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Comment by foolrush | Hacker News Reader

“The employee produced no evidence to back up her claims.”

This logic is infuriating.

This is a Patriarchy.

Claims of sexual abuse and / or coercion should not, at first trigger, be subject to this sexist rubbish.

Edit: Downvotes. I would encourage the downvoters to take a serious look at the article and explain the rather glaring side step into irrelevant sexist rubbish, and how it adds or detracts from the ideology of the whole piece. Reframing, it is the sign of a company that takes sexual related concerns seriously? More importantly, why exactly does the author choose this particular series of details?

Still shocked and saddened that some people around HN have this attitude. If a woman close to you were to suggest she were raped or coerced into sex, would your first response be "Show me the proof!"?

Public statements such as this reveal the downward cultural pressures on women. This is a real thing.

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If someone I know and trust, someone close to me, says something, then yes I will take them at their word.

But media, and the law should not. The accused should always be presumed innocent until proven guilty. And the media has nearly as much power to ruin an individuals life as the law when they accuse someone. That power should not be exercised without good evidence.

Suppose a woman accuses a black man of sexual assault? Is it sexist to not assume he's guilty, or racist to assume he is?

We should give every accused person an opportunity to be presented with evidence and present evidence for their innocence before assuming anything regardless of the color or gender of the accused or the accuser.

I am also unhappy when someone downvotes me without comment, but in this case I think I can explain it.

Stating facts is not sexist. There is no sexism in that statement (if it's true). If you see sexism there, I am sorry to say that, but you're the one biased here.

> If a woman close to you were to suggest she were raped or coerced into sex, would your first response be "Show me the proof!"?

If I knew her, probably not, if she were a stranger, probably not the first response, but at some point, yes.

> Still shocked and saddened that some people around HN have this attitude. If a woman close to you were to suggest she were raped or coerced into sex, would your first response be "Show me the proof!"?

I think most people would take the word of a " woman close to you " but the important part is the "close to you", if it's between two strangers, " innocent until proven guilty " should apply as with any accusation of wrongdoing. The alternative is how internet lynch mobs form

What logic? He's making a factual assertion, not an argument. Unless you're suggesting accusations of criminal conduct don't require supporting evidence...

EDIT: Here's a link to the results of GitHub's independent investigation (by an external party): https://github.com/blog/1826-follow-up-to-the-investigation-...

We hired Rhoma Young, an independent, third-party investigator that GitHub had never worked with before. Rhoma has a long history of conducting fair and impartial investigations, with 30+ years of HR experience. She has worked with every type of organization, from Fortune 50 companies to local governments, and frequently testifies as an expert witness for both plaintiffs and defendants in depositions, arbitrations, and in litigation involving discrimination, harassment, retaliation, disability, and mitigation of damages...

...We gave Rhoma free rein to review all the media reports, public allegations, and HR records so she could create her own investigation and interview plan. She identified three key issues that she focused her investigation on: the claims about Tom and his wife, the claims about the male engineer, and the general culture and working environment at GitHub... The investigation found Tom Preston-Werner in his capacity as GitHub’s CEO acted inappropriately, including confrontational conduct, disregard of workplace complaints, insensitivity to the impact of his spouse's presence in the workplace, and failure to enforce an agreement that his spouse should not work in the office. There were also issues surrounding the solicitation of GitHub employees for non-GitHub business and the inappropriate handling of employee concerns regarding those solicitations...

...The investigation found no information to support misconduct or opportunistic behavior by the engineer against Julie or any other female employees in the workplace. Furthermore, there was no information found to support Julie’s allegation that the engineer maliciously deleted her code. The commit history, push log, and all issues and pull requests involving Julie and the accused engineer were reviewed. The investigation considered all possible commits surrounding the accusation of passive-aggressive code removal... After interviewing over 50 employees, former employees, and reviewing evidence, Rhoma found nothing to support a sexist or discriminatory environment at GitHub, and no information to suggest retaliation against Julie for making sex/gender harassment complaints.

If you make an accusation, especially one like this, that could easily destroy the life of the accused, of course you have to prove your claim. Innocent until proven guilty. It's perfectly sound logic, it applies to anyone regardless of gender, and nothing about that is sexist.

>This logic is infuriating.

Not nearly as infuriating as the demand that accusations of serious offences require no evidence when they are made by a woman against a man. Either come forward with your desires for special treatment, or stop preaching equality.

>If a woman close to you were to suggest she were raped or coerced into sex, would your first response be "Show me the proof!"?

What a weak straw man. If my friend said his neighbour attacked him, I would believe him without question, too. It's absurd to expect a stranger, and especially the law, to take the side of the accuser merely because they made the accusation, or because of the type of crime or gender of the victim.

Under the existing system, do you believe it is possible that men receive “special treatment”? Is the sh#tstorm that flares up when a woman (already a minority in tech circles) not a form of that?

“If my friend said his neighbour attacked him, I would believe him without question, too.”

Except when it comes to women and their ability to report sexual related incidents, this is not what we do as a culture, which, whether we acknowledge it or not, is directly related to the “type of crime [and] gender of the victim”.

I'm pretty sure the argument here was that most people would believe someone that is close to them. Someone that they know, someone that they trust.

