I have to agree. Adria Richards took a picture of two guys then posted the, to twitter, complaining about a conversation the two were having that possibly contained sexual innuendo. The same sort that she made on twitter earlier.
In this case, someone has quit and said that a company hasn't been doing the right thing. That's a far more ethical stance to make.
Yeah I'm curious as to why they included that at the end... It's a pretty bold claim, it doesn't add to the article, and there's nothing to back up what they're saying. It just adds to the shoddy journalism of recode.
Seems like we have a pretty lame situation here being documented by pretty lame journalists.
Going into a workplace with the idea that everyone should be treated fairly and equally is a distraction and a problem waiting to happen? "Feminism" isn't "women better, dudes worse."
(And the always popular implication that people who aren't engineers don't matter...)
> the always popular implication that people who aren't engineers don't matter
There is also the popular implication when there is a girl on twitter starting trouble again, they're not coding and trying to claim some form of discrimination, instead of developing programming skill.
You can't--and obviously I mean in the "if you're a basically functioning, mostly vertebrate human being it's morally repugnant" sense of "can't", not the physical, over-literal sense that I feel like you're going to use--blame shitty workplace behaviors (and this isn't the first I've heard of GitHub having problems) on people not knowing how to code. I mean, what kind of world do you want to live in where you can excuse mistreating people because they don't "develop programming skill"?
Actually, don't answer that. I don't want to know what kind of world you want to live in.
But that's an unfair implication, not one you should be looking to imitate.
Edit: I see from your profile that you're an undergrad. Hopefully you'll grow out of the attitude that only super-coders are valuable to a project, like I did.
Tumblr isn't representative of feminism or humankind for that matter. And a collage of Tumblr posts cherry-picked for their awfulness isn't even representative of Tumblr itself.
How about university courses about feminism, taught by self-proclaimed feminists? I've been dropped from such a course against my will for no other reason than being male IMO, after two days of class, having said nothing (like everybody else). "Too many people in the class", the only two dropped were the two males of which I was one. I don't think it's a stretch either to say that a great deal of feminist writing reeks of misandry.
The last women's studies course I took in college had the professor actively thanking the men in the class for their contribution to the discussion.
Some people are Assholes. Feminists are people. Ergo, some Feminists are Assholes. It doesn't say anything more about feminism than it does people in the checkout line at the grocery store.
I think we can expect more from full professors than people in the checkout line. It's hard to imagine any professor in any other discipline not being fired for that.
The "I was born a woman but I really am a chinchilla inside" variety of Tumblr users in perpetual Poe's law mode aren't the average feminist, but the Twitter feminist circles I've seen (I don't know if Julie is really a part of them — I recall seeing her name often, but I don't know much about her) are, honestly, more articulate and powerful versions of some SJ Tumblr circles. They don't rise up for the same reasons the more unhinged[0] Tumblr posters do, but they have some pressure power that's used unwisely like in the dongle/fork situation last year.
[0] Both many prominent Twitter Feminists and Tumblr SJWs cling to the idea that if you're privileged, you can't criticize the oppressed (even if you're not directly oppressing the oppressed in question), so if you're misunderstood as doing something that opresses the oppressed they can start a campaign against you so you lose your job, etc, but you can't answer in the same tone. This is to say, I'm being a jerk for using the word "unhinged" when I don't have any apparent mental disorders.
Tumblr feminism is actually an even extremer extension of postmodern feminism, which is the mainstream ideology nowadays, promoted by journals such as Jezebel and Feministing.
The vast majority of tech industry feminists are postmodernists.
When no one does anything to counter them, or to make it clear they don't speak for the social group, it does actually define said group.
There's a lot more to this phenomenon than you could get into on hacker news, but it goes something like "if you don't agree with everything i say exactly, you're clearly the enemy"
Sigh... No it's not, it is just comparing apples to oranges. If you cite the 20% number I know you have no interest in understanding the issue, because that number is a comparison across all jobs, and it ignores education, part time, everything. You don't have women and men working in the same company with 20% difference in wages (at least not significantly many - of course such things happen, but also with men vs men).
The 20% number definitely is not from the tech industry either.
So you have women picking different jobs. You have different incentives and preferences (motherhood is the big one here), different preferred industry (like media vs mining or whatever).
You also have women getting half of the income of their husbands, having the option to drop out of unpleasant jobs, not being under the same pressure to feed their family, and so on.
There are many many aspects to this. So far I haven't seen anything that convinces me women are being treated unfairly.
There are issues, but only if you consider staying at home with kids degrading. For example I suppose the incentive to get a good education is less if you know you will miss out several years where you could earn back the money invested. I don't think "unfair" is the right way to characterize that issue, though.
I downvoted you for the "marketer/enthusiast" comment. I think that was out of line. Deciding whether she's an engineer or a marketer is not up to you, it's between her and Github.
That said, feminism describes lots of different things, and I think she was addressing a broad group with that first statement. The sooner you realize that not all feminists have the same agenda, the easier it will be for you to understand what's going on.
If the author couldn't make this distinction, I wonder what else they missed? Integrity is required all across the board, and it reflects poorly on you as a writer if you mess up something so central and easy in the title of your article.
"Prominent GitHub Employee Quits, Alleging Gender-Based Harassment" ...there fixed, now is it relevant ? Let's just add the title to all the other shoddy inaccuracies in the article. So, now do you agree ??
>> What job she did there has no relevance to whether or not harassment is worth investigating.
You're right, but as a writer, if you mess up something so simple as somebodies job title, then your integrity takes a hit. I want a solid piece, that includes getting minutia like this right.
Relevant to the article title but not that actual issue. How she was treated is not made better or worse depending on whether or not she's an engineer.
Splitting hairs about her position distracts from the actual issue at hand.
Yes. But it also addresses the quality of the journalism, which in this case is disgustingly poor. The link to random open source repos hosted on github, the inability to nail down a title... just poor journalism.
I think rds2000's comment about her not being an engineer was responding to the origin article referring to nrrdcore as variously, "prominent github engineer" and "influential engineer".
Does she need to be an engineer or a "good engineer" to have a non-hostile workplace?
Considering that GitHub appears to have hired her partially for the purpose of bettering the culture, your point about "feminist agendas" also falls short.
I'll wait for real facts before coming to any conclusions, but immediately rejecting her statements like you're doing is not constructive for anyone.
'prominent engineer' makes it sound like the prominence is due to being well-respected for skill in engineering, when it's apparently not. This is what ehutch79 is saying.
As an example, my primary role in my company is administration of systems. I very rarely take out the trash, and sometimes refill the toilet rolls if they're low. It would be misleading to refer to me as a janitor, prominent or otherwise.
Edit: I say 'apparently not' because she may be an awesome engineer, but her code is in private repos.
The article calls her an engineer, she describes herself as a designer and front-end developer. And just because someone doesn't have many publicly available repositories doesn't mean they don't contribute to private repositories. This isn't even the controversy, what she does for a living is of little consequence, it's the alleged harassment that's up for discussion – we shouldn't be judging how good she is at programming.
Julie has contributed to one of my projects, but due to my own fuckup, the code has not yet made it into master, and so doesn't appear on that graph: https://github.com/resque/resque.github.com/pull/3
It's an incredibly valuable contribution that I thanked her for and apologized for not yet merging in person.
Ditto. I had private repos on github, even, but moved to bitbucket because their pricing model made more sense to me. My bitbucket account looks equally empty to anyone that isn't logged in as me. That's excluding the dummy github and bitbucket accounts I have, just like the dummy irc and email and twitter and more accounts I have because some people are assholes and my real name (Jane) is so very obviously feminine. Oh, I can't forget to include HN in there too - I picked a very gender ambiguous username all those years ago for a reason.
Not to mention I can't actually share the code to a lot if not all of the work that I do, and I'm too busy elsewhere (a restaurant...) or dealing with impostor syndrome to share anything else most days. Hell, sometimes I have a hard time just opening my mouth to talk to other people because of impostor syndrome. But I code for a living, and I thought that was enough to call myself a coder.
But according to some people, including people I used to consider friends and allies of my very laid back feminism, nothing is ever fucking good enough for them so I don't really know what I am in the end. Amateur hour involving a part time restaurant owner that is clearly a fake coder and couldn't possibly have majored in CS in college because she has big boobs and she has other hobbies that aren't staring at the computer for the entire day? Gasp. I really have no fucking clue, why don't you tell me what I am? :|
So a person has to have lots of open source code available to prove that they are good engineer? Maybe, just maybe, they were too busy earning money and the code they wrote, however brilliant, was commercial?
>Does anyone here have proof of gender discrimination or she was a good engineer?
Her skills and/or experience as a software developer have absolutely nothing to do with this. Someone's performance on a job is completely irrelevant when it comes to harassment or intimidation in the workplace.
You are part of the problem with sexism that exists in software development teams.
indeed it has nothing to do with gender: the article quotes hint that she was performing poorly and thus raged against people - used any kind of things available to her to circunvent the performance issue - including saying shes being harrassed or told she perform poorly because shes a women - even thus they seem to imply it has not been the case.
see the problem?
the only gender based issue is calling her queen.
i think people like you are the problem with toxic workplaces in general l you're blindly transforming arguments into whatever serves your cause - even when unjustified.
If she feels like people are treating her as if she's not good at her job because she's a woman when the reality is that she's just not good at her job, then yes, that is relevant. Not every time a woman gets passed over for a promotion is sexism, and all we've heard is one, obviously biased, detail-free version of the "story."
The ultimate sign of a piece of shit with no social comprehension is a programmer who uses the not equal relational operator in conversation. Human lives are not as simple as the PHP you write at your day job, dude.
Then you turn it into some sort of fucked up meritocracy thing. She wrote No Code therefore her opinions are invalid! I've got more bitcoins than her too!!
If a publicly distributed first-hand account by the person in question isn't "solid proof," what exactly are you looking for? What reason do you have to think she's being anything less than truthful?
There are three sides to every story. In this case there is her side, github's side and the truth. It is not that someone is lying, it is that people perceive things differently and it takes time to detangle perceptions to reach the truth. Let's wait for the truth before casting stones in either direction ...
An accusation is not a proof, at least not in any civilized country. As for your other question, it's hard to prove a negative but if you want reasons, well, github doesn't have any past record of sexism and no one has ever quit from github. So the least we can do is give them the benefit of the doubt, right? Or shall we grab our pitchforks?
Because for two years she said the opposite? She is, was, or is and was obviously lying, it is just a matter of when and how much. Was she lying before when she said everything was awesome, or is she lying now?
You could play the super long odds, everything was AWESOME for the past two years, but just turned awful. Then she was only lying now (because "I've been harassed by 'leadership' at GitHub for two years..."). That would paint her in the absolute best light, and it IMHO, rather unrealistic.
You could even play the super-super long odds, and assume everything she said before was a lie (said it was good, it was actually awful) and then things BECAME good recently and she doubled-down on lying and said things were bad.
... in my case, it isn't an assumption. It is a expectation based on prior behavior.
