So what we know now is that Adria Richards' issues are not just with sexism, offensive behavior in general or gender equality, but that she has an ideological agenda that goes well beyond that.
Her issues with pornography are ideological, in that they aren't shared by many men and women who would take issue with sexist behavior or gender based discrimination. However, like many ideologues, she doesn't make that distinction herself.
And what is also typical for ideologues, she doesn't have any issues with saying or doing things that disproportionately harm people who disagree with her, because they are "the enemy". They're not interested in change, they are interested in winning.
These kind of people will do more harm than good when it comes to fighting sexism in tech. They will actually alienate a lot of women.
(I do however find it inappropriate and borderline sexist to call her a prude. Being against pornography doesn't make you a prude, just like enjoying pornography doesn't make you a sexist pig.)
These kind of people will alienate a lot of men too.
"Oh no! There's a woman in this conference room! I better just shut up and not say anything just in case she takes offense at my talking about my dislike for DRM dongles. Too bad that this means we'll be shipping a DRM-encumbered product, but my job and reputation are more important to risk being fired over perceived sexist comments, even if it saves the company from financial ruin in the long run."
When every perceived slight ends up triggering thermonuclear war, people will stop interacting with each other.
This was the first article I read about this "case" and what I found amusing was the name (or at least url - haven't clicked) of her blog. She seems to be (just from these few paragraphs I read) the stereotype of a feminist (stereotype in a bad way). People like her just hold the progress of gender equality back.
I think the most interesting part of this post was a simple observation that I, for one, hadn't seen elsewhere:
We don't know why PlayHaven fired the dev in the first place.
Sure, the controversy undoubtedly played a role. But we don't know if the dev was on the ropes, if he wasn't pulling his weight, or if his boss simply didn't like him. This may have been a gross overreaction, or it may have been the straw that broke the camel's back.
As story-driven creatures, we constantly seek to form narratives around events. As sensation-seekers, we inherently care more about emotional impact than veracity when we craft the mental stories that tie events together and give them meaning. This is not to say that we are incapable of detached, rational thought, but rather that our brains don't default to that mode.
One of my biggest personal takeaways from this sordid tale is just a reaffirmation of that fact: that even smart, rational people, who get paid to be smart and rational, will blindly abandon reason in pursuit of a good story. This incident blew up into a tabloid-like frenzy because smart people abandoned reason in favour of sensation. Moreover, this is not due to some personal flaw on their parts: it's simply how we, as human beings, are built.
If anything positive comes from this, I hope it's simply a greater recognition on the parts of all concerned of our propensity to engage in this kind of behaviour, and the mental processes that lead to it. Maybe we can be a little more measured in our appraisal of future incidents like this.
> Moreover, this is not due to some personal flaw on their parts: it's simply how we, as human beings, are built.
This. We just witnessed a snowball turn into an avalanch. I know I've experienced this in personal relationships more than once. Emotions make us great and they make us terrible. Which gave me an idea: A bug tracker for relationships. Addressing a problem immediately sounds good on paper, but we often need time to distance ourselves to be able to think critically. If couples started using a bug-tracker for relationship issues, you could log the issue in detail when it happens, sit on it for a few days, and address it up when both parties are level headed. I doubt I'd ever want to use this product, but if anyone else wants to..
>We value and protect the privacy of our employees, both past and present, and we will not comment on all the factors that contributed to our parting ways.
All I get from that is that it played a role. In fact, their statement is tacit support of the argument that the controversy wasn't the only factor in their decision.
PlayHaven had an employee who was identified as making inappropriate comments at PyCon, and as a company that is dedicated to gender equality and values honorable behavior, we conducted a thorough investigation. The result of this investigation led to the unfortunate outcome of having to let this employee go.
Notice the result of this investigation part. Maybe this guy has had issues in the past, or maybe they just didn't like his code, but by all appearances, he would not be jobless if this investigation had not been started.
Without knowing PlayHaven directly in this context its hard to say what those words mean. They come off as PR for covering their ass. I'd be surprised if any thorough investigation could be concluded so quickly.
The fact that they state employee privacy is of importance yet clearly outline he was dismissed also sends flags up for me. To specifically say their decision goes beyond privacy when he is clearly identified through the picture and other channels is to say "we fired mr-hank" a point that is already covered within this thread of discussion. To say "we have investigated the complaints and taken appropriate action" is a safer bet legally.
These are just speculation, but my interpretation is that the response was a hasty PR damage control rather than a rational response.
A one-day "thorough investigation" is code for "met with our attorney". Every HR department in the US has to regard him as an untouchable; there was no investigation because it doesn't matter what he actually did.
By the same token, we don't really know why SendGrid fired Adria. The post mentioned that SendGrid failed by not immediately making a statement (or forcing her to publicly apologize), then over-reacting by firing her too late. But we really don't know what was going on at SendGrid behind the scenes. Maybe they were trying to work with her and she wouldn't change her position, or maybe they just didn't know what to do.
For the last three HN threads I have seen people casting aspersions on the guy who was fired, that maybe there were other factors at play. Now it comes out from someone that knows Richards that she is a bit of a difficult person herself. Maybe there were more factors at play in her firing than simply this event. Of course who knows, but it's fun and easy to cast aspersions!
>I have seen people casting aspersions on the guy who was fired
I hope you don't include me in that category. It was never my intent to disparage the dev; I simply found the statement that we don't know the whole story behind his firing to be a compelling one.
I doubt if there was any other case than the controversy. I doubt that the dev was any where incompetent. I say this simply because of the dev's interest in attending a conference and his company sponsoring it to him using forking and dongles in a sentence... those are simply good signals of a good developer and he being happy at his job. I feel that Pay Haven responded in a most defensive way by simply firing him and getting it out of their shoulders.
" him using forking and dongles in a sentence... those are simply good signals of a good developer"
Pray tell, how does a plebeian joke about dongles signal that a developer is good?
"dev's interest in attending a conference and his company sponsoring it"
And as for his presence, it's not uncommon for a company to send a key developer and a friendly coworker to conferences, especially when it is far away (so he may just have been a friendly coworker of Andy Reid)
It think what the gp post was saying is that usually (in most companies) developers who are not very good or are not pulling their weight, are not sent to conferences. What is the freaking reason to send someone to a conference to learn and bring new ideas if they are about to be sent out of the door?
I don't know about friendly coworkers. Maybe other companies do that, we don't. In my experience it is not about friendliness but about who deserves to go and who is passionate about programming.
And, yeah, I agree, I don't see any correlation between him making dongle jokes or being or not being a good programmer.
I would say that using technical terms in a joking way is definitely a sign of enjoying one's job, and enjoying one's job is definitely a significant data point as to gauging whether one is good at it. If you can talk about your job without criticizing it and laugh, I would say you enjoy what you do and therefore that you do it well.
It may well be the case that the controversy was the only factor in his termination, but none of us have the requisite information to confidently make that claim.
Given that one employee was retained and the other was let go, the firing could not have stemmed 100% from the issue at hand. One person was clearly not a " valued employee," unlike the other person from playhaven.
Without tumbling deep into a flame war, I'd like to ask a sincere question. I have trouble understanding the sexism behind the remarks, and why the instigator needs to apologize (for sexism).
People get offended for all kinds of things, nobody can claim a monopoloy on that. (http://imgur.com/EX5v4 stephen fry quote)
- If they would both have been gay and talking about a homosexual topic, someone in that room would be offended.
- If they were creationists dismissing darwin, someone would be offended
- 2 women discussing ‘shades of grey’, someone would be offended.
- A dongle and forking, and Adria is offended.
To me it seems she is offended by the sexual overtones. A pruder man might be offended by that too, or many a religious man. I just don’t see the link to sexism.
I get it's lowbrow humor. It's not professional. It's probably not suited for a public event like that. The dongle joke was men comparing their 'dongles' and the suggesting they wanted to "fork" the male speaker.
How are women being put down or belittled at all here. How is it sexist?
This is exactly why I feel like the only person actually guilty of sexism here is Adria herself. She's belittling her own gender by acting as though women cannot be around sexual humor.
And the company she was envangelising for on that twitter feed thinks that a visual joke about photocopying your genitals is not inappropriate for their jobs pages:
I understand that speaker and context make all the difference, but she made a joke about sexual humiliation, and then, at the same conference, got offended by a joke conflating dongles to genitals.
Discussions like this seem to always come back to a sense of "fairness". It's not about being fair, but about how situations make people feel.
Majority-group members tend to brush away the sensitivities of minority-group members. If you're straight, you can walk hand-in-hand with your spouse without issue. You may even be able to embrace publicly, and kiss, hug and display all kinds of PDA. Gay couples can't do that without fear of reprisal, sometimes violently.
Minority-group members are only "safe" in certain places.
At a tech conference, women are in the minority, and so crass comments about/towards women are not perceived in a safe way. It's not your buddy making a funny joke, it's the majority-group members expressing oppression.
Whether you personally agree with that is not the point; it's how minority-group members feel.
My country has a law about offending religion. Almost whole population is to some degree religious. So not only minorities get offended.
Recently local pop star was tried and sentenced because she said that Bible was written by heavily pissed and baked blokes and some people got offended.
Protecting the offended can be a tool for bullying people that speak their mind or behave true to themselves.
One might think that in this age of intense communication people would grow thinker skin. But Americans got more fragile instead.
And I've always found that self-proclaimed feminists are _always_ offended and loud about it when they are. A few I know go to the point by saying females are better and that all masculine references should be eliminated. They need to vote with their pocketbooks: don't pay for a ticket, and don't attend.
I went to a 'con recently: The Midwest RepRap festival. I heard no references to sex, sexuality, race, or anything of the sort. One sales person came around, got argumentative once we said we were not interested, and started to try to argue religion. That was perhaps, 10 minutes tops. Everybody else stayed absolutely professional about everything.
Now, the last thing I want to hear at a tech conference is another tiring sex joke. It may be funny, but that's not why I'm here.
Feminists are people who believe men and women should be treated equally. Nothing more, nothing less. Classifying fanatics as "feminists" and acting like all feminists acts that way is ... well... pretty damn stupid.
That's actually really not accurate at all. If feminism were that simple of a concept, discussing it would be a hell of a lot easier. First off you have the whole "wave" notion, where feminism has changed dramatically over time. Second, most contemporary feminists are talking less about equality and more about diversity, and the value of alternate perspectives. As for whether fanatics get to be classified as feminists or not, it sounds like a classic No True Scotsman scenario to me.
I try to avoid the no true Scotsman fallacy. If you say you are a feminist, I accept. But what I say stands: every self proclaimed feminist I've met always get offended at the stupidest things. One I know even had a diatribe towards Carlin about the "personhole cover" because of his insensitivity. The usual stance many in this category take is equality regarded in Animal Farm: they are just "More Equal"
<added> I live in Indiana, and had this haopen to me: I went into a car dealership, looking for a used car. Dealer walks up asking if I wanted to test drive or ask questions. Later on in negotiations, he went hardcore slimy. Along with that, said ,"You can trust me, I'm a good Christian."
That was enough to get me to leave on the spot. Usually people with self-proclaimed titles are to be distrusted, or t least listened to with a very critical ear. It's also similar if I run around calling myself "Ub3r Haxx0r". Most of you would justly call BS.</added>
Then, I have also met many who fight for women to be equal with men. They usually aren't much for the labels, yet will fight ferociously for the rights to be equal. Equal pay is the big one right now, considering pay parity is apart by 20%.
Best said by a friend: when a woman hits a man, and the man hits back, and nobody gasps in astonishment, we shall be equal.
Interesting how well this aligns with http://paulgraham.com/identity.html. You basically seem to be saying that you are more trusting of people who follow pg's advice in that essay, and I'm inclined to agree with you on that particular point.
Your analogy seems to reverse about halfway through. Not being able to make lewd jokes because the majority would find them offensive doesn't seem to apply, here. If, instead, you mean that being offended is, itself, something that you can't do without causing the majority to feel offense, if you're in the minority (as Adria was), I think that this analogy may be stretching too far, or going too meta, or something. :)
"Sexism" does not appear once in the blog post. So uhh there's that.
The concern with "offensive" discussions/jokes at developer conventions is it can give the sense that some people are not welcome there - if you don't like it, go somewhere else.
There's a feminist belief that all forms of "pornography" are inherently discriminatory toward women with pornography being a very broad concept--basically any form of sexuality not associated with love. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gloria_Steinem#Pornography
Any crude comment relating to sexuality would fall into this category. I am not attempting to justify the response here, just explaining the rationale.
Adria stated they had been talking for a while, indicating there were previous comments.
PyCon determined the guys had said something offensive.
So, either PyCon lives in fear of Adria, or other people also found the comments to be overtly sexist/sexual.
Unless PyCon publishes an investigative report, I doubt we will get the entire story.
If you personally don't find the things they said offensive, that's fine, but they were there in a professional representation, not a personal one. If PyCon and their employer both felt the guys said something clearly outside the guidelines represented to them by PyCon, that's the issue. Whether it was about dongles or donkeys doesn't matter.
EDIT: Originally I stated PyCon removed them from the conference, as a followup pointed out this was incorrect.
Wrong.
http://pycon.blogspot.co.at/2013/03/pycon-response-to-inappr...
" The comments that were made were in poor taste, and individuals involved agreed, apologized and no further actions were taken by the staff of PyCon 2013. No individuals were removed from the conference, no sanctions were levied."
Stealing something I wrote on another thread here:
Dick jokes are perceived to be almost exclusively a part of "guy culture". Want proof? Watch how fast a group of guys making those jokes suddenly clams up and changes the topic the moment an unfamiliar woman walks up. (And when a woman joins in and shows that she's comfortable making those jokes, too, watch how glad everyone is that she can be "just one of the guys".)
So when guys at a conference routinely make dick jokes in public, that contributes to a sense that the conference is a male space. It's not a conscious thing, but it's a real thing, and it would be good for it to change. I don't know that the public shaming in this case was the right way to go about that, but I'm not sure that I have a better alternative to offer, either. (Women are all too aware that quietly saying "Please don't act that way" tends to have no impact at all, apart from the guys thinking she's a humorless busybody.)
The reason a group of men clams up when a woman walks past is because they're worried she'll take offense like Adria did. Evidence it's not exclusively part of men's culture is that when a women shows herself not to be offended, most groups of men will actively include her in those jokes.
