College students and young adults far and wide have become acquainted with Tinder since the app launched in 2012, and many can attest to its efficacy. Whether it’s helped them find a fun one-night stand or an everlasting bond, nobody can deny it: Tinder brings people together.
It establishes familiarity between strangers by linking to Facebook, so Tinder has also been commended for being “lady-friendly.” However, in light of recent events, that praise is ironic.
Tinder’s chief marketing officer Justin Mateen has been suspended amid allegations of sexual abuse and threats directed toward Tinder co-founder and former marketing vice president, Whitney Wolfe.
Wolfe filed a lawsuit against Tinder and its parent company InterActiveCorp, creator of Match.com, on June 30 for sexual harassment and discrimination.
The lawsuit seeks punitive damages for emotional distress, as well as “compensatory damages” for lost pay. Wolfe claims she endured verbal abuse and sexual discrimination and was stripped of her “co-founder” title and company equity, which Wolfe’s attorney David Lowe said was worth millions of dollars at the time she left Tinder.
According to court documents, Mateen called Wolfe “a whore” on various occasions, including one that was allegedly witnessed by Tinder CEO Sean Rad, and said he was taking away her title of co-founder because “having a young female co-founder ‘makes the company seem like a joke’ and ‘devalues’ the company.”
Mateen, on the other hand, evidently doesn’t apply such stringent standards to himself. His social media persona is a collection of racist and sexist views.
A majority of articles written about Tinder’s meteoric rise barely mention Wolfe, if at all. But, in reality, she had an instrumental role in making Tinder as successful as it is.
According to Joe Munoz, who built the app’s technical backend, Wolfe is the one who came up with the name “Tinder.” She also singlehandedly increased the app’s user base by more than 65 percent with her marketing savvy and Panhellenic ties.
“Her pitch was pretty genius,” Munoz said during an interview with BusinessWeek. “She would go to chapters of her sorority, do her presentation and have all the girls at the meetings install the app. Then she’d go to the corresponding brother fraternity — they’d open the app and see all these cute girls they knew.”
Via: vaunte.com
Wolfe was nonetheless robbed of rightful recognition, relegated to a lower rung in the Tinder hierarchy –Rad hired Mateen as Wolfe’s superior — and, adding insult to injury, berated by a colleague both face-to-face and over a series of emails and text messages, some of which were published by Silicon Valley-blog Valleywag.
Wolfe is a prominent victim, but her experience is not rare. The legal war she is waging against Tinder and ActivCorp is a “small person, big picture” portrayal of the misogyny and sexism rampant in the business world, which is arguably a boy’s club.
Historically speaking, men got a leg up in the professional realm while women were metaphorically still chained to stoves. And in spite of all the “leaning in” everybody has been talking about so much, gender inequality is still very much a reality, especially in the tech world.
Facebook is a glaring example. It employs almost 7,000 people, and 69 percent of those employees are men.
It can be speculated that women are particularly underrepresented in the tech field because of educational biases that funnel women to social sciences rather than STEM fields. Underrepresentation is a problem in and of itself, but it also contributes to women’s vulnerability to unfair treatment in the workplace.
Even worse, their complaints, if ever they materialize, are routinely dismissed by superiors. Wolfe, for example, was dismissed by Rad as “dramatic,” according to the lawsuit.
This lends itself to an even bigger issue: People in positions of power, typically men, use semantics in self-serving attempts to undermine female employees who speak out against sexual harassment and general mistreatment, exemplified by Wolfe’s demotion to “contributor” from co-founder. This occurred after Wolfe cut off a relationship with Mateen that reportedly lasted several months.
And Tinder isn’t the only tech company that’s come under fire for its treatment of women.
Snapchat, another app wildly popular with the 18 to 28 set, has also been in hot water. Its CEO Evan Spiegel apologized last month for emails containing misogynistic statements he sent during his time at Stanford University.
Ashe Dryden, a programmer and an advocate for workplace diversity, was quoted in a New York Times article as saying, “These incidents [of sexual harassment] reflect what we see at every level — the continual dismissal of women’s competence, the overt sexualized atmosphere we see both online and off, the aggressive hyper-masculinity that is often rewarded and idolized by other men.”
Dryden’s words hit close to home because they encapsulate what University of Florida students witness and experience on campus. The Greek system, which has a stronghold on UF’s social sphere, represents a toxic binary that promotes ideas of misogyny and sexism. Because those ideas are ingrained into the collective unconscious, it’s easy to turn a blind eye to sexism. And to turn a blind eye is to perpetuate.
The sooner we realize that and act accordingly, the sooner a more ideal status-quo will be reached.
Featured photo courtesy of: Twitter