She has previously classified someone complaining to her employer that she used foul language during a speech at a conference where she was representing her employer as harassment. This makes me question her judgment regarding what should be considered harassment.
that seems like a poor analogy to me. Try this one
Harry: I can't afford to do that
Tom: I don't know, I don't have enough info here to know if you can afford to do it or not.
Bob: Are you saying that Tom is lying, or that he doesn't know his own situation?
The big difference in this case is that while it is totally plausible for X and Y in your conversation to know literally nothing about Portugal, in my example it is not plausible for Harry to be unaware of his own situation without being an idiot. So when Tom 'withholds judgment' on Harry's situation, he is saying that evidence directly from Harry is untrustworthy - Harry is either a liar or an idiot. (I introduced the third person, Bob, as in this case Tom is Horvath and she is not the one responding to you, doubting Tom).
Harry: John punched me
Tom: I don't know, I don't have enough info here to know if you were punched or not
Bob: Are you saying that Tom is lying, or that he can't recognise when he's being punched?
Not judging her story as truthful does not imply judging it as not (or "anything less than") truthful either.
Her story as far as the article describes, is not an account, it's an accusation without much factual, actionable data. You normally don't judge on accusations until you have tried within reason to obtain factual data from both parties involved.
My approach is different actually. While I think the criminal justice "beyond a shadow of a doubt" standard is sensible for many criminal trials, because I have no legal power over github, I treat these things more like civil suits. Which means I just look for "the preponderance of the evidence". In this case there are varying amounts of evidence for all three of the following:
1) workplace harassment against women is quite common
2) such harassment is frequently ignored
3) there was some harassment in this case
And there's no evidence that I've seen that suggests there was no harassment or that it was handled properly by management. Therefore for the time being my assumption is that the harassment and mismanagement both happened.
That said, although I have seen mountains of evidence for 1) and 2), because the amount of evidence for the specific situation is small, that means a small amount of counter-evidence about the specific situation could easily shift the balance of probabilities.
That said, I have seen quite a bit of evidence that such accusations are only rarely false, so while I would change my balance of properties readily, I don't expect that to happen.
Corroboration. Unless Julie Ann Horvath suffered in silence AND everyone else turned a blind eye, then there will be people who can support her story and provide additional credence to what she says.
> What reason do you have to think she's being anything less than truthful?
Experience. How often have we read a sensationalist-sounding story on the internet[0] that, in the end, turned out to be over-blown or an outright deception?
0 - "Single person claims that large/popular entity has done something despicable/outrageous! More at 11."
A counter-claim by the opposite party. more witnesses. evidence.
This isn't a formal court, but the court of public opinion can (in some cases) be more hurtful and more damaging than a real court that is merely exercising governmental powers.
Without a proof that is legally acceptable in a court of law, it's just her word against the companies.
I am not implying what she is saying is false. As @Jare said, "Her story as far as the article describes, is not an account, it's an accusation without much factual, actionable data."
How can I take the article seriously when it says that "GitHub has been embroiled in a series of diversity controversies, such as programmers adding racial and sexist slurs into their code", which links to an article where someone took GitHub search and found random people putting bad words into their public repos?
This author can't seem to distinguish between the code employees at GitHub write, and code users put onto GitHub.
That bit needs to go. This about workplace abuse, a tremendously more serious matter as it relates to Github than what non-Github employees put in the code Github hosts
I'm not waiting for a statement from Github, I'm waiting for a statement from ANYONE. Julie has written some tweets, but we don't even have her side of the story yet. I'm not grabbing my pitchfork, I'm saying people putting the word "bitch" in open source code hosted on Github has NOTHING to do with this story and is going to distract from a serious issue - as it clearly already has. re.code is usually better than this
Let's say I am an open source developer and I put some crazy stuff on Github.
Some journalist does a profile on me. Am I a "Github Software Developer" to them?
* Google Name -- "aha, link to Github"
* Find crazy stuff checked into Github repos.
* Google Github -- "aha, technology company something something distributed ... eyes glaze over technical mumbo jumbo".
* Claim I am a "Github Engineer"
It is obvious to us how it works, but say someone who has no idea about repos or open source will not quite understand the separation between user content and platform.
Everyone understands that not all the content in Youtube is written by Google employees. Same case in Google+, Facebook, Yahoo! Answers, ... It's the same idea applied to the Github repos.
Yes that is youtube used by many non technical people this is Github. It is a bit different. Chances are those that don't do any coding have no idea what Github is or what it is for.
That's like saying you find a racist post on facebook and conclude it's written by a "Facebook Poster". Also, I would expect better from a site called _recode.net_
The stupid article is on gizmodo and was merely linked as github-and-gender-related drama. Which it was. Crappily written drama, but drama nonetheless.
If you're unable to figure this kind of stuff out, then you should NOT be calling yourself a journalist. It's your job to figure out what the truth is. Making mistakes like this, especially when it's fairly common model right now, is inexcusable.
When you're presenting yourself as an authoritative source of information, ignorance of the absolute basics of what you're talking about ceases to be an excuse.
Zero percent of this conversation should be about the article, and should entirely be on the validity of the claim against the unhealthy work environment.
Sorry, but the article is doing Julie Ann Horvath a disservice by mixing up her - let's assume valid - complaints about the work environment with irrelevant rubbish. Blame re/code for not treating the subject seriously, either purposefully, or through sheer incompetence.
Well, it's the internets !! I wouldn't blame re/code. Julie has done herself a disservice by mixing up her - let's assume valid - complaints about the work environment with venting out on Twitter. I find it amazing that the kind of people who presumably, ought to know and understand the effect of something going viral sometimes are so unconcerned about what they post.
Unfortunately, we can't judge the claim at all, because for now it's innuendo, not a claim.
I'm curious why she'd post this on Twitter instead of taking it to a lawyer. And I don't mean for that to be innuendo- there are many reasons for this to go any which way.
If I had told people publicly my workplace was safe for women, and then I found out it wasn't, It would be important to me to let people know that fairly quickly. There might be other women applying for jobs there and making big life choices based on that information who deserve to know that the information has changed.
If I had told people publicly my workplace was safe for women, and then I found out it wasn't, It would be important to me to let people know that fairly quickly.
If you publicly told people that for two years, and suddenly have a live-streamed blow-out on twitter with Facebook-style innuendo, honestly I would completely discount your claims as an emotional tantrum, and would give it absolutely no stock.
There is absolutely nothing "actionable" being discussed. And this may surprise some people, but women are just as capable as men of grinding an axe or trying to take down someone (or some organization) they feel slighted by.
So if you were a woman considering taking a job at GitHub, this would have no influence on your decision? Really?
All it would take for me personally to reverse my stance on an employer being a good place for women is a single case in which I reported being sexually harassed and management then took the side of the harasser over me. Because one case is not acceptable, and it's all it takes to turn a workplace into a hostile and unpleasant environment.
That's not to say "oh, if she says something, she must be telling the truth", but the possibility that she is telling the truth is a huge red flag.
You're thinking only one level deep and taking her statements at face value. Look at the entire construction of this piece. What was specifically referenced? Nothing really.
In my opinion, a simple tweet like
"@x has done @y thus influencing me to leave this company, will put up a blog post." would be much more effective.
This way people know what happened, and all journalism is formed around the actual event. If the guy didn't want to get called out publicly, maybe he shouldn't have fucked up, but this way we get to hear both sides of the story.
No, I'm using risk analysis to conclude that the cost to me of accepting a job there if she's telling the truth is much higher than the opportunity cost of not taking the job (assuming I have other options) if her complaint turns out to be wrong.
Edited to add: the process of deciding the best action to take given uncertain information is fundamentally different from the process of trying to decide what is most likely to be true when there is nothing in particular at stake personally.
1. Which is why I have to estimate risk from incomplete information. Which is a pretty common thing for people to have to do in real life.
If I'm in an unfamiliar city and someone I don't know says "Hey, watch out for that alley, several people have been attacked there recently," I wouldn't know whether it was true. But it would be pretty stupid to decline to take any precautions until I could perform my own plot of crime statistic data by location to assess the truth value, don't you think?
2. Actually, they have a history of problems with women that they were trying to repair. Which is why she was trying to turn the company around on the issue and evangelize it in the first place. Did you read the article?
Have you ever heard of gaslighting? I don't know what actually happened with this woman either, but it is unfair to say, "Tell us what exact event caused this."
Many people have developed PTSD from a traumatic childhood within which no one distinct event/spoken sentence can be pointed to-- just many, many hurtful episodes over days, weeks, months, and years.
There probably was an event that set her over the edge. I just wouldn't expect it to be some Disney movie scene in which a guy in a suit slams his fists down and shouts, "Women are the worst!" Real people are more crafty than that. Real-life abuse is more subtle.
Again-- I don't know what happened. Just can't help but point out the kind of faulty logic being used here, since it is so common.
> So if you were a woman considering taking a job at GitHub, this would have no influence on your decision? Really?
If I was a woman interviewing at GitHub and then read this, it would absolutely influence my decision. I'd want to work there more.
There are two possibilities here:
1) Github has a culture of sexist workplace harassment
2) She is not telling the truth and Github is a perfectly nice place to work
In 1), I would be harassed, sure. I would then take care to document the harassment and file a lawsuit against the unrepentantly sexist company. I'd get a great settlement, Github likely has deep pockets or backers who do and would be desperate for this to go away. Cha-ching, cash in, and feel great doing it.
In 2), I'd have a nice job and everything would be cool.
Says a person who has obviously never been in such a situation and can't even imagine the reality.
It's cartoon-ish to say, "Well then I'd sue and everything would be worth it." Know why most women don't sue? Death treats. Rape threats. Not being able to ever get a job in tech again. No one believing the claims could possibly be true. The expense of suing someone and losing. Etc.
The day-to-day psychological effects alone are bad enough that, with any familiarity, you would never roll the dice on that chance.
> Says a person who has obviously never been in such a situation and can't even imagine the reality.
I worked on a community care facility for developmentally disabled adults when I was in college. I was young when it happened, probably 19-20, and an older woman I worked with made constant unwanted sexual advances. We worked unsupervised in a two person team in a group home, and for about six months she would never let a day go by without pointing out that she would be willing to engage in intercourse with me, right here and now, in pretty graphic terms. I was pretty low on the totem pole, the woman harassing me was very good friends with management, and so I never did anything about it.
So yes, I have been in a situation like that, can imagine the reality, and would totally be willing to go through it again and do it right by reporting it and maybe saving others from getting that treatment in the future.
She'd put a fair amount of reputational capital behind the idea that github wasn't like that, so making a public retraction is the honourable move if she genuinely believes she was publically spreading misinformation previously.
A very puzzling point of view. She claims to have been harassed all along at GitHub while she was promoting it. This goes to show the limitations of the twitter platform for serious discussion. I'm sure she'd have a more logical case to make in >140 characters. Twitter is the easiest platform to vent on, and that is precisely why it should be avoided in such circumstances.
"I regret defending GitHub's culture to feminists for the last two years. I'm sorry to everyone I've hurt in doing so."
