avoid putting less senior members in such a position.
Our current involvement with this issue was triggered by an invitation Yuval Peres received to give a plenary talk at an international conference next year. We felt that this invitation sends a highly undesirable message to our community in general, and to the women he harassed in particular, as if his transgressions are considered unimportant.
We sent an email conveying our concern to the organizers of the conference, suggesting that they disinvite him. With our permission, they forwarded a version of our letter (in which we made changes in order to protect the identity of the women involved) to Yuval Peres. They did not reveal our identity, rather they told him that this is a letter from “senior members of the community”. In our letter we included a paragraph describing a general principle that should be followed. The principle is:
A senior researcher should not approach a junior researcher with an invitation that may be viewed as intimate or personal unless such an invitation was issued in the past by this specific junior to that specific senior. The point being that even if the senior researcher has no intimate/personal intentions, such intentions may be read by the junior researcher, placing the junior in an awkward situation and possibly causing them great distress. Examples for such an invitation include any invitation to a personal event in which only the senior and the junior will be present (e.g., a two-person dinner, a meeting in a private home, etc).
Yuval’s reply was rather laconic, in particular, he did not address the issue of his behavior in the past couple of years. However, he did write:
“I certainly embrace the principle described in boldface in the letter. This seems to be the right approach for any senior scientist these days.”
The reason we are copying this to all of you (as opposed, for example, to using bcc) is related to the islanders’ paradox: we believe that the fact that everyone knows that everyone knows is a significant boost to holding Yuval Peres accountable for his future actions. We’re also bcc’ing several young women who already aware of Yuval Peres’s actions, in order to keep them in the know too.
We understand that sending this out to a large number of people without offering Yuval Peres the chance to respond may be considered unfair. However, after weighing the pros and cons carefully we believe this is a good course of action. First of all, because it is clear that the victims did not invent his offers and their ensuing feelings of anxiety and stress. Secondly, we know that Yuval Peres has been confronted in a face to face conversation by a senior colleague, and it did not end his behavior, so we think it’s important to stay vigilant in protecting the younger members of our community. Thirdly, the information in this letter will reach (or has already reached) almost all of you in any case, so the main effect of the letter is making what everyone knows into public knowledge. Finally, although his response to the organizers did include the minimum of declaring he accepts the guiding principle that we stated, it did not include any reference to the ongoing behavior we described- neither regret nor concern nor denial. So it’s not easy to assume that he truly intends to mend his ways.
We hope that our actions will contribute to the future of our community as an environment that offers all a pleasant and non-threatening atmosphere.
Sincerely,
Irit Dinur, Ehud Friedgut, Oded Goldreich
Bits of DNA 
217 comments
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November 28, 2018 at 6:21 am
Ehud Friedgut
Dear Lior,
I am unhappy with your decision to post this, and feel you should have requested our permission first.
I urge you to remove the post immediately, as it is only a matter of hours before his family will be alerted to this, and I have no desire to harm his kids, parents, siblings and, of course, wife.
In any case, until you do so, I am also sending below his response to our letter.
November 28, 2018 at 8:43 am
Lior Pachter
Hi Ehud,
I did not choose to make this letter public. It was made public by others, e.g. Omer Reingold, who posted it to the stanford-theory list which I linked to I’m my post (https://mailman.stanford.edu/pipermail/theory-seminar/2018-November.txt). When I saw it there I realized I could not in good faith NOT blog about it, given the information I had heard independently. I appreciate very much Omer’s statement on the matter and his forwarding of the email to the Stanford theory list, as well, of course, your and your coauthors’ courage in sending it around.
November 29, 2018 at 12:09 am
Audrey Fu
Dear Ehud (and Lior),
I am just a reader of this blog post and not involved in matters mentioned in the letter. Nonetheless, I wanted to thank you and the other two co-writers of this email for taking sexual harassment seriously and for speaking up. I also wanted to thank Lior for sharing this email. Most victims of sexual harassments keep quiet because of the humiliation from the harassment itself and because of the denial and hostility in the society when the harassment is revealed to the public, as displayed in several despicable comments here. It is therefore particularly noble and respectable for you and others to lend your voice to the junior researchers and to sexual harassment victims in general. The general reaction in other sexual harassment cases has shown that even though most victims do not speak up and most people do not bother to leave comments, actions similar to yours are immensely respected and silently applauded by the majority in the society. Academia (and elsewhere) needs more people like you.
November 28, 2018 at 6:24 am
Ehud Friedgut
—————————————————————————————————————————————————————-
Dear Ehud, Irit and Oded, Dear email recipients:
This is my community, and I greatly appreciate each and every one of you.
As you can imagine, I am sad to see this email but understand it arises from genuine concern of the authors.
(I do wish they had written to me directly rather than through intermediaries).
I disagree with some claims in the email but let me start by emphasizing that I embrace the passage:
A senior researcher should not approach a junior researcher with an invitation that may be viewed as intimate or personal unless such an invitation was issued in the past by this specific junior to that specific senior. The point being that even if the senior researcher has no intimate/personal intentions, such intentions may be read by the junior researcher, placing the junior in an awkward situation and possibly causing them great distress. Examples for such an invitation include any invitation to a personal event in which only the senior and the junior will be present (e.g., a two-person dinner, a meeting in a private home, etc).
I regret all cases in the past where I have not followed this principle. I had no intention to harass anyone but must have been tone deaf not to recognize that I was making some people very uncomfortable. As I wrote above, I promise to adhere to this principle in the future. In order to show that I am not trivializing the concerns of Ehud, Irit and Oded, I will regretfully rescind my acceptance to deliver a keynote talk in the conference that sparked their message. I apologize to the organizers of that conference and wrote to them separately.
I have collaborated with about 300 researchers in my career, many of them women, and most of my success is due to those collaborations. (A lot of those collaborations took place in two-person lunches and dinners but usually when the collaborators knew each other well). In particular, I consider my early work with Claire Mathieu and my recent book with Anna Karlin as some of the high points of my career. In the last SODA/ANALCO I gave four talks, three of them based on collaborations with brilliant young women. I completely agree that it is crucial that we present a welcoming atmosphere to these women.
If any one of you has further suggestions, you are very welcome to write to me personally at this address.
Yours,
Yuval
———- ———————————————————-
From: Ehud Friedgut
Date: Tue, Nov 27, 2018, 10:07
Subject: Sexual harassment
To: ofer zeitouni , Itai Benjamini , Ronen Eldan , David Peleg , Michal Irani , Robert Krauthgamer , Jennifer Chayes , Christian Borgs , Anna Karlin , Ronitt Rubinfeld , Noga Alon , Benjamin Sudakov , Michael Krivelevich , Asaf Shapira , Michal Karonski , Andrzej Rucinski , Wojtek Samotij , Ron Peled , James R. Lee , Nati Linial , Avi Wigderson , Gil Kalai , Penny Haxell , Tamar Ziegler , Dorit Aharonov , , , , , , , , ,
Cc: Irit Dinur , Oded Goldreich
Hello all,
This is an email composed by Irit Dinur, Oded Goldreich and me.
The purpose of this email is to share with you concerns that we had regarding the unethical behavior of Yuval Peres. The behavior we are referring to includes several recent incidents from the past few years, on top of the two “big” cases of sexual harassment that led to severe sanctions against him by his employer, Microsoft, and to the termination of his connections with the University of Washington.
Together with two colleagues who are highly regarded and trusted by us, we have first and second-hand testimonies (by people we trust without a shed of doubt) of at least five additional cases of him approaching junior female scientists, some of them students, with offers of intimate nature, behavior that has caused its victims quite a bit of distress since these offers were “insistent”.
While the examples that we encountered from the last few years do not fall under the category of sexual harassment from a legal point of view, they certainly caused great discomfort to the victims, who were young female scientists, putting them in a highly awkward situation, and creating an atmosphere that they’d rather avoid (i.e., they would rather miss a conference or a lecture than risk being subjected to repeated intimate offers by him).
We wish to stress that his aggressive advances toward young women, usually with no previous friendly connections with him, puts them in a vulnerable position of fearing to cross a senior scientist who might have an impact on their career, which is at a fragile stage. We believe that the questions of whether or not Yuval Peres intended to make them uncomfortable, and whether or not he would or could actually harm their scientific status are irrelevant; the fact is that the victims felt very stressed to a point that they’d rather miss professional events than risk encountering the same situation again. Needless to say, it is the responsibility of senior members of our community to avoid putting less senior members in such a position.
Our current involvement with this issue was triggered by an invitation Yuval Peres received to give a plenary talk at an international conference next year. We felt that this invitation sends a highly undesirable message to our community in general, and to the women he harassed in particular, as if his transgressions are considered unimportant.
We sent an email conveying our concern to the organizers of the conference, suggesting that they disinvite him. With our permission, they forwarded a version of our letter (in which we made changes in order to protect the identity of the women involved) to Yuval Peres. They did not reveal our identity, rather they told him that this is a letter from “senior members of the community”. In our letter we included a paragraph describing a general principle that should be followed. The principle is:
A senior researcher should not approach a junior researcher with an invitation that may be viewed as intimate or personal unless such an invitation was issued in the past by this specific junior to that specific senior. The point being that even if the senior researcher has no intimate/personal intentions, such intentions may be read by the junior researcher, placing the junior in an awkward situation and possibly causing them great distress. Examples for such an invitation include any invitation to a personal event in which only the senior and the junior will be present (e.g., a two-person dinner, a meeting in a private home, etc).
Yuval’s reply was rather laconic, in particular, he did not address the issue of his behavior in the past couple of years. However, he did write:
“I certainly embrace the principle described in boldface in the letter.
This seems to be the right approach for any senior scientist these days.”
The reason we are copying this to all of you (as opposed, for example, to using bcc) is related to the islanders’ paradox: we believe that the fact that everyone knows that everyone knows is a significant boost to holding Yuval Peres accountable for his future actions. We’re also bcc’ing several young women who already aware of Yuval Peres’s actions, in order to keep them in the know too.
We understand that sending this out to a large number of people without offering Yuval Peres the chance to respond may be considered unfair. However, after weighing the pros and cons carefully we believe this is a good course of action. First of all, because it is clear that the victims did not invent his offers and their ensuing feelings of anxiety and stress. Secondly, we know that Yuval Peres has been confronted in a face to face conversation by a senior colleague, and it did not end his behavior, so we think it’s important to stay vigilant in protecting the younger members of our community. Thirdly, the information in this letter will reach (or has already reached) almost all of you in any case, so the main effect of the letter is making what everyone knows into public knowledge. Finally, although his response to the organizers did include the minimum of declaring he accepts the guiding principle that we stated, it did not include any reference to the ongoing behavior we described – neither regret nor concern nor denial. So it’s not easy to assume that he truly intends to mend his ways.
We hope that our actions will contribute to the future of our community as an environment that offers all a pleasant and non-threatening atmosphere.
Sincerely,
Irit Dinur, Ehud Friedgut, Oded Goldreich
November 29, 2018 at 9:00 pm
Kaizer
Always wondered why YP got along so well with my female batchmates but had the smirk of the worlds most burdened man when we wanted to run some thoughts by him. Weird world this!
November 28, 2018 at 6:28 am
Rick Durrett
I can’t believe you posted this slanderous piece.
November 28, 2018 at 6:52 am
Igor Rivin (@igriv)
You can’t? It is a disgusting hit piece, but completely in character for Pachter.
November 28, 2018 at 7:15 am
eventhisoneistaken
Lior Pachter is just the sort of creep to get #metooed. Just wait.
November 28, 2018 at 7:20 am
Anon
It is not signed by Pachter. I recall you accused certain people pointing out thje obvious of “besmirching” your character for what you deemed merely impartial faciliation of certain discussion. I can’t tell how all thjat squares in your mind, but then I’m not a specialist.
November 28, 2018 at 8:37 am
Igor Rivin (@igriv)
@Anon By a happy coincidence, @Ehud Friedgut’s comments have clarified Pachter’s role. The letter he cites was PRIVATE (at least semi-private, since the recipient list is not short). I hope you are clear on what I mean now.
November 28, 2018 at 8:59 am
Lior Pachter
You apparently did not even read the post, because if you did you would see that it is not I who wrote the email nor is it I who made it public. I saw it on the Stanford Theory List (https://mailman.stanford.edu/pipermail/theory-seminar/2018-November.txt). So no, the letter I posted was not private, nor was it semi-private. I am not at all clear on what you mean.
November 28, 2018 at 9:52 am
Igor Rivin (@igriv)
@Lior Pachter I did not catch the Stanford Theory list reference, it is true, but this only makes the guilt shared between yourself and the authors. The letter (and your post) accuse Yuval of some unspecified inappropriate behavior in public, leaving people to imagine the worst, and thus blackening a man’s name with no grounds whatever/. The initial authors are cowards also – if they thought it was inappropriate for Peres to speak at whatever conference it was, fair enough, they could have written him directly, and asked him to withdraw. All three authors of the letter are very senior people, and it is not like some grad students living in fear of the great and mighty Peres.
This is disgusting cowardice and lack of honor on the part of all four “accusers”.
November 28, 2018 at 6:10 pm
Anima
See my comment below. I was subjected to sexual harassment, it was unmistakable and it was gross. Yes, u should imagine the worst with Yuval because that is what women researchers have experienced
November 28, 2018 at 10:59 am
Nicolas Bray
Hi Rick,
For something to be slander, it has to be false.
HTH,
Nick
November 28, 2018 at 11:26 am
Igor Rivin (@igriv)
The letter alleges that the YP acted improperly, in an unspecified (but clearly not criminal, and not even harassing [according to the letter itself] way). It also alleges that disciplinary action was taken by UW and MSFT. Presumably, such action (if, indeed, it existed) was taken confidentially, so the only way the authors of the letter became aware of it was gossip. So, to summarize: this post is not slander, it is not libel, but it IS malicious gossip, so while the people involved cannot be sued (at least as far as I know) the readers can (and in several cases I am aware of, have) lose all respect for them. By contrast, Peres, whatever inappropriate things he may or may not have done, is now the victim.
November 28, 2018 at 8:29 pm
Nicolas Bray
Hi Igor,
I think it’s really neat how you manage to have an epistemology so radically strict that basically anything that doesn’t happen directly in front of your eyes is in some realm of unknowability while also managing to believe that, e.g., Barack Obama was born in Kenya. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say that you just believed whatever you felt like and constructed post hoc rationalizations to justify yourself!
Meanwhile, even ignoring the novel things alleged in this email, we see:
1) Dinur, Goldreich, and Friedgut, who have no apparent motive to lie and would clearly be harmed professionally if they did so, state forthrightly that there were “two ‘big’ cases of sexual harassment” against Peres which were found to have merit by Microsoft and the University of Washington
2) They not only state this but do so in a manner which suggests this is common knowledge for their intended audience (i.e., top researchers in the field of CS theory)
3) Peres himself DOES NOT DISPUTE THEIR STATEMENT IN HIS REPSONSE
For anyone with even the slightest grasp on reality, rather than the sad jumble that resides within your skull, it’s incredibly obvious that Peres has sexually harassed multiple women.
HTH,
Nick
November 28, 2018 at 9:15 pm
Igor Rivin (@igriv)
Thank you for your thoughtful response. You will notice, however, that Lior’s audience is NOT the audience you refer to, but the big wide world out there (including, as Friedgut points out, Yuval’s family, which is not part of the CS research community). The question is: what is the purpose of their letter? If it is to not have Yuval speak at some conference, the proper way to do this is for them to contact him directly. If it is to apprise the world of his alleged malfeasance, they should do so, and not beat around the bush (actually, an even better way is to contact him, and have him clear the air, probably with the aid of his attorneys, and his employer (and THEIR attorneys) especially as he seems happy to publicly recant). They way they did it does result in reputational damage (to themselves), but it did not have to. Also, certainly facts being “well-known” in a community does not actually mean that they are not gossip. I have certainly been around long enough to see plenty of outright falsehood attain the status of well-known facts.
Now, we ask: what is the purpose of Lior Pachter’s shouting from the rooftops? The only purpose I see is “virtue signaling”, since he has no direct connection (that I am aware of) with Peres, and his only connection to the whole affair is his subscription to the Stanford Theory list. I find him appointing himself the guardian of public morals nothing short of repulsive.
Speaking of repulsive, please cut out your insults. It makes you look like an idiot, which, I assume, is not your goal.
November 28, 2018 at 9:35 pm
Lior Pachter
Dear Igor,
So that readers may be aware of a significant conflict of interest in our exchanges, I must include here a link to my previous blog post that centered on your hijacking of a mathematics journal to further your misogynist goals: https://liorpachter.wordpress.com/2018/09/17/mathematics-matters/
Regarding this post, you asked who I wrote it for. I decided to repost the letter from the Stanford theory list because I thought women and men in *all* of the areas Yuval works in should be aware of his behavior. Readers of my blog include people from mathematics (specifically combinatorics), computer science and probability/statistics, all fields which are relevant here. Finally, it appears that you have lost all respect for me and that you find me and my blog repulsive (your words). You are certainly entitled to your opinion, and if this is how you feel perhaps you should stop reading my blog and commenting on it? You are of course welcome to continue spewing your vitriol here- I don’t censor- but I also imagine that many readers, like me, understand at this point what you think and don’t need to have it repeated ad nauseam.
Lior
November 28, 2018 at 10:30 pm
Igor Rivin (@igriv)
Dear Lior,
Thanks for the comments. First of all, I disagree with your characterization of my activity as misogynistic. Second, I do appreciate the fact that you do not censor. Third, I do have respect for you intellectually, but that has the curious effect of making me more unhappy about your vicious attacks on people (after all, who cares about what some idiot says? But you are not an idiot). Fourth, I have been (and still am) hoping to understand what it is that drives you. My theory, as you know, is that it is virtue signaling, but I am sure you don’t agree, so there is some cognitive dissonance. Fifth, as you by now know, I am severely triggered by witchhunts (since these had completely corrupted the intellectual atmosphere in Eastern Europe during my childhood, and resulted in the untimely demise of tens of millions of people. I do not expect that you will cause the latter, but you, and the likes of BethAnn McLaughlin, are doing your part to accomplish the former – I hope you understand that).