It doesn't mean we actually think it's offensive or understand why anyone would be offended.. honestly I find it kind of baffling, but nevertheless, I will watch my tongue around unfamiliar women just in case. The other thing is that the potential outcome from offending a woman is much worse than offending a man. I would hate for what I said to be misconstrued as sexual harassment, and it could potentially lose me my job if it was (as it has done for an unfortunate developer in this case).
As far as "one of the guys" goes.. I think that's a perhaps unfortunate way of phrasing a well intentioned message: you are someone we are happy to relax around. My girlfriend is a female developer and quite happily refers to herself as one of the guys and doesn't see it as a problem or sexist. What she does find a little annoying is having to reassure men that she won't be offended by their non-harassing sexual innuendos in order for them to relax around her.
There's probably not really an absolute solution to this.. people take offense at different things. It's nearly impossible to offend me, but other people are offended by the colour of the sky.
It feels like you're missing my point a bit here, so maybe I've been unclear. The reasons that the guys clam up aren't really the issue at all, and I'm not trying to make claims about whether dick jokes are or should be offensive to anyone.
My actual point is that in practice, whatever the reason, guys typically only make those jokes when they consider themselves to be in an environment where such jokes are welcome: what I called a "male space". So what does it imply when guys at tech conferences feel comfortable making dick jokes in public? The message that "this is a male space" comes across loud and clear to everyone who hears them: men feel a bit more comfortable making off-color jokes of their own, and women feel like outsiders.
Again, all of those implications are entirely independent of whether anyone actually finds the jokes themselves offensive, and independent of the reasons that guys typically self-censor. In this case, I rather suspect that Richards herself was not offended by the joke, but was upset that the guys were (unconsciously) sending a "male space" message simply by being willing to say it out loud.
According to the article I read, which could be wrong, the phrase was "I'd fork that repo." In and of itself, harmless, but said in the proper tone (don't know if it was), it would remind me of things that have been said about me. I.e. People talking about how they would do 'x' to me. Totally creepy and disturbing, right?
A phrase like that is called a 'trigger'. The same reason you don't say the n-word around a person of color, because you don't know what kind of experiences that person has associated with that. Same for rape, because you could have a victim or a rapist nearby and you don't know how it will affect them (harming or reinforcing them, respectively).
Gender, race, sexuality, and many other topics make people feel very strongly, and sometimes can cause people to dwell on those bad experiences and have the same feelings of angry/inadequacy/self-loathing/whatever that they did at first. My perspective is: I don't know how this really charged term has affected the lives of the people around me, so...maybe I'll wait to make the joke? Or I won't make it?
The dongle thing is silly to me, and the "forking" thing was immature. But that's how I could take offense at that statement. Hope that clears it up? Just my perspective. I don't know if that's how Richards felt...if she didn't, I don't know what the sexist overtones could be either.
But how can you know what someone will find to be a trigger? Someone can find almost anything offensive for some reason, or have it remind them of a bad experience. If they were being particularly graphic, of course, that would be inappropriate, but even if this was a wiggley-eyebrows wink wink nudge nudge sexual innuendo, it still seems pretty harmless (other than going against PyCon's rules which is bad). I could get offended, as a vegetarian, by someone saying they're so hungry they could eat a horse - or if I were anorexic, maybe that would be a trigger?
The alternative seems to be that we all become humourless drones, just in case any of our humour offends someone. Maybe I'm biased though, as a Brit: if we didn't have sexual innuendo, we couldn't get up in the morning (wink wink nudge nudge). It's as essential as our morning breakfast tea.
Nah, you can't know. It's just a consideration. Obviously some things are more blatant than others. I'm just offering one possible way what was said could've been taken offensively -- not saying that I personally agree.
I don't want to trivialize the power of such a trigger and the strong emotional states they may bring about. But you are arguing sensitivity and general discourse, for which I agree, these comments were misplaced.
In the underlying argument "What makes it sexist", you seem to imply if the person set off by the trigger is a woman, then the initial statement was sexist. Which is a little broad for my liking.
As for sensitivity, Imagine for a second a victim of prison rape (of which there are unfortunately many cases). I could imagine someone like that having an extremely sensitive reaction to any 'gay' word or image. Should we therefore limit the right of gays to express their affection, out of fear they might offend said people.
Yeah, I can see how my post could be interpreted that way, though I didn't mean it like that. Just because a woman was offended definitely doesn't mean the statement was necessarily sexist. I'm just trying to offer one possible way they could be construed as sexist -- not to say that I agree with the interpretation personally, though.
This is a great article from a far more neutral and informed point of view than most of us have managed (or could, given what little has actually been said by first-hand sources). Thanks to the author for treating this issue both critically and realistically, and for attempting to make a difference in SendGrid's reaction, whether it worked or not.
Amanda Blum apparently has a history of animosity with Adria Richards, while at the same time she also isn't one of those who would stick their fingers in their ears and say there isn't sexism in tech. That makes this post pretty interesting.
I think a lot of people (myself included) spoke out against Adria Richards because of her bullshit - not because she was a woman.
One can argue against what she did and not be a "mysoginist man-privelaged pig". (<--- I've seen women write that against people who spoke against Adria Richards)
Well, some of the people arguing against her were that. But definitely not all.
There were and are a lot of people who see this issue through exactly one lens: is the man right or is the woman right? They caught hold of this issue and made it part of their long battle. This issue got reposted to those various blogs and subreddits that represent those armies. (And they each monitor the other so summoning either army summons both.) I suspect that, had those armies never been involved, neither person would be fired today. Not that those armies care. The two people who got fired were acceptable casualties in their war on The Other.
Ugh, this comment turned into pop-psychology, sorry.
FWIW, she discloses that in the post - and explains why in ways that are pretty easy to fact-check if anyone wonders if it's justified.
I haven't bothered personally to fact-check whether Adria hijacked a newbie talk at a conference to push an anti-porn crusade based solely on another (female) presenter's presentation title, on the grounds that Amanda could get called out on that in an instant if it weren't true.
I know which of the two has come out looking fair-and-balanced, and which has come out looking borderline-unhinged here, at least from my point of view.
Well said. The last paragraph sums it all up perfectly:
"I imagine in an alternate future, Adria just turned around,
smiled and whispered, “Hey. No offense, but I’m not all that
interested in hearing about your dongle, you know?’. The men
would have become momentarily embarrassed, and then reflexively
defensive before letting their rational neurons fire in that
crowded room and say, “yeah, dude, no problem”. Maybe one of
them would have approached Adria later in the day and pulled her
aside to say “hey, I really didn’t mean to offend you, I’m
sorry. Hope there’s no hard feelings.” In this alternate future,
at a future conference that developer quietly steers a
conversation amongst friends away from this territory, without
making a big deal of it."
"Because of my experiences growing up, I have triggers. This means that I’m always scanning for danger; for situations that seem like something from the past that could hurt me. When I recognize something that matches, I can overreact and feel intense fear, anger or anxiety. This is something I’ve worked on a lot. It’s much better now than 10 years ago but there are some things that send me over the edge."
I've tried to keep a pretty neutral opinion of her. It just seemed like she made a misjudgement. This is the first post (Amanda Blum post) to reasonably say something that makes me question that a bit.
Now, combine Amanda's post with this info and it's just possible that Adria hasn't suffered enough of a negative response to her past actions (and maybe even benefited from them a bit in blog traffic, etc), so she didn't really 'learn her lesson'[1] on the way she should approach these situations. Unfortunately this time the negative reaction was extreme.
[1] This doesn't imply that her reactions were malicious or self-serving. Just that there was never a reaction that caused her to question her way of responding to these things.
When the dust settles, SendGrid, PlayHaven, affected developers, women in tech as a group, and our industry as a whole will end up with some reputation damage and setbacks in the struggles on equality front.
But Adria personally will probably benefit from her newfound celebrity status in one way or another. There's no such thing as bad publicity, that's the most likely lesson to be learned [again].
> Just that there was never a reaction that caused her to question her way of responding to these things.
If only human minds worked that way.. sigh..
Edit1: Oops just realized out of context "reaction" is pretty neutral, but along with the rest of the passage it reads "strongly negative enough reaction" i was replying with that in mind.
In my experience, some of these triggers are impossible to eliminate in one's lifetime and usually one just develops strategies around it. perhaps one of those strategies failed in her case at this event. Granted, it failed and affected one developer personally, and created some strong* opinions among the rest of the tech/developer community, but am not sure a stronger negative reaction is going to help future incidents. infact i believe it will just exacerbate such reactions.
*-- Am deferring judgement on the effects on these..
I'm not sure what direction you're going with it, but it seems to me this actually makes it worse as far as how she handled the situation.
This is a person who knows she's prone to overreacting, but not only does she apply to and accept a job that puts her in overwhelmingly male-dominated situations, she continues to both overreact and fail to recognize or address it.
For someone who claims to have gone through truly traumatic things (and I certainly don't doubt that), she's done an unbelievably poor job of restraining herself. If this is better, I imagine she must have been totally unemployable (not to mention incapable of normal human interaction) for a long time.
So Adria Richards has pulled shit like this before? Seems like she just does most of this stuff for attention... too bad she took it too far this time and bit off more than she could chew.
There is definitely a pattern recognizable from her writing style down to her topic choices and views on these things. Some of these actions also look in no small way hypocritical. However, this discussion is already so extremely loaded with such an insane amount of subtext and misplaced projections done by people who feel reminded of their own traumas, it's hugely unhelpful to launch into a character critique of Richards at this point. It's become an overloaded topic as it is.
This is exactly how rape trials used to be conducted. The victim would be put on the stand and critiqued about every single relationship she had ever had, with the defence bringing all of her skeletons out in a manner carefully calculated to seem reasonable, fair, and balanced.
I'm fifty. I could put together two blog posts about myself, one of which would make me seem like a saint, the other a demon, and both would be factually correct. Which one you read right after I got into some hot water could seriously skew your feelings about my role in events.
This line of rhetorics is exactly the reason why I said that a character critique is unhelpful here, so I'm not sure what your point is but I'm choosing to interpret this as agreeing with me. ;)
I agree there is rampant sexism in tech, and in society in general. I've seen it, lots. I'm not convinced a couple of guys chuckling at "Big Dongles" is sexism, though it is inappropriate for a professional event.
But now we get the picture of Adria Richards and it does seem to be one of someone looking out for ways to be offended and publicise herself with them.
And then there's the DDoS and the threats. Utterly un-fucking-acceptable.
There's not really anyone that comes out of this looking good.
> There's not really anyone that comes out of this looking good.
In my opinion, the PyCon organisers handled things well. They acted on the complaint, explained to the jokers why it was inappropriate, got an apology, and left it there, without publishing names.
Unfortunately for them, popular perception of PyCon is probably somewhat tainted by this whole messy incident anyway.
I am just gobsmacked...I can't believe I just read something so thoughtful and well-reasoned...this whole thing should end with this article marked "End Of Thread".
Or even better -- I want this to be "Beginning Of Thread". I want to skip over all the rampant speculation and name-calling of the last 24 hours and have the discussion begin here, with this. If only we could, then maybe the next sexism brouhaha might lead to something other than repeating history.
Very much agreed. Whether or not I agree with it, it's very nuanced and avoids the kind of "laying blame for the purpose of laying blame"-type of argument that has dominated any discussion of this absurd series of events.
This is a great article with which to start a discussion, not end one. Hopefully the tolerance for less nuanced and more reactionary discussion will abate. I wouldn't put money on it, but I can hope.
Respectably, I disagree with the OP on this entire subject. Yes, the Adria scandal was not constructive to any party involved - but the way it's being analyzed is dead wrong:
When women in this industry are hurt, we’re all hurt.
No. No. It's exactly this kind of thinking that got us here in the first place. It's this kind of thinking that perpetuates the very dissonance inherent in stereotypes. There is so much anti-racism/anti-sexism/anti-everything-slightly-inappropriate recently that some days I don't want to get out of bed. I don't want to watch what I say at every turn. I don't want to limit my vocabulary when there are so few English words in the first place. I don't want to change what I find funny because society has all of a sudden deemed it possibly inappropriate under certain situations. So what's the solution?
People need to start recognizing others as individuals--people need to start recognizing themselves as individuals. I'll admit it: I make inappropriate jokes all the time around my friends: every sort of inappropriate joke you can imagine. Why? Because the whole concept of shock humor is poking at things that are obviously not true. Why would people laugh if women actually were bad drivers (I am a terrible driver)? Why would they laugh if Asians could actually all do backflips (I broke a finger trying). If forking someone's repo was actually sexual, why would it be funny? "I'm going to fuck her" surely isn't funny.
The moment we all recognize that people are individuals, and not just subsets of classes, is the moment where all this ridiculousness will go away. Thinking that a blow to one woman hurts all women is as ridiculous as thinking a blow to one Asian hurts all Asians - or a blow to one person in tech who has large muscles is a blow to all people in tech who have large muscles. The association is ridiculous.
I don't know any women in tech. I know people in tech, and some of them just happen to be women.
Except this time, like the case with the family run makeup distributor (Turning point in the book), her attempts at creating drama has hurt someone. [Yet she doesn't exhibit remorse for her actions (Unlike Mr. Holiday)]
Do I think that was her intention? No, I think that part spiraled out of control. Do I think this spawned from a PR person looking for the page views? Yes.
> Trolls aside, if you don’t believe there is misogyny in the tech world, this will absolve you of that belief. There was little reasonable chatter, instead she was attacked not as a person or developer but as a female- a bitch.
For what it's worth, I've seen and partaken of a great deal of reasonable chatter here on HN. I don't doubt a fair amount of "unreasonable" chatter has taken place elsewhere, but for the life of me I can't find a single example of it coming from any person that could be said to be reasonably representative of the community as a whole.
I mean, if all it took was one penis joke for one man to be fired, one would think that there would be industry-wide layoffs every time one of these incidents occur.
After reading this article, it really has painted a picture that this person really does belong in the extreme feminist camp. She would fit right in at /r/shitredditsays.
This was a great post. And I think it does a pretty good job at illustrating the absurdity of the situation: one sex joke and three people are out of a job, with one potentially unemployable in the same capacity.