"I've been harassed by 'leadership' at GitHub for two years. And I am the first developer to quit."
Worse than having a serious discussion on twitter, though, is tweeting twitter as a source of breaking news.
She never said GitHub "wasn't like that" as much as that she was doing her best to change the situation from inside of her own company (GitHub). She encouraged women to join GitHub because of the change she was working on creating-- not because it was a utopia at the present time. That was never claimed. (Though your point is still valid that she was "changing her tune" and that is a risk for anyone to do publicly.)
I found it quite funny. Especially given as example of a slur instance of someone having in his code class paths that idicates that his username on his own computer actually is "Faggot".
The whole piece reads more like a revenge of someone with twitter audience, who lost at the game of office thrones.
That username one was pretty ridiculous. For all we know it was an auto-assigned username to someone named something like Faggo T., and no slur was meant. These same bristling SJW's would be flaming anyone who pointed out a non-Anglo-Saxon name for having an unfortunate abbreviation. (Of course this is a hypothetical of a hypothetical.)
One of the comments[1] even seems to indicate an earlier version of the article included occurrences of "fag" that were benign words in another language. If you literally search for offense on the Internet, you'll find it, but without context you might be getting offended over nothing.
You mean people who are productive don't have time to harass other people? That does not sound convincing, because there a plenty or documented events were that happened.
Or do you mean, people who are productive don't have time to defend themselves against harassment? In this case you are definitely blaming the wrong people because you should blame those who still don't manage to keep the workplace, and the rest of society, free of sexism, racism and so on.
Article looks sensationalist without any concrete details, however I will reserve my judgement and wait for more information before condemning either party.
FTA: "Nonetheless, GitHub has been embroiled in a series of diversity controversies, such as programmers adding racial and sexist slurs into their code"
This links to a gizmodo article linking to random open source code on Github written by random people on the internet containing slurs. How is that Github's fault exactly? Should they censor "git push" with anti-slurs filters? This even links to a repo containing a list of words that should not be used by the user https://github.com/hhzl/Cuis-Smalltalk-StyledTextEditor/tree...
Ridiculous. No idea about the rest of the accusations though.
Oh, cool. I just realized I am lucky to not be listed in Leslie Horn’s terrible "article" [1]. I forked a URL shortener a few years ago. One feature I added was to avoid auto-generating offensive short URLs, which is on GitHub [2]. (In the early days of URL shorteners, TinyURL used a simple increment function to generate URLs (aa, ab, ac, …), and someone waited until "the C word" was up next and pointed it at the then-First Lady's website, apparently as a joke. Okay, that's easy enough to learn from.)
I've worked in healthy and unhealthy work environments, the healthy ones have ample diversity, and the unhealthy ones were heavily male dominant. When I worked for Dell, it was so heavily skewed that several of the female workers felt unsafe, and I would walk them to their cars. Little boys who would otherwise sit in the corner at the bar and completely avoid actual interaction with women get very brave when they have 30 of their friends backing them. It was disgusting. You do what you can, but senior leadership is ultimately responsible for the tone and the hiring/firing. I on several occasions brought complaints from what I had seen, I know the women had as well, and not a single person was ever fired for this.
Well, anywhere from unwarranted sexual touching (ass slaps), to coming up from behind and cozying up to a woman at her cubicle. These were all after the women had made it clear that this was inappropriate, though this shouldn't be required. Language was often beyond condescending, and often abusive and dismissive. One individual was particularly bad, he would get really upset if his advances (which could only have been learned from bad porno, they were so clueless and inappropriate), he would travel straight to verbal abuse and threats. The language was simply degrading.
This same individual, was in the elevator when my friend who worked at another company, but same building. He got into the elevator with his wife, and the individual said something along the lines of "I bet you'd like it if I bent you over now. Let everyone here have a turn" to his wife. My buddy showed far more restraint than I would have.
But, but, .. what do you mean? Just yesterday, that nice founder of GitHub showed us all of their mobile-first bring-your-life-into-work-and-never-leave tools for communication! It was all open and stuff!
You mean there are still informal networks? Power gradients? Alliances? They lied to us!
I agree that Valleywag was more neutral, but I disagree that the quality of Valleywag has gone up. Does anyone remember the old Owen Thomas/Nick Denton era of Valleywag, when they would actually get insider scoops? Sam Biddle and Nitasha Tiku are nothing more than glorified repost kids trying to squeeze out pageviews.
Sam Biddle and Nitasha Tiku are nothing more than glorified repost kids trying to squeeze out pageviews.
Agreed, to say nothing of the extreme left-wing bias that they bring to the table - wealth is automatically bad and suspect; startups are toxic, evil, and sexist; business needs to get out of San Francisco which would otherwise be a prosperous socialist paradise ...
It's getting harder and harder to read it on a full stomach.
It seems increasingly clear to me that there is a concerted effort to paint some tech companies as more sexist than they are. Don't get me wrong, there is definitely a problem of gender imbalance and harassment in our industry that needs to be addressed. But I have heard this "Github is sexist" meme in half a dozen of different contexts, but every time I investigate an incident it's some semantic squabbling about the word "meritocracy" or some idiot reporter who searched for racial slurs on a huge public corpus of user-submitted content, forgetting that the exact same argument could be applied to Youtube, Facebook, or literally any website.
It's equally frustrating because if Github (and others) actually do engage in despicable sexist behavior, I want to hear about it and adjust my views of them accordingly. However, when reporters, bloggers, and commentators flood the internet with harassment stories accompanied with such vitriolic language, it's harder for me to tell the actual stories apart from the bombastic linkbait.
I would love to read a first-hand account. For example, if Ms. Horvath blogged about her experiences and that was submitted to HN instead, it would have been much more interesting. This piece is simply there to piss people off and get clicks.
If you were so hurt by constant harassment at your workplace that you decided to quit, how would you feel about publicly describing those experiences?
What if you want to remain friends with some of your former co-workers? What if those former co-worker friends work on the same team as former co-worker harassers? Are you willing to put those friendships in jeopardy? Are you willing to make it harder for those friends to do their jobs? If they are forced to choose sides, how would you feel about affecting their working relationship with their coworkers? Sure, it's not your fault. But it's not their fault either!
What if you misremember who was involved in a particular incident? (Do you take detailed notes every time you're harassed? Even if it's a lot of little things that all added up in the end?) What if you name the wrong person? What if the hacker community focuses on that and uses it to discredit you and destroy your reputation you spent years working to build?
Would you enjoy remembering and reliving all of the experiences that hurt you over the past few years so that you can write a blog post about it? Would that actually make you feel better?
Would you enjoy feeling like you had to write that blog post just so that people would believe you?
If you were that hurt, I don't think posting a string of accusatory but unspecific tweets would help your cause better. You'd best be served by writing a thoughtful, accurate summary of the events that occurred, and let the reader decide for themselves how to respond.
I understand if she's just angry in response to other comments like the "Queen" one -- that's actually totally understandable. I don't blame her for reacting on Twitter like this. All that I said was if she did that, that would be one example of how I could understand what this kind of harassment is like and why it's harmful.
"You'd best be served by writing a thoughtful, accurate summary of the events that occurred, and let the reader decide for themselves how to respond."
Maybe she doesn't want the story to be about the specific events in her specific case. She wants it to be about the industry as a whole. Going into the details would distract from that message. The problems here are not specific to GitHub and certainly are not specific to her.
> The problems here are not specific to GitHub and certainly are not specific to her.
The problem here is that nobody has yet given a concrete example of such a problem. In this particular case, there are a bunch of vague tweets, in others, people looked at user-submitted content etc. Just saying ‘there is a problem’ neither makes it clear that there is a problem, nor what that problem is nor how to fix that problem.
GitHub knows about the problems. I hope GitHub makes an honest effort to fix them. And I hope they blog about what they fixed and why they fixed it. Hopefully when that happens, there will be some good lessons there.
But we don't have to collectively relive what Julie went through. This story is about a real, systemic problem. It shouldn't turn into a "true crime" infotainment story about one person's experience.
GitHub went through tons of PR issues, if she had a valid complaint do you think HR would ignore it? Let's use common sense here for a minute.
If she had issue with the company and went public with this, she can say what it was. There is no need to post tweets and beating around the bush on this issue.
This is not helpful. Either there is a problem at Github, or there isn't. Couching it in terms of a general problem across the industry is not helpful.
Is the leadership at Github sexist? You can't just handwave that question away and say "Of course it is, it's a well-known industry problem.", when a specific event has caused that allegation to be made very public. Talking about the event in question gives rise to understanding, generalities and vague tweets do not.
I don't want to attack the messenger here, but all we have to go on are a series of tweets which do not, by themselves, present a very clear message. She claims to be harassed by the leadership for two years... whilst defending them to feminists for the same time? And then in the next tweet, it's only the events of one day which have caused a problem.
It's very hard to get a consistent story out of the information at hand, which is why people are asking for a better explanation. Since Horvath has made this public in the first place, I don't think that's an unreasonable expectation.
It would be better to have the results of a survey done on a random sample of employees. Unfortunately, in journalism, we only get sensationalized and often completely unsubstantiated versions of single accounts. In this case, instead of an actual account, we merely have innuendo that could be one.
Honest question: how does a prominent person quitting publicly make it more clear that there's a concerted effort (which insinuates an arranged effort, basically a conspiracy) to mislead people? If anything I took it as the opposite, that there is likely some incident(s) that concretely points to sexist behavior. I'm not saying you're wrong, but it seems to me that the simplest explanation is that Julie Ann Horvath quit because she was fed up, not to harm her ex-employer for a bigger cause.
I just realized you may mean the author of the article is trying to harm github's image, which I agree is possible. But the real story to me is Horvath quitting, not someone writing an article about it.
Disclaimer: I am speaking of the general case here... NOT about J.A.H.
But what you're missing is that people sometimes crack up. We're all a little unstable. You see two choices: The person is harassed out by the conspiracy in their company, or the person quits to fuel the conspiracy they're a part of.
I say there is a third choice: The person freaked out, or was under too much stress, or had a period of mental instability, and 'flamed out'. This actually happens to prominent people pretty frequently, hell it happens to most people at some time in their life. I've done it before. Fortunately I wasn't in a public position.
Whether or not her allegations turn out to have merit, blasting them out on Twitter without having gone through the appropriate channels inside and outside the company first shows a distinct lack of professionalism.
There are plenty of professional responses when there is conflict with your coworkers and attempting to publicly shame them is very far from any of them.
She founded GitHub's Passion Projects series, so if GitHub does something that undermines that message, her professional reputation is on the line. She writes on twitter "HR has a well documented explanation and has for years."
not sure how "all destroyed in a day" and "hr documented for years" work together.
oh yeah - it doesnt. if anything thats another thing that totally discredit her... i dont doubt she complained to ht over the years trying to fuck ppl up after reading the excerpt however.
Oh, I see, it's the victim's fault because she didn't engage with systems created by the harassers to your satisfaction. Such elegant logic: no matter what, somehow it's the woman's fault.
Gender seems quite irrelevant when it comes to what colechristensen is saying. It'd apply equally well to a male who feels wronged in some way at his place of employment.