In the particular case of Yuval, I had written a paper with him (he did much more of the work than I did), so if you like, you can consider it a conflict of interest. That said, I am perfectly OK with him facing the consequences of his actions, with the proviso that due process is followed. What you are doing is not due process (but a witchhunt, see above). If, for example, Yuval loses his job at MSR because they fear bad PR, and not actually because of whatever it was he did, well, then, a grave injustice will have been done.
I do hope we understand each other.
November 29, 2018 at 12:09 am
Nicolas Bray
Igor Rivin:
“Thank you for your thoughtful response.”
I cannot accept your thanks because it was not, in fact, a thoughtful response. It was merely an enumeration of things obvious to anyone who read that letter with the intent of actually understanding the situation rather than constructing rationalizations to defend sexual harassers.
“You will notice, however, that Lior’s audience is NOT the audience you refer to but the big wide world out there”
That is completely irrelevant to the context in which I invoked the intended audience of the letter.
“(including, as Friedgut points out, Yuval’s family, which is not part of the CS research community).”
That is indeed unfortunate and any suffering they feel is yet another thing that Peres should feel deeply guilty for (although I will not hold my breath).
“The question is: what is the purpose of their letter?”
No, this is not “the question”. The authors of the letter had their purpose in writing it but that purpose is not of great interest to me. *My* purpose is that every single sexual harasser is made to answer for what they’ve done and that would-be harassers cower in fear of the consequences they might face.
“They way they did it does result in reputational damage (to themselves), but it did not have to.”
I know this is difficult for you to understand but most people do not share your perverse sense of what makes for a good reputation. Most people actually admire those who take action to stop harm from occurring.
“Now, we ask: what is the purpose of Lior Pachter’s shouting from the rooftops? The only purpose I see is “virtue signaling”, since he has no direct connection (that I am aware of) with Peres”
Again, what is a mystery to you is plain to see for those you do not have your shortcomings. Lior’s purpose is to stop Peres from harassing more women and the motivation you find so perplexing is a genuine hatred of sexual harassment.
Your citation of Lior’s lack of direct connection is revealing. Most people understand that it is possible for someone to care about things that do not directly affect them.
“Speaking of repulsive, please cut out your insults. It makes you look like an idiot, which, I assume, is not your goal.”
Igor, insulting you is very much the appropriate thing to do. Your grimy attempts to take the high road here do not change the fact that you are a truly terrible person.
November 29, 2018 at 8:15 pm
Lior Pachter
It was brought to my attention that my claim that I don’t censor could be viewed as incompatible with my blog comments policy which is that “I reserve the right to reject comments if they contain inappropriate content” (see https://liorpachter.wordpress.com/about/ ). I would like to clarify that the comment policy articulated on the About page is the one I follow on this blog. The number of comments I have not approved, except for one post which I closed for comments is about 1 a year.
November 28, 2018 at 6:50 am
Ehud Friedgut
Dear Lior,
I am unhappy with your decision to post this. I think you should have requested our permission first. I urge to remove the post immediately, as it is only a matter of hours before this reaches his kids, parents, wife, etc., and I see no reason to inflict this on them.
Also, until you remove it, I am posting his answer to our letter below.
Please remove this post!
Ehud
November 28, 2018 at 8:42 am
Lior Pachter
Hi Ehud,
I did not choose to make this letter public. It was made public by others, e.g. Omer Reingold, who posted it to the stanford-theory list which I linked to I’m my post (https://mailman.stanford.edu/pipermail/theory-seminar/2018-November.txt). When I saw it there I realized I could not in good faith NOT blog about it, given the information I had heard independently. I appreciate very much Omer’s statement on the matter and his forwarding of the email to the Stanford theory list, as well, of course, your and your coauthors’ courage in sending it around.
Lior
November 28, 2018 at 7:01 am
fedster9
I do not understand how ‘persistent’ ‘intimate’ offers ‘do not fall under the category of sexual harassment from a legal point of view’.
Depending on the jurisdiction people in a ‘position of trust’, might, or might not, go to a junior colleague or a student and say ‘how about we have sex?’, but once they are told, ‘Thanks for the beautiful offer, but no thanks’, any further attempt qualifies as harassment, right? and the same would be for a request for a date, right?
If that is not the matter at hand, what are we talking about here?
I also do not understand this ‘A senior researcher should not approach a junior researcher with an invitation that may be viewed as intimate or personal unless such an invitation was issued in the past by this specific junior to that specific senior’. Does it mean is it ok for students to hit on their supervisors? How is this acceptable? What the hell is going on?
November 28, 2018 at 6:11 pm
Anima
I am not bothered by dinner invitations personally. Yuval is a sexual predator. there is no ambiguity. Dinner is not the issue. He made a gross move on me and that is the issue here.
November 29, 2018 at 4:05 am
fedster9
First off, I am genuinely sorry to read you did not feel safe in your work settings, that is a big burden to bear.
What I am trying to understand is: how is it that someone can be a sexual predator (i.e. there is a consistent and predictable pattern of illegal behaviour) and yet said person does manage to be so without falling outside the bounds of the law (since the letter Lior posted states ‘the examples that we encountered from the last few years do not fall under the category of sexual harassment from a legal point of view’).
November 28, 2018 at 7:14 am
wouldeveryonepleasegrowup
“A senior researcher should not approach a junior researcher with an invitation that may be viewed as intimate or personal unless such an invitation was issued in the past by this specific junior to that specific senior.” I think this principle needs some clarification. For example maybe the junior person one time issues an invitation that could be viewed as intimate or personal (but didn’t mean it that way), and this does not entitle the senior person to repeatedly issue such invitations.
November 28, 2018 at 7:42 am
PalyB
To anyone of conscience and/or intellect, your reaction is perfectly predictable … yet the letter was still posted.
Perhaps you can gain civil perspective on this issue, and perhaps you cannot. In any case, here it is in the hopes that you will absorb both its truth and principle:
The divisiveness of this situation as described lies not in the willingness of the authors to post the letter, but rather in the willingness of some males of our species to treat females in such a fashion. Anyone with significant work experience is likely to have already witnessed how males often treat females verbally, with personal interaction, and in all-male conversation, and so there certainly isn’t anything to debate regarding the theory of the described scenario. The only debate is whether you trust the statement offered by the several authors of the letter, who were willing to put themselves into possible harm’s way in order to issue that letter.
At the very least I would hope you can agree with the social principle that in a professional environment (in particular in an environment where one’s intellect is the primary tool being utilized), female colleagues are, literally, NEVER to be treated in such a manner.
November 29, 2018 at 1:22 am
eventhisoneistaken
Which part of the Zuleikha project do you object to, Nicolas Bray? It clearly states that the issue is men *falsely* accused of harassment. Do you not think such men have rights? Deserve protection?
November 28, 2018 at 3:30 pm
eventhisoneistaken
People like Lior Pachter are causing women very real harm: https://posttenuretourettes.wordpress.com/2018/11/28/seriously-whats-pachters/
November 28, 2018 at 3:33 pm
Igor Rivin (@igriv)
Do you think he cares? He only cares about his own virtue signaling.
November 28, 2018 at 8:32 pm
Nicolas Bray
This is like watching a pair of monkeys try to discuss group theory: it’s really not that complicated but they’re congenitally incapable of understanding it.
November 28, 2018 at 11:13 pm
eventhisoneistaken
Replying to Nicolas Bray: There is a substantive argument being made here (at the link) about harm to women, which you completely evade. You call us monkeys yet you’re the one flinging poo.
November 28, 2018 at 11:38 pm
Nicolas Bray
No, there is not a substantive argument being made at the link. It is like the rest of the sophistry you churn out, except perhaps more disingenuous than usual since, as we both know, you do not give a shit about harm to women.
And I didn’t call you monkeys. It’s an analogy.
November 28, 2018 at 11:50 pm
Igor Rivin (@igriv)
I agree with my learned colleague. Instead of flinging poop (an analogy, of course), why don’t you articulate your position and enlighten us. Your “sophistry: comment sounds like a typical: I don’t care about facts o reason, I just care about my feelings, which has been playing in a tight loop coming from the left for the last, oh, 100 years or so. You disagree? State your case cogently.
November 29, 2018 at 12:40 am
Nicolas Bray
I was going to actually write something but I think I’ll let eventhisoneistaken make the case for me. Please consult the following post:
November 29, 2018 at 9:16 am
eventhisoneistaken
Which part of the Zuleikha project do you object to, Nicolas Bray? It clearly states that the issue is men *falsely* accused of harassment. Do you not think such men have rights? Deserve protection?
November 28, 2018 at 5:56 pm
Anima
I had a nauseating experience with yuval peres when I was younger. I know many other women who did. This is an open secret and yet nothing is ever done. He invited me to 1-1 dinner when I was younger. I didn’t anything twice..I have had dinner with so many amazing male researchers and that is not the issue. As we were leaving he hugged me closely and gave me this looks and invited me to the swimming pool. It was unmistakable. This is textbook sexual harassment and there is no ambiguity here. I felt worthless and it really affected my self esteem when I was younger. I was so angry..I wanted to discuss research with him and all he did was to treat me like a piece of meat.
November 28, 2018 at 7:23 pm
Anon
Thank you Anima, for your courage to share your experience publicly. I have a female friend who shared with me (5-10 years ago) that she had an almost identical “nauseating experience” with Yuval. She did share it with people at Microsoft Research, but did not make it public (for multiple reasons, among them, fearing retaliation).
November 28, 2018 at 8:38 pm
Igor Rivin (@igriv)
Fair enough. I respect your courage in sharing your experience (and I am sorry you had it). On the other hand, this does not change my opinion of the inappropriateness (the mildest word I could find) of Lior et al’s zero-information smears.
November 28, 2018 at 8:40 pm
Nicolas Bray
I’m so sorry that you had to deal with that. The horrible irony is that it’s the victims of sexual harassment who so frequently feel worthless when it’s people like Peres who should be too ashamed to show their faces in public.
November 28, 2018 at 8:11 pm
Anima
And it is sickening that Yuval gives examples of his female collaborators as evidence of his good behavior. It is a classic behavior of sexual predators to make sure they have female allies
November 29, 2018 at 4:53 am
Yuval Rabani
I don’t have any firsthand information regarding the specific case, but I do want to point out a couple of more general issues that come up through the discussion:
1. Lior, I believe, confesses to a violation of Title IX requirements that apply to American universities, whereby professors are obligated to report allegations of sexual harassment, **even if the source of information requests confidentiality**. Israeli universities (at least the one I work at) are subject to different regulatory requirements, whereby professors who do not hold one of a number of administrative positions (such as department chair) are obligated to report **unless confidentiality is requested**. I believe the Title IX requirements are damaging, because they often mean that a harassed individual is isolated from seeking useful advice (for instance, from their advisor or from a female faculty member), unless they’ve already decided on their own that they don’t mind that a formal complaint be filed. This places victims in a very lonely position.
2. That said, my very limited information indicates that often the advice that is given in confidence by (well-meaning) powerful researchers in such cases is very poor. It’s more or less “shut up because we’re helpless and you might get hurt.” Anima has tweeted eloquently the effects of shutting up: simmering frustration at feeling worthless and in a toxic environment. It often doesn’t take much to do something at least somewhat useful about it, and some relatively small but quick response is often a lot better than doing nothing. In part, it’s better because feeling helpless is lousy, but it may also help deter future misbehavior.
November 29, 2018 at 7:50 am
Lior Pachter
To clarify, the confidential information that was relayed to me (and the request for confidentiality) was done in a setting of a small committee where others were present including more senior people in the department who would have been the ones to report to. I therefore don’t believe I was in violation of Title IX in this specific case but your point is well taken. Title IX reporting requirements override requests for confidentiality.
November 29, 2018 at 1:21 pm
Nicolas Bray
I’m curious what point you’re making with point 1. It begins with a tone of accusation but it ends with a criticism of the basis of that accusation. The result is somewhat hard to interpret.
November 29, 2018 at 4:23 pm
Yuval Rabani
I didn’t intend to accuse, just to alert Lior as to possible implications of his post. But the main point I was trying to convey is that I believe Title IX reporting requirements are harmful. It’s one thing to require department chairs and the like to ignore confidentiality requests. It’s a completely different thing to extend this requirement to everyone.
November 29, 2018 at 6:24 am
Anonymous2718
I think it is a good thing to shine light on behavior that we do not wish to tolerate in society. But I think the way forward is not simply to villainize and ostracize the perpetrators but help them get the treatment or help they need to change. I know Yuval Peres and some of his circle, who I think he would consider friends, personally. When I first started to hear about these allegations, I asked one of these people to talk with him and perhaps guide him towards getting help or counseling, but the person chose to ignore the issue or not get involved. We need to give space to the victims of sexual harassment to state what has happened to them (the more people that are willing to come forward and relate their stories, the better), and also to understand the reasons for why harassment exists and address it – not simply by punishment. That is treating the symptoms and not the underlying problem.
November 29, 2018 at 6:36 am
Oded Goldreich
As another co-author of the original email, I wish to join Ehud request that you remove the post or at least anonymize the offender’s name (by using a label as NAME) as well as identifying information. I wish to stress that this request is made on behalf of myself and not as a result of any request made by anyhow else (incl NAME).
I do realize that you have no legal obligation to follow our request, but I think that ethics goes beyond the law. This is actually the case wrt the subject of our letter; we rejected the opinion that this issue should be left to the law enforcing institutes, let alone that the recent cases we focused on ,may not be illegal, and thought that violations of ethics count too and may be handled at the level of the relevant community and rely on less rigid procedures. (Indeed, the rigid procedures seem to hinder the treatment of such cases, since the victims prefer not to risk using them.)
For this reason, we chose not to make our letter totally public (e.g., to post in on blogs of our own friends), but rather to share its contents with a large set of colleagues. We did take into account that they may share it with their own colleagues, but assumed that publicity will stop at the borders of the relevant research communities. The posting on Stanford’s theory’s mail digest was/is an ***unintended*** consequence of our permission to forward our mail to that group. Indeed, many asked us for explicit permission to forward to others, which we granted, and two have asked for permission to post on a departmental/group list, which we granted too.
In retrospect, I think we made a mistake in not stating our assumptions and/or requests explicitly. What I would have said is:
1. You have permission to share with friends and colleagues, and do not need to notify us of doing so.
2. We will grant permission to post on a dept-mailing list, but wish to be notified of this.
3. Please do not post our text on a public media such as a blog or webpage, and please forward the above instructions to whoever you forward our text.
Turning back to my second paragraph, I believe that keeping the current post will hinder rather than promote the cause we are fighting for.
Oded Goldreich
November 29, 2018 at 1:46 pm
Lior Pachter
Hi Oded,
Thanks for posting. I appreciate the clarification of the intended audience of your letter, and your request for me to delete or redact the post. First, I think it’s helpful that I briefly describe my policy for editing the blog. I have always been careful to accompany edits/updates with a log (usually of the form [update: date, change]). I do sometimes fix very minor typos without a log (for example a missing letter) when the change does not alter meaning. Overall, I think of the blog as I do of the arXiv; my posts and the associated comments are intended to be permanent. With that in mind, neither deleting the post nor redacting names is compatible with my policy but I nevertheless have carefully considered your request.
You state that your intent was “to share [the letter’s] contents with a large set of colleagues” and that the “publicity will stop at the borders of the relevant research communities”. I note that the letter was sent to 34 recipients who collectively work in 16 institutions. Perhaps the letter was bcc-ed to additional recipients, but at least insofar as the public recipient list goes I don’t agree that it consists of “a large set of colleagues”. There are huge gaps in terms of institutions and senior faculty/scientists that Yuval interacts with. I posted your letter on my blog not to fill in those gaps but so that *junior* faculty, postdocs and students would find out about his “aggressive advances toward young women, usually with no previous friendly connections with him [that] puts them in a vulnerable position of fearing to cross a senior scientist who might have an impact on their career”. I thought it important that students, postdocs and junior faculty would find out that there have been “two ‘big’ cases of sexual harassment that led to severe sanctions against him by his employer….and to the termination of his connections with [a] University.” I thought about whether to post or not carefully, because as I said above the posts are permanent, and also I know they are generally widely read. I decided to do it because I did not believe that I could in good conscience, given my past knowledge of his behavior which was corroborated by your letter, *not* alert future potential victims. I was influenced by your collective reputation (yourself, Irit and Ehud), people I have held in high regard my whole career, and by your statement that your letter was triggered by “first and second-hand testimonies (by people [you] trust without a shed of doubt) of at least five additional cases.”
In terms of what your letter or this post will hinder or promote, I will say that it is my belief that propagating information about harassment only among senior colleagues perpetuates a culture of power imbalance where senior faculty hold all the cards. It has been my experience in academia that senior faculty do not always sit down with new trainees and warn them of all the predators they know about, nor have I observed “word of mouth” to be very effective at conferences. For these reasons I will not remove the blog post nor redact it.
Lior
November 29, 2018 at 1:48 pm
Lior Pachter
Hi Oded,
Thanks for posting. I appreciate the clarification of the intended audience of your letter, and your request for me to delete or redact the post. First, I think it’s helpful that I briefly describe my policy for editing the blog. I have always been careful to accompany edits/updates with a log (usually of the form [update: date, change]). I do sometimes fix very minor typos without a log (for example a missing letter) when the change does not alter meaning. Overall, I think of the blog as I do of the arXiv; my posts and the associated comments are intended to be permanent. With that in mind, neither deleting the post nor redacting names is compatible with my policy but I nevertheless have carefully considered your request.
