Sexual harassment is crime we all must take seriously especially the tech industry which is struggling get in more women.
But at the same time open blogs like these must be taken with a bit of skepticism too because it is one person's story. We must question if not assign malicious motives to the victim.
P.S. What can we do about such cases ?
I think entire tech industry can create a fund specially for victims of sexual abuse so vulnerable women could consult a lawyer for a very low price who will be specialized in handling such cases. The hammer of justice must be brought into picture as soon as possible. It is unfair that some women has to live with this burden for so many years.
It isn't a single 'open blog'. Alison is a widely respected member of the infosec, internet freedom and librarian communities.
I also feel that it's not that we all need or want more women in tech, it's that we need and want fewer men. It's weird that a good chunk of the women trailblazing back into tech (after all, programming was primarily a women's occupation as late as the 70's) are hyper feminists who maybe want to be programmers but also really want to just do something that most people now perceive as a "male" occupation, for personal or gender pride or whatever. Hear me out, before you flag this one too.
This (programming is a male occupation) is a horrible fallacy that is running through our society, especially in the most common female mindsets. Programming is not a classically male occupation, and programming ability has nothing to do with gender. It's not something where physical strength is valuable and thus statistically more likely that a male is the best candidate available in the labor pool to work it.
And when you think about it, programming is really the perfect job for a woman who also wants to take time off or have flexible hours for having a baby and raising a family (common reasons for the most common choices for female degrees, education and social work). A good chunk of women plan their careers around their desire to have a family, you see. This is out of choice and it's not something where there's a guy in HR who is looking at a file of a man and a file of a woman and giving the man a raise (on average).
I don't know why more women aren't clamoring to get trained and get jobs in programming, but from what I've seen first hand, it's not discrimination by men, or sexual harassment or any of that. I think it's due to other women shaming women programmers for working in a male industry when it's not and being male provides no advantage. It's women on women that's the main problem. I think it's due to women not getting college degrees in the right areas and that's something pretty easy to fix. The industry as it is now is still pretty new and I think that most educated women have set out and dominated the other areas (law, medicine, accounting, business management) and tech just hasn't had the social appeal that strong women want in a career. It's not fun or socially awesome to sit and program all day. Why would you do that to your life when you could be in meetings or selling stuff or curing cancer or fighting a court battle? I think once everyone realizes that programming ability is maybe something socially desirable (who knows if that will ever happen), women will flow back in and probably dominate this world also, just naturally.
So, anyway, I personally don't feel that bad for today's women programmers. It's not men's fault the majority of your peers went into a soft social science, nursing, education or business degree and are now leading fun, awesome lives in really fun, socially important careers. I am sorry that the rest of your gender has let you down and now you are working alone in a really bad line of work that's hard on your body and is mostly dominated by weird shut-ins and people unable to communicate. Teach your daughters to program, teach them that making computers do things is as cool as making a recipe or whatever, and teach their friends also. And I think that this is already happening and in about 10 years the problem will resolve itself. In the meantime, you are going to have an industry dominated by 90% mostly socially awkward men and 10% mostly hyper-fem women and that's just a recipe for all kinds of mudslinging, misunderstandings, sexual misconduct and agenda-beating, and I feel this is yet another case.