This is a poorly-written article focusing on insignificant tidbits of illegitimate controversy attributed with GitHub which distracts from actually discovering the details of an unhealthy work environment that may exist at GitHub.
The bit about racial and sexist slurs in some random users' code? Completely irrelevant. GitHub is a platform to host code. They are not and should not be responsible for what people commit to repositories. To suggest otherwise is to suggest that GitHub should take on the role of a censor, and at that point, code associated with any gray area (like Popcorn Time) becomes a target for the vocal minority.
Let's wait for Horvath to finish her side of the story and go from there.
I dont know much of the circumstances, but I feel that this particular article hurts Julie Ann Horvath more than it helps. First, it presents a series of tweets, each more vicious than the previous. Then it presents a blatantly wrong example of Github accepting racial slurs and its ilk. However, it continues to talk about how GitHub has actually been improving the culture and that more women have been joining. Next, it presents a rather weak example of 'harassment' that I can even see as the manager trying to do the right thing in his own view but presenting it entirely in the wrong way. Finally, it ends with a tweet that Julie Ann Horvath wants secret to remove a post about her (is anyone else angry about the implicit censorship here?).
Again, I do not know what is happening here, but the article has at the least made me mad that people are resorting to censorship to solve their disputes.
Slander turns out to not be covered under the DMCA, so the hosting site is under no obligation to remove a post after a notice and no trial or court order.
But it might be in their best interests to take it down regardless. The fact that they're not legally compelled to do so makes it even less like censorship.
You don't think it's censorship if at any time, for any reason, someone can induce them to take down any post by claiming libel? Well, I might agree with that, but it would also make every site useless.
First, it would be libel. Second, truth is a defense to libel. Therefore, in order to say that the action was illegal you would have to prove it false. Hence the reason I call it censorship: because there is no proof (or even argument) as to whether or not it is true or false, just a person demanding that it be removed.
...'The issue has spilled over into other Internet companies too, as Horvath quite correctly called out Secret, the anonymous-sharing app, for leaving up what is an appalling post about her, in which she is called “Queen.”.....
I signed up for the Secret yesterday based on the HN comments of their UX interactions and I immediately noticed that in comments below Secret posts, people are assigned random icons and then refer to each other by what the icon looks like. She refered to the author of that Secret comment as "greenshirt" in her tweets. Is it possible that the "Queen" was a reference to her icon(which we dont see from the screenshot), rather than an insult. It could be just be attributed to a chess figure icon.
OMFG, seriously Recode? you registration that requires a password sends it over plain text to an http post?
I was about to register to comment, but now i will have to use a throwaway email, password
Yes. You don't use gendered pronouns to refer to your coworkers and professional associates because you're reducing that person to their gender when it rarely matters. Also, you don't call people 'retards' because that's insulting to people with disabilities. What you call your wife and daughter is between you and your family.
Can't speak for the person who called her "queen", but that's the problem with some words being gendered and others not. Most words in my mother tongue are gendered even if the thing they're referring to are objects with no innate gender. Cultural insensitivity or not, I fail to see how calling a woman a queen reduces her to her gender. Hell, I can't see how calling a man a queen reduces him to any gender.
I'm assuming whoever called her a queen wanted to allude to a domineering personality, and indeed nobody is called a "king" for being pushy and domineering, but the sentiment is also expressed in regards to men, as in "he does X like he fucking owns the place".
I don't know, I've personally seen both men and women be criticized for domineering attitudes in similar situations. Some men are less likely to criticize men for their domineering attitude for fear of starting a fight (some men don't physically attack women, but will attack men), making an enemy with bully tendencies, losing their job, etc. Perhaps it's not that men being pushy and domineering is really appreciated, it's just accepted as a fact of life to prevent uncomfortable repercussions.
> I fail to see how calling a woman a queen reduces her to her gender. Hell, I can't see how calling a man a queen reduces him to any gender.
You may see it that way, and I won't question your integrity about it. However, it is undeniable that there has been a ton of misogyny directed towards women in the workspace in fields that have been classically dominated by men. And, the perpetrators of which, typically have used sexually-charged terms, such as "Queen", to refer negatively to women attempting to elevate their careers within in a organization in no different manner than a man would.
This isn't a semantic argument. It's quite possible to work in a professional setting with members of the other gender, and critique a coworker has having as being pushy and domineering without resulting to gender pronouns. Regardless if you think that the use of them implies that you think the other gender is equal or not, the context described in my previous paragraph makes it hard to escape the perception that if you use them, you don't think the genders are equal.
> You don't use gendered pronouns to refer to your coworkers and professional associates because you're reducing that person to their gender when it rarely matters.
Huh? You mean you should not refer to your coworkers as "he" or "she" when they are a man and a woman, respectively?
Are you being purposely obtuse? The root of this entire thread was around the use of the word "Queen" to criticize a female coworker. Please don't take my point out of context. If you really want to have a argument over semantics, then I'll amend my original argument to say "veiled gender pronouns".
You are being obtuse here. The issue was the inflammatory tone of the language being used, of which that was just one part. There are tons of contexts where it would be perfectly fine.
Eh, publicly shaming doesn't work without considerable and undeniable proof. It will just backfire into internet rage and dossing ala dongle gate. If there is real harassment best just make it hurt through state harassment arbitration. When they get tired of paying through the nose for all the stupid insensitive things naive and oblivious coworkers are bandying about, maybe they'll get serious.
Start writing things down and then contact a local equal opportunity office and start the process. It will not be cheap for them. If people keep doing this they'll change their ways.
Going public on Twitter or Hacker News though hasn't done much other than bring out nasty and unproductive fights between Social Justice Warriors and Men's Rights fanatics. They make everyone look bad and we all walk away feeling like maybe we've lost faith in humanity when in reality a serious problem just stems from mostly unintentional, but hurtful ignorance.
This is exactly what I don't understand. If I was being harassed to the point that I was considering quitting my job, I would simply gather all the evidence I could (she mentions emails, I would also carry a voice recorder) and hire an attorney. I wouldn't tweet about it, I wouldn't write a blog post about it or give a talk about it. None of those things are going to fix the problem. File the lawsuit and let the facts speak for themselves.
That's not how it works, at least not in California. That is if you use the equal employment opportunity system. You go through arbitration first. The two sides have to meet and negotiate an outcome, someone is there to help the process. Likely it will be settled there with money exchanged unless there was never any enough evidence for it to go to arbitration. Once there is arbitration, both sides have to compromise. If this fails, then you can file a law suit. The arbitration will be part of that I imagine, but I've never seen how the process works after arbitration. I think usually fixing it in arbitration is the norm.
You don't still have to work at that place to file the grievance. So this individual can still do that. I think if you've gone public with your accusation you are less likely to have success at arbitration because I would think at least.
The amount of money I've seen exchanged is usually a few months salary. You have to come in with a big number though, because you will be pressured to bring it down.
I am quite frankly disappointed in the behavior of my peers whenever a story like this comes out. It makes me ashamed of my industry - we are so much better than this!
There is no place for discrimination in this world. Ever.
"Differentiation between what is ‘good’ and ‘bad’ requires discrimination. This is a capability no younger than life itself, which it serves as an indispensable function. As soon as there is behavior, there is discrimination between alternatives. One way leads to survival, the other way leads to death. There is nourishment, or not; reproduction, or not; safety or predatory menace. Good and bad, or the discrimination between them (which is the same thing), are etched primordially into any world that life inhabits. Discrimination is needed to survive.
The very existence of archaic hominids attests to billions of years of effective discrimination, between safety and danger, wholesome and putrid or poisonous food, good mates and less good (or worthless) ones. When these elevated apes differentiated between good and bad, appetizing and rotten, attractive and repulsive, they found such discriminations sufficiently similar in essence to be functionally substitutable. When judging that some food item is ‘not good for us’, a person is ‘rotten’, or the odor of a potential mate is ‘delicious’, we recall such substitutions, and the primordial sense of discrimination that they affirm. There can be no long-term deviation from the original principle: discrimination is intelligence aligned with survival.
Two contrary developments now present themselves. Firstly, there is a sublimation or sophistication of discrimination, which might be called cultivation. Abstract concepts, modes of expression, artworks, delicate culinary flavors, refined behaviors, and exotic elaborations of sexual-selection stimuli, among innumerable other things, can all be subtly discriminated on the ancient scale, supporting an ever more intricate and extended hierarchy of judgments. The reflexive doubling of this potential upon itself, as captured by the ‘higher’ judgment that to discriminate well is good, produces a ‘natural aristocracy’. For the first time, there is a self-conscious ‘Right’. This, at least, is its logico-mythical ur-form. To divide the good from the bad is good. Order, hierarchy, and distinction emerge from an affirmation of discrimination.
Because the Left cannot create, it comes second. It presupposes an existing hierarchy, or order of discriminations, which is subverted through a ‘slave revolt in morality’. The formula is simple enough: to discriminate is bad. Following from this leftist moral perversion, as its second-order consequence, those who do not discriminate (well), but are in fact discriminated against, must be the good. In the new moral order, therefore, to be bad at discrimination is good — or ‘universalist’ — whilst the old (and now ‘evil’) quality of good judgment, based on competent perception of patterns and differences, is the very quintessence of sin."
Oh, blanket statements. If you are against discrimination, always, you must then be opposed to Horvath’s creation of a series of talks that discriminate against men? It’s explicitly woman-only. The only discrimination that has demonstrably occurred at GitHub is the anti-male selection criteria of Passion Projects.
Shouldn’t have to say this, but I’m merely pointing out that you probably aren’t saying what you think you are saying, and I am neither condoning nor condemning Passion Projects, GitHub, or Julia.
Yes, as it happens, I am against both negative and positive discrimination. But until I have a better alternative to the latter for improving access to our industry then I have to accept it as a mechanism to help overcome the legacy of the former.
Nothing makes me roll my eyes harder than reverse-discrimination rebuttals. Inevitably the community focuses all its energy on character assassination to avoid sniffing its own stench.
Having a speaker series featuring women in tech is not "anti-male discrimination". Maybe it would be if there weren't 1000+ other tech conferences where the majority of speakers are men. How someone can say stuff like this in 2014 honestly baffles me.
It’s obviously "anti-male discrimination," by definition. It’s just not evil or unwarranted. Discrimination is not a synonym for hate; it basically means selection criteria or bias, which obviously applies. For pete’s sake. Are you so eager to prove you’re a good guy that you’re going to paint everyone else as a bigot?
I just don't take these people seriously anymore. It seems like a uniquely north american woman phenomenon.
Why is that I almost never hear about a German female software developer crying wolf?
This person could have been legitimately harassed, but all of the bullshit flooding online has made me grow a thick skin and just not care anymore because I think it's fake.
There is a lot of sexism in Europe. e.g. the European Union tried to get more women into science with a campaign called "Science: It's a girl thing"[1]. The promotional video[2] is painfully archiac. It looks like something straight out of Mad Men. "Pete, women are only interested in make up, so make sure we have lots of that"
Perhaps they were thinking of TV Shows like Germany's Next Top Model? While I also think the video is ridiculous, who knows, perhaps it actually works for the audience of that TV show (which is most teenage girls).