You state that your intent was “to share [the letter’s] contents with a large set of colleagues” and that the “publicity will stop at the borders of the relevant research communities”. I note that the letter was sent to 34 recipients who collectively work in 16 institutions. Perhaps the letter was bcc-ed to additional recipients, but at least insofar as the public recipient list goes I don’t agree that it consists of “a large set of colleagues”. There are huge gaps in terms of institutions and senior faculty/scientists that Yuval interacts with. I posted your letter on my blog not to fill in those gaps but so that *junior* faculty, postdocs and students would find out about his “aggressive advances toward young women, usually with no previous friendly connections with him [that] puts them in a vulnerable position of fearing to cross a senior scientist who might have an impact on their career”. I thought it important that students, postdocs and junior faculty would find out that there have been “two ‘big’ cases of sexual harassment that led to severe sanctions against him by his employer….and to the termination of his connections with [a] University.” I thought about whether to post or not carefully, because as I said above the posts are permanent, and also I know they are generally widely read. I decided to do it because I did not believe that I could in good conscience, given my past knowledge of his behavior which was corroborated by your letter, *not* alert future potential victims. I was influenced by your collective reputation (yourself, Irit and Ehud), people I have held in high regard my whole career, and by your statement that your letter was triggered by “first and second-hand testimonies (by people [you] trust without a shed of doubt) of at least five additional cases.”
In terms of what your letter or this post will hinder or promote, I will say that it is my belief that propagating information about harassment only among senior colleagues perpetuates a culture of power imbalance where senior faculty hold all the cards. It has been my experience in academia that senior faculty do not always sit down with new trainees and warn them of all the predators they know about, nor have I observed “word of mouth” to be very effective at conferences. For these reasons I will not remove the blog post nor redact it.
Lior
November 30, 2018 at 3:36 am
Oded Goldreich
Dear Lior.
I disagree with your interpretation of our choice to sent our email to a group of 30-35 senior researchers. Our objective was to make *them* aware
so that *they* take actions of various types, incl warning potential victims. That is, I believe that taking potentially controversial actions aimed at changing things in the community is primary the responsibility of the more senior, who can afford to take the risks involved. In order words, I view our email as a call to duty, rather than as “closing ranks.”
In any case, I agree that alternatives ways of action would have been reasonable too, but this is the way we chose (and I was asking you to respect it — see next).
Indeed, I see the issue at hand as respecting a request for avoiding public posting of a message that the authors did not intend to be *widely public*, but failed to spot a loophole that allowed their message to be posted on a public log/archive (i.e., Stanford’s). (Indeed, why is that log public?)
A natural tendency to accommodate these not-careful-enough authors
stands in contrast here with potential principles/policies/practices
of maintaining a blog, including the one you pointed out. Still, in my opinion, the violation of these potential editorial principles can be justified
by citing my explicit request (i.e., “blaming” me) and replacing the name of the offended by NAME (or “name withheld”). Ditto for other identifying information. I guess that at this time asking to remove the entire post and the numerous comments is not reasonable.
In addition to respecting a reasonable request of a colleague, out of sheer collegiality, I think that our joint cause will be better served this way.
Whatever could have been achieved wrt NAME, was achieved already,
and I now look at the wider perspective. From that perspective,
given the sensitivity of these issues, respecting the wishes of the victims
and also of the reporters is of paramount importance. Needless to say,
the victims come first, at “infinitely” greater priority than the reporters,
but still the reporters are of priority viz a viz anything else (but the victims)….
Finally, let me point out that you could have written a post of yourself about NAME, without quoting our text in full but rather informing the readers of its contents (esp., the claims it makes wrt existence of reliable evidence regarding unwanted initiate propositions and what these have caused the victims). This would have served your goal of “not keeping silent” jst as well, but without using “my hand” towards your goals.
November 30, 2018 at 12:37 am
turing
Dear Oded,
You, Irit and Ehud have chosen to compose this email and widely share it. Surely it occurred to you that a fully public posting such as this was possible and, indeed, probable. The responsibility for the outcomes (good or bad) of this rests on your shoulders, not Lior’s, and you should not expect it to be taken down. By now this is indexed by Google and so forth.
I am torn about whether I support your actions. On one hand, it seems clear that something should be done regarding Yuval’s behavior (and I do not doubt your accusations). This email is something, which is better than nothing. On the other hand, “online lynchings” lack any semblance of process or proportionality. I certainly hope this is not a model for how sexual harassment allegations should be handled.
Regards,
A junior theory person.
November 30, 2018 at 4:14 am
Oded Goldreich
Dear turing. I was not trying to push the responsibility to Lior, but rather asked him to remove the name of the offender from the copy of our email that he cited. I am well aware, that I have no legal right to ask this, but still think that I do have a moral right to ask this. I do believe that an email can be sent to a wide circulation and readers be asked not to be made totally public. That is, I see a difference between sharing it with relevant people (within our community) and making it available to the wide public (via a public blog). Our failure, as I see it, is in not making this request explicit. I wonder what Lior or others would have done in such a case.
I share your general dilemma about the handling of such cases, when the victims are typically unwilling to file a compliant with some official body that has official juristic mechanisms. But I think that at this case things are quite straightforward, since the two relevant facts we stated were: (1) that proposals that can be reasonably interpreted as intimate were made, and (2) that the impact of these on the victims was devastating (e.g., skip[ping conferences, lectures, and job opportunities). We don’t really need the offender’s perspective wrt (1), unless we believe that the victims are insane, and hat the offender’s view is irrelevant wrt (2). Note that I make no claim regarding the offender’s intentions in the proposals — for this we would need to hear him and maybe cross-examine him — but rather that it was reasonable to interpret the proposals in that way. (Actually, I believe that different interpretations are unreasonable, but this is not part of our accusation.)
November 30, 2018 at 7:17 am
Anonymous
Sorry, but why are you the gatekeeper of who should know this information and who should not? I and many of my friends in the theory community would not have known anything if it weren’t for this blog post because we are not senior, are not close to any of those you chose to e-mail, and are not at Stanford. To be honest, it sounds like you only care about those at prestigious institutions and that you do not care if members of the community who are not at places like Stanford get harassed.
November 30, 2018 at 9:23 am
Oded Goldreich
Just saw this. (I really cannot handle this media…)
I think I answered your question in my last two emails.
Again, I’m not a gatekeeper, but I believe I have some moral rights on my own texts. And we thought that the right action at this time was to call a large group of seniors for actions of various types, per their duties of seniority. We kept the option of wider circulation for later (and recall that none of this is new staff). It is perfectly OK for others to act differently (i.e., make a public statement of their own), but why do they use our text (rather than extract some facts from it) in blunt violation of our wishes?
November 30, 2018 at 9:36 am
Anonymous
Hi Oded.
It might not be new stuff to you (or to those you’ve chosen to inform), but it certainly is very new to a large group of vulnerable people who, arguably, are the ones who actually need this information. As a young female academic who has (very recently) had some sub-optimal interactions with the subject of this post, I would have very much appreciated knowing about the two “big” incidents which seem to have been handled largely behind closed doors.
Maybe this knowledge would have changed my experiences, and the experience of others. Very likely, there is knowledge out there (kept very neatly in the “right” circles) that would prevent future negative experiences I will have, but due to concern for the perpetrators (and the disruption of *their* life/work/family), that information will not reach me in time.
It’s fine that you did not want your text replicated in this public forum, but the initial protests (albeit, which came from Ehud) were regarding how this publicity would affect the subject’s personal life. When will this community start caring about mine?
November 30, 2018 at 10:13 am
Oded Goldreich
I am not Ehud, i’m Oded 🙂
I wonder if you really rear my text carefully. It should have been clear to you that we were deeply concerned about the situation exactly because we care about junior female researchers and the price that they pay, regardless of their affiliation. (I missed the unkind comment re affiliation before, but I fully pardon it since it is clear that we are all very emotional about this issue and for good reasons…)
This specific case is a story that has been going on for years, some institutions took some actions and some did not. I am not aware of the exact details of all, since these institutions kept it secret. Although we did hear first and second hand of the old stories (at the said institutes), we felt that we should not act on them (given that these institutes have supposedly investigated and decided on specific actions), but there are indeed at the background. What called us to action were the accumulation of more recent stories of unwelcomed proposals of intimate nature (or to be more careful — as I’ve been above — proposals that can be reasonably interpreted as having an intimate nature).
At some point, we decided to act, and took a specific course of action (see our posted text, which reports on part of it). Why we did not act before is a good question. It has to do with the fact that his main community only borders ours, with the fact that with time we learned more and more stories, with the fact that it takes time to investigate the stories (while being respectful of the victims), and more. We decided to take a specific course of action. I admitted that I would consider other courses of actions (like a public post) reasonable, but we decided to do it differently. Our considerations are not adequate for a public post.
Given all circumstances, I fail to see why it was so urgent to post our email on a public blog, a day or so after it was sent and without consulting us. And, again, there were also other alternatives. But Lior has had his considerations and acted as he did. I respect it, but still may think that he did a mistake.
Finally, let’s remember that we are all on the same side of the struggle for a better society (or at least better research community), in which junior females will be free from the anxiety of imposing propositions that do not respect their autonomy and hinder their life. Oded
November 30, 2018 at 4:34 pm
Anonymous
I know that you are not Ehud, which is why I qualified my statement with that note.
And you are correct: One day might not make a difference (although, it very well *might*). Rather it is the 10+ years that this has been ongoing as an “open secret” that bothers me. Any vitriol you may have detected in my post was unintended, or at the least, was certainly not directed towards Lior, you, or the other writers of the email. I am well aware that there are good people in this community (you lot included), who are hoping and striving for a better, more inclusive environment. But, please note that what might not seem “urgent” to you *is* exactly that to me, and many people like me. One week — one day — can make the difference to stop an interaction that pushes someone to quit a position (there have been several events that have shaken me enough to be quite close to that). So, while not directly aimed at you, please do excuse my frustration on just now finding out that everything that has happened with this specific case in the last several years could have been prevented if the people involved (again, not just you) were more concerned with the safety of future victims than of the “appropriateness” of the course of action.
December 1, 2018 at 2:57 am
Oded Goldreich
To Anonymous@4:34pm. I do sympathize with your anger and frustration and pardoned you already for being a bit harsh. What was important for me was to clarify where I (and others) stand wrt this annoying phenomenon. We are extremely upset and would do our best to eliminate it. But we do ask for your trust and comradeship, while understanding that this is not a trivial request nor easy to grant.
Regarding your specific points. Yes, it seems that this was going on for many years, but *we* only heard of it a few months ago (maybe a year — I don’t recall). Recall that this is not exactly our community (definitely not mine — I’m doing TOC proper). At some point it down on us that, since it does not seem to stop, we should act. We had to confirm the rumors, and do so without harming the victims, who are not people we know well. Doing so took some time. Then, we tried one action, and it did not seem to yield satisfactory results, and so we went for the current one. Within such a context, another day or a week does not seem that crucial, although there is a non-negligible probability that another abuse will occur exactly at that time period. On the other hand, the odds are not that high (esp., given our second action, which has had a tremendous effect (before the post!); if they were, I’d not say that a day/week does not matter much. You may disagree with my calculations, but please believe me that they are not based on indifference to potential suffering of others. I’d say the same if this was risking my own suffering with the same odds.
Please trust us more. Oded
November 30, 2018 at 1:37 am
Anonymous
Thank you, Lior, for sharing this. I agree with your assessment that junior members of the community, especially students, were largely *not* aware of this situation until now. To a woman at the start of her career in TCS, this sort of information is critical; it disappoints me to see how many would prefer to shelter the accused rather than consider the interests of the wider community.
November 30, 2018 at 4:25 am
Anonymous
“In terms of what your letter or this post will hinder or promote, I will say that it is my belief that propagating information about harassment only among senior colleagues perpetuates a culture of power imbalance where senior faculty hold all the cards. It has been my experience in academia that senior faculty do not always sit down with new trainees and warn them of all the predators they know about, nor have I observed “word of mouth” to be very effective at conferences. For these reasons I will not remove the blog post nor redact it.”
I have nothing more to add, but I think this is a very solid justification for this post. I am a junior woman, and have never personally been warned about harassers. Thank you, Lior, for posting this.
November 30, 2018 at 5:53 am
Oded Goldreich
The question whether we are better off or not with Lior’s post is not the one I raised. I can see PROs and CONs, and short-term vs long-term considerations. Of course, an opinion of a junior female may carry more weight here than that of a senior male, but still…
Anyhow, the question I raised is whether it was OK for Lior to reproduce a letter sent over in restricted (but not private) distribution, without asking for the authors’ content, and to refuse their request to remove or detract it, all in service of what he believes to be the promotion of good. Would it be OK for somebody in my dept to post a message I send on the dept’s distribution list (which includes hundreds of subscribers)? Does the answer change if I explicitly ask in my email not to do so?
I don’t think we should seek categorical answers to such questions, but rather circumstantial ones. In my opinion, in the current circumstances, Lior should have acted as Ehud and I asked. But, I do view his different opinion as legitimate and do not hold it against him. Still, I maintain mine.
I don’t like BLOGs in general, and may not read further posts and respond to them. I will be happy to discuss anything over email (regardless of the number of people being CCed). I see a fundamental difference between corresponding in email (even in a large group) and public posts. Oded Goldreich
December 4, 2018 at 9:21 pm
Anonymous
Dear Oded,
You have defended your decision multiple times in this thread without elaborating on the CONs except that it would negatively affect offender’s family. Shell I assume this is the only CON you have to offer?
It is also enlightening that all the past and present institutions who have or might have taken seret disciplinary action against the said offender have made exact same decision of not making any of it public and keep it tightly wrapped with chosen senior principals. With your continual demands to follow this same pattern to Lior suggests that you are in full agreement with how any such future offenders should be dealt with even if it were to general similar outcome of decade long continuation of behaviour pattern as in this specific case. I’m also not unable to avoid the impression that you and other authors of the email might be OK for such offenders to exist in the community as long as they follow the principles you and other authors have laid out in email and deemed to be sufficient to prevent the damages. This sort of decisions that would affect wide community are clearly being taken in select biased circle without any visibility, review or acceptance of the members for the policies being proposed.
In any case, I’m still interested in list of CONs you have to offer against making this information public.
November 30, 2018 at 11:07 am
Anonymous
I am disheartened to see the tone of some of the comments criticizing Ehud, Irit, and Oded. It is clear to me that they are doing their best to help correct some of the problems in the field with no real personal benefit to them. I am a female undergraduate in computer science, and it has been very uplifting to see such influential researchers spend their time to help minorities in this field. Clearly reasonable people can disagree on what was the optimal course of action, but seeing that several senior people do care about this issue has made me more hopeful about my future in this field. Thank you for your efforts.
November 30, 2018 at 11:52 am
Oded Goldreich
Thanks for these kind words (@11:07am). It does empower me.
But don’t worry, I’m not offended at all by the critiques nor by the tones,
although one might have been offended by some of the remarks.
I view these remarks as demonstrating a feeling of distrust at seniors and/or at males, and I view the problem as being the circumstances that led some to such a distrust. What we need to do is change the circumstances, and in the meanwhile build some trust in one another. Till then, we should not be too taken back by the distrust.
Thanks again for caring about our feelings. Oded
November 30, 2018 at 12:43 pm
lovelace
I’d also like to express my great appreciation for Ehud, Irit, Oded, and Lior for the various ways you have helped and will help junior women in the future with the email (Ehud, Irit, Oded), the blog post (Lior), and all of your sincere discussions in these comments. I make no stance on the appropriateness of the blog post. This comment is meant to show my sincere and tremendous appreciation on the part of a junior female researcher for the effort and care you have shown. Regardless of whether the email was meant to be public, Ehud, Irit, and Oded chose to send it with the knowledge that backlash is likely and *have* (along with Lior) taken that backlash valiantly as demonstrated here in the comments.
Thank you, Ehud, Irit, Oded, and Lior.
November 30, 2018 at 1:59 pm
Josh Benningham
I think Yuval should have been given a chance to respond. I found incredibly unconvincing the four reasons given in the email that he should not be given the chance. I think analogues of those reasons could apply to any case of potential misconduct — one cannot simply repeat the allegations and their impacts as reasons the accused should not have a chance to respond. Certainly blogging about situation makes it reach a much wider audience.
November 30, 2018 at 3:40 pm
Lior Pachter
In terms of Yuval being given a chance to respond:
1. He was sanctioned for his harassment and he did not respond. More women were harassed.
2. A senior colleague confronted him and he did not respond. More women were harassed.
3. He received a letter from conference organizers detailing concerns with his behavior and even then, he did not respond.
After all of these non-responses, in a bid to prevent harassment of more women, three of his colleagues who seem to have been alarmed drafted a letter and sent it to 34 other senior colleagues. The only reasonable thing I can think of to say to Irit Dinur, Ehud Friedgut and Oded Goldreich is thank you. Thank you.
By the way, with the Dinur-Friedgut,-Goldreich letter public Yuval did respond (see above), and his response was that he “must have been tone deaf”. Given that he was sanctioned and confronted and still harassed women… I have to say I don’t really understand what he means. He also added that he collaborated with many women which is another way to say “please think of all the women i *didn’t* sexually harass!” He also apparently regrets not following some principle and he did apologize to some conference organizers.
What he did *not* do is articulate any regret for what his actions did to the women he harassed (on these very pages one of them talks about how he made her feel worthless and negatively affected her self esteem), voice any concern for their welfare, nor apologize to them. That seems to me to be a much bigger problem than whether or not he should have been given (yet) another chance to respond.
November 30, 2018 at 11:39 pm
Josh Benningham
Good points. You have changed my mind, and now I agree with you. One nitpick though — it seems Yuval did show some regret when he said “I will regretfully rescind my acceptance to deliver a keynote talk in the conference that sparked their message”. His email is weird though. It seems like he is taking some responsibility but not really…
November 30, 2018 at 10:52 pm
Not Disclosing
I thank Anima for her courage to give a public testimony.
With that testimony, any right, if anybody even had, to request Lior to redact Yuval Peres name is gone. Irit, Ehud, and Oded, we are thankful to you to take concrete action to bring the issue to the community, but please do realize that as soon as one of the victims made her testimony public, the issue has become public, and none of us have any right to request Lior for confidentiality. Further, Yuval Peres has to bear any consequences, whether it is his family finds out or his close friends (including non-scientists) do. Certainly Anima had to suffer the harassment, and her family and friends can also find out, and that is why her courage is worthy of our gratitude.