Now, guys will feel compelled to check themselves every time they are in public. When being victim of actual harassment, girls will think twice about denouncing it.
And the worst part is that all the actually sexist guys will be able to point to this incident as a justification for why sexism in the tech industry is "not a problem".
Thanks, Adria. Thanks, Internet. You all did a terrific job.
Some of the reactions to her have really gotten way out of hand. Seriously.
I was just browsing through her YouTube account and it's now spammed with tons of overtly racial and sexist slurs against her. These aren't "dongle" jokes. They're the real deal.
This is really just a tragedy. Adria Richards is not the only one who is showing her sensitive, human side here. I think she made a mistake, a big one, and I agree with the decision of SendGrid. But, oddly enough, I think some of the reactions are showing that maybe she was right all along. Her example of sexism and racism in the developer community was a terrible one, but ironically it has led to lots of legitimate examples.
Extremists play a role. Where do you draw the line on sexualisation at a tech conference? Perhaps we need unpopular people like Adria to create debate on what is acceptable and what isn't. I don't always agree with RMS but I think the world is a better place for having him around influencing opinion one way or another. At least these people aren't flying planes into buildings though shaming people with photos is clearly heading towards the dark side. The bigger issue is the unfair dismissals that resulted.
For example, take this pic from LinuxCon last year: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bitmason/7987595846/ (To be clear, I took this pic because I found it funny, not offensive. I suspect some might find it offensive.)
I don't understand that ad TBH. If they are trying to get males to purchase tee-shirts, wouldnt you want to show a male wearing the tee-shirt? I understand the idea of selling for sexuality, but most retail companies advertise men's clothes with men.
There's a lesson to be learned here, that a gender war leads nowhere. While sensational, this event has little substance. It's all about conferences (shows) and appearances. None of the two was fired because of their work. There's barely anything useful that can be taken away from this story and added to a company's moral code. The real gender issues have little to do with these high profile tech soap operas.
If your job is evangelism and you get to the point where you are claiming in a tweet that your employer "supports" you there is a real risk that you are asking them to evangelise you rather than the other way round and then your position is likely to be precarious.
When you are employed, particularly in a PR or role or any other where you speak for your employer your speech is not fully free. Even when in your own time on private accounts if you claim views and opinions as your own rather than your employer's it can still have an impact. Anonymity is valuable if you have something that you want to say without bringing your employer into the issue.
This is not to deny that there may be sexism or that it may be right to publicly stand against it but when in controversial territory speak for yourself and let PR or the CEO back you publicly if they want to and do consider the affect on ability to fulfil role and then balance the need to make a societal impact against that (or quit and speak freely).
I for one am very glad that this happened. It's unfortunate that two people were fired, but I haven't seen such fervent discussion of gender issues, social media, and social norms in a very long time.
I didn't even know "money shot" has a porn meaning until reading this article. I thought it's something to do with dice games or marksmanship or something. You learn something new every day.
As for the matter of the loss, I think the article is spot on. I personally would be horrified if I learned that somebody who made a silly joke I didn't like lost his/her job when if I just handled it a bit differently everything could be fine and nobody would be hurt. Now two people are out of jobs and amount of misery and bad feelings in the tech world is clearly increasing. And that's in open source where the thing that brings people together supposed to be helping each other and making the world better together. Everybody lost here, big time.
I'm interested in a different aspect here than the discussion of sexism and who fired whom at this point. If you're running a blog as a public evangelist for a company, and twitter is part of that public presence, and you emit a tweet which includes a picture of people and criticism of them without their permission, surely this constitutes a violation of commercial use-of-likeness laws in most states, doesn't it?
Aside from the personal stuff between her and Adria, I think she has a good grasp of the situation. (i.e. I agree with her) However, I find one thing troubling:
> Adria reinforced the idea of us as threats to men, as unreasonable, as hard to work with… as bitches.
(From here addressed to Amanda, should she be unlucky enough to stumble upon this thread) I don't believe you should be worrying about whether what you do reinforces someone else's preconceived notion of your gender. Do you really think someone who already sees women as uppity b-tches would suddenly change their tone just because you don't adhere to their stereotype? No, they're going to write you off as an exception. "No no, you're not like them! You're one of the good ones!" But as soon as you do something they don't like? "What a fucking b-tch. This just proves women don't belong in tech. etc etc"
However, I'm a guy. I don't really have the right to tell you how you should think about your own oppression, much like how no one has the right to tell Adria how she should have handled calling those two guys out— aside from doing something illegal, which posting a photo on Twitter most certainly is not.
I guess what I'm saying is that I agree everyone lost, but one person lost a hell of a lot more than anyone else. That guy whose name we still don't know? He's gotten job offers. Play Haven, the place that actually fired him? Unscathed. Adria? Constant harassment, rape and death threats, and now presumably fired from her job while her former employer is being DDoS'd. All because she posted a picture of some guys on Twitter.
Think about that the next time a thread comes up about the sexism women face in the programming community. You can't write it off as a bunch of trolls this time, because a lot of the backlash was directly from HN.
First of all, I want to say that in absolutely no way are the rape/death threats in any way acceptable or excusable. There are lots of ways to criticize someone without threatening physical violence. Shame on anyone who chooses that route.
That said, I don't think that Adria is making off worse here because she's a woman, or because of inherent sexism in the community - she's making off worse because she was the aggressor, and because she decided to pick a fight and decided to go all-in on it. She's a bully, and if there's anything that the nerdosphere hates with a burning passion, it's a bully.
The guy she photographed privately apologized and then publicly published an apology defending Adria. He's done his make-good on this. Adria, on the other hand, has apparently determined she's going down with this ship, and is riding it all the way to the bottom. If she's not willing to compromise and is instead determined to be a martyr, it's difficult to dredge up sympathy that she's getting a harder bargain than the guy she decided to pick on.
Like I said in another reply, and like the author of this submission said in her post, many of the threats and harassing statements were very much specific to her gender (and some of her race.) Why is it that when a woman does something wrong, the hacker/tech community's first reaction is to throw around gendered slurs? Don't give me this crap about how every other community does it. That's not an excuse. We have to start somewhere, and we should be better than this, but we're not.
WRT her not apologizing for posting his photograph: What do you think would happen if she did? She's been fired, she's been threatened with rape and with death, she's been harassed on a constant basis since this began. Do you think her apology will have any effect? Look at how her (rather benign and polite) comment was received: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5399047 Scroll down and look at all those dead comments. Do you think her coming out now and saying, "I'm so sorry for publishing your photograph" would do anything?
I'd like to add, where is the lynch mob against these guys that their photograph was supposed to cause? I see a lot of people saying "you're publicly shaming them!" and "you tried to get a witch hunt going!" but... there wasn't one. She was just posting their photograph, and nothing in the public sphere happened to them. Only one guy was fired, and no one knew about that until he went and made an account on HN himself and said it.
Before you accuse everyone on HN to be sexists, please provide evidence that her gender is the cause of the comments.
If a guy would had overheard two women, and found what they said to be offensive and hanged them out on twitter, would people send him roses instead? Say one of the women got fired. Everyone would cheer right?
The DDoS and the personal attacks are horrible, wrong, and just plain bad, but I serious doubt to the point of disbelif that all this is because the gender of the twitter user.
I don't have the effort to link every single comment, but please go into any of the major discussions (that have since been removed from the front page) and ctrl+F "feminist". Go and look at the vitriol being directed at her, look at the specific insults used (that Amanda mentions in her post.)
If it didn't start because of her gender, it most certainly became about her gender.
> If it didn't start because of her gender, it most certainly became about her gender.
So what you are saying is that the insults did not start because of her gender, but the type of insults used are.
Peoples vocabulary when it comes to insults are limited. The average west person's vocabulary when it comes to insults are built on sexism, racism, agism, religious hatred, and homophobia. If we go east, nationality also pops in. If we go middle east, religious hatred starts to take a more prominent form. This is quite a large social problem, and is no where close limited to the technical crowd. People on hacker news a people too, and they are thus limited in their insult vocabulary like everyone else.
Thankfully, people who use such insults are commonly down voted and/or removed. That's the community, dealing with bad behavior with the tools given to us.
Last, I thought I would go and check and do some searches for feminist in those threads. The three largest thread are 5419071, 5415256 and 5410515. Neither one has a single comment calling Adria a feminist. Not a single one. Maybe you should go and re-read them instead of throwing down false statements?
This is, by far, one of the bests posts I've seen about the Adria situation, because it isn't entirely biased to one side.
Amanda (the post author) notes that "[nobody] won," which is the signifying action as to why this is so important. Adria was threatened and hated upon over an overreaction. While she definitely didn't do the right thing initially, the best move would have been to mitigate damage, both from Play Haven & SendGrid. If both companies had apologized, they would both be better off for it, and it wouldn't have resulted in any DDoSing or threats.
I'm disappointed at all of the reactions attacking Adria, because they're the exact thing she was trying to prevent in the first place (sexism, hatred), because it wasn't constructive. It does nothing but burn bridges, and undermines the original problem (the dev being fired) in the first place. If the community instead rallied around the dev & asked him to get reinstated, rather than attacked Adria, it would have ended differently.
This conversation took place between the two guys. Why the hell does she have the right to be offended on a conversation he overheard? And further, what gives her the right to take pictures of people without telling them anything. You can't even argue the public place rule, because the the guys would be able to talk about whatever they want. If she really was offended, and not in it for personal gain, pseudo-women's rights, and just plain selfishness then she would just go to the conference organizers and told them about the incident. But she decides to be a huge hypocrite, post his picture on Twitter and get attention to herself. She succeeded, but it never turned out the way that she thought it would be. I am pro women's rights, but this isn't an argument of sexism, this is a hypocritical narcissistic feminazi who wants the center of attention. The guy who got fired didn't deserve it, while she really did. She doesn't deserve the attention she is getting.
I honestly believe we had no social tool to soothe the viral effects of this story. Without a downvote or obscure button in twitter, hacker news, facebook, reddit, the only thing you can do is promote. In this case, the agents of sensationalism completely swept the story out of the publics hands, and we're left with remorse at an unfortunate incident that was made way worse though the internet.
both parties have had time to inspect their actions, both appear to be sorry, i believe that adria owes the developer an apology for an internet level attack - because thats what it is. she does not owe an apology for objecting to the comment and mr hank has made it clear he's seen his error.
i hope we all learn from this, and move on. our profession might be younger than most white collared professions, but have to be better than this, we all have to be.
One thing I will say though, ironically, is that this may be actually a good experience for the million or so male and female technology people reading about this.
If programming teaches anything, it's that common sense is not something that actually comes easily. The better term perhaps is 'good sense'. And with changing environments, it's easy to lose sight of what is good sense, in different situations. Anyway, if the net result will be that a lot of people will be talking to people first if they have issues, and being more careful about their conversations, and more sensitive generally, then there might actually be a kind of hidden, but great, good outcome to it all.
"But at the Boston conference, great strides were made to have a strong female presence. Almost 40% of attendees at Boston were female, almost 40% of speakers (at the time these numbers were VERY high),"
That's not gender equality though, that's positive discrimination. I think conferences should try to get the best speakers available regardless of their gender.
"She didn’t get the developer in question fired"
She is clearly partly responsive for the company's reaction to the "incident".
"How it Could Have Gone"
The best alternative future is of course clear: act like an adult in a conference. If you think an overheard joke about "dongles" is not to your liking, then too bad. It's rude trying to control other people.
The internet is a weird place. I will never understand why Adria did what she did, from all i read she is an intelligent person yet she chose to do the most childish thing in the world... tattle the kid that said "penis" in class. I'm not saying that what the kid is wrong, but don't tattle on him flat-out... just tell him to stop before you go to the teacher and the whole class finds out and the kid gets expelled. But then, the whole class got mad at her. With reason, or not. It do... But the point is that this feels like kindergarden. JUST BE NICE TO EACH OTHERS. DON'T BE PENISES.
I said it once and will say again: these off color jokes between _some_ males tend not to happen when there's not a woman in earshot.
So, yes, I suspect strongly there was a good reason for Adria Richards to be offended.
The firing by her company and the reaction of the community just left me speechless. Just plain sad. Why the dev in question needed to be fired is also questionable to me.
Or perhaps... in fact...in the end... we all won?!
The situation resolved itself in a way that demonstrated that the community is tolerant of political correctness slip ups, and intolerant of those that blow them up out of proportion. But please, y'all... don't take it as a license to make puerile jokes. A little bit of extra sensitivity may be appropriate for a while.
I don't think trying to get all analytic and Freudian about her state of mind is either
1) Intellectually honest (since you most likely don't know anything about her)
2) Useful in the scope of this discussion
I'm not at all advocating for or against her actions, I'm too remote from the affair to be judge of anything, but please let's not let it slip on a personal terrain, you're simply putting personal theories on the table here, maybe she's better adjusted than all other parties involved for all we know.
Yeah, if we got rid of everyone from tech that had personal issues, there would be about 2 people left in it. "Having issues" isn't a sin and we should leave that alone.
What I'm not seeing is the amount of flack that Playhaven got from Ms Richard's supporters. I suspect that it was contacted heavily [if the reactions from the SendMail site are any indication].
This is by far the best post I read about this whole sordid affair. As suspected, Richards, did indeed exhibit this pattern of overreacting before. The balance of this article was amazing!
I didn't see this drama. I usually try to avoid the dramas, but, wow she took their pictures and posted them on Twitter?
She thinks of herself as 'being a hero'?
Mentioned this to my 80 year old grandmother, who has a PhD in Aerospace, said the inability to work problems out by talking was a common stereotype for women.
Let's simplify the rules to basic decency. Don't Be a Dick. Oh wait, I guess I can't say that now. Well, fuck me. Whoops, can't say that either.
I hope mr-hank gets a huge severance out of PlayHaven. (At-will employment is not as simple as employers like to say it is.) At this point, he has position for something substantial, given that they discussed the termination in the public (disclosing an opinion that he is guilty) when he is a non-public employee. He should not just focus on termination (long odds) but also defamation of character and, unless they give the best of references, tortious interference. He ought to play hardball. Oh, whoops. Not sure I can say that either.
This nonsense about "offensive jokes" is ridiculous and distracts people away from the real sexism. I think we should care more about women earning 77 cents on the dollar and having an unfairly hard time recovering their career progress after maternity than about an occasional dongle joke. There are real problems and whatever Adria just tripped on is not one of them.