Advertising is more interested in results than in political correctness.
Then again, advertising paid for by tax money? I suspect somebody went golfing and sealed the deal...
It's cringe-worthy for you, but it's actually popular amongst the target demographic and has probably done more for getting girls into tech than most other initiatives. You can deny it all you want, but many girls really do like that kind of thing - and denying their right to like that stuff is just as bad as denying their right to join the tech workforce.
EDIT: I mean the initiative as a whole, not the video alone. The whole initiative has been done in a fairly cringe worthy way for me though, but for the target audience it mostly gets it right.
(a) evidence of that being extremely popular with women
(b) or evidence of people with the power/ability/money/resources to make/sell/publish books thinking that that sort of thing is extremely popular with women.
Not the same thing at all. After all, the original video was made by the European Commission to publicise their women in science campaign, which does not mean that the video is popular with women in science. Sometimes organisations make mistakes or are wrong.
Let me give several alternate reasons:
1. There are far fewer Germans.
2. The percentage of software engineers in Germany is lower.
3. Germany has fewer startups. Large companies typically take gender equality pretty seriously, if for no other reason than that they are more risk averse.
4. Germans have the annoying tendency to speak and write in German. So while there may be quite a lot of people discussing problems in Germany far fewer people can read these and none are posted to english language websites like hacker news.
So assuming the problem was equally prevalent at software startups in both countries would expect to hear about it a lot less from Germany.
If you have a thick skin, then you won't mind my telling you that this is not the first time I've read a rude, immature comment on here and then looked above it to see your name attached to it.
All of the incidents of claimed harassment in tech that have resulted in enough noise that I have noticed them (5, if I am remembering correctly) have involved North American women. I think they were all in the United States, in fact.
There could be some bias because I'm in the United States, and most of the tech news and tech discussion sites I read are in the US, so I'm probably more likely to learn of things happening in the US than in the rest of the world. Still, given that every example I can think of is North American, I cannot criticize his observation.
Matteo Renzi brought on a pregnant woman as a minister in his new government here in Italy, and I've read and heard no end of comments about it. Like she has some kind of disease that prevents her from working.
So, yes, sexist bullshit exists the world over.
Generally though, these things don't get resolved in threads like this, or even through laws or prominent lawsuits (although they can help). My feeling is that things really improve a bit at a time when each and every one of us becomes more vigilant about what goes on around us, and acts - perhaps just in a small way - to try and improve the situation whenever we see stuff that's not right. The other thing about acting locally is you act on stuff that you see and hear yourself, so none of this "he said, she said" stuff.
Pregnancy is not a disease, but it does prevent you from working at least part of the time. Just saying - I don't know anything about that Italian story.
Once the child is born, it can prevent you from working. That much is true, although there are ways to deal with that too given some money and drive (see: Marissa Mayer). But if you're an ordinary office worker, and aren't doing heavy labor, no, pregnancy is not generally an obstacle to doing work. My wife worked in a laboratory on her feet most of the time pretty much up until the end. She went for a 10 km walk a few days before our daughter was born.
Ok then lets say there is a probability >> 0 of not being able to work all the time. Several acquaintances had to lie in bed for weeks. My wife is also currently having issues.
If P(can't work) > 0 it means E(days can't work) is also > 0.
Also stress for the mother is supposedly bad for the baby. Not sure how stress free a job as minister of the state can be expected to be.
> But if you're an ordinary office worker, and aren't doing heavy labor, no, pregnancy is not generally an obstacle to doing work.
It’s been a while since I last saw a televised brawl in the Italian parliament, but I would not expect such a job to be remotely comparable to that of an ordinary office worker (even without the fighting…). Just think of e.g. flying, which is apparently to be avoided during pregnancy, yet bouncing back and forth between meetings all over Europe happens fairly often at least for German ministers.
Why is that I almost never hear about a German female software developer crying wolf?
Did it not occur to you that it might be because German female software developers are treated better and it's North American tech culture that causes the problem?
But yeah probably a bunch of whiny girls amirite lol
Honestly, if Ms. Julie was _actually_ harassed I hope that she gets proper retribution in whatever form works best for her.
It's just that I seen so many 'false-positives' before that just made me roll my eyes and think, "that's not really sexism.".
She is accusing people and a very large company of SERIOUS things, I hope she actually has proof her lawyer can use. I want her to have a happy ending.
The thing is, sexism and sexual harassment boils down to a lot of he-said-she-said, people individually passing judgment on what happened, and one person's definition of sexism isn't another person's definition while whatever happened has happened. Just because some people have a way thicker skin doesn't mean that even the smallest things should be given a free pass, and in a lot of these situations it's nearly impossible to get any proof of anything happening.
Like I hate that it's only March this year and I've had two men in 4? tech events with men attending just sit down next to me without asking if they could do so and try to talk to me - while I was coding on my laptop sitting by myself in the corner of the room on purpose while everyone else was further away chatting next to the food. Like if that's not a cue to leave me alone, I don't know what is. A shirt that says "fuck off" or telling them I'm busy like they'll even acknowledge that unless I just get up and leave - but then why do I have to do that? And of course, this wouldn't be complete without people telling me that that experience was just normal so be quiet and I shouldn't be surprised to encounter people with terrible social skills in tech. Thanks? Like, I should stop feeling uncomfortable when strangers sit close enough for our thighs to touch because at least they're not groping my breasts or raping me on video so that meets your standard for proof? And my terrible social skills can't be that terrible because I know when to leave strangers alone?
The best reply - and by best I really mean the stupidest one - is when my friends and acquaintances take my complaints seriously and offer to go with me in the future or do something about a guy annoying me or help me with whatever I'm currently doing for other women in tech, but then they complain that Shanley or some other "feminazi" is whining on Twitter again why can't that bitch shut up. Like what the hell. I just don't like to complain about things but I have a MOUNTAIN of stories to tell you if you were interested. And complaining and making things public doesn't make my message any less valid.
Even if it's something trivial, even if it's after all that Julie has said against other feminists, even if there's no proof that anything serious happened but something happened... if it made her uncomfortable, there's a problem there that needs to be fixed.
You might want to see a counselor about your crippling interpersonal inadequacy. I think after you clear up your mental health issues you might be less insanely fixated on shoehorning meaningless occurrences into the framework of your delusions.
It's so crippling to the point that I can't stand that some stranger's thigh is touching mine at a tech event even though I shifted in my seat to avoid it the first time. And WTF, the worst part is I managed to shake hands and talk to other/new people at the same event and those assholes were so NICE!...they just didn't do the thigh touching. I really need to get over it, whatever. And WTF is up with hacking at an event, I really need to talk to people instead. Except I have one hell of an uncontrollable bronchitis+asthma cough right now so I'm trying to take it easy.
Yup.
My old therapist before I moved to SF actually thought I was kind of nuts for staying in the tech industry because I used to tell her everything because her son wanted to go into the industry too. Maybe she has a point. And my new one most definitely knows what harassment and uncomfortable situations are, she spent a while asking me questions about my fiancé to make sure I wasn't being abused at our very first session. (And no, no truly crippling problems other than not so hyperactive ADHD, so sorry.)
>I've had two men in 4? tech events with men attending just sit down next to me without asking if they could do so and try to talk to me
I have always been under the impression that tech events are just as much about networking and socializing as it is about the speakers themselves (otherwise we would all just be on a Google Hangout).
If you go to a social event knowing you will get upset if people try to socialize with you, you're going to have a bad time.
There's a world of difference between going "hello ("I hope I'm not interrupting" if you want to be courteous, maybe followed up by "I'm foo, what's your name? nice to meet you!"), what did you think of that talk" sitting in front of me or with some space next to me and leaving if I say I'm busy, compared to sitting right next to me with my thigh touching yours going "are you busy working? well whatever, you should check this out! and I'm going to keep talking to you!"
I don't mind the former at all in almost any situation, even if they ignored cues due to the nature of the event - being nice and respecting other people makes it okay and a few people did that just fine! I had to deal with the latter. It's the unwanted physical contact after interrupting without a care that's the problem. I have a sneaking suspicion most people don't want to be on the receiving end of that at a tech event, period, as it's (respectively) uncomfortable and rude. Or do people normally sit close enough to touch a stranger without an introduction and I'm making a big fuss about nothing?
With that out of the way, sure, I agree tech events are about socializing. I normally like socializing. I did socialize. I went to the event to go say hi to a couple people, watch the talks, maybe ask a question of the speakers in person, and then sat in a corner to wait for my fiancé to finish talking to friends...because I was tired and had a non-contagious but unpredictable cough from bronchitis and asthma flareups that would rear its ugly head if I talked for more than a couple sentences. So my lesson is learned. I'll just not even present an opportunity for people to creep?
Anecdotal, but I have a friend who worked at eBay 'schland and at a ring tone company in Berlin. She was stunned at how everybody treated her like a toy, like a girl to be played with.
One of her bosses told her outright that he would just steal her ideas, take credit for it and never give her a raise or credit.
After years here she finally moved back to the US. She now does iOS and rails development in SF/Oakland.
Another friend of mine is German, female and doing well in iOS dev in Berlin now. Anecdotal.
So it's not 100% bad and German tech environment is improving overall I would say.
I just don't take these people seriously anymore. It seems like a uniquely north american woman phenomenon
This reminds me how many in the Catholic Church had exactly the same attitude of denial about clerical pedophilia -- that it was an American phenomenon -- but they soon learned better (and, by coincidence, this article[1] on the topic is specifically about Germany):
BERLIN - The German Catholic church, which long regarded pedophilia among the clergy as a particularly American phenomenon, is now bracing for a possible crisis of credibility among the country's more than 27 million Catholics.
In recent weeks, half a dozen dioceses have come under intense media scrutiny for past abuse by priests and attempts by the church hierarchy to hush up the scandals. Critics are calling the revelations only the tip of the iceberg, while the church scrambles to control the damage.
> @getsecret told me they took down a post that's attempting to
> assassinate my character. They didn't. It continues.
>
> "Removed my comments, but why are people using Secret as an
> outlet? Internally, "Queen" has history of RAGING against any
> professional riticism. Leadership has stood idly by while she
> lied about contributions, threw hardworking oworkers under the
> bus (again and again), and spread vicious rumors about women at
> work and in the community. That's fucked. Maybe we shouldn't
> discuss that in the open, but unethical behavior should be
> exposed. If you have similar stories, please share with
> greenshirt on Anonyfish. This will be private. Just a safe way
> for us to talk. Thanks."
Either the person in question behaved in a toxic manner, and was called out for it secretly, or else she did not behave in a toxic manner and the secretive calling-out is the toxic behavior.
Who's telling the truth? I wasn't there for any of it - so I have no idea.
after reading the article and links - i think i can safely say some people are batshit crazy - and that the only harrasment at github was this women harrasing others.
even thus this article was supposed to be in her defense. batshit crazy.