December 1, 2018 at 2:39 am
Oded Goldreich
I will be addressing Josh’s comments at length later, but let me start by replying to “Not Disclosing”. We did not ask for comments of others to be removed; I view such a request as utterly immoral. We asked for our own 5text to be removed or detracted. Now, I admit that the publicity has had some benefits — most importantly, in my opinion, empowering victims and potential victims (not only of NAME). But I do see a problems with a practice of not respecting requests of authors’ regarding their text, even when this is done in the promotion of good. I am not saying that this should be disallowed categorically, but rather that one should carefully examine the circumstances. I still maintain that in this case it would have been better to anonymize the text, and this can still be done and affect future google searches. But let me turn to a much more important issue.
I am not satisfied by Lior’s answer to Josh, and by Josh accepting it. As far as I’m concern, the main argument is as follows (reproduced and augmented from a prior comment of mine): In this case [as well as similar ones] things are quite straightforward, since the two relevant facts are:
(1) that proposals that can be reasonably interpreted as intimate were made, and (2) that the impact of these on the victims was devastating (e.g., skipping conferences, lectures, and job opportunities).
We don’t really need the offender’s perspective wrt (1), unless we believe that all victims are insane, and the offender’s view is irrelevant wrt (2).
Note that I make no claim regarding the offender’s intentions in the proposals — to support such a claims we would need to hear him and maybe cross-examine him — but rather claim that it was reasonable to interpret the proposals as intimate/sexual. (Actually, I believe that different interpretations are unreasonable, but this is not part of my claim (1).)
To summarize, the reason that confirmation is not really necessary is that the claimed facts are so simple/elementary that verification is a futile exercise in formalities.[I am best know for research in cryptography that promoted use of precise/formal definitions, however I never saw definitions/formalism as a goal (but rather as a tool to clarify complex issues).]
Second, confirmation is not possible since the victims refused to disclose their identity, whereas providing even basic details of the specific proposal
(e.g., where and when) would disclose their identity (at least to NAME), or at the very least they were reasonable in fearing that this may happen 9and may have negative consequences on their well-being).
This is a crucial point that refers to all cases of sexual harassment. Combined with the claim that confirmation is not really necessary (when a handful of people testify of the same basic/elementary behavior), this means that if we seek a social change then we should not insist on the futile formal exercise.
The mention of the social is not a coincidence. In contrast to the imaginary perception (currently promoted by Neo-liberalism) by which the foregoing violation can be understood in terms of interaction between two individuals who live in outer space, these violations take place within a social context. It is not X making an inappropriate proposal to Y, where both may be considered equal regarding the proposal and/or the situation. It is a senior-male making an inappropriate proposition to a junior-female in a social context in which seniority carries power and the male-female axis is aligned with power relations in the society at large. Just try to imagine the scenario of a junior-female making an inappropriate proposal to a senior-male. All this is meant to say that one should not be surprised that victims of sexual harassment are extremely reluctant to complain. Indeed, saints as Anima and do exist, but one cannot base a social order on saints. The fact is that all those who have informed us of such proposals in the past (and a few who informed us in private following our email to the selected group) preferred to remain unanimous.
December 1, 2018 at 3:28 am
Saint Thomas
“saints” as Anima? Oded, it seems you are being sarcastic here.
December 1, 2018 at 5:59 am
Oded Goldreich
Did not mean to be sarcastic. Why do you think so? Unless I misunderstood, she came out public saying she was harassed by NAME. If this is not the case, then i take the saint label back. In any case, what I meant to say is that we cannot rely on people doing such heroic deeds.
December 1, 2018 at 6:40 am
Doubting Thomas
The victims who chose to be anonymous are not less saintly or less heroic. It is their choice and let us respect that choice.
December 1, 2018 at 8:12 am
Oded Goldreich
I think either you or I are confusing saints with victims. I do respect and am empathic of all victims, but I was using saints to refer to those who chose to file a complaint, with no intention to disrespect those who did not (i.e., not being a saint is being human…). In any case, my point is that social order cannot and should not rely on extraordinary actions (as filing complaints in current circumstances).
December 1, 2018 at 3:53 am
Oded Goldreich
THE LAST TWO SENTENCES OF MY LAST COMMENT GOT DISTOTRED. I MEANT TO WRITE: Indeed, saints as Anima and the victim-that-complained-to-the-employer-of-NAME do exist, but one cannot base a social order on saints. The fact is that all those who have informed us of such proposals in the past (and a few who informed us in private following our email to the selected group) preferred to remain unanimous.
December 1, 2018 at 9:58 am
Not Disclosing
You certainly have copyright to your original text, but not on the information. I am with you that the entire letter should not be reproduced without the consent of at least one author. Though your objection is not with the text, since at some point you permit Lior to reproduce the text but redact Yuval’s name. So your objection is with the information, and the information does not belong to you. You could have a moral right if you had requested confidentiality (of the information) from the original recipients, but even there, your intend was that the original recipients disseminate the information as they deemed fit to protect the future junior female scientists. One of the recipient deemed fit to post it on a public mailing list, and a reader of the public mailing list (Lior) deemed it fit to post it on a blog.
Bottom line of my opinion is that you have moral and as a matter of fact, even legal right to ask Lior to remove your text. You created it, and you have copyright on it.
Redacting Yuval’s name is not your call though.
December 1, 2018 at 10:20 am
Oded Goldreich
I would be fine with him stating the information as something he has read on a distribution list, and would have appreciated him getting in touch with us and consulting about that matter before posting anything. If the information is public, supposedly regardless of our email, then why does he need to rely on us and post our email? If it relies on our email, then he does need our consent, since it should have been clear (although we neglected to state it explicitly) that we did not intend it to be posted on a public place such as a blog. We did not say that the original recipients were free to disseminate as they deem fit, and none of them understood it so. Some asked for permissions, and — if I recall right — at some point we said that people should feel free to forward to friends etc. No recipient (till now… as far as I know…) has posted it on a public mailing list. Two have posted it on a dept-mailing list, and one of these lists is logged on a public domain, a fact that neither the poster nor we knew….
Before proceeding, let me stress that we are holding a discussion of a secondary point, which I do care about too, but no reader should get the idea as if I don’t see it as secondary to the actual contents of this entire thread. Still, the question I pose is whether this is the behavior we want to see (wrt confidentiality of emails), in general and in such cases.
I think that adopting the norm that one can post any contents that one received by mistake, without consulting the sender, is going to hurt the cause of making our community safe from unwelcomed propositions of intimate nature and other forms of inappropriate behavior, since email discussions regarding violations play a role in our struggle and protecting their non-publicity may be important.
December 1, 2018 at 10:15 pm
Not Disclosing
Oded, I get your viewpoint.
Usually, my understanding is, when content is given (your email), that still belongs to the author. But the information in the content belongs to recipient as much as the sender, unless confidentiality is expected.
The original email you wrote, it gives no expectation of information being confidential.
My viewpoint is that it is wrong to violate your content rights by replicating your email. But I also see that your primary objection is to the information, since you requested to redact Yuval Peres name.
Once a victim has publicly testified, then even if confidentiality of the information was expected, that expectation is now lost.
Again, I agree that Lior is wrong by violating your copyright, both morally and even legally in some jurisdictions. Once you have given him the notice to remove the content, which you clearly have numerous time above, he should remove your content, and rewrite the information in his own words and form.
December 1, 2018 at 3:44 am
Tom
I agree with Oded that their step was reasonable and there was no immediate need for public stone pelting which Lior seems to be fond of. It would be good if it stops all future harassments but at the same time it may create an unnecessary distrust between senior male researchers and junior female researchers. Capital punishment has not ended rapes and mob lynching wont stop sexual harassment. Another point I want to make is about mental harassment (not of sexual nature) which young male researchers face sometimes from senior male researchers. Although TOC community in general is friendly, there are bullies who demoralize young members. In my opinion, this is not “less serious” than sexual harassments, I know people who decided to switch to other field by being subjected to this.
December 1, 2018 at 6:37 am
Oded Goldreich
Tom’s comment finds me on the guilty side. I do recall a few times I was too aggressive in seminars or in voicing critique in person. I was carried away by my passion regarding contents and presentation (see http://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~oded/passion.html). I later tried to correct the damage, in face to face discussion, and also tried to be more careful in the future. Oded
December 1, 2018 at 6:51 am
Tom
Dear Oded, please do not be guilty. You are a much loved member in the TCS community. It is important to criticize, give honest feedback even if it is harsh. But what I pointed out is based on a few stories where these boundaries were transgressed. I understand on one hand, seniors should be thoughtful and considerate towards juniors, on the other hand juniors should be resilient enough and should not take every criticism to heart. Oded, thank you for spending so much time in community service. Hope these discussions help all of us to have better behaviors. My heart goes out to the victims, to Yuval, to Oded, Irit, Ehud, Lior. Let there be understanding and empathy. in our heart. I am sorry if I hurt you or Lior.
December 1, 2018 at 8:15 am
Oded Goldreich
You did not hurt me at all. I took offense at none of the reactions I read here, but I did not read all — I only read those who replied to my own comments, since I felt obliged to do so. In general, I have principled as well as practical reservations regarding participating in blog discussions. But once I’m forced to place a comment, I feel obliged to answer candid responses.
December 2, 2018 at 12:15 pm
Anonymous
Thank you for posting this. As someone who also had some unpleasant interactions with YP as a female graduate student a decade ago, and as someone who watched him invited a female undergraduate to his hotel room, I have to say I appreciate this being posted on a public blog. This may have been an open secret, but it certainly wasn’t known to me or my friends at the time, and I wish it had been.
I Googled “Yuval Peres sexual harassment” only a few months ago. I’ve always wondered what lines, exactly, he’s crossed in his career. I have to confess that I’m bothered that even after all this publicity, I still do not know. It’s all very hush-hush: the “big cases” were apparently settled behind closed doors. Until this blog post, I never even knew (although I certainly surmised) that other people had had the same experience.
I don’t know what the right answer here is, and I don’t like online lynch mobs, but certainly in this case, the publicity is way overdue.
December 2, 2018 at 2:54 pm
Take Legal Action
I feel very bad for all of the women who have been negatively affected by Yuval (ranging from a single bad experience to possibly ruining their academic careers). I have been thinking about this for a while, and I cannot understand/rationalize why Microsoft did not fire Yuval already after the first incident was reported, nor at any point in time over the last ten years. My understanding is that multiple women have reported their negative encounters (unwanted advances/sexual harassment) with Yuval to Microsoft and to the University of Washington over the last ten years. My understanding is that UW has reacted very quickly, and cut their ties to MSR, but Microsoft is still employing Yuval to this day.
How can the HR and legal departments from Microsoft justify this? You have credible reports that a person has repeatedly made unwanted sexual advances to young women (possibly sexually harassed them – although I am not a lawyer), possibly shown the behavior of a sexual predator (although I am not a lawyer), and he does not stop this behavior after he is told do so, and still, he is employed by Microsoft to this day. I believe that Microsoft is liable for employing such a person, and creating a work environment where such a person interacts with young women, in particular after Microsoft has been notified multiple times about his behavior? Think about all the female employees, PhD students, interns, visitors, etc. that were at MSR and have interacted with Yuval after Microsoft already knew about Yuvals previous behvior. Microsoft has “endangered” all of them!
I think, all of the women who have been negatively affected by Yuval (while at Microsoft) can sue Yuval personally and Microsoft as a company, and they would have a pretty strong case, given that it now seems clear there was not just a single incidence, but multiple cases that have been reported to Microsoft. Of course, I understand if some or all of them women do not want to come forward and/or go through such a legal process.
December 2, 2018 at 3:52 pm
Take Legal Action
PS: To clarify, by “suing Microsoft” I mean “suing for compensatory and punitive damages” on the order of hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars…
December 2, 2018 at 7:20 pm
Anonymous
I agree and I think there should be a formal inquiry into all the organizations and people that protected a known sexual predator whose results are made public. This reminds me of the case if Larry Nassar who was protected by officials presumably because he was a big deal.
December 2, 2018 at 4:11 pm
Anon
It doesn’t do you credit to speculate like this…
December 4, 2018 at 9:55 pm
Anonymous
Speculation is only occurring because the corporations, institutes as well as the authors of the email presenting themselves as defender of the victims have decided that public is too naive to know all the details and those details must be kept within the circle of few people that they feel wise and of higher intellect to handle it “correctly”. This has been cause in virtually every sexual harasser being let go with slap on the hand and run his operations for decades. It is sad to see this being continued here in exact similar vein while authors of the email spin this as some sort of moral obligations for themselves to continue this old ritual without justification or clear reasoning beyond invoking trivial legalities such as being copyright holder of the text.
December 2, 2018 at 5:13 pm
Lany
A very tragic situation, most of all for the victims who lived through these experiences once and are now probably reliving them mentally again.
Can someone with the knowledge of the details explain when the five additional cases mentioned in the original posting happened? Before or after YP was sanctioned by MSR and UW?
December 2, 2018 at 7:33 pm
Fire Yuval
I have seen that bastard drool over young female researchers for sooo long. Despite appearing to be extremely sweet on the surface, he is a dick to you unless you are a female or a genius male. Knowing him for over a decade, I strongly believe that he will never change his behavior and will only refine his approaches in the future and might still get away very cleverly. The only solution to this is to get him fired from Microsoft. Maybe a bunch of us could contact Eric Horvitz about our experiences with Yuval or sign a collective petition to get Yuval fired.
Its so strange that no strong action is being taken against him despite all the shit he does.
December 3, 2018 at 1:09 am
Anima
I am so disappointed that most of the comments focus so heavily on pseudo intellectual debate on privacy and moral rights to reveal yuval peres as a sexual predator. Very few acknowledged the big stress I have to undergo with these public statements (and a big thank you to ones who could emphasize with it).
I am doing this on behalf of all the women what are unable to do so and we all deserve justice. I want to put an end to how he is abusing his position to prey on young women who have no idea.
I didn’t grow up in the CS theory community. I was an outsider who found interesting connections between statistical physics and machine learning, pretty much on my own. I was looking forward to discussing this with yuval. I had no freaking clue! No one warned me. He was free to visit all Microsoft labs and talk to Microsoft Faculty Fellows and other outsiders. I know have a better picture of the extent of abuse. I wish someone like Lior existed when I was younger but better late than never!
December 3, 2018 at 3:08 am
Anon
Dear Anima, we are sorry for what happened to you and would like to ensure that women members in our community are protected. But there is reason why we are debating about privacy and moral rights to reveal yuval in public. I think Oded-Irit-Ehud’s action was reasonable and as a natural next step one could forward the email to all women members in the community. With workshops like women in theory, women in probability, women in ML, we can easily create such mailing lists and start a whisper campaign against the persons who cross ethical lines. We can also give them warnings through their friends and employers. We can keep watch on their behaviors. If these actions does not stop their misconducts, we can go for stricter actions. What we do not want is to do justice in a way that is similar to mob lynching. Everyone deserves to present their side of the story. Yuval is surely not the most evil, mysoginistic, predator guy out there. So it is natural to give him another chance to rectify his mistakes and to say sorry. Killing a criminal would surely stop the crimes he would do in future, but is it the right way to deal with criminals and crimes?
December 3, 2018 at 12:43 pm
Nicolas Bray
One thing you’ll notice about this “lynch mob” situation is that Yuval Peres is very, very much still alive.
I’d suggest that you go google image search the words “lynch mob” and consider how those people might have felt about their brutal, horrific deaths being compared to someone having unpleasant but true things said about them.
And then feel very bad about yourself, as you should.
December 3, 2018 at 4:39 am
Gabriel Nivasch
Dear Anima,
First, let me offer my sympathies to you. The sexual harassment that you, as well as the other women, underwent, was wrong. Sexual harassment can cause women to abandon the CS community. Hence, it can also hurt the CS community itself. We have a moral obligation to stand up against it.
I’m sure the overwhelming majority of the “silent readers” of this post agree with the above, and feel similar sympathies for the affected women, even if they didn’t publicly express them.
Now, regarding the other topic of discussion here in the comments.
The discussion was whether the letter written by Friedgut et al should have been made public or not. Two of the letter’s authors are unhappy that Lior made the letter public. (Strangely, they tried to make the letter sort-of half-public, without realizing that that had a very slim chance of working.)
My personal opinion is that, after having unsuccessfully tried other things, and after carefully checking all the facts, going public was the right thing. It was important.
But nevertheless, even if the authors are now angry at Lior for making the letter public without their consent, they still were the ones who wrote the letter. And they did it in order to stand up for you and the other harassment victims.
December 3, 2018 at 8:00 am
Anonymous
Yeah, no one warned me, either, and I was definitely in the same community as Yuval! People watched really sketchy interactions involving myself and my friends, and no one ever said anything.
Thank you for signing your name. I’m not part of these communities anymore (I quit academia after my post doc) and I’m a bit hesitant to do so, but perhaps I should.
December 3, 2018 at 2:33 am
eventhisoneistaken
Do you really think firing him is sufficient? What if he gets a job somewhere else?
December 3, 2018 at 4:04 am
Anon2
It is natural to be empathetic to one’s friend, even if he/she is accused. This is a natural human tendency, not a “white powerful male only” phenomenon. If you know about the Avital Ronell case (a feminist woman professor who is accused to sexually harass a male grad student), quite a few leading feminist women friends of her supported her. Similar thing happened with french me too movement. Some interesting things are coming out in this issue 1. Harasser often thinks he/she does not have evil intention. Proper counseling is needed here. 2. Only friends discussing the matter may not help. One may not take the friends seriously. The proper course of action should be of reprimanding through both friends and non-friend colleagues and employers. The idea of creating a list of potential harassers and mailing it through women-only /community specific lists seems to be reasonable. Public blogging and social media shaming should be the final step, not the knee jerk reaction step. This is not to protect the accused (every member including the accused deserves fair treatment) but to ensure that the atmosphere in the community does not become vitriolic due to other factors such as difference of opinions and ideologies, professional rivalry etc.