However that wouldn't, and shouldn't be extended to a stranger without proof. Especially in regards to career damaging allegations and even more so after an independent investigation turned up nothing to substantiate her claims (other than TPW's wife working too closely within the company).

People like you, with your attitude, are doing much to undo all the progress that our society has made. The only one who sounds sexist in this conversation is yourself. Don't poison our communities with your hostility.

Fuck off green account patheticly frightened little child. You should be ashamed of yourself and the “culture” you so feebily defend. Chickenshit.

Women fought for equal rights, for centuries, and achieved this towards the end of the last century, by any measure. Feminism won the fight for equality.

You are setting the clock back, and asking for women to be treated as fragile, vulnerable, and unable to look after themselves. You are arguing is that a woman's claim of harassment needs no evidence nor witnesses. That women are so weak that to place a burden of proof on them is "sexist rubbish."

Claims of harassment are easy to make. As we know, it is easy to destroy a career by making such claims. It is also trivial to record conversations on a mobile phone, to get incriminating emails, to get witnesses, to get DNA samples. This is no longer difficult. One no longer needs to believe anyone's word.

This is why you are being downvoted.

Allegations of rape or abuse or harassment, by men or women against men or women (and the gender is irrelevant) must involve law enforcement, due process, trial, and conviction as defined by law. Period. You and I are not qualified to second-guess the legal system. If you feel the law does not protect you, go live in a country without it.

> Feminism won the fight for equality.

Citation needed. By nearly any measure I can think of, women's political and professional lives are dominated by men's ideas and policies to an absurd degree.

Asking for consideration of others' differences is not putting the clock back -- we weren't even having the conversation a few decades ago. Talking about the nuances of that discussion now is not regression.

> Claims of harassment are easy to make.

Again, citation needed. It's not like someone can say the word "harassment" and then distance themselves from anything that happens afterwards and be free of all consequences. Since we're talking about GitHub specifically, how easy do you think it's been for Julie Ann Horvath to find a job? Regardless of whether I happen to believe her or not, the fact of her statement doomed her career among the more mainline professional networks of Silicon Valley. She's radioactive now. So, I wouldn't call that "easy" by any stretch.

> Since we're talking about GitHub specifically, how easy do you think it's been for Julie Ann Horvath to find a job?

It doesn't look like she's had too much difficulty on the employment front, based on her LinkedIn profile. The same month she left GitHub she got a job as Senior Designer and Web Developer (same title as she had at GitHub) at &yet in Seattle. When she left that job there was a 4 month gap and then she was Head of Design at Clef in Oakland. She left them at the end of 2015 and started the new year as a Senior User Experience Designer at Apple.

I don't think we can infer anything about job finding difficulty from that 4 month gap between &yet and Clef, because she moved from Seattle back to the Bay Area sometime in or near that gap, and it is not uncommon for people to take some time off between jobs when changing cities.

As I've pointed out elsewhere: the original claim was "...[c]laims of harassment are easy to make". Are you voting that they are "easy"?

Here is an anonymous hit-piece written about Horvath and posted on Medium: https://medium.com/@geeekcore1/facts-conveniently-withheld-d...

I'm not saying she was forever un-employable. But I am saying that like any other whistleblower in any other industry decrying her accusation as "easy" is an insult to what she went through.

EDIT: Hell, there's a flagged comment on this branch that proves my point: "If someone pulled those kind of stunts on you, I think your sympathy over their career would be limited also."

> As I've pointed out elsewhere: the original claim was "...[c]laims of harassment are easy to make". Are you voting that they are "easy"?

I'm not "voting" on anything, nor even offering an opinion on that particular aspect of your discussion with the poster above you.

You posed a specific question: "Since we're talking about GitHub specifically, how easy do you think it's been for Julie Ann Horvath to find a job?". I was curious enough to spend a few minutes looking at her LinkedIn and then a couple other public things of hers (a Medium article and her Twitter profile) to try to get an idea what the answer was to that one specific question from your comment.

Sorry, I read it as an attack on the argument as a whole rather than a straight fact-check. I knew her employment situation when I wrote the comment and thought the factual citations were refutations instead of context.

So yeah: I'm sorry I jumped down your throat for trying to add to the discussion.

Can you give a few examples of women's political and professional lives being dominated by men's ideas and policies to an absurd degree?

Lol so self evident anyone who asks for an example is downvoted.

She works as a senior designer at Apple.

Good for her! How does this continue the discussion?

It negates the theory that harassment whistle blowers are unemployable. In that respect, it does not continue this particular discussion, it ends it.

That's a cute rhetorical point you've made, but I think the evidence for whistleblowers torpedoing their careers in the name of personal justice is pretty overwhelming. The fact of her eventual employment doesn't undo the damage she did to her career by making an accusation -- which is the point I was addressing from the original comment that "...[c]laims of harassment are easy to make".

There have been github staff that have shared what they see as more of the story.

https://medium.com/@geeekcore1/facts-conveniently-withheld-d...

If someone pulled those kind of stunts on you, I think your sympathy over their career would be limited also.

That this was instantly downvoted is grim.

I would prefer HN to require commenting with a downvote. For spam, there already is flagging.

Yes, it must be all part of the patriarchal conspiracy. It couldn't have anything to do with the casual dismissal of basic due process and presumption of innocence, particularly in the context of career-destroying accusations of criminal activity.

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