423 comments
[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 308 ms ] threadFalse.
In this case, someone has quit and said that a company hasn't been doing the right thing. That's a far more ethical stance to make.
Mind you, I've no idea what the issues were/are.
Seems like we have a pretty lame situation here being documented by pretty lame journalists.
Meanwhile, all sane male engineers will be walking the other way when they see Adria at a tech conference.
All businesses should really care about is if the employee is a value add to the company. Male or Female, it should not matter.
Disgusting GitHub, didn't expect this from you.
She said so many times how bad her employees were treating her but she never said exactly what they were doing.
It's funny, the designer in the article fought against just that.
http://www.businessinsider.com/githubs-ceo-ditches-meritocra...
Going into a workplace with a feminist agenda is a distraction and problem waiting to happen.
Twitter Followers != Engineer
https://github.com/nrrrdcore - she didn't even have any code. She's not a prominent engineer IMO. More of a marketer / enthusiast type.
Edit: Does anyone here have proof of gender discrimination or she was a good engineer?
(And the always popular implication that people who aren't engineers don't matter...)
There is also the popular implication when there is a girl on twitter starting trouble again, they're not coding and trying to claim some form of discrimination, instead of developing programming skill.
You can't--and obviously I mean in the "if you're a basically functioning, mostly vertebrate human being it's morally repugnant" sense of "can't", not the physical, over-literal sense that I feel like you're going to use--blame shitty workplace behaviors (and this isn't the first I've heard of GitHub having problems) on people not knowing how to code. I mean, what kind of world do you want to live in where you can excuse mistreating people because they don't "develop programming skill"?
Actually, don't answer that. I don't want to know what kind of world you want to live in.
Edit: I see from your profile that you're an undergrad. Hopefully you'll grow out of the attitude that only super-coders are valuable to a project, like I did.
Woah woah woah - all those she-beasts online had led me to believe otherwise. Hell just take a look at /r/tumblrinaction.
Some people are Assholes. Feminists are people. Ergo, some Feminists are Assholes. It doesn't say anything more about feminism than it does people in the checkout line at the grocery store.
Here's another feminist who also did the same (and was eventually made to resign for it, thankfully): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Daly
[0] Both many prominent Twitter Feminists and Tumblr SJWs cling to the idea that if you're privileged, you can't criticize the oppressed (even if you're not directly oppressing the oppressed in question), so if you're misunderstood as doing something that opresses the oppressed they can start a campaign against you so you lose your job, etc, but you can't answer in the same tone. This is to say, I'm being a jerk for using the word "unhinged" when I don't have any apparent mental disorders.
The vast majority of tech industry feminists are postmodernists.
There's a lot more to this phenomenon than you could get into on hacker news, but it goes something like "if you don't agree with everything i say exactly, you're clearly the enemy"
The 20% number definitely is not from the tech industry either.
So you have women picking different jobs. You have different incentives and preferences (motherhood is the big one here), different preferred industry (like media vs mining or whatever).
You also have women getting half of the income of their husbands, having the option to drop out of unpleasant jobs, not being under the same pressure to feed their family, and so on.
There are many many aspects to this. So far I haven't seen anything that convinces me women are being treated unfairly.
There are issues, but only if you consider staying at home with kids degrading. For example I suppose the incentive to get a good education is less if you know you will miss out several years where you could earn back the money invested. I don't think "unfair" is the right way to characterize that issue, though.
That said, feminism describes lots of different things, and I think she was addressing a broad group with that first statement. The sooner you realize that not all feminists have the same agenda, the easier it will be for you to understand what's going on.
This is not a subjective distinction. It is very objective thing and such judgement can be done by outsider.
Github ENGINEER. If she's not an engineer, she's not an engineer, it's pretty simple.
It shouldn't matter, but it does to many people.
Splitting hairs about her position distracts from the actual issue at hand.
Considering that GitHub appears to have hired her partially for the purpose of bettering the culture, your point about "feminist agendas" also falls short.
I'll wait for real facts before coming to any conclusions, but immediately rejecting her statements like you're doing is not constructive for anyone.
12.6K twitter followers disagree with you. For comparison, founder PJ Hyett has 14.9K.
you can be a really shitty engineer, or not one at all and have thousands of twitter followers.
As an example, my primary role in my company is administration of systems. I very rarely take out the trash, and sometimes refill the toilet rolls if they're low. It would be misleading to refer to me as a janitor, prominent or otherwise.
Edit: I say 'apparently not' because she may be an awesome engineer, but her code is in private repos.
https://twitter.com/Linus__Torvalds
It's an incredibly valuable contribution that I thanked her for and apologized for not yet merging in person.
If you identify as a developer, you're probably a developer.
Not to mention I can't actually share the code to a lot if not all of the work that I do, and I'm too busy elsewhere (a restaurant...) or dealing with impostor syndrome to share anything else most days. Hell, sometimes I have a hard time just opening my mouth to talk to other people because of impostor syndrome. But I code for a living, and I thought that was enough to call myself a coder.
But according to some people, including people I used to consider friends and allies of my very laid back feminism, nothing is ever fucking good enough for them so I don't really know what I am in the end. Amateur hour involving a part time restaurant owner that is clearly a fake coder and couldn't possibly have majored in CS in college because she has big boobs and she has other hobbies that aren't staring at the computer for the entire day? Gasp. I really have no fucking clue, why don't you tell me what I am? :|
Her skills and/or experience as a software developer have absolutely nothing to do with this. Someone's performance on a job is completely irrelevant when it comes to harassment or intimidation in the workplace.
You are part of the problem with sexism that exists in software development teams.
see the problem?
the only gender based issue is calling her queen.
i think people like you are the problem with toxic workplaces in general l you're blindly transforming arguments into whatever serves your cause - even when unjustified.
Then you turn it into some sort of fucked up meritocracy thing. She wrote No Code therefore her opinions are invalid! I've got more bitcoins than her too!!
You could play the super long odds, everything was AWESOME for the past two years, but just turned awful. Then she was only lying now (because "I've been harassed by 'leadership' at GitHub for two years..."). That would paint her in the absolute best light, and it IMHO, rather unrealistic.
You could even play the super-super long odds, and assume everything she said before was a lie (said it was good, it was actually awful) and then things BECAME good recently and she doubled-down on lying and said things were bad.
... in my case, it isn't an assumption. It is a expectation based on prior behavior.
Here's an example:
X: The economy of Southern Portugal during the first half of the 13th century was bad. Do you agree?
Y: I don't know, I don't have enough info and absolutely zero knowledge of Portugal's economy during the 13th century.
X: are you calling me a liar?
Harry: I can't afford to do that
Tom: I don't know, I don't have enough info here to know if you can afford to do it or not.
Bob: Are you saying that Tom is lying, or that he doesn't know his own situation?
The big difference in this case is that while it is totally plausible for X and Y in your conversation to know literally nothing about Portugal, in my example it is not plausible for Harry to be unaware of his own situation without being an idiot. So when Tom 'withholds judgment' on Harry's situation, he is saying that evidence directly from Harry is untrustworthy - Harry is either a liar or an idiot. (I introduced the third person, Bob, as in this case Tom is Horvath and she is not the one responding to you, doubting Tom).
What's more is her testimony thus far has been very vague. She hasn't described any concrete event.
Her story as far as the article describes, is not an account, it's an accusation without much factual, actionable data. You normally don't judge on accusations until you have tried within reason to obtain factual data from both parties involved.
1) workplace harassment against women is quite common
2) such harassment is frequently ignored
3) there was some harassment in this case
And there's no evidence that I've seen that suggests there was no harassment or that it was handled properly by management. Therefore for the time being my assumption is that the harassment and mismanagement both happened.
That said, although I have seen mountains of evidence for 1) and 2), because the amount of evidence for the specific situation is small, that means a small amount of counter-evidence about the specific situation could easily shift the balance of probabilities.
That said, I have seen quite a bit of evidence that such accusations are only rarely false, so while I would change my balance of properties readily, I don't expect that to happen.
There's even the possibility that she's being completely truthful, but GitHub's side of the situation is relevant and changes the full picture.
Corroboration. Unless Julie Ann Horvath suffered in silence AND everyone else turned a blind eye, then there will be people who can support her story and provide additional credence to what she says.
> What reason do you have to think she's being anything less than truthful?
Experience. How often have we read a sensationalist-sounding story on the internet[0] that, in the end, turned out to be over-blown or an outright deception?
0 - "Single person claims that large/popular entity has done something despicable/outrageous! More at 11."
This isn't a formal court, but the court of public opinion can (in some cases) be more hurtful and more damaging than a real court that is merely exercising governmental powers.
I am not implying what she is saying is false. As @Jare said, "Her story as far as the article describes, is not an account, it's an accusation without much factual, actionable data."
This author can't seem to distinguish between the code employees at GitHub write, and code users put onto GitHub.
Alleged workplace abuse. Let's wait for a statement from GitHub before we grab our pitchforks.
Let's say I am an open source developer and I put some crazy stuff on Github.
Some journalist does a profile on me. Am I a "Github Software Developer" to them?
* Google Name -- "aha, link to Github"
* Find crazy stuff checked into Github repos.
* Google Github -- "aha, technology company something something distributed ... eyes glaze over technical mumbo jumbo".
* Claim I am a "Github Engineer"
It is obvious to us how it works, but say someone who has no idea about repos or open source will not quite understand the separation between user content and platform.
I'm curious why she'd post this on Twitter instead of taking it to a lawyer. And I don't mean for that to be innuendo- there are many reasons for this to go any which way.
If you publicly told people that for two years, and suddenly have a live-streamed blow-out on twitter with Facebook-style innuendo, honestly I would completely discount your claims as an emotional tantrum, and would give it absolutely no stock.
There is absolutely nothing "actionable" being discussed. And this may surprise some people, but women are just as capable as men of grinding an axe or trying to take down someone (or some organization) they feel slighted by.
All it would take for me personally to reverse my stance on an employer being a good place for women is a single case in which I reported being sexually harassed and management then took the side of the harasser over me. Because one case is not acceptable, and it's all it takes to turn a workplace into a hostile and unpleasant environment.
That's not to say "oh, if she says something, she must be telling the truth", but the possibility that she is telling the truth is a huge red flag.
In my opinion, a simple tweet like "@x has done @y thus influencing me to leave this company, will put up a blog post." would be much more effective.
This way people know what happened, and all journalism is formed around the actual event. If the guy didn't want to get called out publicly, maybe he shouldn't have fucked up, but this way we get to hear both sides of the story.
Edited to add: the process of deciding the best action to take given uncertain information is fundamentally different from the process of trying to decide what is most likely to be true when there is nothing in particular at stake personally.
Great basis to form a decision.
If I'm in an unfamiliar city and someone I don't know says "Hey, watch out for that alley, several people have been attacked there recently," I wouldn't know whether it was true. But it would be pretty stupid to decline to take any precautions until I could perform my own plot of crime statistic data by location to assess the truth value, don't you think?
2. Actually, they have a history of problems with women that they were trying to repair. Which is why she was trying to turn the company around on the issue and evangelize it in the first place. Did you read the article?