I see people post this a lot without understanding the point of what she's saying. Adria subscribes to the belief that "racism = prejudice + power", which is basically to say that, yes, black people can be hateful towards white people and yes, racial discrimination does occur within the black community, but RACISM is the result of systematic oppression over hundreds of years.
The reason this distinction is made is because black people discriminating against white people is a response to the racism that they face every day, which is very different from white people thinking that blacks are inherently inferior and should have their rights stripped from them.
Please, educate yourselves on what Adria's saying. I know it all seems so foreign, but beyond the fog, there is a very real and very true message that should be heard and studied.
Don't blame the reader for not being aware of a failed definition of the term "racism". The definition of "race based prejudice" is the one being taught across the western world to children and it has therefore "won".
The concept you describe is indeed important and should be understood, absolutely, but don't blame the reader for the authors failure to communicate. Especially when that failure is mostly intentional as part of a struggle to redefine a word that has significant power. A very useful tactic when it succeeds, but that battle has been lost in this case for quite a while.
Personally I'm quite happy with the common definition of "racism" because the belief you describe is too tied up with the dated concept of "race" (which doesn't exist in reality) and means that the determining factor in whether an action is "racist" is the skin colour and ancestry of those involved, neither of which is under the control of any participants. The other definition means it is determined by asking if the action was prejudiced and if that prejudice was related to race.
There is a very good point to make here that the more common definition can make it more difficult for people to understand the effects of generations of oppression can have on a class of people, even on that society generally considers overt racial prejudice to be unacceptable. The definition you describe does not have this flaw.
I am brown. I have never felt like I was treated in a prejudiced manner by a white person that I know. My grandfather was. Some brown people still are. If I discriminate against a white person, that's not a response to racism, it's racism and calling it anything else is utter bullshit.
For what it's worth, if I am treated in a prejudiced manner by person A, and I treat person B in a prejudiced manner, and the only thing connecting A to B is race, that too is racism.
Or in simpler terms, two wrongs don't make a right.
Have to agree with you. I have a fairly messed up background for this, and prejudice based on race is racism. Any other name for it is just foolishness.
It's called Critical Race Theory, and it's just as valid to question it as it is to espouse it. It's not hard science.
One could argue it gives minorities license to say as many racist things as they want to and claim it isn't racist. It's an argument constructed so that one side wins by default.
Well, it's an argument that one side does win by default, and that "racism" should be used to acknowledge that power imbalance.
"Minorities saying racist things", by this theory, doesn't hold a candle to, say, the fact that minorities are more frequently imprisoned, more often pulled over/searched illegally/beaten by law enforcement agents, more often feared, more often treated with bias in the workplace or dating world, and on and on and on and on and on. Racism isn't "the act of saying something bigoted", it's the acknowledgement of a systemic bias based on a person's skin color. And it doesn't deny that bigotry exists in both directions – it just insists that to focus on bigotry is to miss the deeper issue.
This is relevant to this thread, because gender inequality works much the same way. What Adria did was a dick move, and I think her actions were and continue to be rude as hell. But she acts within a greater context of sexism and misogyny in the programming world – hell, in America at large – and to completely disregard how shitty an environment exists for many women is to miss that Adria's behavior stems from a crappy reality. Doesn't make what she did any less inappropriate, perhaps, but it suggests that maybe there are issues here more important than what she did which may be more worth focusing on. I mean, any ills resulting from her behavior have been more than counteracted by the death and rape threats that have been fired her way – she may have started this, but the backlash against her has been obscenely disproportionate.
In both cases, it seems to work more as extenuating circumstances than as a blanket permission to say inappropriate things to another human being based on his looks. Or in other words, it's not OK to discriminate against somebody else solely for the reason that you are part of a group discriminated against. It just makes you part of the problem.
I think having a definition of racism to be "discriminate against somebody else due to skin colour", as well as a notion of "institutional racism", which is the same thing but on a systemic level, would make more sense than the more academic definition of racism.
I agree with you. It's an ambiguity that leads to lots of people ignoring the real problem, because they're convinced the people talking about it are really just looking for an excuse to be bigots – as here.
I agree with you. I took notice of how the backlash was disproportionate as you mentioned, and I believe its because of what I've heard people describe as "racial fatigue" (in this case it's gender). The media is constantly bombarding us with racial issues, and at times even finds ways to racially charge stories that have nothing to do with race. I'm sure the accused party (white people, or Men in general) gets tired of being portrayed as the proverbial villain, so when someone attempts to blow something out of proportion under the banner of sexism(and it turns out to be bullshit), you get this colossal shit storm.
Do realize that your superparent (who you are associated with by arguing with your parent) is not criticizing Critical Race Theory. They are claiming it is racist.
That definition of racism is certainly a minority one, and isn't supported by the dictionaries I checked. To intentionally misunderstand what most people mean by racism, and then tweet like that, it seems like she's setting up a straw man in order to get into a fight.
I'd say the exact opposite. This attempt to redefine the well-understood term "racism" into "something only white people can do" is a shameful maneuver to commandeer the societal reserves of moral outrage rightfully reserved for use against racial hatred, and redirect them so that racists who hate white people are immune. It is absolutely Orwellian.
Racial hatred is despicable in all forms. Those who push for such an artificial redefinition of racism would have us forget this.
That's a lot of nonsense and semantic quibbling. Words mean what they are understood to mean. The school of thought she adheres to is attempting to re-define a word, and they have thus far failed.
Therefore, no, she cannot expect her audience to adhere to her particular definition of racism since it is highly non-standard outside of certain limited circles.
For what it's worth, I also happen to think her "definition" of racism is rubbish. It makes all kinds of assumptions about power dynamics in a given situation and injects motivations into actors where none are known.
What? People shouldn't have to be "aware of her definition of racism" because her definition of racism isn't the definition of racism. I might as well lament your ignorance for not being familiar with a word I made up 5 minutes ago...
This bit of definition only matters if there's someone involved without power.
Presumably Adria is claiming to be without power. She has the power to get someone fired with a single tweet. She has so much power she's gone mad with it.
Tu quoque (appeal to hypocrisy) is a fallacy, but this annoys me too. The pictures she took at PyCon of her playing a game of Cards Against Humanity are perhaps the most galling:
This goes beyond Tu quoque. She claims to have been offended, enough to publicly name and shame these people over their private conversation, but she has publicly made jokes that were far raunchier days before. It isn't about hypocrisy in this case, it is about whether she was really offended.
I agree that it looks like she was exaggerating her offense. Hypocritical people often lie to manipulate situations to their advantage, or rather they choose truths to suit them according to the situation. So I guess what I am saying is that there are two questions here, are her hypocritical actions deplorable (yes), and was it sexism (no), but that the answers to the questions don't have any bearing on each other, which is why it's tu quoque to connect them. Anyway, in the end, yes, painful drama.
I honestly didn't know Appeal To Hypocrisy was a fallacy! Probably one I'm going to continue to make; hypocrisy is the one thing that drives me insane.
Yeah, it's a kind of ad hominem, because it says, "This person's arguments are not worth listening to because this person's behavior is not in line with what they are arguing for." But if arguments are rational things with inherent truth then it doesn't matter who says them. Her argument about overheard dongle jokes being sexist is weak enough as it is. The added hypocrisy just makes for sadly entertaining drama / gossip / whatever. In a way, by focusing on the hypocrisy, it lends credence to her claim of sexism, because there's the subtle implication that if she weren't a hypocrite then the sexism claim would be valid. Anyway, whatever, her reputation is kinda ruined now, I hope she makes it out of this okay.
And, as usual with ad hominems, we must be careful not to throw out too much.
She argues that the joke was offensive. Her evidence was that she was offended. Evidence that her concept of offendedness is flawed does argue against the offensiveness of the joke.
Had she asked three people sitting near her if they were offended, and they had said yes, then she would no longer be a part of the argument and her hypocracy would not be relevant. But she didn't so it is.
Let's assume an identical situation, except that this time one of the two guys said something to her like, "Hey baby, I'd like to fork your repo, so do you wanna see my dongle?" Would her hypocrisy have any bearing on her claims of sexism? Would her personal emotional reaction have any bearing on her claims of sexism?
So with other people claiming sexism O, hypocritical Adria H, and sexist remarks S, you're saying !O -> (H -> !S), but O -> S. I guess I don't believe that the truth of statements depends on the number of people making them (this is what you believe, right?). I also don't see much point in the use of subjective experience as the basis of argument. She felt the way she felt, legitimately, but for a claim of sexism she'd need to demonstrate how the dongle jokes were somehow demeaning to women, as opposed to just being immature. Nobody is disputing that she got offended.
Plenty of people are claiming it wasn't sexism, but it seems like it's not a large enough number of people for you to dismiss her hypocrisy as irrelevant.
S->O
|
V
D->A
|
V
H
S=sexism
O=other people being offended
A=Adria being offended
D=Adria being dishonest
H=Adria being hypocritical
We know that A and H are true. We don't have data for the others. O would allow us to conclude S. H suggests D, which explains A, causing A not to be evidence for S.
It's like how flying saucer cultists being visibly crazy is evidence against flying saucers if their statements were the evidence in the first place, but if you had actual radar tracks, then it wouldn't matter.
Okay, thanks for explaining, I better understand your position. For myself, I don't believe A -> S or !A -> !S. I also don't believe O -> S or !O -> !S. People will get offended over the silliest things, and conversely victims of abuse will also deny that any was done to them. I also don't believe D, in that I don't think she was intentionally lying about being offended in order to manipulate the situation. I'm not sure that H suggests D, unless you mean emotionally dishonest, which of course I believe. She did fabricate the bit about forking being sexual, but I thought that was more jumping to conclusions than lying. But, I do understand your position insofar as if A implies S, then H matters.
It does seem to me that when you say A is evidence for S, even though your diagram only has S -> A, that you're just affirming the consequent. That is, given P -> Q and Q, claiming P is true.
So, my position is, she's a hypocrite, she got offended, obvious character flaws, etc. But whether or not there was sexism can only be determined by looking at both sides of the description of events that we have. For the most part, it seems people are saying that it isn't sexism, and that it would have to be specifically degrading to women.
I don't think the flying saucer analogy applies, because nobody is disputing the events that took place, people are only disputing whether there was sexism, i.e. what the meaning of the events was. To me it's more like, crazy person sees something fly overhead, claims it was a flying saucer and the beginning of an alien invasion, and proceeds to escalate the situation, when everyone else who looks at the data after the fact says it was just a plane.
At any rate, barring a conversion one way or the other to the truth of A -> S and !A -> !S, I think this is at a standstill, but it was an interesting discussion, so thanks.
My arrows are for causality. It's simpler this way. Evidence flows the other way. If sexism causes offence, then offence is evidence for sexism. How strong evidence depends on the likelihood of the consequence in absence of the cause. Bayes FTW!
As for concluding !S, most statements aren't sexist. In the absence of meaningful evidence for S, we should conclude !S (or rather, p(S)<.1).
Ok, I actually just didn't realize you were talking about probabilistic logic, because I'm used to propositional logic. If there is no way to determine S in the absence of A, then yes, A matters. However, we have a reasonable accounting of the facts agreed upon by both sides, at least as far as the dongle joke is concerned. Given that, a post mortem evaluation of the joke by a large group of people is a much better way to determine S, making A irrelevant, and therefore H irrelevant. It's not the case that you had to be there in order to know S directly. Does this make sense, regardless of whether or not you agree?
I always use probabilistic logic for real-world questions. Certainty is just too rare.
I understand and agree with your analysis except for one point: as I understand it, the exact text of the joke has not been published, sadly preventing post mortem evaluation.
Well, mr-hank said it had something to do with "a big dongle joke about a fictional piece hardware that identified as male", and Adria corroborates that less specifically with it being a joke about a "big" dongle.
However, if that description isn't enough (it is for me), I'd much rather accept Adria's oversensitivity and injustice-seeking behavior as applicable character flaws. As opposed to her hypocrisy, those things really do make her a bad judge of what is and isn't sexist, because they generate false positives.
Her hypocrisy is also galling because of her response to the events, but that still doesn't affect her claim that she took appropriate action, because it's a generic claim about any woman in that situation, and doesn't rely on any of her character flaws.
Okay, that is as refined as it gets for me, I think. I did come to see how I was implicitly accepting an ad hominem argument without realizing it (the one about oversensitivity), so thanks again.
"Anyway, whatever, her reputation is kinda ruined now"
I think her position, which was originally extremely weak, has been reinforced by the large misogynistic response. She's a public speaker, and once people forget about her offense, she'll roll this into five years of lunches, keynotes, corporate re-education, and books.
This backlash has given her a level of credibility as an expert on gender-based harassment that she would not be able to attain on her own merits. She needs no academic background after this. She needs no list of petty "I thought of a four year old girl..." stories.
Thanks for catching that. It's hard to reason about these things because tu quoque is already false. I mean, if you assume false is true, then you can prove anything. I guess it depends on whether there's an if or an if-and-only-if relationship between being a hypocrite (H) and there not being sexism (S):
(H -> !S) -> (!H -> S) // false (this is what you mean)
(H <-> !S) -> (!H -> S) // true
But besides being wrong, I guess I was also hinting at something else, which is that if you accept this one fallacy (tu quoque), you are probably implicitly accepting this other fallacy (I think it might have a different name than affirming the consequent, but they're related). That wasn't clear with my use of the phrase "subtle implication" and I didn't realize this either.
Well, no, it's not an ad hominem. An ad hominem would be to use insults, or baseless accusations. The accusations here are well-based. She has made offensive comments, and gotten upset when others made less offensive comments. That's textbook hypocrisy.
It doesn't matter who said the offensive comments. It's true that they're all offensive. It does matter that he apologized, and she didn't. That shows a profound lack of moral judgement, or an inability to be self reflective, or a hostility for the truth.
Ad hominem does not require the accusations to be baseless; it's usually more effective if they aren't. It's true that she appears to have character flaws and is apparently hypocritical. I personally don't respond well to blatant hypocrisy either. However, the fallacy is to connect the hypocrisy to the question of whether or not the guys were being sexist and whether her outburst was appropriate. That question can be answered on its own. I'm not standing up for what she did here, but it's more like, if I did the same thing as her but wasn't a hypocrite, would that be okay? I hope not.