December 3, 2018 at 6:39 am
APostDoc
It took thoudsands years of civilization to go from “the rule of the mob” to “the rule of the law”. As a kind, we have learnt through awfull examples, like McChartism and witch hunts, that the best way to trial and punish guilty people is through institutions of law, after a procedure that might be lenghty and feel cumbersome but preserves the rights of both accusers and the accused.
Of all the people, it is pretty astonishing to see a university professor reverting back to public shaming and witch hunting as a way to achieve justice. But it is too risky to point out, so ‘ll just join the crowd, and cheer, and watch it burn.
December 3, 2018 at 8:37 am
Igor Rivin (@igriv)
In case you did not notice, Lior’s life mission is reverting to the rule of the mob. Sad, but there you have it.
December 4, 2018 at 10:16 pm
Anonymous
No one is against “fair trial” clause. But for the fair trial to happen, the charges must be brought in public, trial must proceed in public and judgement must be handed out in public with appropriate sentencing or absolving of guilt to the accused. In this case, like many others, no details are being made public, no one knows what proofs or defences occurred and no one is certain what exact punishment was handed out to the accused, if any, by his employer. It is customary to keep some details of the case such as names of victims confidencial but here we are talking about secret court that places itself as higher above the public eye. The entire self-appointed judge and jury system has apparently decided it needs to execute such that public is deliberately kept unaware with any of the accusations as well as outcomes of the proceedings.
December 3, 2018 at 8:01 am
Anonymous
Whoops. That last comment was supposed to go on here.
December 3, 2018 at 9:04 am
Dana Moshkovitz
Back in 2007, while I was a PhD student at Weizmann, Yuval Peres asked to meet me to discuss my post-doc. Microsoft Research was one of the top places for post-docs in theoretical computer science, so I met him. He showed me a presentation of his research, discussed problems he was thinking about, and talked about Microsoft Research.
Then he offered me wine (I refused), tried to sit too close to me (I kept my distance) and grabbed my hand, twice (I said I was uninterested and pulled my hand back). I couldn’t believe this was happening. I left immediately. Later I reported the incident to relevant people at Microsoft.
Several months later I learned that Yuval Peres became the head of Microsoft’s theory group in Redmond.
Seeing Yuval’s behavior, I suspected that the incident with me was part of a larger pattern of behavior of his. When I was a post-doc at Princeton in 2009 I wrote a public essay describing what happened and urged the relevant people to take action. I didn’t mention Yuval by name because I didn’t want to hurt his family, but I did disclose his name to leaders of our research community.
When I was an assistant professor at MIT, I learned of two other cases of harassment by Yuval, before and after mine. The one that happened a few years after mine was particularly painful to me, because it felt preventable, and because it caused a lot of direct damage to the young student involved.
I suspected that there were other incidents, but didn’t know for sure until I received the email from Ehud Friedgut, Irit Dinur and Oded Goldreich last week. I’m relieved that the information is now public, and hope that it will prevent future incidents.
=======
This is the public essay I wrote in 2009:
My Personal Experience with Sexual Harassment
In 2004 I was 21 and in my first year of PhD, still at Tel-Aviv University. My advisor at the time sent me to the US for a month-and-half “tour”. It was quite an experience for me. It influenced my life in many ways I did not expect. Some of those ways were quite unfortunate. I was too young, and it was very premature. I met many new people on this trip. Some of them were very nice to me. I stayed in people’s homes and got invited to dinners, parties and hikes.
Three years later, in 2007, I got an email from one of the people that I met during the 2004 trip. In 2007 I was a year away from finishing my PhD at the Weizmann Institute, and that person wanted to meet me regarding my post-doc. That person was a professor who was very nice to me back in 2004. In the few days that I spent where he was, he invited me to dinner with his family, asked me to join him and his colleagues on some near-by hike, explained mathematical stuff to me, introduced me to people, and so on. I had no connection with him since 2004.
Following his email in 2007, I met this man at some coffee shop near his parents’ house. He had arrived from the US just a few hours earlier. He had some presentation of his research that he showed me and he talked to me about the place he was at and the people there.
At some point he said that the coffee shop was too loud, and asked me if it would be ok to continue our conversation in his family’s house. I agreed [I was at his house in the US; I met his family].
When we got to the house, things started to become weird. He suggested a glass of wine. I told him I never drink. He suggested “just epsilon”. I refused.
I sat on the sofa, because I thought he would sit on the armchair. He came to sit on the sofa next to me. I sat as far as I could, on the very edge of the sofa. I was unsure what was going on.
He continued to show me the presentation, and that was ok. Then he started talking about 2004, telling me how much I impressed him.
He grabbed my hand. I took away my hand, telling him that I did not want that. I think that I was shivering and my voice trembled as well. At that point it was already clear what was going on, and I just could not believe it was actually happening.
He grabbed my hand for the second time, telling me that it was “ok”. It was not, but it was sort of weird, because it felt just like my father’s hand. I took my hand away again.
I looked at my watch and told him, in what I thought to be a somewhat theatrical gesture; that it was too late and I had to go, and I went out of there as fast as I could. My car was parked right next to his house, and I walked fast. He followed me outside, and then he stopped.
He told me that he was sorry, he misinterpreted my behavior.
I was quite stunned by this last remark. That man had invited me to a “job interview”. He had pretended it was a job interview for almost the entire meeting. I acted like a person in a job interview, which I thought I was, until I realized otherwise. This “I must have misinterpreted your behavior” is outrageous. [And it is a bad cliché.]
Each and every instinct I had told me to ignore this remark and just get away from there as fast as I could. But it was outside, and I was next to my car with my keys in my hand, so I figured he would not be able to harm me. So I asked him what exactly he could misinterpret in my behavior.
He told me that nothing; that it was something in 2004.
This only added to my astonishment. There could not have been anything to misinterpret in 2004, because I could never think of that man (married, father to children, twice my age, professor) in a romantic sense. More than that, the very thought that someone could attribute such intents to my 21 year old self simply frightened me.
It was quite a trauma for me, because this experience shook my very foundations: it undermined my trust in people. Fortunately for me, my family and friends reacted very well, and that helped preventing any poisonous thoughts that could have arose.
But this experience was interesting. It made me understand, immediately, what most people never understand: that sexual harassment is not about sex, and it is not about love. Sexual harassment is about hunting down. And both parties obey the rules of hunt. I felt trapped, I was terrified and I ran away. He had the patience and the sensitivity of a hunter. It was not the sensitivity of a lover, by the way. The difference is that a lover cares.
What are even more interesting than the general principle are the specifics of this concrete case: the man, and me, and the circumstances that led to this evening. Mostly I do not know, and I would not speculate. What is clear is that the man did a fundamental mistake: he had some impression of me, and he mistaken it with my-real-flash-and-blood-self. I would expect a person with several tens of years of life experience not to make such harmful “mistakes”.
But he did, and I got hurt, and I had to decide how I wanted to handle this. The first thing I did when I got home was to tell my family and my advisor. But then the question was what I wanted to do next.
First, there is the legal aspect. As far as I understand, and I do not have any sort of legal education, what that man did is against the Israeli law. The relevant law is called “the law for equality of opportunities in work” from 1988, with corrections from 1995 and 1998. The law references “the law for prevention of sexual harassment” from 1998. The law forbids a job giver, someone acting on behalf of the job giver, or any other employee, to perform “sexual harassment” in a person seeking a job. “Sexual harassment” is any one of several acts. One of these acts is making offers of a sexual nature when the person in question showed that he/she is not interested in such offers. I advise those that are interested to look up these laws and read them, as well as the legal work that was done around them. It is very interesting.
There is also the ethical aspect. Institutes, universities and large corporations usually have detailed ethic codes that address sexual harassment. While I did not check the ethics code of the particular place that man was at, I assume that his actions violate this code as well.
I strongly felt that this man should face what he did. This is morally true and this is simple common-sense. However, I did not feel that I should be the one directly confronting that man, nor was I interested in such a role.
What I decided to do was to write what happened to the people who were in the appropriate position at the place where this man was. I thought that they were the best people to handle this, both because of their position and because of their long acquaintance with the man. I also had some presumption about these people; I thought that they were “good people”. So, I asked for their intervention.
I decided not to file charges against that man, because I felt that this situation can still be judged in the realm of relationships between people and ethics, rather than that of law. I also wanted to avoid any sort of fuss around this, for my sake.
Shortly after I sent the email to those people, they sent me a brief response which I liked. It said that they were very concerned about what happened and they were looking into it. The email ended with “take care”. I found this response human and sensitive, as well as practical and to the point, and I was glad that I decided to handle things the way I did.
I never heard from those people again.
A few months later I learned that the man was “promoted” to an influential position. In retrospect, I guess that everyone, but me, already knew about this “promotion” at the time that everything happened.
I find it extremely strange, though, that it did not truly alert anyone that one of the first things that that man did with the power that was placed in his hands was what he did that evening in Israel.
I had no connection with that man or with those people since 2007. In the two years that passed since, I happened to see the man, unexpectedly and from distance, two or three times.
Why do I write this essay now? Because I can.
There was some prosaic trigger: someone said to me – in a completely neutral setting – this awful word “epsilon” [it’s awful only when used to neglect something that is non negligible], for the second time in my life, and I almost choked. I was amazed that I almost choked, that it still bears such influence on me. But the deeper reason is that now is the first time that I can write this text in this form. It took time, it took a change of scenery, and it took independence.
I already had all the ideas that appear in this text a few days after this whole thing happened. But I could never write this text in this form then; just like I probably would not have written this text in this form if I had written it in a later point of my life.
I dedicated a lot of thought to what would be the “right” way to handle this.
I do not know whether this text is this “right” way, but I do not know what else I can do. I believe that I exhausted the direct ways to handle this.
And I believe that it should be handled, and it should be handled properly.
What is “Proper Handling”?
In my opinion, any sort of “proper handling” must consist of:
(1) Acknowledgement:
Acknowledgment of my position and my viewpoint as reflected in this essay, and — much more importantly — acceptance of the probable truth of this essay. I made efforts to tell the story exactly the way it happened. Some people, like my parents, who witnessed me coming back home upset and distracted after this happened, or my advisor to whom I sent an email right away and who had a long conversation with me on the phone about the incident, have no problem accepting what I told them as truth. They saw the immediate outcome, and they know me very closely and are very well aware of my reliability. For other people, especially people who do not know me, accepting this essay might be difficult. From those people I only hope for kindness and good judgment.
(2) Reaction:
When I wrote this essay I decided that I was willing to risk my privacy if I can use my case to help myself and others. I figured out that what happened already had some unfortunate practical implications on my life, as I tried to keep my distance both from the man and from the people who chose not to handle the incident properly: I missed lectures that I wanted to hear (when that man was the speaker), turned down invitations to give talks (I did not want to be that man’s guest again), I did not apply to certain post-doc positions (I did not want that man or those people to be my bosses).
Basically, what happened was that I was forced into this traumatic, undesirable incident. Then, instead of this matter being handled immediately, letting me move on with my life, I had to move on with my life knowing that I have to be careful of certain people. That’s no way to live. And I expect that living like this in the future will lead to even more undesired practical implications on my life. That’s unfortunate. I care a lot about my life.
I think that some action must be taken. What happened indicates a severe ethical failure of a person who is in an influential position. It indicates bad judgment, and it indicates abuse of power. This sort of things is dangerous, and I do not think that we should underestimate them.
I do not think that we should overestimate them either. I do not know whether this man had ever done something like this before, whether he thought of doing something like this before, or what happened to his “thought process” following this incident. All I know is what happened in 2007.
I think that the people in the appropriate position should react exactly to what happened, and do so effectively. And any sort of reaction must take appropriate measures against something like this ever happening again.
In addition, I think that we, as a community, must do something in the broader sense (more on this is in the “reflections” section below).
Some Reflections
I was “sexually harassed”. “It happened to me.” Of course, to use this term “sexual harassment” and say that “it happened to me” is artificial. There was never an “it” that happened to me. There was just one man who did something that he should not have done. But I think that there is an “it” such as “sexual harassment”. I think so because I felt it, strongly. I experienced “sexual harassment”. I also think that there is an “it” as “sexual harassment” because there should be an “it” here. This is something that we, mathematicians, do: we invent imaginary concepts if they help us explain the world better. I think that there is “sexual harassment” because the horrifying feeling that you walked right into a dangerous “trap”, is something that is not captured by the definition of “courtship”, because the feeling that someone misused the trust that you put in him/her because of his/her position, is not part of normal relationships between a young person and an older, influential person.
I think that it is a good mental exercise to try putting yourself in the shoes of someone who experiences sexual harassment, to try to understand. Of course, if you did not experience something, even if you try real hard to imagine how it is like, you are bound to miss the most trivial things. But, I still think that this is an important exercise. I also recommend the following intellectual exercises: What would you do if your child/close-family-member-you-feel-responsibility-to/ told you something like what I wrote? What would you do if your student told you something like this? Your friend? What would you do instead of those people who got the letter from me in 2007? What do you do as a bystander?
First of all, it is my strong conviction that each and every one of us, male or female, and all of us as a community, has to understand sexual harassment. In particular, we have to understand sexual harassment in academia. Keep in mind that academia is based on strong authority/mentorship relations (e.g. professor-student) among people who are [typically] adults [though usually there is a significant age difference].
Like with every concept we encounter, we should look at “sexual harassment”, we should wonder what it means, [and in this case, since we are talking about an inherently-social problem] we should talk about it.
And we should root it out. We must.
It should have been clear to this man that he should not do what he did, and it should have been clear to him, even if he lacked the wisdom to understand it by himself.
It would have been clear to him if this was the “status quo”, if this was “common knowledge”.
I thought that it was, and I think that it is for most of the people that I know. But what this evening, and the conversations that I had with people because of it, taught me, is that it is not sufficiently clear.
It is not sufficiently clear even to highly intelligent people, and even to people that I care a lot about their opinion.
And it could have been clearer to almost all the people I know.
December 3, 2018 at 12:49 pm
Anon
Dana, I am so sorry that you have also been harassed by Yuval. I cannot begin to imagine how this must have felt at the time, and what you went through!
Also: thank you also for your courage to share your story publicly. This will help other women, and it helps bolster the case against Yuval and Microsoft.
What is interesting to me, is that not only is there a pattern of bad behavior on Yuval’s side over many (10+) years – but also on Microsoft’s side. If I understand this correctly, there have been multiple incidents, now at least going back to 2007, where Microsoft has been alerted about an incident, and decided not to take action against Yuval. And in some cases they did not even get back to the women, perhaps hoping that they would give up by themselves. Given the size of the Microsoft Corporation, this is truly unfathomable (but I guess not unheard of).
December 3, 2018 at 4:34 pm
Anon
Dana,I’m sorry about your experience and thank you for your essay. This is one of the most insightful I have read about this issue, and really gives a powerful perspective about the importance and magnitude of this problem in our community. I hope we can move quickly toward a fair, just, and empathetic solution.
December 3, 2018 at 9:38 am
a theorist
Thank you for writing this, Dana. Thanks also to Anima.
And thanks to Irit, Ehud, and Oded.
December 3, 2018 at 11:30 am
Ehud Friedgut
Dana, thanks very much for your courage to tell your story in public!
If I had to put an example in a textbook on this topic, an example that exemplifies the total imbalance in power between the parties involved, this would be it. When is a person more vulnerable than when their job application is being considered? And how obtuse and indecent does one have to be to make a pass at someone who is at their mercy (professionally) at that point?
Kudos to you for getting up and leaving immediately, and for reporting it to his boss. To this day I am bewildered that he wasn’t fired for this. In retrospect, that would probably have been a much better outcome for him than the path he’s currently walking down.
December 4, 2018 at 8:16 am
Anon
Dana: I think that you are a brave woman and that you did exactly the right thing in all respects!
You are not a prophet and shouldn’t chastise yourself for not doing more at the time.
Ehud: I respect you but I think that you let the cat out of the box.
The whole purpose of the public letter (as you halfheartedly admit) was to expedite the sacking of Yuval.
It may be a legitimate cause under the circumstances (I’m not in a position to make a judgement) but you guys should be ready to admit that openly.
Oded (and Ehud): I’m unimpressed from you failing to realize the inevitable effect of sending a mass email on such a sensitive topic. Every 10 year old girl understands it. Are you playing dumb or what?
N.B.
I’m not in the CS/probability community and wasn’t exposed to this filth until recently
December 3, 2018 at 2:12 pm
Marnie Dunsmore
“To this day I am bewildered that he wasn’t fired for this.”
Really?
Lawsuit claims sexual harassment rife in Microsoft’s ‘boys’ club atmosphere’
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/13/microsoft-sexual-harassment-lawsuit-lacklustre-response
December 3, 2018 at 2:59 pm
Anon
Wow. I did not know about this lawsuit (even though, if I had seen the headline, I would have read the article).
This is horrifying…
December 3, 2018 at 3:12 pm
For the men who don't work with women
If more men worked with women, if women felt that they were treated with respect, taken seriously, and that they had no problem working with people, then they would not be so afraid to say no to a dinner or swimming or whatever invitation (not that inappropriate invitations should be issued).
The problem is that many men don’t work with women, or they work with them on paper but in practice treat them worse than their male mentees/collaborators.
I can think of plenty of examples at both universities and at Microsoft. Just take a look at the group that Yuval is part of. There is not even one woman there and some of the researchers in that group don’t have even a single paper co-authored with a woman (or very few). Why? These are not people that started publishing yesterday.
Women are afraid because they feel isolated and the people who treat them like shit and ignore and dismiss them are just as much to blame for having created this environment.
December 3, 2018 at 8:36 pm
Anonymous
I’ve never had trouble being taken seriously, and I certainly didn’t accept invitations to swimming or anything obviously inappropriate.