Many people have developed PTSD from a traumatic childhood within which no one distinct event/spoken sentence can be pointed to-- just many, many hurtful episodes over days, weeks, months, and years.
There probably was an event that set her over the edge. I just wouldn't expect it to be some Disney movie scene in which a guy in a suit slams his fists down and shouts, "Women are the worst!" Real people are more crafty than that. Real-life abuse is more subtle.
Again-- I don't know what happened. Just can't help but point out the kind of faulty logic being used here, since it is so common.
If I was a woman interviewing at GitHub and then read this, it would absolutely influence my decision. I'd want to work there more.
There are two possibilities here:
1) Github has a culture of sexist workplace harassment
2) She is not telling the truth and Github is a perfectly nice place to work
In 1), I would be harassed, sure. I would then take care to document the harassment and file a lawsuit against the unrepentantly sexist company. I'd get a great settlement, Github likely has deep pockets or backers who do and would be desperate for this to go away. Cha-ching, cash in, and feel great doing it.
In 2), I'd have a nice job and everything would be cool.
It's cartoon-ish to say, "Well then I'd sue and everything would be worth it." Know why most women don't sue? Death treats. Rape threats. Not being able to ever get a job in tech again. No one believing the claims could possibly be true. The expense of suing someone and losing. Etc.
The day-to-day psychological effects alone are bad enough that, with any familiarity, you would never roll the dice on that chance.
I worked on a community care facility for developmentally disabled adults when I was in college. I was young when it happened, probably 19-20, and an older woman I worked with made constant unwanted sexual advances. We worked unsupervised in a two person team in a group home, and for about six months she would never let a day go by without pointing out that she would be willing to engage in intercourse with me, right here and now, in pretty graphic terms. I was pretty low on the totem pole, the woman harassing me was very good friends with management, and so I never did anything about it.
So yes, I have been in a situation like that, can imagine the reality, and would totally be willing to go through it again and do it right by reporting it and maybe saving others from getting that treatment in the future.
She's either currently faced with an unusual situation that doesn't reflect githubs normal behaviour, or she had no credibility in the first place.
At this point, she seems disgruntled about a single issue and is using it as a platform to stir up wider controversy.
Are you like... going back in time and revising your opinion?
"I regret defending GitHub's culture to feminists for the last two years. I'm sorry to everyone I've hurt in doing so."
"I've been harassed by 'leadership' at GitHub for two years. And I am the first developer to quit."
Worse than having a serious discussion on twitter, though, is tweeting twitter as a source of breaking news.
Because sometimes people do things, that while completely legal, can also make people feel unwelcome and unsafe.
The legal system is not the only possible recourse for settling disputes or grievances.
Congrats.
The whole piece reads more like a revenge of someone with twitter audience, who lost at the game of office thrones.
One of the comments[1] even seems to indicate an earlier version of the article included occurrences of "fag" that were benign words in another language. If you literally search for offense on the Internet, you'll find it, but without context you might be getting offended over nothing.
[1] http://gizmodo.com/hey-norwegian-here-mine-fag-and-finn-fag-...
I'm not saying there is not a story here, yet. But let's wait until there are some facts to report.
Or do you mean, people who are productive don't have time to defend themselves against harassment? In this case you are definitely blaming the wrong people because you should blame those who still don't manage to keep the workplace, and the rest of society, free of sexism, racism and so on.
This links to a gizmodo article linking to random open source code on Github written by random people on the internet containing slurs. How is that Github's fault exactly? Should they censor "git push" with anti-slurs filters? This even links to a repo containing a list of words that should not be used by the user https://github.com/hhzl/Cuis-Smalltalk-StyledTextEditor/tree...
Ridiculous. No idea about the rest of the accusations though.
[1]: http://gizmodo.com/5980842/there-is-blatant-racist-and-sexis...
[2]: https://github.com/alanhogan/lessnmore/blob/master/-/banned_...
Can you give more detail on what you had seen that you felt justified being fired over?
This same individual, was in the elevator when my friend who worked at another company, but same building. He got into the elevator with his wife, and the individual said something along the lines of "I bet you'd like it if I bent you over now. Let everyone here have a turn" to his wife. My buddy showed far more restraint than I would have.
You mean there are still informal networks? Power gradients? Alliances? They lied to us!
GitHub seems to fall to the right of the divide.
Agreed, to say nothing of the extreme left-wing bias that they bring to the table - wealth is automatically bad and suspect; startups are toxic, evil, and sexist; business needs to get out of San Francisco which would otherwise be a prosperous socialist paradise ...
It's getting harder and harder to read it on a full stomach.
It's the legions of +1 commenters that are depressing.
It's equally frustrating because if Github (and others) actually do engage in despicable sexist behavior, I want to hear about it and adjust my views of them accordingly. However, when reporters, bloggers, and commentators flood the internet with harassment stories accompanied with such vitriolic language, it's harder for me to tell the actual stories apart from the bombastic linkbait.
What if you want to remain friends with some of your former co-workers? What if those former co-worker friends work on the same team as former co-worker harassers? Are you willing to put those friendships in jeopardy? Are you willing to make it harder for those friends to do their jobs? If they are forced to choose sides, how would you feel about affecting their working relationship with their coworkers? Sure, it's not your fault. But it's not their fault either!
What if you misremember who was involved in a particular incident? (Do you take detailed notes every time you're harassed? Even if it's a lot of little things that all added up in the end?) What if you name the wrong person? What if the hacker community focuses on that and uses it to discredit you and destroy your reputation you spent years working to build?
Would you enjoy remembering and reliving all of the experiences that hurt you over the past few years so that you can write a blog post about it? Would that actually make you feel better?
Would you enjoy feeling like you had to write that blog post just so that people would believe you?
I understand if she's just angry in response to other comments like the "Queen" one -- that's actually totally understandable. I don't blame her for reacting on Twitter like this. All that I said was if she did that, that would be one example of how I could understand what this kind of harassment is like and why it's harmful.
Maybe she doesn't want the story to be about the specific events in her specific case. She wants it to be about the industry as a whole. Going into the details would distract from that message. The problems here are not specific to GitHub and certainly are not specific to her.
The problem here is that nobody has yet given a concrete example of such a problem. In this particular case, there are a bunch of vague tweets, in others, people looked at user-submitted content etc. Just saying ‘there is a problem’ neither makes it clear that there is a problem, nor what that problem is nor how to fix that problem.
GitHub knows about the problems. I hope GitHub makes an honest effort to fix them. And I hope they blog about what they fixed and why they fixed it. Hopefully when that happens, there will be some good lessons there.
But we don't have to collectively relive what Julie went through. This story is about a real, systemic problem. It shouldn't turn into a "true crime" infotainment story about one person's experience.
GitHub went through tons of PR issues, if she had a valid complaint do you think HR would ignore it? Let's use common sense here for a minute.
If she had issue with the company and went public with this, she can say what it was. There is no need to post tweets and beating around the bush on this issue.
Is the leadership at Github sexist? You can't just handwave that question away and say "Of course it is, it's a well-known industry problem.", when a specific event has caused that allegation to be made very public. Talking about the event in question gives rise to understanding, generalities and vague tweets do not.
I don't want to attack the messenger here, but all we have to go on are a series of tweets which do not, by themselves, present a very clear message. She claims to be harassed by the leadership for two years... whilst defending them to feminists for the same time? And then in the next tweet, it's only the events of one day which have caused a problem.
It's very hard to get a consistent story out of the information at hand, which is why people are asking for a better explanation. Since Horvath has made this public in the first place, I don't think that's an unreasonable expectation.
It would be better to have the results of a survey done on a random sample of employees. Unfortunately, in journalism, we only get sensationalized and often completely unsubstantiated versions of single accounts. In this case, instead of an actual account, we merely have innuendo that could be one.
I just realized you may mean the author of the article is trying to harm github's image, which I agree is possible. But the real story to me is Horvath quitting, not someone writing an article about it.
But what you're missing is that people sometimes crack up. We're all a little unstable. You see two choices: The person is harassed out by the conspiracy in their company, or the person quits to fuel the conspiracy they're a part of.
I say there is a third choice: The person freaked out, or was under too much stress, or had a period of mental instability, and 'flamed out'. This actually happens to prominent people pretty frequently, hell it happens to most people at some time in their life. I've done it before. Fortunately I wasn't in a public position.
There are plenty of professional responses when there is conflict with your coworkers and attempting to publicly shame them is very far from any of them.
oh yeah - it doesnt. if anything thats another thing that totally discredit her... i dont doubt she complained to ht over the years trying to fuck ppl up after reading the excerpt however.
The bit about racial and sexist slurs in some random users' code? Completely irrelevant. GitHub is a platform to host code. They are not and should not be responsible for what people commit to repositories. To suggest otherwise is to suggest that GitHub should take on the role of a censor, and at that point, code associated with any gray area (like Popcorn Time) becomes a target for the vocal minority.
Let's wait for Horvath to finish her side of the story and go from there.
Again, I do not know what is happening here, but the article has at the least made me mad that people are resorting to censorship to solve their disputes.
I signed up for the Secret yesterday based on the HN comments of their UX interactions and I immediately noticed that in comments below Secret posts, people are assigned random icons and then refer to each other by what the icon looks like. She refered to the author of that Secret comment as "greenshirt" in her tweets. Is it possible that the "Queen" was a reference to her icon(which we dont see from the screenshot), rather than an insult. It could be just be attributed to a chess figure icon.
I call my wife 'mi reina' and my daughter 'princesita'. Are you telling me these retards are saying that's a no-no?
I'm assuming whoever called her a queen wanted to allude to a domineering personality, and indeed nobody is called a "king" for being pushy and domineering, but the sentiment is also expressed in regards to men, as in "he does X like he fucking owns the place".
You may see it that way, and I won't question your integrity about it. However, it is undeniable that there has been a ton of misogyny directed towards women in the workspace in fields that have been classically dominated by men. And, the perpetrators of which, typically have used sexually-charged terms, such as "Queen", to refer negatively to women attempting to elevate their careers within in a organization in no different manner than a man would.
This isn't a semantic argument. It's quite possible to work in a professional setting with members of the other gender, and critique a coworker has having as being pushy and domineering without resulting to gender pronouns. Regardless if you think that the use of them implies that you think the other gender is equal or not, the context described in my previous paragraph makes it hard to escape the perception that if you use them, you don't think the genders are equal.
Huh? You mean you should not refer to your coworkers as "he" or "she" when they are a man and a woman, respectively?
This doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/pronoun
"Queen" is not a pronoun, gendered or otherwise, it's a noun that refers to a female person.
That's what 'queen' is referring to.
Start writing things down and then contact a local equal opportunity office and start the process. It will not be cheap for them. If people keep doing this they'll change their ways.
Going public on Twitter or Hacker News though hasn't done much other than bring out nasty and unproductive fights between Social Justice Warriors and Men's Rights fanatics. They make everyone look bad and we all walk away feeling like maybe we've lost faith in humanity when in reality a serious problem just stems from mostly unintentional, but hurtful ignorance.