No, an Ad Hominem is an argument against the man (well, person), as its name says. It's any argument that tries to invalidate an argument by attacking the person who said it. In fact, insults are not necessarily Ad Hominem fallacies, and the accusations don't have to be baseless to be fallacies.
I'll start by saying I think you're absolutely correct.
To further refine the point (possibly what you meant in your penultimate clause), it's not ad hominem when the attack on the man in question is germane.
If I say "I am a good candidate for US President", and you say "You don't even know how many US States there are", it's an attack on me ("the person", that is the arguer), but it's totally relevant, and thus not an ad hominem attack in the sense of the logical fallacy.
To bring it back to the case at hand, if someone says "Adria's wrong that it's offensive, because if she says that then she's a hypocrite, because she says offensive things", that's tu quoque (and yes, ad hominem). Murderers are not incapable of identifying other murderers!
But for one thing, ericb makes a good point that hypocrisy is suggestive that she might not have been genuinely offended, which plays some role in this story.
Moreover, hypocrisy plays a complicated and not-entirely-fallacious role in circumstances where we disagree about acceptable behaviour. If Adria's claim is that double-entendres are inherently unprofessional behaviour, but I disagree, one basis for disagreement is to cite community standards, and Adria's own behaviour seems likely to be behaviour that she will accept as not-abhorrent. She could argue "yeah, it was repugnant of me to do that, just as it was repugnant of this man to make a dongle joke", which would mean she was a hypocrite, but the hypocrisy would not affect her argument (unless some other part of her argument required her to assert that she's a virtuous person). Or she could argue that only privileged groups can offend (as she apparently has about racism, much as this argument disgusts me), and insofar as she was persuasive about this, she might evade the accusation of hypocrisy and also the impact on her argument.
I assert that it's a sign of mental laziness to hold hypocrisy as a great evil, in general. I think evildoers who think their transgression is evil are less evil than evildoers who think it's just fine and facilitate it in others. Even though the former are hypocrites and the latter are not. (And if, at some point, I accuse someone of hypocrisy, it will make the preceding statement by me no less true!)
> Yeah, it's a kind of ad hominem, because it says, "This person's arguments are not worth listening to because this person's behavior is not in line with what they are arguing for." But if arguments are rational things with inherent truth then it doesn't matter who says them.
The inconsistency claimed here was an argument against the credibility of the claimed offense. "Offense" is not a objective conclusion of a rational argument, it is a subjective state. Inconsistency in the part of the person claiming the subjective response is a legitimate basis for challenging the claim of offense, and isn't a form of ad hominem fallacy because it isn't challenging the argument being made because of the hypocrisy of the arguer, it is challenging the fact claim in the premise of the argument, by presenting factual evidence.
If you evaluate whether or not those guys deserved the treatment they got on the basis of anyone's emotions, then it's all up for grabs. It's incorrect in the first place to support a claim of sexism on the basis of an individual's emotions.
Remember when we meet the Lion in the Wizard of Oz? Hyper-aggression and hyper-sensitivity go hand in hand. It doesn't make the hyper-sensitivity untrue in some way, but it also doesn't positively or negatively affect any arguments the Lion might have about the existence of abuse - they'll hold water on their own if they can.
I mean, the whole purpose of argument is objective reasoning, right? I thought this was primarily a discussion about whether or not there was sexism involved. All we can really say subjectively is that she got offended and apparently overreacted. Whatever she claims her emotions to be, they are valid claims.
"hypocrisy is the one thing that drives me insane"
Me too because hypocrisy is clearly a form of intellectual dishonesty in itself and I don't want to lose time with intellectually dishonest people. As simple as that.
If someone I know is a torturer and doesn't know I know it and tells me: "torturing people is bad", I'm not going to argue with him. I'm not going to think: "his point may be wrong because he's intellectually dishonest so torturing may actually be acceptable".
No, actually I'd disrespect this person even more: a first time because he's a torturer and a second time because of his hypocrisy.
I've got zero things to learn from such person, no matter how true or wrong their poisonous words are.
There are way enough knowledgable and honest people out there to learn things from.
> Me too because hypocrisy is clearly a form of intellectual dishonesty in itself and I don't want to lose time with intellectually dishonest people. As simple as that.
I think I understand where you are coming from, but personally, by your definition, I don't know anyone who's not a hypocrite.
It's just a simple fact that the conscious mind is not in 100% control of an individual for every minute of their life, and furthermore, that even if it was in control, that it would never make a decision that was contrary to some position they've espoused in the past.
Point is, maybe ease up on people a little. Hypocrisy should be limited to people who espouse one thing publicly, and espouse the opposite thing privately. Not merely laps in the application of an honestly held belief.
Yeah, that one. There are more pictures of it on her Facebook page along with plenty of nasty comments. Basically the game is based on politically incorrect 'humor' and they were playing it in public spaces at PyCon. Although I probably wouldn't have reported it, I still find it more offensive than puerile dick jokes.
I'm wary of heading too far down this line because I've certainly done things (hosted X-rated parties, etc.) at conferences in the past, which I certainly wouldn't do as official conference events under a company name with random people, but which seem fine in a social setting. And gotten drunk on stage, etc.
But at a "hacker" thing (DC7-13, etc.), not at a developer conference or professional event. There probably is some evolving standard of conduct now that things which were formerly mostly underground are now essentially big business.
Note: Things are only "a fallacy" when they are applied falsely. It may not be your favorite flavour of argument, but the true fallacy is making sweeping judgements outside of context.
She was playing it in the hallway, at the conference, by the washrooms, posting about it on her public Facebook page, and tagging it #PyCon.
Nobody dragged Adria anywhere and forced her to listen to the penis jokes. She just overheard them behind her. The chances of me overhearing that group of people on my way to the bathroom are comparable to the chances of me overhearing the penis jokes. It might be even more likely that I'd overhear the Cards Against Humanity game.
Although her hypocrisy has no bearing on the sexism question, it doesn't stop it from being hypocrisy. Granted, her name probably doesn't need any more smearing, but boy did she keep asking for it - ass clowns? Really?
>I hope mr-hank gets a huge severance out of PlayHaven
It's interesting that the story is about Adria and mr-hank when, in fact, it should be about their respective companies. There are probably thousands of tweets posted everyday by people who got offended with inappropriate jokes - many of them at work. The real story is about the decisions of the respective HR / management to fire them. Aria didn't overreact more than PlayHaven HR, and she was less affected by mr-hank than by the SendGrid CEO laying her off. These people took the real decisions and they're hardly in the public eye.
I was honestly surprised by those decisions. This feels like the sort of risk-averse, old-fashioned line that I'd expect an Intel or IBM to take. Someone said something in public and it was controversial; fire everyone involved on all sides!
The legal advice that companies like IBM and intel would have gotten in these situations would almost certainly precluded firing people over it, conservatism runs both ways.
* given the employees a formal reprimand, which would stink up the personnel file but probably be harmless, or
* fired the employee, but with a decent severance package (1.5 * expected job search time for that position) including two-way non-disparagement.
Discussing the termination in a press release would not have happened, as it shouldn't. You should only discuss a termination in high-profile cases of severe ethical wrongdoing by important officers. Otherwise, you shut the fuck up about it.
There was no ethical wrongdoing by mr-hank and he was not an important officer. I don't think he deserved to be fired. In fact, I think it was fucking ridiculous. Adria Richards was in the wrong (I'd call it mild-to-moderate wrongdoing, myself) and in a more high-profile role, so I think the termination was justified, but the public disclosure I am less comfortable with.
I saw a tweet yesterday that said "We test life in production".
I'm ashamed of companies that don't let their employees make little mistakes. If I made a mistake and the internet decided to DDoS my employer's site, I'd hope my employer thought the internet needed to cool off.
I hope you are referring to the men and not Ms. Richards. Because her "little mistake" resulted in the firing of a decent human being with a wife and 3 kids.
She posted a tweet. Even had she called for his resignation (which she didn't), she didn't have any power to effect it. What about the overreacting HR people who actually fired him over that tweet (knowing about the 3 kids and all)?
She did more than just posting a tweet. She publicly hounded and demonised them when a simple "guys, shut up" would have sufficed. Those people in question have come across as the mature ones since (apologetic and cool-headed) so I'm sure they would have taken her complaints seriously and kept quiet. Failing that, then they would have deserved any backlash. But they weren't even given a warning nor chance to explain the context of their conversation (which wasn't nearly as pornographic as Adria interpreted them).
I know I might now sound heartless, but I struggle to find any sympathy when a bully gets bullied. And while I don't wish anyone to lose their job nor receive death threats, this isn't the first time Adria has bullied individuals nor organizations. Quite frankly, she has a history of being unprofessional and a bully. So while I don't wish the backlash on anyone -not even her- I also can't help thinking "what goes around comes around".
Sorry if that makes me sound heartless. I generally have a lot of time for people (even those who I don't like). But after a childhood of being bullied for being different (read: nerdy), I have zero respect for those who choose to bully my nerdy peers (be them male, female, American, Indian, Chinese, gay or straight - i couldn't care less about that stuff; we're all nerds. But if they're a bully, then my respect for them ends).
How would you like to wake up one day and discover that your picture is all over the internet along with sexist/misogynistic accusations, and for all intents and purposes, you have no idea what you did wrong? Then you go to work and get canned.
This was a pretty scary scene she perpetrated, at least to me. You can really do damage to someone with a mere tweet. Over a dumb, overheard joke? Come on. Judging by the public sentiment, it'll probably be okay for this guy. He's been incredibly gracious publicly. But had he gone home and hung himself, what story would we be talking about?
A tweet ratting out people for having a personal conversation she eavesdropped on. With their picture and everything.
And for what? For something that was absolutely not her fucking business.
Also telling is what she didn't do:
1) She didn't complain to them. 2) She didn't ask them to stop (if they were talking loud). 3) She didn't ask the conference organizers to take some action. 4) She didn't post a generic tweet/blogpost with her opinion on the incident without naming names.
So, no, she didn't just "post a tweet". She is as much responsible for the guy getting fired as his manager.
And she didn't even apologize (at least for the getting him fired part).
After reading her blog post and several tweets, her words seems carefully crafted to achieve a personal agenda, and I would take anything she says with a whole salt shaker worth of grains of salt.
For all I know this could very well be PR and damage control from her. I have a hard time believing she had no idea this was a possible and probable consequence of her posting of this picture. This is not an uncommon outcome.
Either we hold everyone responsible for what they say publicly, or we don't.
On one hand a person was having a conversation that was over-heard and caused offence. We admonish him and hold him responsible. Is this right and fair? Consensus seems to be yes. Whether it was a private conversation or not, and whether it was intended to cause offence or not is irrelevant. He spoke publicly and whatever the result was was his responsibility.
If this is the standard we want to live by then it is absolutely immaterial whether or not Adria intended for the man to be fired. She spoke publicly and his firing was the direct result of that, hence she is responsible.
>Either we hold everyone responsible for what they say publicly, or we don't. On one hand a person was having a conversation that was over-heard and caused offence. We admonish him and hold him responsible. Is this right and fair? Consensus seems to be yes.
What consensus? I find it absolutely horrifying and terrible that this thing happened for a private conversation (that the conversation took place in a public place means nothing. People talk privately in public places: restaurants, city parks, whatever, offices, all the time).
And judging from the comments I've seen, most people agree.
Only Adria spoke in public: on twitter and her blog, and intending the posts to reach a wide audience.
Of course -- just like it's more acceptable to lay off a lady! Her husband can just get a job :)
You single guys supporting your parents or supporting people you're not married to (for whatever reason) or sending money back home to help out, your families are invisible.
One could argue that someone with a spouse has a bigger safety net than a single person -- which is actually true and is a contributor to the fact that married men have higher life expectancy than single men -- but it's easier to make assumptions. I'm sure someone will read this and argue that "on average married men need the job more"; I'd like to remind them that this is so because we (society) make it that way through paying men more, expecting men to be primary breadwinners, making childcare so *&^%ing expensive that it makes sense for the lower-paid parent to stay home, spreading elder-care responsibilities unequally.... The system does have its logic: someone's got to do the work, after all!
I'm a developer who is single making a decent salary in the Bay Area, but I also have sent a significant portion of my earnings last year to family who have not faired as well in the economic downturn of the past few years.
Just because someone is single with no kids doesn't mean nobody depends on them.
>Is it somehow more acceptable to layoff someone that is single?
Both are bad, but in the first instance you cause suffering and income loss for the dependent members also (kids).
A guy can even sleep for a while in some friends house (or in his car, or under a bridge) until he gets another shot to paying the rent. A guy with three small kids, not so much.
It's certainly a much bigger deal for someone with 3 kids to lose their job than for a single person... think about the burn rate and possible consequences of running out of money.
She publicly posted without consent a picture and an incriminating comment in an increasingly context of being touchy and wary about gender issues at tech conferences.
Of course this has a significant potential for HR to do PR and distance themselves from their employee in an attempt to save the company image and avoid a potential pro-feminist backlash. Though I agree play haven overreacted, from their despicable business activity it's not that surprising, and past similar experiences points towards this as almost predictable and expected.
But for a dev evangelist, this was highly inconsiderate and irresponsible thing to do, it looks like she didn't care about the consequences of what she did, and got fired over it. Which makes sense too, as explained by sendgrid here: http://blog.sendgrid.com/a-difficult-situation/ she did it all wrong, made her employer look bad, had the opposite effect of what her job position asks for, render herself ineffective at her job in the future, and inadvertently endangered her employer business.
The 77 cents on the dollar thing is just a symptom of the same thing, blaming men for all and everything and portraying women as victims (to excert special compensation for women). If you research the paygap issue a little bit, you'll find that it really isn't an issue of discrimination at all (hint: among other things, women chose other professions than men).
I admit that I have started to become very angry about this constant misrepresentation of men as oppressors of women and women being the victims. In reality women are the privileged "class" in our society.
Actually I am willing to shoulder more, as had been men's ordained role for quite a while (in exchange women risk their lives for childbirth), but to then be derided and spat on is galling.
among other things, women chose other professions than men
But why do they choose other professions? Do people pressure them into not choosing better paid jobs? Isn't that a symptom.