But there’s often a power imbalance other than male/female. If you’re invited to dinner by a really influential person in your area and there are going to be other professors there, should you go? Even if your previous experience leads you to suggest that the person inviting you might have something in mind that you might not? It’s a hard balancing act.
December 3, 2018 at 10:27 pm
Anon
Actually, the theory group at Microsoft was created thanks to Jennifer Chayes, who also led the group for many years before moving to Boston. She is now the head of the Microsoft Research branches in Boston, NY and Montreal.
December 3, 2018 at 8:47 pm
Jennifer Chayes
In response to Dana Moshkovitz’s post:
I want you to know we at Microsoft take these situations very seriously. We investigated at the time and we imposed discipline. We don’t comment publicly on confidential personnel matters, but I do want to assure you that we take these matters very seriously and we discipline employees when appropriate. And we will continue to investigate when we hear of new concerns and will take action as needed.
December 3, 2018 at 9:26 pm
Anon
Jennifer: Yuval had a large number of young female visitors, students, and subordinates over the years since disciplinary actions were taken by Microsoft and then by the University of Washington. Were those visitors given any warning? Was there another member of the Redmond theory group who was told of these events so they could take measures to prevent future abuses? Was there ongoing monitoring by Microsoft in any capacity?
If the answer to those questions is no, and the behavior continued with other visitors and employees, do you think Microsoft should be held accountable for the lack of continued oversight?
I apologize for commenting anonymously when you have done so publicly, and I hope it’s clear that I am addressing the questions of culpability towards Microsoft (and you as their representative), and not toward you personally.
December 3, 2018 at 9:42 pm
Anon
[ Despite the monicker “Anon” and the typographical and thematic similarity of the two comments, I want to make it clear that Anon 9:26pm (me) and Anon 9:34pm (someone else) were not coordinated in any way. ]
December 3, 2018 at 9:34 pm
Anon
Jennifer: thanks for commenting on this. However, given the personal stories on this board, and the accumulated evidence over the last 10 years, it sounds almost cynical when you write that “Microsoft takes these situations very seriously.” For once, Dana wrote that “she never heard back from Microsoft!”. Second, future visitors/interns/PhD students/etc. were not warned about Yuval (as I know personally), and have been harassed by him, even after Dana had reported her incident. So, it seems obvious that, even if Microsoft did something (but what was it, given that Yuval was the head of the Theory group for many years, and is still a Principal Scientist), it was not enough by a large margin…
December 4, 2018 at 6:42 am
An observer
I think what Jennifer is saying in plain English is that Yuval is going to get the sack from Microsoft very soon (probably even before Mourinho).
I’m not saying this out of schadenfreude or with any sentiment. (I’m merely a spectator of this ugly game.) It’s just the only logical outcome.
December 4, 2018 at 8:16 am
Anonymous
As someone who visited Yuval at Microsoft Research after 2007, I can confirm that no warning was given. None at all. We had no idea.
December 4, 2018 at 10:35 pm
Anonymous
Dear Jennifer,
It is sad to see your standard corporate response of “we will continue to investigate when we hear of new concerns and will take action as needed”.
YP was disciplined and harassment had continued. He is disciplined again, so what’s new?
I would like to see dissolving this corporate policy of keeping harassment complaints secret. If an employee beats up a student on your campus and caused harm, you would report the incident to police. Why is it the case that you would keep everything secret when an employee causes much more longer term harm to a student?
We expected better from you.
December 4, 2018 at 10:49 pm
Anonymous
Very sad to see this passage in Dana’s essay and does not align at all with Jennifer’s statement:
Shortly after I sent the email to those people, they sent me a brief response which I liked. It said that they were very concerned about what happened and they were looking into it. The email ended with “take care”. I found this response human and sensitive, as well as practical and to the point, and I was glad that I decided to handle things the way I did.
I never heard from those people again.
A few months later I learned that the man was “promoted” to an influential position. In retrospect, I guess that everyone, but me, already knew about this “promotion” at the time that everything happened.
December 11, 2018 at 1:41 pm
Anon
One has to wonder if the time it took Microsoft to act was because YP knew something about senior management at MSR.
It is time for MSR to come clean on why it took this long, and carry out a public investigation on this topic.
December 3, 2018 at 9:18 pm
sanctimonious hypocrite
“I also wonder when the leaders of the statistics department at UC Berkeley, where Peres used to work, and where Terry Speed was a professor emeritus before I reported him, will end their culture of silence.”
Why don’t you wonder that for your own department too? Peres and Speed’s exploits are child’s play compared to Professor Bonaparte’s:
https://stemfeminist.com/2014/10/04/287/
December 3, 2018 at 9:26 pm
Lior Pachter
FYI this story is about a professor at Berkeley. I am not employed there but when I was I did see this post and alerted a number of people to it and matters related to it. There are also a number of other problems in that department, e.g. https://twitter.com/lpachter/status/1017919753514414082
December 4, 2018 at 3:50 am
Nicolas Bray
Hi sanctimonious hypocrite,
I just wanted to say that I always find it strange when people comment on these posts with their speculations about Lior’s internal state rather than the actual issue at hand (sexual harassment, in case you forgot).
Best,
Nick
December 4, 2018 at 12:09 pm
eventhisoneistaken
How ironic, Nicolas Bray, that you call out others for mind-reading people’s internal states, while that is precisely what you did to me (“you do not give a shit about harm to women”). And you still haven’t answered my question about what you find objectionable in defending wrongfully accused men. You’re not obligated to respond, of course — but then again, I’m not posting this for your benefit.
December 4, 2018 at 1:06 am
Jane
It boggles my mind that after Dana’s complaint he was still made the head of the theory group at Microsoft. There are not that many postdoc opportunities, and probably most young female theorists at some point went through an interview or at least a visit with his group. How many of them were subject to this kind of treatment we’ll never know…
December 4, 2018 at 8:20 am
Anonymous
Or maybe, just maybe, the mission is to bring these long-hidden stories into the light. Let’s stick to the specifics here: do you think this is a witch hunt? Is Yuval being unfairly targeted? In case you haven’t noticed, many “official” channels were tried before making things public.
December 4, 2018 at 11:05 am
Anonymous
As a female grad student, I do not think this is a witch hunt. I have heard first-and second-hand stories from friends who I trust. People have been dealing with this very carefully as it matters to their career and it is unfortunate that it affected their professional choices in different ways.
Thank you Anima and Dana for sharing your stories in public – I feel sorry for what happened and you are both very brave in many ways. Thank you Irit, Ehud and Oded for the letter. I do not want to get into the debate on intellectual property but thank you for making this matter public, Lior. We appreciate for what all of you have done.
December 5, 2018 at 12:36 am
another female anon
From the statements of people who claim to be harassed by YP, it is clear that, whatever actions were done by Microsoft and others behind the closed doors, they were insufficient because harassment continued. So I do think that in this particular case the email was justified. Also, I cannot speak for the authors of the email, but if I were to send out such an email, it wouldn’t be an easy decision to make: one has to choose between being potentially not fair to YP and potentially hurting more females. I think, given the circumstances, the authors made the right choice, and I thank them for that.
That said, I think it is our responsibility to view such an action as very extreme and not make it a standard “way to go”. I hope everyone agrees with me that, just like women deserve to live in a world where they don’t worry about being harassed, men deserve to live in a world where they don’t worry about being falsely accused of harassment. Part of that is to make sure that we have efficient administrative or legal process for these cases (so we don’t have to resort to sending emails out of despair, and warning each other through a gossip network). I cannot believe that M didn’t do anything to at the very least make sure that YP would’t talk to female colleagues in private one-to-one.
And thanks to everyone who spoke out. As a person who was once touched in a non-sexual, but nevertheless very weird way – at a conference, by another female whom I even didn’t know – I can only imagine how bad Dana felt. It would be great if we all respect each other’s boundaries, especially in a professional environment.
December 4, 2018 at 10:45 am
Crypto Winter
Jennifer Chayes: It seems to me essential to divulge more information publicly, if you want to make the claim that Microsoft takes these situations seriously and you impose discipline. The current public account is according to Dana, that she complained and Yuval was promoted to head of the theory group. I can see you not wanting to disclose confidential company information, but what you’re saying seems to be contradicting to the current public facts.
December 4, 2018 at 3:08 pm
MadHatter
From Dana’s essay, It seems that he was already promoted before the incident. But Microsoft should be ashamed and held responsible for the fact that there were others who were later similarly harassed by the person, even after the details of Dana’s case were known to them.
December 4, 2018 at 11:00 pm
Anonymous
My read of Dana’s essay is that YP was promoted several months after she had filed the complaint. Also, she was never informed about the outcome of her complaint or that any action at all that was taken which is contrary to the “comfort email” that she had received. The claim that some action had indeed been taken would remain forever in doubt unless this veil of corporate secrecy to protect offenders is destroyed.
December 5, 2018 at 3:00 am
Lucas Gerin
Dear Lior,
I work in the field of Combinatorics & Probability. I would like to thank you for publishing this letter. I also support all the young women who have courageously witnessed.
December 5, 2018 at 8:20 pm
Jake
I have to admit I’m a little surprised and disappointed that none of the other math and tcs blogs I follow have been brave enough to talk about this at all. (Theory DIsh gets a pass due to Omer Reingold being the person who lit the spark here in the first place)
December 6, 2018 at 8:57 am
Igor Rivin (@igriv)
How does kicking someone qualify as bravery?
December 6, 2018 at 9:39 am
Carina
Talking about something openly, and risking the blowback, usually takes quite a bit of courage (whether or not you agree with the decision to do it).
December 6, 2018 at 10:47 am
Boaz Barak
I can’t speak for other theory blogs but I will eventually post something about this, and reflection on sexual harassment in general, on the Windows on Theory blog.
I am hoping to have a guest blog by someone more qualified than me (and in particular offered the original letter writers to post), but if I don’t find such a person I will post something myself. It is not a trivial topic, and it is more important to get it right than to get it fast.
(Also the fact that the blog aggregator is currently down might cause some theory blogs to wait with posting things in general, and about this in particular.)
December 8, 2018 at 1:40 pm
Igor Rivin (@igriv)
@Anonymous coward: You are missing the point completely.
February 19, 2020 at 3:18 pm
Random Guy
Dear Boaz: When really do you plan on posting? It’s been over a year since your comment.
I conjecture that none of the theory people will post anything concrete about Peres’ actions simply because there is a sickening trait of diplomacy that runs through the community.
June 5, 2020 at 7:26 am
Another random guy praying for a postdoc, ergo the cowardice
@Random guy: I don’t think it is diplomacy per se. It is self-servingness in the garb of diplomacy. Saying something concrete will inevitably burn bridges, and might cause them to miss out on a grant/collaboration/Nature paper. Even after being senior and “untouchable” in terms of reputation, obviously your grant and induction onto Simons’ board is more important than what a female researcher has to go through. The trick to wimp out of saying anything concrete is to use vapid self-effacing phrases like – “I am not at all qualified to comment on this”.
You don’t need to read research on sexual harassment to say that it is scarily atrocious that that Yuval wasn’t fired long ago, after what seem like multiple complaints. Clearly, someone at Microsoft decided to retain him because his worth as a researcher meant more to them than the harm that was being caused by him to innocent women. I don’t see any other plausible explanation. Furthermore, I’d add that people need to call out the kind of response that Jennifer Chayes gave, and insist that a clear detailed account be given about why Yuval wasn’t fired after multiple complaints. More importantly, who made the decision to not fire after, say, three complaints? To me, that person is the biggest problem in all this.
December 6, 2018 at 11:20 am
Igor Rivin (@igriv)
@Carina Blowback? This is an echo chamber, where everyone is kicking the guy when he is down. Pathetic.
December 6, 2018 at 11:54 am
Carina
Igor: You, and several others, have been openly critical of Lior’s decision to post this. So yes, there has been blowback. Surely Lior anticipated this, but chose to post it anyway.
December 8, 2018 at 12:24 am
Anonymous
At the same time you are not very concerned about YP having taken advantage of scientists with less power than him and having systematically harassed people. Apparently molesting someone when they are down is not on equal footing with kicking them when they are down.
December 6, 2018 at 1:36 pm
eventhisoneistaken
@carina Oh yeah, I’m sure Lior hesitated a thousand times before posting this: Will Igor Rivin get me fired from my job? Block my grants/reject my papers?..
December 6, 2018 at 3:37 pm
Carina
Surely not, and he can safely assume that no one will pretend their job is at risk as a result of his criticisms.
December 6, 2018 at 3:46 pm
eventhisoneistaken
Well, not quite. That’s only true if you espouse the right-thinking opinions. I, for example, have good reasons for maintaining my anonymity. And of course, Yuval’s job is very much put at risk as a result of this post.
December 6, 2018 at 6:33 pm
Anonymous
As it should have been at least ten years ago.
December 8, 2018 at 2:07 am
1@1.1
NAME is no longer at MSR.
December 8, 2018 at 5:22 pm
Anonymous
I want to thank Irit Dinur, Ehud Friedgut, Oded Goldreich, and Lior Pachter for making this issue public. Although I have known Yuval for several years and admire his research, I was blissfully unaware of this disgusting behavior. I am sorry to everyone who was victims of this behavior. I hope that this teaches others to not abuse their power, and also that Yuval faces the consequences for his actions.
December 9, 2018 at 11:28 am
Anon1984
I would think that this community, above all, would recognize that distances and relations between points in high dimensional spaces are often measured and compared with rather arbitrary metrics. The unwritten “ethical rule” that someone in a position of power shouldn’t hit on someone with less power is ridiculous. YP is not a particularly attractive guy, while the girls were no doubt much better looking. I feel really sorry for the ugly ones (in the most general sense). While walking around with your fly open reflects badly, there is nobody that needs to be “protected” unless it gets to the point that actual written law has been broken. The career of a brilliant scientist has just been destroyed because someone didn’t have thick enough skin to deal with an offer to go swimming. There have been so many others (Walter Lewin comes to mind). I hope your contributions to science make up for YPs. +1 for Trump.
December 9, 2018 at 12:07 pm
Lior Pachter
If you don’t have a thick enough skin to comment in your name then perhaps you are not in the best position to opine on how thick the skin of others ought to be.
December 9, 2018 at 12:47 pm
Anonymous
What does any of this have to do with how good looking YP is??? I am bewildered by your “logic”. It’s ok for him to hit on women whose careers he can influence because he’s not, in your view, good looking? Seriously, wtf? You also conveniently do not acknowledge that according to Dana’s account, he touched her without her consent. In fact, after she had explicitly indicated she was not interested in his overtures.
December 9, 2018 at 1:33 pm
Marnie Dunsmore
I don’t know what Yuval Peres did or didn’t do, but it is problematic when someone crosses boundaries in what is obviously understood to be a business or academic discussion.
I do feel sad for Yuval, Walter Lewin, Sergio Verdu and many of the other men who have developed a pattern of pursuing sexual relationships in inappropriate work and professional contexts. I started my career in Canada where there is no title IX, so I tend to frame these problems in a more general context than the definitions of title IX.
The problem in these cases, is that this happens all the time for women in science, engineering, and computer science. If there is direct or even indirect supervision authority of the person crossing a professional boundary (not necessarily sexual), the junior person is then left with a double bind. They can speak up and say they think the behavior is inappropriate, or they can simply play along. It is much easier to play along than to speak up. And unfortunately, even in minor situations like asking a person to not repeatedly over talk or dismiss a woman’s technical inputs, any feedback that a more respectful behavior is needed is frequently met with hostility and reprisal. In an academic setting, the reprisal doesn’t even have to be obvious. Just withholding or downgrading someone on a letter of reference can have a devastating effect on the career of a junior person.
Over the long run, for women, the withholding of professional support and in its place, expecting subordination, complicity (sexual and otherwise), and “work wifing”, is to destroy the advancement of women in computer science and electrical engineering.
Unfortunately, Anon1984, I’ve run into versions of you almost every week during my career. It is emotionally and professionally crippling to work with you.
Regarding Walter Lewin: my husband, an MIT EE PhD, was a great admirer of Walter. But upon reading the reported facts of the case, he could not but conclude that MIT made a very difficult but necessary decision. Walter’s behavior was repeated, calculated, meant to subjugate, and intentional. To justify his behavior is to declare that women are not worthy of respect and equal, professional treatment in an academic setting (or otherwise).
The recent NASEM report certainly describes how pervasive sexual harassment, gender harassment and gender bias are in academic STEM fields. And it also describes how much in denial a large number of people are regarding this issue.
So, Anon1984, I’m not surprised by your remark. I see this attitude all the time. But don’t expect the culture of silence that you have benefitted from for the last century, to continue.
December 9, 2018 at 1:42 pm
Carina
I have heard a lot of people express the view that women, particularly young women with nascent careers, need to have thicker skin. At the same time, it seems that senior men with well-established careers need to be treated with great care, like a Fabergé egg. I don’t understand this – can someone explain?
December 9, 2018 at 12:51 pm
Anonymous
Perhaps the contributions of the many women who will chose to pursue scientific careers because they will be less likely to face harrassment and coercion WILL make up for the contributions of the “brilliant” YP.
December 9, 2018 at 9:18 pm
Anon1984
Carina, Faberege eggs and prolific scientists are rare. Just because someone studies math, it doesn’t mean they will become an Einstein or Noether. Just because someone is “creepy” should their career be ruined? If Turing endearingly asked me out for a date should I fall to pieces and give up math? Who knows, maybe I would like it. If, as an adult, I can’t make that decision for myself then I’ve got other problems. I don’t understand why it’s contradictory to have an intimate mathematical discussion and then switch gears to test the waters for physical intimacy. If the person says no, fine. From the accounts above it doesn’t sound like YP went much beyond an inquiry. Perhaps he had dual motives and hopes in arranging the meeting to discuss both math and physical intimacy – so what? He touched someone’s hand – the horror! What if he were an unmarried, good looking guy – would all women in math be off limits for him? Did he explicitly threaten to ruin someone’s career if they didn’t sleep with him? I think the “victims” here are going too far. My points regarding attractiveness/ugliness (or powerful/weak) are 1) that no one would ever be able to ask the weakest person in the room out on a date and 2) the metric used to compare relative strength is not adequately defined.
