Ever hear of the “Dave Rule”? If you work in Silicon Valley, chances are you have. Or, rather, if you work in Silicon Valley and you’re a guy, chances are you have. That is because not very many people who aren’t guys work in Silicon Valley. The Dave Rule is someone’s testosterone-infused take on gender balance in the workplace in the Valley. Reportedly, it says that you need to have at least as many women on your work team as you have guys named Dave.

Gender balance in the tech industry, or the lack thereof, has hardly been a secret. But Google recently made a very public commitment to doing something about it, following its straightforward revelation of the lack of gender balance on its own roster (70% of its global workforce is male). Since Google’s announcement of a $50-million project to encourage and train female programmers, other hi-tech companies (Facebook, LinkedIn and Yahoo!) have fessed up to similar imbalances in their workforces.

And now a high-profile sexual harassment lawsuit brought by a female former executive (and cofounder) of the dating app Tinder has hit the media, as if to specifically demonstrate how predictable such developments are in a culture so male dominated.

The specifics of the case are recognizable to anyone who deals with such cases. Whitney Wolfe, who had been VP of Marketing at the company, accused Tinder’s executives and those of Tinder’s parent company IAC/InterActiveCorp in the suit. According to Ms. Wolfe, her fellow executives engaged in “atrocious sexual harassment and sex discrimination” against her. She singled out Chief Marketing Officer Justin Mateen as “verbally controlling and abusive.” According to Wolfe, at various times Mateen called her a “slut” and a “whore,” at least once in public at a company event. At one point, says Wolfe, Mateen and CEO Sean Rad told her she was being divested of her co-founder title. Their explanation allegedly was that she made the company “look like a joke” as a “24-year old girl with little experience.” Mateen also told her, she alleges, “Facebook and Snapchat don’t have girl founders, it just makes it look like Tinder was some accident.”

All of this allegedly happened, it is generally agreed by those familiar with the parties involved, when Wolfe and Mateen’s romantic relationship began to sour.

Giving credence to Ms. Wolfe’s allegations is the fact that the company subsequently conducted an investigation and publicly confirmed that Mateen had sent private messages to Ms. Wolfe that contained what The New York Times described as “inappropriate” content. Mr. Mateen is now on suspension.

Tinder is hardly alone in being exposed as a breeding ground for remarkably open bad behavior by males who spend most or all of their time in a world with virtually no built-in constraints on such conduct. The technology industry in general has come under scrutiny for its blatantly sexist culture. Last year at the TechCrunch Disrupt technology conference, which is a hackathon for technology engineers, one entrepreneur introduced an app that promoted staring at unclothed women. Another demonstrated his new app by, among other things, simulating masturbation. According to witnesses, both presentations were enthusiastically cheered by the highly entertained, mostly male audience. The sponsors of the event later felt compelled to issue an apology for allowing the demonstrations to take place.

If nothing else, the Tinder case and others like it demonstrate the power of a deeply-embedded culture to dictate the behaviors of the people in it. There is an ongoing debate about how to change a culture. One side of the debate argues that culture change can be accomplished by energetic, ongoing behavioral change learned through training, policed by firm, well communicated policies and led by example from the top of the organization. The other side of the debate argues that the only way to change culture is to change the demographic by changing the people in it, up and down the entire organization. The Tinder case and others like it argue powerfully that behavior change may help change the sexist culture of the technology industry. But the needed change will never happen unless the demographics of the industry change. Technology needs more women.

Sources: money.com 7/1/14; theguardian.com 7/2/14; The New York Times 7/1/14