Most feminists don't "blame men", but "blame gender roles". It's just most gender roles significantly benefit a lot of men (and harm a small amount of other men).
For various reasons. Probably they tend to have in mind that they need more flexibility for when they have children. Also that they might have a husband who provides main income.
I don't know if people have to be pressured into having more time for their family, though. I think it is more having the option vs not having the option. I'd love to have the option as a man, but in general it is a privilege of women or rich people (not having to work).
Income is just one measurement, health and life satisfactions are others. Are men really so well off if you consider those?
Also, don't know about the US, but in my country women automatically get half of what their husbands earn. So they can go to Yoga class every day and still have a good income. Are they really so bad off? (edit: yoga class sounds snarky, what I mean is: women live longer than men, priorizing health over income might play a part).
Also, if you say "pressured into bad jobs", what is the punishment for not choosing a bad job?
My wife has expressed some interest in learning to program. I asked her why she never took any programming classes in high school or college (aside from the little bit of Matlab they gave to most freshmen interested in technical fields.) She said that in high school she wasn't even aware it was an option. No one ever thought to suggest it to her, they just assumed she wouldn't be interested. Once she got to college, she therefore felt like she was already behind; that everyone else already knew way more that she did and that she wouldn't be able to keep up in an elective class.
It wasn't an oppressive culture or dongle jokes that kept her out of programming, it was just the assumption by everyone around her that girls generally are not interested in computers.
Plenty of people without any access to programming classes manage to teach themselves. If she was interested, she would have found a way. Just having access to college classes puts her ahead of most of america, honestly. Most people in America aren't lucky enough to have that sort of privilege. (as much as I hate that word)
I don't want to make too many assumptions about someone I've never met, but from here it seems likely that it wasn't an oppressive culture that kept her out, it was the lack of enough innate interest to kick over into actively learning more about it.
Not offering someone a potential carrer path just because of their gender seems a bit opressive to me.
Sexualised content at tech events just reenforced the idea that "programming isn't for women". Imagine a woman at a tech event where ther'es a lot of straight male locaker room jokes, and the organisers do nothing ans say there's nothing wrong going on, she'll come out of it thinking tech is for men.
Men have to earn enough money to support themselves and their potential spouse if they want to attract a mate, or even just generally be considered not a complete and total failure. Women can just marry someone after college and make the husband pay off all of their college loan debt for their women's studies major or whatever. Men have to choose more carefully, because they're the ones who have to pay off whatever debt they incur. (This also goes for lesbians as well, who can't expect their significant other to pay for all their things just because they are female, because their SO is also one.)
I don't know that having all that societal pressure to make money is really a benefit for men. Women have far more options with career paths these days, and very rarely have to worry about money. It's totally socially acceptable to let their family or boyfriend support their existence. This is why you can easily find "professional artists" who write in their little blog that they "make their living" off of etsy when you can easily see they've made a total of a whopping $150 from their shop this month.
I don't think it's fair at all to blame men for women making less money than men. Most women have the luxury of being able to afford not making much (or any) money and still do whatever they feel like/not have to worry about starving/housing/etc.
Not trolling. I've seen my female friends do this many times/seen my male friends have to do this for their gfs/fiancees/etc. People have really different standards of what's acceptable based on a person's biological sex. Again, note that it's something that's not a given in gay relationships, because they don't usually follow heterosexual cultural scripts. I wish people would study it more because I think it's potentially a really interesting way to investigate heterosexual gender roles and norms.
Except that most of the high paying jobs aren't physically discomforting (e.g. sitting in a nice office all day), and there are loads of jobs that are poorly paying that are very uncomfortable (prostitution, cleaning toilets, etc.).
Sorry I was not talking about physical discomfort but all negative aspects of a job. Men have a greater incentive to seek high pay & status at the price of longer commute / longer hours.
Women do not in my experience value pay as highly and consider the (non-monetary) costs more carefully than men.
The job someone earns at the end isn't discomforting, but getting to the point where you deserve that job based on merit and acquired skills is more discomforting. A four year engineering degree is far more "discomforting" than a four year sociology degree.
Apart from what I said in my other reply, I suppose it is possible that a lot of women don't reflect their options and just choose the traditional paths society expects them to.
If the 77% discussion makes more women reflect and choose professions with higher pay, fine. I just reject the notion of female victimhood and male oppression.
However, it might really be a bit complicated. For example to get a degree costs the same no matter if you are going to work part time or full time. So investing into higher education already is a bigger gamble for women, if they expect they might have kids at some point. I suspect women are not stupid but chose their jobs smartly.
That you're being an idiot. White male is the most privileged thing to be, not some down trodden, exploited minority. Posts like yours belong in /r/mensrights with the other crap. And from your other posts, I think you're much better than this.
Notice I said being an idiot. Name calling would be saying that he was an idiot as a state of being. I didn't say that, nor do I believe it.
>No, being an upper middle-class white male is the most privileged thing to be.
If you have to be poor or middle class you want to be white male. Do you honestly think you'd be better off being poor and black or poor and a woman? Maybe some day we'll get there but we're not there today.
>Think positive, maybe one day a minority might become president.
Yes, one half-black person getting elected president means there is absolutely no racism of any sort (never mind all the racial motivated attacks Obama has had to deal with since before getting elected...).
Your comparison is odd. If you are poor, you are poor. So a poor woman, poor black male and a poor white male would be equally poor.
Seems to me more interesting is the risk of being poor. I think you'll find that there are a lot more poor men than poor women. I guess this is the case because 90% of homeless are male, and men tend to be more prominent on the extremes (more rich men and also more poor men than rich/poor women). Feel free to research the actual data, though.
I see that you believe that, but you provide no arguments to support that.
I only learned about /r/mensrights yesterday, checked it out but didn't like their attitudes at all. I think it is important to counter misguided feminism, though.
Look, there are certainly misguided feminists out there and I wouldn't even consider Andrea Richards a feminist but rather a "shock jockey" who stirs up fake controversy to drive blog traffic for fun and profit.
But that doesn't excuse making a post that could have been word-for-word copied out of mensrights about how downtrodden we are, complete with quotes to claim the wage gap doesn't exist. I'm all for countering misguided extremists from any side.
By the way, you're quoting articles from Rupert Murdoch's WSJ to support your point? Didn't they have an article that claimed that the WHO and Berkley reports were wrong and the US (pre Obama care) had the greatest health care in the world? Yea, not believing anything from WSJ.
You're right, this isn't reddit. Applying a derisive label in place of an actual argument doesn't work here. If you have a point, please feel free to make it. Either way, lay off the name-calling.
BTW, your post reads like a tour of logical fallacies. You can do better I'm sure.
Something sounding like /r/mensrights does not make it right or wrong.
And I argue against misinterpreting a statistic here, not particular feminists.
I wonder why you are so emotionally invested in the belief that women are being oppressed? And what is absurd about men wanting rights?
One issue I have with the "discrimination causes the wage gap" theory is that it prevents looking into the real causes. WSJ was just something that came up yesterday. I am not from the US so don't know their history (similar wage gap in my country, though). Using common sense, too - and researching more.
>And I argue against misinterpreting a statistic here
Pretty much everyone who studies the issue concludes that there is a gap. It is likely that if anyone is misinterpreting a statistic it would be a laymen like you or I, not experts in the respective fields.
>I wonder why you are so emotionally invested in the belief that women are being oppressed?
I'm not emotionally invested in anything but the truth.
>And what is absurd about men wanting rights?
Obviously nothing. But /r/mensrights is a well known group of women-haters [1] who love to spout off one-off anecdotes to show how men are "actually the exploited group" and other such nonsense. There are cases where men get a raw deal (divorce court in the US comes to mind) but they are by far the minority.
Of course there is a gap (if you count the right way anyway), the question is, what does it mean? I argue that jumping to the conclusion that women are being discriminated against is wrong and aslso counterproductive.
As for /r/mensrights I really can't comment. I do think men have a problem, though.
Agreed. Even though I'm sure Adria has been putting up with tons of real sexism over the years in the tech industry, and that this may have been the figurative straw on the camel's back, this is definitely the wrong thing to focus on. Sex jokes are definitely not necessarily sexist. These guys were perhaps a little crude, and their puns maybe horrible, but they were essentially harmless and at worst, just annoying.
What we should focus on is the terrible response from the tech community towards Adria. There is horrifying sexism in the comments that have been posted over the past 24 hours, and it just brings to light the pervasive sexism in our industry. Let's focus on that and denigrate those comments, not some random crude comments a couple guys said in private.
> What we should focus on is the terrible response from the tech community towards Adria.
I still believe (hope?) that those horrible things posted are not from the tech community but rather from a few random trolls and groups like militant mens right people.
She's allowed to be offended with those comments (or single pun), but the method of communicating her offense was definitely not called for.
And honestly, even if it were sexual, it isn't sexist. I think that's a distinction that certainly needs to be made. Calling Adria a c*nt and other horrible things online definitely is sexist though.
And the company she was envangelising for on that twitter feed thinks that a visual joke about photocopying your genitals is not inappropriate for their jobs pages:
I understand that speaker and context make all the difference, but she made a joke about sexual humiliation to thousands, and then, at the same conference, got offended by overhearing joke conflating dongles to genitals.
I agree with you that resorting to sexual slurs is immensely counterproductive and makes one look stupid, but I can also understand why angry people would reach for them, since this is in the line of the discussion. Understand, but not excuse.
Still the point stays - you don't make penis jokes and then get offended by penis jokes.
I'm not saying that getting offended is the right response, I'm just saying she has the right to be offended. I get offended by people walking slowly in front of me. They're not doing anything horribly wrong, I'm just annoyed. Again, I understand her being offended, but do not excuse it, as you say.
I'm questioning whether she was offended at all. She certainly has the right, but her actions before and since (ie at previous speaking events, comments on her twitter feed, mishearing an innocent comment as a sexual one) beg the question.
And yes, sadly this is relevant, because, as much as we all have the right to decide when we are offended and not, there will always be people, consciously or not, who will game the system.
And you aren't offended by people who walk slowly in front of you - you are annoyed.
When someone walks too slowly in front of you, they are annoying, not "offensive". You are perfectly with in your rights to be _annoyed_ at them -- but you are _not_ "offended". In order to be offend-ED, some would have to actually _offend_ you, not just annoy you.
Similarly, in this context, I'd disagree: No, saying "dongle" in earshot of someone who tweets about "enhancing" the contents of one's shorts by stuffing socks down them does not give the over-hearer any "right" to be offend-ED, since it obviously isn't anything that this worthy regards as particularly offens-IVE. She obviously claimed the right to _maintain_ that she was offended, but by any sensible definition of the word she actually wasn't.
[Edit:] Duh, that's what I get for replying in a browser tab I opened ages ago -- I see someone said most of that already.
Is insulting a female inherently sexist? I wouldn't call someone a sexist if they called me a dck or a son of a btch. Obviously the response here is sexist, but calling somebody bad names is not sexist, regardless of their gender.
I don't know. Some words are just attached to each sex, and that's just a part of language. We don't say waitperson over waiter or waitress. Something that is both attached to a gender and insulting is by no means insulting someone for their gender or insulting a gender overall.
English is definitely one of the least sexualizing languages of the Romance Languages. In French or Spanish, everything would be attached to a gender, but that doesn't mean that the words define the gender themselves. Nobody in Spain thinks that chairs are 'where women belong' or anything like that.
Well, no, we say server, because server is gender-neutral. Compare steward/stewardess with flight attendant. And some servers will get mighty angry if you call them a waitress.
I don't necessarily think that response is justified when no offense is actually meant. But the point is that there has been an identifiable trend in our language towards moving away from gender-specific terms for roles that shouldn't otherwise have a relevance to gender.
I'd argue this movement is overdue for epithets. I think "asshole," "asshat," "assclown," really anything in the venerable ass family, makes for an ideal gender-neutral epithet. We should use these more often!
That's always seemed an odd quirk of the restaurant industry to me. Server to refer to a person sounds stilted to my ear; a server is a computer to me, but a waiter or a waitress is a person.
So a sincere question: Why would someone be offended to be described as a waitress?
English is not a romance language. It acquired quite a lot of French words and a few grammar patterns after an unfortunate event in 1066 but remains a distinctly Germanic-family language.
Most of the French grammar bits have been discarded in quotidian speech long ago; how often do you hear the subjunctive voice used in English?
English is distinct from other Germanic languages, though, in the same way. Most European languages of any stripe are gender-heavy while English mostly applies grammatical gender mostly only to vehicles and individual sexually dimorphic animals.
>Calling Adria a cnt and other horrible things online definitely is sexist though.*
I'm not sure. We call other people names, "a dick", "a cunt" etc, all the time, including people of our own sex, if we think they deserve it.
So, if Adria deserves the verbal abuse --and judging by what she did, one can easily think she does-- then there's nothing sexist about it (even if the swear words concern sex. Just as when we call a guy a "jerk-off" there's nothing sexist about it).
I'm curious - did you consider whether mentioning the name of that filesystem check utility in a public forum might be considered inappropriate? I'm really (honestly) not judging either way, I'm just curious as to whether you checked yourself before posting?
I'm just curious as to whether you checked yourself before posting?
Between the anti-authoritarian and cynical writing, the 2002-10 trolling habit (long story; kids, don't fucking troll), the leak of Google's "calibration score" mess, the liberal use of profanity, the knowledge of altered consciousness (looked into doing a startup helping treat addictions w/ binaural beats), the blog post that cost VC-funded startups millions, and the fact that the CEO of a prominent startup made a personal campaign out of ruining my reputation (for, one year ago tomorrow, refusing to perjure myself on his behalf)... I don't think Michael O. Church is worried about saying fsck on the Internet.
Chaotic good FTW. Except for the trolling, which was halfway between chaotic neutral and chaotic stupid.
" There is horrifying sexism in the comments that have been posted over the past 24 hours, and it just brings to light the pervasive sexism in our industry."
Exactly. Which is why I'm happy this is playing out now, because I haven't seen the industry introspect on gender issues in a long time.
FWIW, PyCon and the PSF have really tried over the last five years or so to consider gender issues and I think they've had a good start – I believe I heard PyCon had women accounting for around 20% (edit: corrected thanks) of total attendance. That's pretty cool considering how much lower the numbers were a decade ago.
