My aunt once accused me of laughing at my grandmother's funeral. I don't remember, but I certainly meant to only be respectful at the funeral.
Sometimes you need to take a dramatic action to make it clear what your culture is (or what you want it to be).
It’s perhaps unfair to one of those 6 who was hypothetically just being polite and pretending to laugh along. But you can bet the rest of the org got the message loud and clear.
Sadly with entrenched -isms like sexism, it seems to require a drastic action like this to really make a change in org culture. It’s really hard to “make the company less sexist” if there is an entrenched bias among employees. And you may just need to fire a bunch of otherwise good people to get rid of it.
We're talking about bias here. While I don't disagree that it would get everyone to step in line firing people who did nothing wrong seems like a high level of collateral damage.
Not to diminish the fact that even raising it to HR could be challenging in some orgs (e.g. see Susan Fowler's saga at Uber).
And also worth noting that it's easier to find the confidence to report to HR in an org where the line has been clearly drawn by actions such as the dismissals that we're discussing -- that's the point of the "shocking rule" principle.
I do recommend you pick up the book and give it a read (it's great), as Horowitz does go into a lot of detail on when the "shocking rule" strategy is appropriate and the considerations. I won't do as good a job summarizing here but I'll try.
It's true that this inflicts collateral damage. That's part of the point. The fact that you're willing to inflict collateral damage to preserve/enshrine a norm is shocking, and that demonstrates the commitment to that norm.
You definitely should not play this card often (ideally never, but you should have it in your playbook).
The action is shocking, and you'd expect many employees to be shocked. They will discuss the event because it's shocking, and so your decision will be well-known and the news will be self-perpetuating. (And maybe some will leave who don't think that it's a big deal to call women "bitches"; this is a good thing, you have made your cultural norms clearer, and employees who realize they are not a cultural fit will tend to self-select out at the margin.)
Note you can use the "shocking rule" principle in non-ism enforcement too, e.g. "mishandled customer PII => instant fired", "plane crashed due to failures in the QA process that was your core responsibility => instant fired" or even Bezos's famous "All Amazon internal services will communcate over public APIs, if you don't do this you're fired". Not making any specific claims about whether these are good reasons, but just pointing out that whatever norm you want to enforce that are critical to the company's/org's survival, you can use this principle to fuel a dramatic culture shift. You don't get to play this card often though, so be sure that the shift is worth it.
So the argument you're really making is about whether what they did was sufficient to pass the bar for "should be immediately fired". Because it wasn't that bad? Because a little casual comic sexism never hurt anyone?
My point was to fire the offender, and not everyone else who might be involved. Innocent until proven guilty, you know.
For me, I wouldn't want to work for a company that fires with collateral damage.
I'm looking forward to minimum report quotas and "report your coworker" special days.
Trying to take it further ("report days"?) seems like a slippery slope fallacy to me.
Safety violations are taken that seriously at some companies, anyone observing one that doesn't report it also gets fired.
It depends on what type of culture of accountability the company wants.
Advice if you work at a place like that and find you're under a bad boss or your coworkers are assholes you need to transfer out. Otherwise eventually you'll get made redundant with the rest of them.
It doesn't sound like it was even proven that anybody said it. Yikes.