Lior, you are right, I fear the repercussions of using my real name. Does that mean I am being harassed? As a male who is not particularly assertive, I am continually subject to the same oppressive forces that Marnie talks about. They are not unique to women. Sometimes I am not the smartest person in the room, so in all likelihood maybe I really should do more listening than talking. If you want to work with a dominant person you had either be dominant yourself or learn how to leverage the submissive role. Dominance hierarchies are very common in nature and evolve for a reason. We are not all Einsteins. We need to teach both women and men how to say no and assertively express their boundaries. There is no such thing as the utopic “safe zone.” I don’t support career limiting harassment, but at the same time think we should all be a bit less prudish. Didn’t your parents teach you to always look both ways before crossing the street? Oh my God, a car came by!
December 9, 2018 at 11:19 pm
Marnie Dunsmore
@Anon1984
“As a male who is not particularly assertive, I am continually subject to the same oppressive forces that Marnie talks about. They are not unique to women.”
That’s true, Anon1984, but according to a recent Pew Center Study on discrimination in STEM fields, women experience:
-pay discrimination at five times the rate of men,
-gender bias at four times that of men,
-slights and marginalizing behaviors at three times that of men
-passed over for promotion at twice the rate of men
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/12/14/gender-discrimination-comes-in-many-forms-for-todays-working-women/
December 10, 2018 at 11:01 am
Carina
@Anon1984: First of all, I want to thank you for answering my question. I appreciate it, and found your answer quite interesting.
I think there is a great deal of empathy out there for someone like YP; and, in general, I think that’s a good thing. But I don’t believe this is incompatible with also having a good deal of empathy for a junior researcher, especially if she’s a student or postdoc who has not yet achieved any measure of job security (let alone had the chance to show the world how much she can contribute). A bad experience for someone at an early stage can be career-altering, especially if it happens during an interview. If talent is indeed rare, shouldn’t we as a community be extra careful not to lose it in our younger generations?
On the other hand, if you feel someone is at risk of losing his/her job unfairly, then your issue should really be with the employer. It’s the employer who actually has the power to make that decision. To suggest that a young woman should suck it up and stay quiet (isn’t that what it means to have “thick skin”?) because you are worried that someone in a position of power may actually listen to her is, I think, misguided. The people responsible for decisions are the people who make them. We should all be allowed to share our personal experiences and opinions without being accused of putting someone else’s job at risk.
December 10, 2018 at 5:30 pm
Jonathan Cohen
I’m surprised nobody has pointed out the obvious flaw in Anon1984’s reasoning. If person A has an influence over person B’s career and person A makes a sexual advance on person B, then person B fears that saying “no” will harm their career. This is a perfectly reasonable fear. First of all, person B has no idea whether person A will harm their career if they say “no”. Second, even assuming person A has no bad intentions, just by basic human nature (as you seem to be interested in), it is quite common for person A to end up with a more negative view of person B, which will at least subconsciously harm person B’s future career.
December 13, 2018 at 6:26 am
Jake
I’m also a male who is not particularly assertive but I’m also someone who pays attention and knows that I am absolutely not “subject to the same oppressive forces”. (And not only did my parents “teach (me) to always look both ways before crossing the street” they also taught me “it’s your responsibility not to hit pedestrians when you’re driving”)
December 10, 2018 at 2:23 am
Oded Goldreich
I refrained from responding for the last week or so after I was told that my responses contribute to the visibility of this post, whereas (as I might have hinted in my past responses) I have principled reservations re the first posting on this thread as well as regarding blogs in general. But I feel a duty to respond to the last post of Aron1984, which well articulated his position while basing it on two common but fundamentally flawed myths. So I allow myself to violate for a moment my own principles (as I did already in the past…) and respond.
The first myth that underlies Aron1984’s position is the myth of the race of geniuses (or Ubermenschen). According to this myth, great progress in the various spheres of culture is the work of geniuses that are fundamentally different from ordinary humans (or even ordinary actors in the field). A careful version of this myth will admit that these geniuses are only revealed by their act of genius, but insist that all/most significant/fundamental discoveries (let alone “revolutions” and “paradigm shifts”) were performed by such geniuses, who are therefore our only/best hope for the next such breakthroughs.
I believe that it will be easy to disprove the very last assertion (i.e., that next breakthrough is due to an old “genius”) by an empirical study, although it may be the case that identified geniuses contribute more than the other best actors in the field (and much of this has to be attributed to the resources that these identified geniuses receive like higher level of job security, becoming a center of flocking, etc). Furthermore, I think the differences between the “matrix of abilities” of different experts in the field is far smaller than normally conceived. In particular, the difference between ability to understand a breakthrough (done by others) and the inability (of a non-expert) to follow it is much larger.
Hence, putting aside for a moment the moral perspective, I’m not sure that the elimination of an identified genius is more harmful to the field than the elimination of ten other researchers (which may have a similar chance to make the next breakthrough).
The second myth is that we live in a gender-blind society in which the position of females (in various circumstances) can be analyzed exactly as the position of males (or be reduced to it). Believing this myth requires an extraordinary level of social blindness: not seeing the difference in socialization from age zero (till death) in the society at large, and ditto regarding the “implicit biases” (I prefer the term unconscious biases) that play a role also in our research communities (and even within progressive males and females). More generally, assuming that all humans have a similar emotional structure and therefore can act similarly in similar circumstances (i.e., if I can just say NO then so can all) is also a mistake. The differences between emotional structure is huge, and so if you want to know what is reasonable to expect 9as an emotional reaction to X), then you better poll a few humans (and try to have a diverse poll…) rather than just infer from yourself.
December 11, 2018 at 5:24 am
Anon
It is unsettling to see mild responses to @Aron1984’s absurd assertions. Acoording to @Aron1984, it should be perfectly acceptable that a person in position of career impacting power actively “investigates” the possibilities of sexual favors with sub-ordinates. In the world according to @Aron1984, no one should object if a faculty member asks a female student to sleep with him. Further, if student happen to say no, she should fully trust faculty member to not feel sexually rejected, and react to her negatively with any retribution. If her career gets negatively impacted after this event, it wouldn’t be because of she denying sexual favor but because she was unfit for the job. By extension, this would be applicable to all men in position of power including politians, police, judges, managers, deans, supervisors and so on. As an inevitable corollary to this proposition it shouldn’t then be crime to just include the question to all female job applicants if they would be willing to sleep with their supervisors on the job.
It also doesn’t escape to me how flexible, if any, ethical boundary this commentor posses. A direct implication of his argument is that a so called “genius” should be allowed to commit crime on lesser “non-genius” mortals. So perhaps YP should have been perfectly fine if he ever drunk drive and killed few people. May be if a “genius” happen to enjoy kidnapping and then physically torturing a person in his basement, that tortured person should be happy that his sacrifice is helping with the whims of maintaining the existence of a “genius” and he needs to be thankful to his contributions. Human rights, freedom, will – all that should cease to exist for lesser mortals when they interact with a “genius”.
Personally I haven’t seen such weak line of argument in decades and I feel praying for all females who will come in contact with @Aron1984. My apology if my description became bit graphic but hopefully this illustrates inevitable and necessary consequences of commentor’s arguments.
December 11, 2018 at 9:56 am
Carina
@Anon: Let me just say something about my own “mild” response. The thing is, the views that Anon1984 articulates are quite common. Good people have these views. (And, 100 years ago, basically everyone would have agreed.) It has been a long – and somewhat painful – road for me to process that. Similarly, one thing I’ve learned over the past year or so is just how many (good) people believe that women are genetically/biologically less likely to be highly intelligent (let alone geniuses), which of course reinforces Anon1984’s point… because the assumption is that none of those younger women will ever rise to YP’s scientific stature. I strongly disagree with all of this, of course, but I think that taking too hard a line on the people who have these ideas just encourages them not to voice them, and then there’s no chance to even argue about it. It’s really hard to critique an idea if it’s not out in the open.
December 11, 2018 at 4:55 pm
Marnie Dunsmore
“It has been a long – and somewhat painful – road for me to process that.”
ME TOO
When I was a graduate student at the University of British Columbia in the 1990s, the work station cluster in the EE building was being used as a porn harvester and server (a harbinger of pornhub). It was set up by senior graduate students and a few professors. I think it was widely known that this was going on, but nobody said anything about it. I was strongly encouraged to keep quiet about it.
Also at UBC, I was told by the wife of my first thesis supervisor (hey, I switched supervisors after this), that women had no mathematical ability and that they were not capable as engineers.
Also during my graduate studies, one of the UBC computer science professors that I went to talk to about his work on mathematical treatments for singularities was livid that I had made an appointment to come to talk to him. He made some nasty comment to me as I tried to have a mathematical discussion with him. I had never met this guy before. I was just interested in his work, and my thesis supervisor had told me to go to talk to him. At the time, I was completely baffled by this. This actually happened when Maria Klawe had been head of the CS department at UBC for a few years. Everyone was all cheery about the great strides women were making in EE and CS with Maria as head of the department. I think this just goes to show the divide between the way universities market the advancement of women in STEM to the public, compared to the actual experiences of women in these fields.
At a semiconductor startup, my manager stood over my desk while I was trying to meet a deadline to “tape out” my design, explaining to me that women couldn’t design integrated circuits because they didn’t have any spatial ability.
At a Santa Clara startup I worked at within the last five years, one of the other engineers at my paygrade decided to regularly order me around, demand that I sort and deliver his mail and insist that I respond immediately to his every request on a daily basis. This guy also started voicing off in our office space for hours at a time (while I was trying to do my work) about painful ways to kill people. He would launch diatribes about politicians he would like to knock off with an automatic weapon. Having been an engineering student in Ottawa, Canada, in 1989 when 14 women engineers were targeted and killed “for being women engineers” at Polytechnic in Montreal, I did not take his behavior lightly. I emailed the CEO (it was a seven person startup) and said that I thought these behaviors were inappropriate and that this person was creating a hostile work environment. Basically, at this point, the CEO hired a team of attorneys, and wanted me to be legally deposed. This seems to be a standard practice in Silicon Valley to silence women who report sexual harassment or a hostile work environment. Hey, we’re just office decorations regardless of our work product, and the male engineers, no matter how unproductive or destructive of the work environment, are untouchable.
Then there was the large Silicon Valley semiconductor company where I was assigned junior design tasks, even though I had been told when I was recruited that I would be mentored into a lead/principal design position. When I asked for more challenging and appropriate to my experience assignments, I was laid off.
Oh, and the recent job at a large government agency where I was treated like an admin and significantly underpaid compared to similarly or lesser experienced male coworkers. Again, the assignments were contrary to what I had been told I would be doing when I was hired.
If they would just say that they wanted me there as compliant and silent window dressing to make it look like they cared about hiring and developing women engineers, of course I would not have taken these jobs.
In my experience, it is virtually impossible to report gender harassment, or gender discrimination without reprisal. Even if you want to make the mildest and most conciliatory communications about what you are experiencing, be prepared to get nowhere or worse. Don’t be surprised if there is retaliation. It is very, very common and almost institutionalized, at least in Silicon Valley and in high tech.
In my experience, most of the people I communicate these kinds of experiences to have one of four responses:
1. they tell me I need to toughen up and be “less sensitive”, rather than ask for better treatment,
2. they tell me something like: “what did you expect? you should have known what you were getting into when you became an engineer”
3. they deny and equivocate
4. they become fearful and noncommunicative (because they know that anyone associated with a harassment or discrimination report is in for trouble)
In STEM, seeing women primarily as sexual objects, non-technical support staff, and of lesser capability technically, rather than as equal participants in the STEM workforce and research community, is the norm, rather than the exception.
Comments like those of Anon1984 don’t surprise me at all. I just assume now that a large portion of the STEM workforce thinks like this to varying degrees. Some women also think like this, by the way. It is sad and maddening, but if there is a silver lining, it is that more people are becoming aware that these assumptions and stealth behaviors are the norm. Women’s absence from physics, engineering and computer science is not because of their lack of ability. It is because of their systematic subordination.
December 11, 2018 at 8:05 pm
Anon
I think that Anon1984 is saying that if somebody in a position of power asks you to have sex with them and you refuse, and then there is no retribution and no professional consequences then nothing bad has happened. However if somebody asks you to have sex with you, you say no, and then experience retribution or negative career consequences then I believe that Anon1984 would advocate complaining and raising the issue to HR (or whoever) after which the perpetrator should be punished. I understand that you might find this point of view simplistic but I think that there is also a good case for a straightforward approach to life.
I’m not saying that you should adopt this approach when casting a judgement on YP, but then I’m not sure why it’s anybody’s responsibility to cast a judgement on YP other than G*d and the Microsoft HR department.
I also think you exaggerated Anon1984 claims. It’s a typical tactic: “refute the exaggerated claim”.
December 11, 2018 at 9:30 pm
Marnie Dunsmore
“I believe that Anon1984 would advocate complaining and raising the issue to HR (or whoever) after which the perpetrator should be punished. I understand that you might find this point of view simplistic but I think that there is also a good case for a straightforward approach to life.”
Has Anon1984 ever complained to HR about this kind of issue?
For one, many companies do not have an “HR”. Most start-ups don’t. Second, HR mostly will use every strategy possible to silence the person reporting an inappropriate behavior. HR almost never takes action. Dana’s experience is typical. No action and no feedback. HR does do one thing: they assess the risk of a lawsuit as soon as they get a harassment report. If the person reporting inappropriate behavior actually manages to find an attorney who will take their case, and they are not bound by an arbitration agreement, they are in for years of very stressful and time consuming legal rangling as the current class action lawsuit (Moussouris versus Microsoft) shows.
HR mostly exists to collect evidence it can use against someone reporting harassment or discrimination. They rarely will act against a high value employee, unless the evidence is inescapable. Think about the Susan Fowler case. She had cell phone snapshots of the harassing emails she was receiving from her boss, and she still couldn’t get HR to take action to protect her.
If you work in a startup, many states in the US, including California, pre-empt companies with less than 50 employees from EEOC legal obligations. Because most attorneys won’t touch a harassment or discrimination case until it has been looked at by the EEOC, it is virtually impossible for a person reporting harassment to get legal representation if they have worked for a start up.
All of this is to say that Anon1984’s idea that a person who thinks they have experienced harassment can effectively report their concern to HR and expect fairhanded treatment is very, very naïve.
Anon1984 is living in a fantasy world. Too many video games or Star Trek episodes, perhaps?
December 11, 2018 at 9:01 am
Anonymous
Yes, I’m shocked that anyone is proposing that it’s OK to hit on subordinates. I can say that even the “I’m not taking you seriously, I’m just hitting on you” vibe is deeply demoralizing (which is as far as my interactions with YP went.) Not having codes of conduct about this is detrimental to women’s careers.
And I fail to see how physical attractiveness has anything to do with this. I would like senior researchers I was discussing mathematics with not to treat me like a piece of meat. That’s surely not too much to ask.
December 12, 2018 at 5:42 am
Ariel Gabizon
I think it might be good to make some well-defined rules for cases we agree are inappropriate. “A person with power making a pass at someone with less power” is vague, and might even be too general and include scenarios we would intuitively agree are fine.
For example, I think there should be a rule that “If the stated purpose of the meeting had a job offer element, the offeror should not be allowed to make a romantic/sexual move”.
As I see it, this was the rule that was broken by YP in Dana’s case.
He suggested they meet to discuss her postdoc – him being a researcher at microsoft and her a PhD student towards the end of her thesis, that is a “job offer element” of the meeting; and thus, no romantic move should’ve been made at that meeting.
You could argue that a more general rule should also hold – e.g. no math/cs professor should ever hit on any math/cs student in any context.
Perhaps..honestly I’m not sure there are no reasonable exceptions to that rule..but maybe let’s start with things we agree on, and make them known official rules in the scientific community.
December 12, 2018 at 12:01 pm
Anonymous person
Looks like Microsoft Fired Him :0
December 12, 2018 at 12:30 pm
Anonymous person
Looks like his homepage is gone:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/peres
December 13, 2018 at 3:10 am
G3
Correct. YP is not listed among Microsoft employees anymore.
December 16, 2018 at 3:31 am
Jed Cooper
I am much surprised by the contents of your posts on TS and YP.
I was previously unaware of these particular examples of harassment. There are some others that I have heard about, or experienced.
Here are some thoughts and questions that you may wish to consider.
You show courage, and you seem successful where mighty businesses and universities have been failing.
The technique you employ does resemble a “job lynch”, in that both subjects had to leave their main and famous institutions soon after the truth became public.
I wonder, did anything happen to the human resources personal and higher administrators who were successfully hiding these matters for over a decade, and thus, in the latter case, served as accomplices in repeated sexual harassment?
I looked in passing at the speaker/participant/organizer list of the international conference likely referred to in your post above. It is a high profile event, and may not be the one you meant, it serves as an example. With everything we know on YP now, both in terms of ethical standards and general attitude and behavior towards peers, he would not particularly stand out in this crowd. Compliments to exceptions. And it is sad to be writing that according to everything we know on TS, he seems ethically superior to the non-exceptions on that list. Indeed, university professors, mathematicians in particular, can well advance in career in spite of, and sometimes due to, their more or less exposed unethical and even abusive characters. Is the situation better in the administration?
So natural questions seem to be: what happens next? what happens in the long run?
In the Wild West, the first few lynches were probably courageous acts that quickly “removed” the dangerous offenders from the innocent and fragile, unprotected by law and order. But then, as we know, this evolved in something highly undesirable.
Encouraged by your successes, there could soon be unethical but otherwise highly influential and respectable peers, or groups of such peers, composing open letters and websites of similar nature, however based on false evidence. Their aim would be to ruin their rivals’ reputations, get their jobs, get even or get ahead. What could prevent this from happening?
December 16, 2018 at 10:30 am
Lior Pachter
December 16, 2018 at 7:23 am
eventhisoneistaken
@jed cooper
“Their aim would be to ruin their rivals’ reputations, get their jobs, get even or get ahead.”