I don't think people understand what "sexist" means. There is no prejudice or discrimination based on gender here. Sexist joke would be someone making a joke implying women were inferior programers or belong in the kitchen not at the computer etc. Saying you would like to fuck the hot blonde sitting in front of you is not sexist (just obscene). What the guys at the PyCon said is so out of category of sexist that it's ridiculous.
Besides the larger issue here is should freedom of speech (in the public sphere) include the freedom to offend. One could make a compelling argument that it should.
I don't know if i'm missing something, but I've seen very little introspection in the responses to the situation. The guy who was called out's apology notwithstanding, out seems like there's just been a mass venting of anti-feminist attitudes all around.
I've seen a lot of posts reflecting on the situation, including of course this page on reddit. Certainly it hasn't just been a "mass venting of anti-feminist attitudes", although that's certainly been present too.
Yes. This is what I find horrifying and humiliating. The person experiencing this kind of thing is the best judge of appropriate escalation, but if you think she over-escalated, then stop escalating even further!
And much of the resulting furor has been way, way worse than that. It would have been nice to see the original apology/explanation without any firings involved anywhere.
It'll take someone cleverer than me to think how to bring where we are now to a better place. I'm discouraged about how awfully my colleagues are behaving.
Keep in mind that PlayHaven probably sponsored his participation in PyCon and he would have been treated as a representative of the company.
If they have standards of conduct (probably codified in some employee manual) there are probably contingencies for this exact circumstance which allow them to fire him.
Actually, sexual harassment laws that actually exist are reasonable and conservative. There are a few women who try to sue over dick jokes, and "men's rights" characters who make a big deal out of it when that happens-- just like people blow the McDonalds case out of proportion (short synopsis: McD was in the wrong for bad cup design and serving over 160F/70C, the court assigned her partial blame, and she originally only wanted her medical bills paid, not "legal lottery" nonsense)-- but the stuff that's actually covered by sexual harassment law in most jurisdiction is leagues beyond mere dick jokes.
No court would consider him guilty of anything for a joke about a dongle.
I doubt his company had a sexual harassment policy that was substantially more aggressive than what the law provides.
If she asked him to stop, and he kept going, then I'd say that he did something wrong. If he made a dick joke, then no. People make dick jokes in semi-private conversations. Women do, men do, because dicks can be funny. If she says "I wish you wouldn't make jokes like that around me", then he should have stopped and would be in the wrong, but I've seen no evidence of that.
The termination suit is uncertain. It's far from a slam dunk, obviously, especially since he admitted making comments that he considered wrong and embarrassing. Bad move to discuss this in the public so soon. He should be able to get defamation, at least with good enough odds to get a settlement that'll cover him till he gets his next job, given what PlayHaven's management said about the termination and about him.
Wait, are you saying she was harassed? Because she overheard a conversation in a public place? Nothing I've read indicated that the jokes were directed at her. The impression I got was she just decided she needed to control the behavior of two people she didn't know who said something behind her back (literally).
Sincere question -- what if he felt that it wasn't offensive enough to have crossed her threshold and continued making similar jokes? Your assertion is that he would be in the wrong, but isn't that entirely subjective on the level of offensiveness of the joke?
What if the joke were "Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side!" and she said that jokes about chickens made her uncomfortable. Is he obliged to stop telling dumb chicken jokes?
If someone speaks up to tell another human being that what they are saying is offending them, they're going out of the comfort zone of a shared public space to express their opinion. It's not an easy thing to do, and it should carry some weight. If this guy continues telling sexually offensive jokes after being asked not to, it doesn't make him a misogynist, in the same way that continuing to tell uncomfortable chicken jokes in the presence of the chicken-adverse doesn't make him anti-poultry. It just makes him an _asshole_. Public spaces are about trying to find a common ground among a diverse group of people, and it's the reason we as strangers usually just fidget and talk about the weather to one another.
I see this case as two people and two companies who acted like children and both lost their jobs and look bad in the community, respectively. Some unfunny man made a joke to his co-worker because he thought it might have eased the social tension that comes from traveling, lodging, and attending a conference with another person over so many hours. An overzealous woman took offense to an overhead comment and saw it more constructive to bring attention to the public conversation that happens on twitter rather than the public conversation happening in that room because it was a more comfortable way to make sense of how she felt.
We're humans and we naturally want to surround ourselves with people who think, act, joke, argue with, and support other people like we do. It's pretty easy to never have to deal with groups we don't agree with on the internet. It's the reason swarms of misogynists got together on the internet to hate Adria and say she represented all the other women that they hate, and to call her awful names and issue a DDOS attack against her parent company.
Both of these companies looked past the human error in all of this, and enforced their zero-tolerance policies, and just fired both of them. This whole thing is a big deal because the other people we align ourselves with and allow to represent us (be it as employees, or pythonistas, or dirtbag misogynists) are making it really hard to connect on personal levels, and really easy to generalize and dehumanize issues into meaningless black or white distinctions.
Maybe this brands me an asshole, but if I'm doing something that I find to be not offensive, and somebody complains that it is offensive to them, I don't honestly know that I would stop doing it. To what extent does one go to accomodate?
If someone finds my breathing offensive, am I an asshole if I keep breathing?
I'm specifically ignoring the action of the companies, the firings and all that, because honestly, while I haven't heard the specific joke in question, it really doesn't sound offensive to me, and it seems as though Adria just decided to be offended by it, and while I'm wary of making assumptions (and even mr hank himself seems apologetic), I can't help but be thankful that it wasn't something I said. I was at PyCon, had conversations, and might have even made a joke or two. I don't think I said anything that might have come off offensive to anybody, but given how innocuous this whole thing seems to me, as somebody who admittedly hasn't followed the story, I just can't help but feel some great travesty happened.
Exactly. Being offended in and of itself is worthless (I'm sure we can find that Stephen Fry quote somewhere in this thread), it is not a motivator for a behavioral change, at least for me, unless I care about the person being offended.
When I do offend people, I often like to probe as to _why_ they're offended. In my experience, most people seem to be incapable of defining any concrete reasons as to why a given statement is offensive other than circular, "it's offensive because it's offensive" reasoning.
> Maybe this brands me an asshole, but if I'm doing something that I find to be not offensive, and somebody complains that it is offensive to them, I don't honestly know that I would stop doing it.
I imagine you're capable of understanding why they might find it offensive and acting accordingly depending on the context, which is the real issue. Whether YOU find it offensive is just beside the point, as it's a given that a person doesn't stand around saying or doing things that they find offensive. Whether you're capable of evaluating the other person's point of view is the key. (I bet you probably are)
If you can see why they'd find it offensive and continue doing it, you're pretty much by definition being an asshole. That's not a moral judgment, I think it's just descriptive...
Breathing is a bad point of comparison. Stopping breathing is much, much more costly to you than making a certain sort of joke.
I think if someone said "Could you stop using words containing "e"? Such words hurt my brain." I think I would.
If someone said "Quit your "e" words, you bad guy!" I'd be less inclined to. "Words with the letter "e" are bad words, and you need to stop using them" even less (the difference between these two being hypocrisy).
Breathing was obviously proferred as an extreme example, but I could, at least for a short while, likely find that to be easier than speaking without using words containing 'e'.
Either way, I find it highly unlikely that I would even try to craft e-less sentences, regardless of how offensive someone might find it.
"No court would consider him guilty of anything for a joke about a dongle."
I'm not an employee of playhaven, but I'm sure new employees sign employment agreements. Usually those agreements reference standards of conduct and that violations can result in termination. The court would have to establish that the employment agreement is null and void, which is a much harder challenge.
"I doubt his company had a sexual harassment policy that was substantially more aggressive than what the law provides."
What we don't know is if employees of playhaven complained about his banter. If they did, and he was informed and asked to stop, then it's his fault.
"He should be able to get defamation"
He might get defamation from her but not from PlayHaven.
(a) mr-hank did or said something sexually inappropriate. (He lost ground by admitting some degree of guilt on HN. Otherwise, it'd all be hearsay and he could say he was just talking about a literal dongle.)
(b) mr-hank's conduct was so bad that there was no choice other than to fire him: "having to let this employee go". It wasn't we decided to fire him. It was we had to fire him. Important distinction, and quite likely, technically false. They probably fired him to save face, not because of an objective violation of any law or ethical principle that left them no other option.
It's not a clear-cut case, and it's less so in the light of his HN admission, but he can certainly argue that the press release (a) misrepresents his behavior, (b) in a way that will damage his reputation and future employability.
He has a lot of options here. He may settle for an amazing reference and introductions to investors. Or he might get a six-figure sum out of it. Or he might walk away. Depends what he wants.
PlayHaven fucked up big time. These companies (especially PlayHaven; SendGrid has more of a case) should be more embarrassed than the people involved.
>He may settle for an amazing reference and introductions to investors
Honest question: if you essentially blackmail someone for an "introduction to investors" what makes you think the person introducing doesn't pull them aside before or after and say "this guy basically threatened to sue me if I didn't introduce him to you"? I have to imagine anyone in that position would likely do that, you could never prove they did it, and the investors would likely in no way take you seriously. That seems like the worst possible parlay I can imagine.
Honest question: if you essentially blackmail someone for an "introduction to investors" what makes you think the person introducing doesn't pull them aside before or after and say "this guy basically threatened to sue me if I didn't introduce him to you"?
You get that in the settlement contract, two-way non-disparagement including your right to see any communication about you, that must be furnished in writing.
That's impossible to perfectly enforce, but if you suspect he's talking off the books, you trap him and hit hard for breach of contract. He should know that you intend to be checking. He should expect that and be careful. It's your job to make that so. You might not be able to catch all cases (he might say things to people he really trusts but not to everyone) but you can have some degree of a chilling effect on negative communication of the sort you described.
Also, what's better for him, once the contract is signed:
1. Make the introduction and leave it alone, or:
2. Make the introduction, then backtrack, making himself look inconsistent and weak to that investor? ("Yeah, I wasted your time, and here's why...")
He cares about his image in front of that investor, and will probably prefer (1). This assumes he doesn't hate your guts, which he might. That's a danger of doing the right thing.
The conference had a code of conduct ( https://us.pycon.org/2013/about/code-of-conduct/ ). Which they almost certainly broke. If you're at a conference as a rep of your company, and break that conference's code of conduct, the company might not like it.
Too bad the "77 cents on the dollar" feminist mantra has been debunked ad nauseam. If you're looking for real sexism to fight, you might want to start from the morally bankrupt and misandric family court system...
Well, let's start with the fact that it wasn't his Twitter message.
SendGrid is probably home free on firing Adria Richards, because she did something objectionable-- harassed someone and cost him his job. PlayHaven, on the other hand, doesn't have a defensible cause for firing him. This would be even more true if he hadn't admitted to the comment as Mr Hank. Then he'd have been fired on her hearsay.
This might be technically true. So, then, if you're fired over hearsay, your next step is to mandate that the firing employer cooperate fully in your suit (defamation, tortious interference) against the originator of the hearsay. If not, then there will be a termination suit. If they don't want to cooperate in your suit against the libelous person, or be sued, then they pony up a settlement.
Termination suits often come down to image, especially of the employer's conduct. An employer that's cooperative and fair usually wins. An employer that seems dodgy (by, for example, firing someone on hearsay and not cooperating with proceedings against the person who supplied the information) is at risk, and looks bad even if victorious.
This is a very gray area of law, at least in practice. There are few termination cases that are clearly black or white. That's why severance packages and those hideous PIPs exist.
Exactly what legal risk for the employer are you referring to? "Termination suit"? You've assembled a series of statements that certainly do sound credible, but I can't figure out how to actually attach them back to employment law.
Firing someone without cause or even for a demonstrably faulty cause is not a tort, Michael.
I think the issue is that you can fire someone for no reason but you can't fire them for a wrong reason, even if a "right to work" state.
I haven't seen this in law but I worked for a very large company in a "right to work" state and this is how they behaved in all things. If you were fired you would never be told why. If you called for a reference you would be told the length of employment and last position held. Nothing more. I don't think they went to all that trouble for no reason.
White: a layoff for a legitimate business reason (termination for convenience). Firing people who break the law or do things that are unethical (termination for cause). Firing people who fall short of a published and objective performance standard, if the policy is enforced uniformly. These are all considered to be unambiguously legal and ethical cases of termination.
Black: firing those who intend to unionize, firing with discriminatory intent, retaliation (including against protected insubordination such as whistleblowing), firing people because of disabilities that can be reasonably accommodated, firing people because they disclose compensation (anti-unionbusting provision), firing people for making legitimate use of HR or internal-mobility processes (a subcase of retaliation), firing people in retaliation for opposing harassment.
Gray: firing people who fail socially (when there's a record, in the company, of allowing internal transfer), firing people for ethically justifiable (but not explicitly protected) insubordination, firing people whose health issues interfere with the job, firing people you don't like.
In the US, most Gray cases are not considered tortious. You're correct. The burden of proof is technically on the employee to prove that it's a Black case.
If he knows what he's doing, however, the employee can establish enough Gray-Blackness that the company will desire to settle.
Typical firing example: Bob doesn't get along with his boss, Mark, who suspects Bob would rather be on another team. Mark gives him shitty performance reviews and he's flushed out. Looks like a non-tortious Gray case; the performance assessments are inherently subjective, but there's nothing about this that entitles Bob to legal protection. Even an inaccurate performance review is non-tortious managerial incompetence, right? Well, it's not that clear. For one thing, most companies make performance reviews part of the transfer packet. Then, a negative review can be construed as harassment: interference with work performance. Part of the employee's job is to cultivate internal relationships and that makes it harder.
Let's say that the performance review happened on February 1, with Bob being fired on March 15. Bob establishes that, in fact, he met with Alice (manager of another team) on January 24. Bob was, in fact, discussing internal mobility. He has a chain of emails to prove what was discussed.
That's not an uncommon thing for people to do when they don't get along with a boss, nor is it uncommon for bosses to pre-emptively fire flight risks. Now, Bob has a legitimate case for retaliation. He was making legitimate use of internal mobility processes and trying to build relationships within the company, which can reasonably be considered part of his job description, and he was punished for it with a negative review.
