A well-respected figure in tech recently asked me if I might like to co-author a piece with him on the subject of diversity. As we sat down to brainstorm, he joked, as an almost apologetic preface: “Just to be clear, I haven’t sexually harassed anyone, so I’m not doing this to cover up for anything.” The possibility hadn’t been on my mind, but as soon as he named it, I was saddened by how plausible it could be.
Time named its 2017 Person of the Year to be ‘The Silence Breakers’: the brave women and men who spoke up and unleashed that wave of reckoning. They were not the first to speak, but theirs were the voices that resonated and were able to break through, which is as much a statement about them as it is about the world that would finally hear them.