Fletcher sued his employer, brokerage Kidder Peabody, for discrimination and won $1.3 million in 1991.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/kleiner-perkins-ellen-pao-law...
That's not how it works, at least not in California. That is if you use the equal employment opportunity system. You go through arbitration first. The two sides have to meet and negotiate an outcome, someone is there to help the process. Likely it will be settled there with money exchanged unless there was never any enough evidence for it to go to arbitration. Once there is arbitration, both sides have to compromise. If this fails, then you can file a law suit. The arbitration will be part of that I imagine, but I've never seen how the process works after arbitration. I think usually fixing it in arbitration is the norm.
You don't still have to work at that place to file the grievance. So this individual can still do that. I think if you've gone public with your accusation you are less likely to have success at arbitration because I would think at least.
The amount of money I've seen exchanged is usually a few months salary. You have to come in with a big number though, because you will be pressured to bring it down.
There is no place for discrimination in this world. Ever.
Of course there is. For instance, when hiring I discriminate against people that aren't qualified.
Of course I know that's not the kind of discrimination you mean. It's funny how "discrimination" has become a synonym for "bigotry."
The very existence of archaic hominids attests to billions of years of effective discrimination, between safety and danger, wholesome and putrid or poisonous food, good mates and less good (or worthless) ones. When these elevated apes differentiated between good and bad, appetizing and rotten, attractive and repulsive, they found such discriminations sufficiently similar in essence to be functionally substitutable. When judging that some food item is ‘not good for us’, a person is ‘rotten’, or the odor of a potential mate is ‘delicious’, we recall such substitutions, and the primordial sense of discrimination that they affirm. There can be no long-term deviation from the original principle: discrimination is intelligence aligned with survival.
Two contrary developments now present themselves. Firstly, there is a sublimation or sophistication of discrimination, which might be called cultivation. Abstract concepts, modes of expression, artworks, delicate culinary flavors, refined behaviors, and exotic elaborations of sexual-selection stimuli, among innumerable other things, can all be subtly discriminated on the ancient scale, supporting an ever more intricate and extended hierarchy of judgments. The reflexive doubling of this potential upon itself, as captured by the ‘higher’ judgment that to discriminate well is good, produces a ‘natural aristocracy’. For the first time, there is a self-conscious ‘Right’. This, at least, is its logico-mythical ur-form. To divide the good from the bad is good. Order, hierarchy, and distinction emerge from an affirmation of discrimination.
Because the Left cannot create, it comes second. It presupposes an existing hierarchy, or order of discriminations, which is subverted through a ‘slave revolt in morality’. The formula is simple enough: to discriminate is bad. Following from this leftist moral perversion, as its second-order consequence, those who do not discriminate (well), but are in fact discriminated against, must be the good. In the new moral order, therefore, to be bad at discrimination is good — or ‘universalist’ — whilst the old (and now ‘evil’) quality of good judgment, based on competent perception of patterns and differences, is the very quintessence of sin."
Shouldn’t have to say this, but I’m merely pointing out that you probably aren’t saying what you think you are saying, and I am neither condoning nor condemning Passion Projects, GitHub, or Julia.
Why is that I almost never hear about a German female software developer crying wolf?
This person could have been legitimately harassed, but all of the bullshit flooding online has made me grow a thick skin and just not care anymore because I think it's fake.
Indeed, why.
[1] https://science-girl-thing.eu/en/splash [2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g032MPrSjFA
Then again, advertising paid for by tax money? I suspect somebody went golfing and sealed the deal...
EDIT: I mean the initiative as a whole, not the video alone. The whole initiative has been done in a fairly cringe worthy way for me though, but for the target audience it mostly gets it right.
http://www.amazon.com/Girls-Get-Curves-Geometry-Takes/dp/045...
http://www.amazon.com/Hot-Algebra-Exposed-Danica-McKellar/dp...
(a) evidence of that being extremely popular with women
(b) or evidence of people with the power/ability/money/resources to make/sell/publish books thinking that that sort of thing is extremely popular with women.
Not the same thing at all. After all, the original video was made by the European Commission to publicise their women in science campaign, which does not mean that the video is popular with women in science. Sometimes organisations make mistakes or are wrong.
So assuming the problem was equally prevalent at software startups in both countries would expect to hear about it a lot less from Germany.
I live in Germany and have female friends who worked in tech here.
"I just don't take these people seriously anymore. It seems like a uniquely north american woman phenomenon."
There could be some bias because I'm in the United States, and most of the tech news and tech discussion sites I read are in the US, so I'm probably more likely to learn of things happening in the US than in the rest of the world. Still, given that every example I can think of is North American, I cannot criticize his observation.
So, yes, sexist bullshit exists the world over.
Generally though, these things don't get resolved in threads like this, or even through laws or prominent lawsuits (although they can help). My feeling is that things really improve a bit at a time when each and every one of us becomes more vigilant about what goes on around us, and acts - perhaps just in a small way - to try and improve the situation whenever we see stuff that's not right. The other thing about acting locally is you act on stuff that you see and hear yourself, so none of this "he said, she said" stuff.
If P(can't work) > 0 it means E(days can't work) is also > 0.
Also stress for the mother is supposedly bad for the baby. Not sure how stress free a job as minister of the state can be expected to be.
It’s been a while since I last saw a televised brawl in the Italian parliament, but I would not expect such a job to be remotely comparable to that of an ordinary office worker (even without the fighting…). Just think of e.g. flying, which is apparently to be avoided during pregnancy, yet bouncing back and forth between meetings all over Europe happens fairly often at least for German ministers.
Did it not occur to you that it might be because German female software developers are treated better and it's North American tech culture that causes the problem?
But yeah probably a bunch of whiny girls amirite lol
It's just that I seen so many 'false-positives' before that just made me roll my eyes and think, "that's not really sexism.".
She is accusing people and a very large company of SERIOUS things, I hope she actually has proof her lawyer can use. I want her to have a happy ending.
The thing is, sexism and sexual harassment boils down to a lot of he-said-she-said, people individually passing judgment on what happened, and one person's definition of sexism isn't another person's definition while whatever happened has happened. Just because some people have a way thicker skin doesn't mean that even the smallest things should be given a free pass, and in a lot of these situations it's nearly impossible to get any proof of anything happening.
Like I hate that it's only March this year and I've had two men in 4? tech events with men attending just sit down next to me without asking if they could do so and try to talk to me - while I was coding on my laptop sitting by myself in the corner of the room on purpose while everyone else was further away chatting next to the food. Like if that's not a cue to leave me alone, I don't know what is. A shirt that says "fuck off" or telling them I'm busy like they'll even acknowledge that unless I just get up and leave - but then why do I have to do that? And of course, this wouldn't be complete without people telling me that that experience was just normal so be quiet and I shouldn't be surprised to encounter people with terrible social skills in tech. Thanks? Like, I should stop feeling uncomfortable when strangers sit close enough for our thighs to touch because at least they're not groping my breasts or raping me on video so that meets your standard for proof? And my terrible social skills can't be that terrible because I know when to leave strangers alone?
The best reply - and by best I really mean the stupidest one - is when my friends and acquaintances take my complaints seriously and offer to go with me in the future or do something about a guy annoying me or help me with whatever I'm currently doing for other women in tech, but then they complain that Shanley or some other "feminazi" is whining on Twitter again why can't that bitch shut up. Like what the hell. I just don't like to complain about things but I have a MOUNTAIN of stories to tell you if you were interested. And complaining and making things public doesn't make my message any less valid.
Even if it's something trivial, even if it's after all that Julie has said against other feminists, even if there's no proof that anything serious happened but something happened... if it made her uncomfortable, there's a problem there that needs to be fixed.
Yup.
My old therapist before I moved to SF actually thought I was kind of nuts for staying in the tech industry because I used to tell her everything because her son wanted to go into the industry too. Maybe she has a point. And my new one most definitely knows what harassment and uncomfortable situations are, she spent a while asking me questions about my fiancé to make sure I wasn't being abused at our very first session. (And no, no truly crippling problems other than not so hyperactive ADHD, so sorry.)
I have always been under the impression that tech events are just as much about networking and socializing as it is about the speakers themselves (otherwise we would all just be on a Google Hangout).
If you go to a social event knowing you will get upset if people try to socialize with you, you're going to have a bad time.
I don't mind the former at all in almost any situation, even if they ignored cues due to the nature of the event - being nice and respecting other people makes it okay and a few people did that just fine! I had to deal with the latter. It's the unwanted physical contact after interrupting without a care that's the problem. I have a sneaking suspicion most people don't want to be on the receiving end of that at a tech event, period, as it's (respectively) uncomfortable and rude. Or do people normally sit close enough to touch a stranger without an introduction and I'm making a big fuss about nothing?
With that out of the way, sure, I agree tech events are about socializing. I normally like socializing. I did socialize. I went to the event to go say hi to a couple people, watch the talks, maybe ask a question of the speakers in person, and then sat in a corner to wait for my fiancé to finish talking to friends...because I was tired and had a non-contagious but unpredictable cough from bronchitis and asthma flareups that would rear its ugly head if I talked for more than a couple sentences. So my lesson is learned. I'll just not even present an opportunity for people to creep?
False. [1][2][3][4][5][6][...]
[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/deannazandt/2013/02/01/germanys-...
[2] http://www.dw.de/opinion-how-sexist-is-germany/a-16555500
[3] http://interculturalmusings.blogspot.com/2013/07/germanys-bi...
[4] http://www.economist.com/news/europe/21571188-where-does-ger...
[5] http://freespeechdebate.com/fr/2013/06/twitter-free-speech-a...
[6] http://www.cafebabel.co.uk/society/article/sexism-on-europes...
[...] Google: "sexism germany". It would have taken you two seconds to do this before spouting off, but that would've required humility...
One of her bosses told her outright that he would just steal her ideas, take credit for it and never give her a raise or credit.
After years here she finally moved back to the US. She now does iOS and rails development in SF/Oakland.
Another friend of mine is German, female and doing well in iOS dev in Berlin now. Anecdotal.
So it's not 100% bad and German tech environment is improving overall I would say.
This reminds me how many in the Catholic Church had exactly the same attitude of denial about clerical pedophilia -- that it was an American phenomenon -- but they soon learned better (and, by coincidence, this article[1] on the topic is specifically about Germany):
BERLIN - The German Catholic church, which long regarded pedophilia among the clergy as a particularly American phenomenon, is now bracing for a possible crisis of credibility among the country's more than 27 million Catholics.
In recent weeks, half a dozen dioceses have come under intense media scrutiny for past abuse by priests and attempts by the church hierarchy to hush up the scandals. Critics are calling the revelations only the tip of the iceberg, while the church scrambles to control the damage.
[1]http://www.boston.com/globe/spotlight/abuse/print2/080402_ge...
Who's telling the truth? I wasn't there for any of it - so I have no idea.
even thus this article was supposed to be in her defense. batshit crazy.
How do you know this? Do you work at GitHub?
Until we know what actually happened (if we ever do) it will be hard to judge.