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Comment by SODaniel | Hacker News Reader

Personal vendetta or not. A person that reacts to a private conversation (inappropriate or not) by posting hearsay about two co-workers to 1000s of followers the way she did is NOT a person I would want to work with, even less hire. She has at the very least shown very bad judgement and should not be commended nor rewarded for it.

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To nit on terminology: testifying about what you heard yourself is not "hearsay", by definition.

I agree her judgement was bad and she shouldn't have posted the image (she has every right to post about the incident, though!).

But what I'm reading here is an awful lot of bile about this woman. She's being asked to answer for someone else's decision to fire someone (there's still no documentation or testimony about this fact, FWIW). She's being attacked for "setting back women's rights". She's basically being made the target for (what I perceive to be) a bunch of anti-feminist frustration among the male geeks. And that's... just really, really ugly; sorry.

She got pissed off and made a mistake, for which it would probably be a good idea to apologize. That's it. Everything else is on you guys.

It feels uncomfortable. I think the reaction here is much more harassing than any dongle/fork/whatever jokes two guys would have made in a conference.

From the comments I read thus far, it seems to me that most comment about "setting back women's right" come from women, not male geeks.

What's private about a conversation taking place in a busy ballroom at a convention, within full earshot of (probably) dozens of people?

Actually according to Adria's blog post (linked elsewhere in the thread) the jokes were made in response to a comment about "forking" a repo from the person sitting next to them. They were riffing off of a conversation she was part of; assuming you believe her, that's "non-private" regardless of context.

This whole thread is making me sad.

From that same post I got that the two guys where talking, SHE interjected and then the joke was made by one of those guys (to me it isn't clear if she was still part of the conversation, but that's beyond the point).

Reporting on something we've directly experienced isn't hearsay and they weren't her co-workers. As women we need to be able to speak in public forums about our experiences without this sort of extreme harassment as the result.

To me it seems the harassment (I hope you mean DDoSing her website, not this thread and the discussion it caused) is in response to the publication of the photo, not the fact that she spoke out.

You mean personal conversation. Their conversation wasn't private, it was in the middle of a conference hall.

So now we have license to police other people's conversations if we are members of a protected group?

Good news! You also can police conversations. Even when you're not a member of a protected group. That's especially true when the conference has a clear policy on the sorts of topics allowed.

For example, it turns out white people don't have to just sit there when somebody's being racist. They can speak up just as much as a black person can.

It's kind of hard to figure out what to do. Harassment is obviously something I would speak out against. But when we define "harassment" to be whatever a minority member in earshot finds offensive things become murky. Perhaps I should constantly poll nearby women at a conference - "ma'am, has anybody said anything recently which you find offensive?"

There is such a thing as unacceptable behavior. But the measure of that is not whether some member of a protected group was offended. Nobody has the right to never be offended in a public place.

Where I live conferences are considered a workplace so our strict equal opportunity and sex discrimination acts apply. Under these acts, crude conversation and jokes are considered to contribute to a hostile working environment. In the event the someone (male or female) is offended, intimidated, or humiliated they are at liberty to file a sexual harassment claim. The intent of the harasser is irrelevant. It can be a single incident or repeated behaviour and the victim is not required confront their harasser. The parties need not even be employed by the same entity.

Of course these very same laws require that the claim is filed confidentially, and the kind of public shaming we've seen here is itself considered harassment.

If PyCon had been held here the only party with their noses clean would the conference organisers.

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