How do you know none of those motives were involved in the YP case?
“What could prevent this from happening?”
Absolutely nothing. But hey — eggs, omelette. A few innocent men losing their jobs and becoming permanently unemployable is a small price to pay to tear down the patriarchy. For those few who do care, keep in mind the Zuleikha project:
December 16, 2018 at 12:59 pm
Anonymous
Why do you make this about the case of wrongly accused innocents when in this particular case it is not? The obvious conclusion rather is that just as mob justice was replaced by a system of justice that works (at least in principle) fairly, for cases of sexual harrassment there will be a system of justice and punishment that actually works. So that a man who is on record for at least 3 cases of sexual harrassment would not have been allowed to stay in his position for over 10 years.
December 16, 2018 at 1:13 pm
Anonymous
It’s interesting you don’t have the same level of concern for the many-more-than-few men *and* women whose psychological and physical well being has been ruined in silence for years and years. No one is suggesting that it is ok to punish people for no good reason, but the subject here is NOT those who are unfairly accused. Why is this still so hard for you to wrap your mind around?
December 16, 2018 at 2:56 pm
eventhisoneistaken
It’s interesting that you’re able to read my mind and know who I do or don’t have concern for (are you Nicolas Bray, by chance?). Concern for victims of harassment is amply represented on this thread — some justified, some overblown. Concern for falsely accused men is rather underrepresented: I seem to be the only one expressing it. In a saner world, I might get a word of thanks for introducing a diversity of opinions into this echo chamber.
December 16, 2018 at 11:04 am
Marnie Dunsmore
“I am Not a Feminist, but. . .”: Hegemony of a Meritocratic Ideology and the Limits of Critique Among Women in Engineering
Authors: Carroll Seron, Susan Silbey, Erin Cech, Brian Rubineau
Abstract:
Engineering is often described as an enduring bastion of masculine culture where women experience marginality. Using diaries from undergraduate engineering students at four universities, the authors explore women’s interpretations of their status within the profession. The authors’ findings show that women recognize their marginality, providing clear and strong criticisms of their experiences. But these criticisms remain isolated and muted; they coalesce neither into broader organizational or institutional criticisms of engineering, nor into calls for change. Instead, their criticisms are interpreted through two values central to engineering culture: meritocracy and individualism. Despite their direct experiences with sexism, respondents typically embrace these values as ideological justifications of the existing distributions of status and reward in engineering and come to view engineering’s nonmeritocratic system as meritocratic. The unquestioned presumption of meritocracy and the invisibility of its muting effects on critiques resembles not hegemonic masculinity—for these women proudly celebrate their femininity—but a hegemony of meritocratic ideology. The authors conclude that engineering education successfully turns potential critics into agents of cultural reproduction.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0730888418759774?journalCode=woxb
December 22, 2018 at 11:18 pm
James Charter
Lior, the first sentence of this post is incorrect.
🙂
December 26, 2018 at 5:21 am
Lior Pachter
Thanks for pointing that out. I updated the post to note that YP no longer works at Microsoft.
December 28, 2018 at 5:27 pm
Anonymous
How do you know he is no longer employed? Was an announcement made about this, or do you just know because he is no longer on Microsoft’s website?
December 28, 2018 at 5:29 pm
Lior Pachter
I first noticed his name absent from the Microsoft website, and later heard information (by now corroborated via a number of different sources) that he is no longer employed there. I have not seen an announcement from Microsoft.
December 29, 2018 at 9:52 pm
Anonymous
Microsoft doesn’t make public announcements when it let’s go of it’s employees. For instance Alexander Holroyd and David Bruce Wilson were fairly recently laid off from the theory group without any announcement as such. YP case is totally different though. I think a public statement by Microsoft now would be really helpful to the community.
January 7, 2019 at 3:36 am
tomthebeaver
His webpage also no longer has his Microsoft or UC Berkeley
affiliations.
https://web.archive.org/web/20190105061345/http://yuvalperes.com/
January 9, 2019 at 5:39 pm
Jamie
Without a doubt, men must above all treat women with respect, and even more so when they are in a position of power. It is clear how poisonous sexual harassment is.
However, in these discussions, something else should be recognized. Most men by nature have strong sexual drive, which can easily override their logic and common sense. It makes them take huge risks. An unattractive young man can have enough poisonous experiences with women to turn him into a harasser rather than lover. Is any horny man who is not a smooth operator (good with women) a sexual harasser, especially if he is unattractive? Is Mr. Peres an evil person, or is he also a victim in some sense? He clearly crossed the line in Dana’s story, but where is that line?
Let us suppose Mr. Peres’ marriage turned sexless for one reason or another. His entire life revolved around academia, so let’s suppose he didn’t have many opportunities to make female friends outside of it. Is there a way he could have found a lover in his life circles that was appropriate? If a female student told him how much she enjoyed his class, would it be inappropriate for him to make any advances at all, after the class was over? Let her know he found her attractive without being insistent?
I know what he did was wrong, and at the very least he could have said he was sorry, but I cannot help but think that we judge him too harshly because he is an unattractive man who hit on women way outside his league.
January 10, 2019 at 7:21 am
Tyrion
But Dana is not in Scott’s league either… I am disgusted by your assumption that Yuval’s physical appearance has anything to do with this.
January 10, 2019 at 9:08 am
Jamie
Mr. Peres was not proposing marriage, he was trying to hook up, and his attempt was way too direct. Of course, his looks have everything to do with what counts as crossing the line, or being too insistent. But that was not my main point.
January 10, 2019 at 6:05 pm
Anonymous
That’s a ridiculous stance. I’ve had lots of “unattractive” guys hit on me and it’s not usually disturbing. What’s disturbing is when it’s someone in power who should really know better.
January 14, 2019 at 3:29 am
Anonymous
I’m afraid that your actions won’t serve women well in the long run.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-03/a-wall-street-rule-for-the-metoo-era-avoid-women-at-all-cost
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-inevitable-unintended-consequences-of-metoo/2018/12/04/9c7e0418-f80e-11e8-8d64-4e79db33382f_story.html?utm_term=.a9c29bf1e6ce
February 10, 2019 at 1:42 pm
Graduate student
this is an important issue to discuss but i’m afraid Lior Pachter is not a person of moral qualifications to bring it up. he is notorious for his bad character and seemingly taking joy in destroying people. some years ago in this weblog he deliberately attacked a poor graduate student who was a rising star and on the academic job market. everybody except him agrees that he did so for the purpose of trashing someone who was in a vulnerable position, seems like it gives him the chills. read about this story here and judge for yourself
February 10, 2019 at 2:23 pm
Lior Pachter
Your comment reminds me that I need to blog about the paper “Network Enhancement: a general method to denoise weighted biological networks” from the Batzoglou and Leskovic groups. Amazingly in their paper, they show that Kellis’ network deconvolution (by the way, Kellis was not a graduate student at the time but a professor at MIT), performs *worse* than “RAW” which is the method consisting of not doing anything to the raw data (!) They show this for both a a biological network problem and an image identification problem. Not only was the Kellis paper fraudulent, despite protestations at the time the method is useless. Thanks for the reminder!
On a separate note, what you have done here is a combination of an ad hominem attack coupled to a straw man argument, both applied for the purpose of distracting from a very serious matter of sexual harassment. I have decided to approve and leave your post up here (despite the fact that you did not provide a legitimate email address as requested per the policy of this blog), because it is illustrative of the sexism that pervades science. The chills I get are of thinking of the damage people like you inflict on a day-to-day basis in your workplace.
April 1, 2019 at 6:33 am
Anonwoman
Hey guys, I am just reading this. I am baffled and shocked at Yuval’s predatory behavior. I congratulate Lior for going against the wishes of the so once respected Oded. And I lost my respect for Oded who requested to redact information on this issue.
This is pretty low on his end. It must have taken courage as fellow researcher to go against such authority and for that, Lior, you deserve extra kudos.
@Jamie, there are escort services that Yuval should have kept using instead of going after his own young sheep.
Forgive me to mention this but i feel like there’s also a cultural sense of this is OK behavior from my experience.
April 16, 2019 at 6:30 pm
intrust antivirus software
I agree Anonwoman, Yuval’s behavior was predatory. And I cant say many people out there have Lior’s kind of bravery. He has my respect.
June 8, 2019 at 12:56 pm
Anonymous
Yuval seems to be the defendant in King county court case BEP201210. Do a name search in https://dw.courts.wa.gov/ . I wonder if this has anything to do with his sexual harassment charges.
July 26, 2019 at 8:19 am
Aaron G
This is a question specifically to Marnie Dunsmore, but anyone else can feel free to chime in.
Dr. Dunsmore states that in STEM fields both sexual harrassment and sexism (and the subjugation of women in the workplace that results from this) has been the norm in the US and Canada (although in my opinion, UBC’s computer labs being a post server is a separate issue, although problematic in its own right.)
My question is how the work environment for women in highly technical but non-STEM fields — for example, in finance, medicine, or medical research — compare. I am asking because I wonder if the corrosive environment for women in tech indicative of a much wider problem with corrosive work environments in general, or is STEM particularly worse than other areas.
August 23, 2019 at 9:55 pm
Robbie Parker
I think Yuval’s contributions to mathematics and TCS, and the absolute beauty of his work, outweigh his misconduct, which he apologized for and won’t do in the future.
November 5, 2019 at 3:09 pm
Anon
… and somehow he continues to be invited to give talks in otherwise well respected academic departments…
https://www.math.ucdavis.edu/research/seminars/?talk_id=5703
November 7, 2019 at 6:49 am
Anonymous
Someone should add all this stuff to his Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuval_Peres
November 8, 2019 at 1:43 pm
FYI
I think that there was a mention of this on his Wikipedia page, but it was removed.
November 8, 2019 at 4:59 pm
Anonymous
One Wikipedia editor reported claims that YP had asked his collaborators to “sanitize” his article. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia%3ASockpuppet_investigations%2FPedantisch&type=revision&diff=917398922&oldid=917080722
November 9, 2019 at 6:01 pm
Lior Pachter
As of right now the paragraph on sexual harassment on his wikipedia page has been restored: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuval_Peres#Allegations_of_sexual_harassment
January 16, 2020 at 12:56 pm
STEM Caveman
Leaving aside the petty vindictiveness and the spectacle of anonymous commenters demanding Peres be publicly perma-shamed on his most visible biographic page —- putting that stuff on his page is an abuse of the Wikipedia editorial standards.
He is not a public figure, and all the references are to blogs and e-mail lists in which the material is written by interested and self-involved parties. Wikipedia requires (ostensibly) reliable sources published by (ostensibly) disinterested third parties. The only published report is in a UC Davis college newspaper article written by an undergraduate, probably not fact checked, and consisting of a cut and paste from the online blog discussions. Meanwhile, the accusations against Peres are all ex parte reports; the famous accusation letter on the Stanford email list stated that his conduct does not rise to the level of illegal sexual harassment; and (as the letter complained) while Peres’ reply includes an apology, it does not concede that actual harassment occurred. So there are problems with the notability and the sources, by Wikipedia standards.
Of course, if interested parties start pushing the Peres matter into higher-profile publications in order to bolster it for permanent inclusion on Wikipedia, that would be pretty evil. I’d consider that a far higher degree of manipulation than Peres boosters editing the WP page (which is no worse, in fact better, than Peres detractors adding the accusations to the page, as it would reverse a violation of the WP content standards).
January 16, 2020 at 1:37 pm
Elizabeth Batory
Dear Caveman,
You don’t seem to understand the main principle here: Pachter and his cronies think that Professor Peres is evil. This opinion justifies destroying Professor Peres’ reputation and livelihood by any means necessary. So far, they have been quite successful.
January 16, 2020 at 3:06 pm
Lior Pachter
Wikipedia has a commenting system and guidelines in place for what content is deemed acceptable for BLP pages. In the case of this story there has been extensive debate on the issues you raise (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuval_Peres). For the record, I have not participated in editing the Wikipedia pages nor have I asked anyone else to do so. I did check the references you allude to and the page currently has none to my blog. As a factual matter, there is one reference to the Stanford server (for YP’s letter), and multiple references to an article published in The California Aggie (the official UC Davis newspaper): https://theaggie.org/2019/12/05/yuval-peres-math-professor-with-series-of-sexual-misconduct-allegations-levied-against-him-gives-lecture-at-uc-davis/
I did not solicit the publication of that article, however I did interview with the journalist who called me to let me know she was writing the piece, and some of my remarks are quoted in the story. The journalist did corroborate what I wrote here (https://liorpachter.wordpress.com/2019/11/06/an-outrage-at-uc-davis/), noting that “The UW Office of Equal Employment Opportunity and Affirmative Action confirmed that Peres resigned from his affiliate position in 2012 ‘after receiving notice that the university would be investigating allegations of sexual harassment.'”
January 16, 2020 at 5:00 pm
STEM Caveman
You were not interviewed by a “journalist”, but by a college student doing a minor in writing. Her sole journalistic activity consists of writing pieces about campus life for the college newspaper, and for some reason she decided to engage in activism by means of this article. Still, the reliability of the article itself can be evaluated.
The college journalista wrote an unbelievably long and detailed hit piece, a term paper dossier on Peres’ career and the impact of sexual harassment on women. She laundered some of the accusations (Anima, Lisha Li) into outright factual assertions about Peres (“Peres’ pattern of behavior was not limited to his time at UW”); a real journalist at a real newspaper would have used qualifiers such as “alleged” or been censored by the legal department. She made public records requests to obtain information from Berkeley (spoiler: “no information regarding any sexual misconduct by Peres”). All this digging for a campus life report on an event nobody on campus had paid much attention to. Of her sources at Berkeley, one gave her a polite brush-off, and the other characterized her inquiry, presumably correctly, as an attempt to “try to dig up rumors and allegations”.
The length, literally, to which she went makes the article appear to be either deliberate activism, a hit piece solicited by interested parties, or a naive college student going overboard. Pretty much no speaker in the history of university math lectures has had such a long and hostile Deep Dive into his background published in relation to a technical talk that did not make any waves on campus before or after the event. Whether the author did this on her own behalf or at the behest of others is not clear but to cite this as some neutral and reliable source for Wikipedia is ridiculous.
January 16, 2020 at 5:04 pm
Lior Pachter
Again, I’m not sure why you are raising concerns about Wikipedia on my blog. I encourage you to move this discussion to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuval_Peres where it is relevant.
November 9, 2019 at 1:07 pm
John Nirenberg
How did Dana Moshkovitz not hear the word “epsilon” very often in her life???? Only two times ever??
November 9, 2019 at 5:50 pm
Lior Pachter
She makes clear that she is talking about the experience of hearing the word refer to something outside of mathematics that is non negligible, yet presented as negligible, i.e. use of the word to diminish something that’s not unimportant.
A general comment: I think a statement like Dana’s, which is incredibly difficult to write, let alone share publicly, demands more than knee-jerk commentary and off-the-cuff responses. I suggest you consider carefully re-reading her statement, that you consider thoughtfully what she is saying, and that you then reflect on the implications of her experience.
November 10, 2019 at 4:57 pm
John Nirenberg
I don’t think it is clear. I consider mathematics “neutral”.
I apologize for my off-the-cuff response. Upon reflection, I think I focused on the epsilon thing as a defense mechanism for (not) processing the heavy stuff she was saying. I feel very bad for her and am proud of her for speaking out.
November 12, 2019 at 3:23 pm
Kay Kirkpatrick
Medicine is part of STEM, and I recommend reading Walking out on the Boys by Francis K. Conley. Things are similarly bad across all the fields you mentioned.
Academia is second only to the military in terms of rates of sexual harassment. The rate of harassment in the financial industry appears to be similar to academia, although that industry has had large lawsuits which may have had an effect on behavior.
December 1, 2019 at 8:45 am
AG
You mentioned that the rates of harassment in the financial industry appears to be similar to academia, and that academia is second only to the military in terms of rates of sexual harassment.
I’m curious to see which industries or sectors (public or private) have the lowest rates of sexual harassment.
After all, if specific industries or sectors have high rates of harassment, it stands to reason that there are other industries that presumably have lower rates of harassment.
March 15, 2021 at 11:08 pm
anonymous
http://www.math.kent.edu/~zvavitch/seminar.html
Yuval gave a talk at Kent State University last month. I am disgusted at how everyone forgets and normalizes sexual predators like him. I think in a few years he will resume his life back in academia and people move on from all the harm and pain he has inflicted without ever apologizing or even acknowledging it. I feel sick to my stomach to be in such a community.
March 24, 2021 at 6:27 pm
Anonymous
https://www.ems-ph.org/journals/of_article.php?jrn=jems&doi=1030
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00440-020-00962-1
All Yuval’s recently published papers have affiliation at Kent State University.
March 24, 2021 at 6:40 pm
Anonymous
https://web.math.rochester.edu/events/single/2042
His upcoming talks are affiliated as “visiting Kent State University”.
March 31, 2021 at 3:28 am
Yuval Filmus
The goal of the original authors of the letter against Yuval Peres was never to have him cancelled completely. They considered the situation in which a serial sexual harasser is given honor after honor to be ludicrous.
Now that Yuval Peres is stripped out of all positions of power, that his misdeeds are revealed to the public, that his character has (rightly) been assassinated, the original goal has been accomplished (and more). Yuval Peres will never be able to “resume his life back” and to have his reputation rehabilitated. His past will always follow him. He wasn’t able to find a permanent position anywhere. The best he could find so far is a visiting position at a rather low-profile university. Hopefully the lesson has been learned, if not by Yuval Peres himself, then by the community-at-large.
Mathematics will gain nothing from preventing further positive contributions of Yuval Peres to probability theory. The community should make sure that his past actions are well-known, and he should not be put in positions of power (including writing recommendation letters, editing journals, organizing workshops, and so on). Even talks could be awkward. But writing papers does not seem objectionable enough to me.
March 31, 2021 at 11:46 am
Lior Pachter
Just a note that Yuval Peres is a “Research Assistant” at Kent State.