If, as is typical, his performance reviews are part of the transfer packet, his negative performance review constitutes harassment insofar as it interferes (tortiously) with his relationship with Alice.
Bob's claim is much stronger, if he has the paper. If he emailed himself (because, after being fired, he's lost access to his work account) copies of the relevant documentation, he has enough paper to initiate a discovery process. Even that, most companies would prefer to avoid.
"Interference with work performance" is also not a tort, Michael. It's one possible element of a retaliation case.
But your use of the word "retaliation" is also suspect. "Retaliation" in employment law means a demotion or termination in response to an exercise of other employment law rights, like a sexual harassment claim. You can't claim "retaliation" when your boss is an asshole and deliberately tries to screw you. In the US, absent a contract that says otherwise, your boss can do that.
Your white/black stuff looks reasonable, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that your "grey" category is what you want employment law to be, not what it is. I'm just an employer though, not a lawyer.
At this point I'm settled on the notion that there is no interesting theory of law I was unaware of that would give the fired Pycon dev any leverage in procuring a severance. You can be fired for any reason, a bullshit reason, or no reason at all. He was. End of story.
>given that they discussed the termination in the public (disclosing an opinion that he is guilty)
The actual wording is: "The result of this investigation led to the unfortunate outcome of having to let this employee go." It's not explicitly stated what (if anything) they determined he did; just that the end result was firing him.
There are real problems and whatever Adria just tripped on is not one of them.
How do you know they aren't related? What if women are being excluded from tech events due to the sexual objectification, and what if that's harming their carrer?
Now, if women are being excluded due to sexual jokes (and I'll note that the joke she responded to was specifically about comparing technology to a part of the male anatomy, not the female anatomy, so it's not objectification of women that's the issue here), then Adria's tweet here is causing the exact same problem she's crusading against.
Man, this is such a fucking confusing case.
I don't want to support harassment in a professional context, but I find it really hard to think of what those guys did as harassment.
I want to live in a world where you can make crude jokes with your work friends and not be afraid about who is listening in. Harassment shouldn't be defined by a list of taboo subjects or stupid rules. Harassment should mean intentional actions that make someone feel uncomfortable or afraid. That means there needs to be some reasonable leeway made for situations where you don't know you're making someone uncomfortable. It makes sense that we should be careful about the kind of jokes we make directly to people but we shouldn't by default have to assume that someone with absolutely zero sense of humour is listening in.
People should be free to make jokes and flirt and do whatever they like at the work place, as long as no-one minds. We have to spend half our life at work, what's the fucking point of having to be a robot the whole time?
Sexual jokes aren't necessarily sexist, nor are they necessarily harassing. Neither is flirting, or kissing or flat out having sex, for that matter. (Might be inappropriate for a work environment, but doesn't have to be sexual harassment, does it?) On the other hand, if you do it in an inappropriate way, looking at someone could be genuinely terrifying harassment. I bet if you were careful and sadistic enough, you could turn any innocuous interaction into something that, over time, makes someone feel deeply uncomfortable.
Imagine if we work together. Imagine I am perfectly normal with everyone else, but when I put my reports on your desk, I slide them on gently, looking you in the eye, then I just hold them there, palm flat on the desk and I smile. I let the smile last just a second too long, then I go off and carry on being relatively normal with everyone else. I do that every single day, and each time you look less and less comfortable, and each time I either don't react or seem to enjoy your discomfort. How long would it take before that became very unpleasant for you? What kind of possible rule structure could be in place that could conceivable prevent me from doing this without requiring some communication from you? What would you ban? Looking someone in the eye and smiling for too long? How many seconds is too long? How would you time it?
Moreover, how the fuck would this rule structure be able to distinguish intentional harassment from the situation where it turns out I am slightly autistic and I happen to really enjoy looking over your shoulder at your screensaver when I drop my reports on your desk?
We have to set the rules at a place of compromise and rely on explicit communication to sort everything else out. Otherwise we'll end up with segregated offices or women in fucking Burkhas or some other retarded solution to the general problem of otherwise clever people being unable to cope with social interaction.
I like the cut of your jib, but most rules (including laws) exist to keep people in a state of fear.
The people in charge don't care if you transform yourself into a robot to cope with the fear, so long as they get their pound of flesh or whatever it was you promised in exchange for the job.
For the life of me I cannot fathom why PlayHaven went to the extreme step of firing the dev in question.
What he did was certainly wrong, but certainly not a firable offense. A stern warning from HR would've sufficed.
Also, I don't understand the hate and DDoS directed towards SendGrid. I think if any, PlayHaven should've been subject of it and pressured to reinstate the dev in question.
SendGrid should've been pressured to warn her, not fire her like it happened.
We commit mistakes every once in a while, and losing your job is a big punishment. It's like getting your car seized by the government for speeding 10% over the speed limit.
Unfortunately the outcome is that a message is sent that DDoS works to get people that the internet mob doesn't like fired, and that a part of the male tech community is wielding that power.
What if parts of the female tech community retaliate with a DDoS against SendGrid now?
Looks like the male privilege extends to having the resources to perform DDoS.
| For the life of me cannot fathom why PlayHaven
| went to the extreme step of firing the dev in
| question.
|
| What he did was certainly wrong, but certainly not
| a firable offense. A stern warning from HR
| would've sufficed.
- The ultra-conservative approach is to distance yourself from anything that could be construed as being supportive of a "boys' club" in tech.
- According to CrunchBase, PlayHaven only has 50 employees. It's possible that they don't have an HR person that maybe went through some sort of training for issues like this, and instead decided to go for the approach they thought would be least likely to have fall out (e.g. people up in arms because he's not fired and they are "supporting a misogynist" or something similar).
- They could have paid for his PyCon expenses (therefore he was there representing the company), and they felt that he did a poor job representing the company.
- It's possible there were other reasons they wanted to fire him before PyCon, but this became a good excuse to act on them.
"They could have paid for his PyCon expenses (therefore he was there representing the company), and they felt that he did a poor job representing the company."
Doesn't explain why one person is still an employee while the other gentleman was canned.
"It's possible there were other reasons they wanted to fire him before PyCon, but this became a good excuse to act on them."
I strongly suspect this happened, given the comment in the PlayHaven response: "we will not comment on all the factors that contributed to our parting ways."
I think firing Adria was appropriate because her actions compromised her ability to function as a developer evangelist. Her irresponsibility in handling the situation has a direct impact on her ability to perform her job. Developer evangelist is largely a PR job, if you are generating incredibly negative PR for your company from that position you should be fired.
> For the life of me cannot fathom why PlayHaven went to the extreme step of firing the dev in question.
The appearance of bringing negative publicity to your employer will often get you fired. Make the complaints sexual in nature and you can probably kiss that job good-bye, this is how society handles these things basically everywhere.
She brought negative publicity on her company, so she also risked her position.
> Looks like the male privilege extends to having the resources to perform DDoS.
Oh pull your head out of your ass. This is by far closer to give a man a hammer and every problem looks like a nail. People acted angrily with the tools they knew best.
Do you really need to use abrasive language like this to get your point across? This isn't Reddit.
>People acted angrily with the tools they knew best.
Yes, the people who were looking to get her fired did so, and succeeded very well. Do you seriously believe the female or feminist tech community has the resources to perform DDoS?
Do you seriously believe the female or feminist tech community has the resources to perform DDoS?
Take a good hard look in the mirror my friend. You're calling "take your head out of your ass" abrasive, but that is downright tame compared to the sexism on display in your presumption that female(s) couldn't possibly have the necessarily tools and ability to launch a DDoS attack.
FWIW, I think the colorful and abusive language in this instance did a good job conveying additional information about the poster's mindset, opinion, and how they relate to others.
Note that it doesn't reflect well on them. Part of their point is how they say it. To me, this says they're being reactionary and not mindful of others, which undermines their standing.
Bad language is a useful signal in communication. In this case, especially, it's a negative signal about the poster.
If you consider the willingness of a large group of people to engage in mildly illegal behaviour and the means to orchestrate such an attack on short notice a 'resource' then they indeed probably don't.
Just like politicians wanting to appear to be "tough on crime" often leading to horrible decisions, I'm fairly sure this is the same thing at play here.
Had the complaint been private, it likely would have resulted in a warning from HR as you said.
Unfortunately, because Adria chose a public forum, it demanded a public response, right or wrong regardless.
EDIT: Not understanding the down-vote on my post. Someone please elaborate.
My impression is that a lot of people who had nothing to do with this conference decided, on both sides, to make this An Issue without caring about the facts on the ground.
I saw the MRAs-vs-feminists going at it in at least two places on the Internet, one of them being HN. This issue was a microcosm of all their old fights and they were going to take us down with them.
For the life of me cannot fathom why PlayHaven went to the extreme step of firing the dev in question.
They had 2 devs involved that incident. One they fired. One they publicly said was a valued employee.
We will never know why they did what they did, why those devs were treated differently, and whether they had cause for their action. I personally find it hard to believe that this event would be enough cause by itself for a reasonable employer to fire an employee in good standing. Which means that some combination of these three are wrong: my belief, the claim that the employer is reasonable, the claim that the employee was in good standing.
Guess whatever combination you want - we are unlikely to ever know the truth. (Though your comment is perfectly in line with my belief.)
They fired one dev out of two, presumably as a value proposition: this was just the one thing to break the camel's back. Which is reasonable, but the issue is that it looks like they fired him entirely for the comment, which obviously has the potential to create a PR fiasco. Lo and behold...
Perhaps the one that was fired was on probation or already on a performance plan for other issues. This may have been the "not gonna work here" moment.
As commenter mr-hank, supposedly the person making the dongle-joke, posted yesterday, the other developer was the one who talked about forking a repo, which was not sexual at all, and only sexualised by Adria Richards.
>What he did was certainly wrong, but certainly not a firable offense.
It's probably not his first offense. It's more likely that this was just the straw that broke the camel's back rather than his first infraction.
>Also, I don't understand the hate and DDoS directed towards SendGrid.
4chan's politics+/b/ boards are chiefly responsible for the DDOS, as far as I know. Those guys love mob mentality and eye-for-an-eye, so it's likely their motivation was to get Richards fired rather than to redeem the guy who made the jokes.
Even if that's true (and I've got no clue either way), it's at least in retrospect turned out to be a _spectacularly_ bad PR move for them.
If they wanted him gone - they should have fired him "privately", doing something like that as such an obvious response to "internet drama" was _always_ going to be "the wrong thing". (Even it it _was_ "the last straw", they should have waited a week or two - if only just to publicly disconnect their HR processes from being twitter/forum shitstorm driven.)
That sets a rather worrying precedent though, if someone takes a dislike to me because of some perceived grievance and proceeds to DDOS my employer's website is that justifiable grounds for firing me?
She was employed by Sendgrid at that time, so since they were paying her salary, it was obvious to her that she was supported by Sendgrid.
I suspect the realisation that they were employing a time bomb as their developer evangelist caused them to rethink the value of employing her in that role.
This whole incident could have been averted if Adria had followed her own advice: rather than stir up foment on the Internet (the "thermonuclear option") she could simply have turned to the guys and said, "this is not cool."
Adria tries to explain that what was going on in her head was an unfortunate sequence of triggers: she's had a traumatic history, so it's to be expected that some things will "get her goat" and trigger her into irrational behaviour. In this case she apparently believed that telling these men that the jokes were not appreciated would have ended up with her being exposed to ridicule on the Internet.
So she took the obvious (to her) course of action which was a thermonuclear preemptive strike.
Do you people realize that women, when between women, can be just as gross as men? They talk about guys as "food" and "expendable" things. They really do. Also they typically give way more details about their sexual life to their women friends than man do to their men friends.
The difference is that in the coding world it's something like 90% men. So of course you won't have enough women "teaming up" to make gravvy jokes about men's short appendages or whatever.
What about we stop it?
I was playing tennis with a friend the other day: two men. On the court next to our were four women. My friend was making a few jokes during pauses and being "gross". I can tell you that the four women were doing exactly the same: you can't hear it but they look at you and laugh and you know they're talking about you as meat they're going to eat or something. Because that's what women do when they look at men and laugh between them. Just ask them ffs. They can be really gross too.
Now I try not to make these jokes and sexual remarks: not because somehow I'd try not to offend the other person (honestly women can laugh as much as they want when talking about me, I don't give a frak). No, the reason I don't do this is because I've got a girlfriend and I don't want to be disrespectful to her by making sexual jokes about "wanting to fork other women's little hidden repo" or something.
It would be great if people stopped doing these lame remarks but it would be great too if women stopped playing 16 years old virgins who are never saying anything gravvy about men when between them.
Hey, sex jokes are not always about women. Big dongles and forking could totally describe male-male sex! Also, why get so upset about sex jokes? Is there something wrong with sex? You wouldn't even be here without it!
I think that people who complain or argue quickly have some unresolved problem. I think this because I am one of those people and I KNOW that I have unresolved mento-emotional issues :) I know that I should be cool and appear to be agreeable all the time, but sometimes (more frequently, mornings or certain topics) it's very challenging. The payoff is so much better than bickering though.
The important thing is to realize you're being a righteous asshole. Then you can start changing.
"In attempting to unveil casual misogyny in the tech field, Adria has accidentally revealed the actual misogyny that lies in our industry, and there's nothing casual about it."
I think even "casual misogyny" is hyperbole, given the original comment that sparked this whole mess. I think the worst you can say about it is that it was crude and unprofessional.
The hateful aftermath, though, clearly should not be tolerated.
All I saw was some smart ass jack asses getting busted since everyone has a camera nowadays. Get used to everyone having cameras to capture your jackass behavior.
Funny that these trolls are so defensive after they got busted and photographed. They can dish it out, but they sure can't take it.
Her issues with pornography are ideological, in that they aren't shared by many men and women who would take issue with sexist behavior or gender based discrimination. However, like many ideologues, she doesn't make that distinction herself.
And what is also typical for ideologues, she doesn't have any issues with saying or doing things that disproportionately harm people who disagree with her, because they are "the enemy". They're not interested in change, they are interested in winning.
These kind of people will do more harm than good when it comes to fighting sexism in tech. They will actually alienate a lot of women.
(I do however find it inappropriate and borderline sexist to call her a prude. Being against pornography doesn't make you a prude, just like enjoying pornography doesn't make you a sexist pig.)