Statement from Playhaven CEO
blog.playhaven.com
blog.playhaven.com
Sorry but I don't like it one bit. If PH's CEO had any balls at all he'd make this guy publicly apologize. Firing someone like this is the easiest solution. I'm sure Playhaven employees take note of how one of their own has been had a summary execution. And for the rest of us, Playhaven is now "the company that fired that guy over a joke".
Maybe this could be a promotion technique for new startups? Create some internet drama to get people to hit your site.
I'm sure people at these respective companies are looking at the extra traffic they got and tracking conversion rates etc.
As a more extreme example, The Onion can be too accurate sometimes: "Athlete overcomes raping someone" https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=...
Instead of taking meaningful action, they've distanced themselves as quickly and as crudely from this situation, while destroying this man's career without giving it a second thought.
I'm not defending this man - although I belong to the part of the population that's more likely to make such jokes at a professional convention than to be bothered by them - I am condemning Playhaven.
And you know what, it's not even about Adria. She's taking undue fire here; she's a social person with a job focused around social media, and as such it is understandable why she uploaded this picture in the first place. Some people shoot their food, some others take photos what they deem as bad behavior in public (after all if she pictured someone acting lewdly at Walmart no one would have said a thing). She's not the bad person here, although I don't think I'd get along very well with her.
Nope, the only one I can blame squarely at the unneeded escalation of this story is Playhaven CEO, for choosing the easiest way out. How very corporate America.
"Hey women who were abused! We'd like this guy who thinks dick jokes are OK in professional contexts to come and help all those rape and violence victims you have. That's cool, right?" Yeah. not going to happen. Think your suggestions through.
We don't know the full situtation, perhaps all these responses have already been done? Maybe there are other reasons at play aswell?
Have you ever read feminist blogs / writings? They'll often prefix text with a "trigger warning" (or TW) to alert readers if this text needs to talk about violence or sexism or racism etc. This is because some people might be "triggered" and have strong negative emotional reactions to some things. (cf. http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Trigger_warning )
Given that, it's highly likely that making dick jokes and especially claiming "It's OK, I'm not as bad as the man who beat you!" to excuse said dick jokes, is a sure fire way to get your head kicked in in some places.
If you go to a battered women's shelter, make lots of demaning-to-women jokes, and then say it's OK because, "hey! at least you didn't beat them!", then yes, you might get some people really annoyed.
I mean, it's like the start of Die Hard, with the "I hate N*s" sign in a black area. What do you think'll happen?! Imagine going into a gay bar and making jokes about gay people. What do you think'll happen?
Here's the bottom line - if such a tame joke can have this large an effect and warrant this type of a knee-jerk reaction from the tech community, our conception of gender equality is seriously fragile.
Better discussions about sexism in the workplace could revolve around the lack of female leadership, sexist working environments, an overabundance of male developers, company roles that appear to be gender-specific, etc.
We are so wrong on the major issues that we want to make the full situation as easy to digest as a dongle joke and a tweet.
It's far more complex than that. And this is the only thing I'm going to say about the situation because we all look like children for addressing this.
I mean this isn't the 1960s anymore. The rest of the professional world has moved on and knows that dick jokes are bad for a professional environment. Why is this such a hard thing for people in tech?
You haven't been to many conferences or events for other industries have you? I'm not arguing whether this is right or wrong but it's definitely not isolated to tech.
"This employee was not Alex Reid, who is still with the company and a valued employee." - why was the other guy not a valued employee?
"..we will not comment on all the factors that contributed to our parting ways.." - or "you can't have all the facts"
"we hope to move forward with a civil dialogue based on the facts." - which is not possible because we don't have them all.
"Alex Reid might've been involved, but he's a good guy in general and we're keeping him. The other guy however, it turned out after an internal investigation, wasn't exactly spot clean and for him this was the straw that broke the camel's back."
I get that it might be hard to draw the line, but come on, we're all human after all, this clearly didnt overstep the border and the guy apologized.
I can say that here, women in my circle of friends are way more likely to issue the "big dongle" joke than men o_O (even between girls alone).
The French are quite famous for the degree to which sexuality is (respectfully) integrated into the workplace.
The US on the other hand didn't manage to do that, so has a general policy of keeping sexuality out of the workplace altogether.
But yes, this shouldn't have been said. If he lost his job for just this that's probably too harsh. Then again there's plenty of Adria's around who've lost their jobs for complaining far more subtly.
Yes. Stop sexualising professional conferences.
Exactly. If you're in a professional environment, behave professionally.
If you're at home, then that's private and you can get naked. But you can't do that anywhere at a conference. The conference is 'mostly public'.
I took the liberty to insert some brackets to transport my understanding of the above, please do correct me if I am wrong. It is easily visible that we cannot fulfil the first, sufficient, but not necessary, requirement for an action to be sexist without knowing the intention of the subject. Hence, I will concentrate on the second condition.
However, I still fail to see how making sexual jokes reinforces gender roles, apart from the, uh, biologically motivated one that, during heterosexual sex, the woman is usually the receiving partner. But by that definition, basically everything remotely related to sex, even the usual bees-and-flowers talk, is sexist, since you will have a hard time finding a discussion of heterosexual sex (especially reproductive sex) that does not involve the female partner being penetrated.
One of the problems is how often the only type of sex that's discussed us "man does women". You can talk about hetero sex lots by describing lots of different types of sex. It's a problem when the only type of sex is when men are doing the woman. It's wrong to say that men have to be the one 'dominating' and 'doing all the action'. This is harmful to gay men who are receptive in sex, since it's used to justify how "they aren't real men". Likewise it's harmful if women are only seen as sex objects. Things to f*. Rather than people, or even people who can control their own sex lives.
I'm British, so American culture is alien to me, but I've always had the view that you can say whatever you want.
People have shouted how Hitler did no wrong, and people have cried how x, y and z people should be put on a plane to another country, but when someone overhears a private conversation containing technical terms (that if you're pedantic enough to take as a joke) you get persecuted; professionally shot by firing squad at dawn.
This is super surreal, you'd get laughed out of the room if the same events happened in the UK (and probably most of Europe).
Ironically in the UK we actually do have laws that can potentially make you a criminal because you insulted someone. http://reformsection5.org.uk/
Which is funny because some US states have laws that criminize you for saying something about someone, even if it's true! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defamation#Criminal_defamation_...
True, and I can respect how they were representing their company at PyCon, but it just seems silly.
But what's done is done I guess, the only exit strategy for the whole event is to move on and get on with our lives.
And I am well aware of our laws, the chap who was jailed for joking about a bomb plot at Robin Hood Airport, which was heavy-handed, but our archaic laws are catching up with tech eventually!
Not a particularly sensible view given the strength of libel/slander laws in England and Wales (fortunately not quite so bad in Scotland, no idea about NI) and the pretty strong "Hate speech" laws we have throughout the UK:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_laws_in_the_United_...
[NB I'm not 100% certain that complete freedom of speech is a great idea either]
This is super surreal, you'd get laughed out of the room if the same events happened in the UK (and probably most of Europe).
Same thing can happen in Europe too. There was some ruby conference in scotland which cancelled itself for sexism reasons.
The fact that you can say whatever you want does not mean you can do so at any time or any place.
You can enter into any (judicial) court and shout "I hate the Queen" but then you will probably be expelled from it, despite your very rightful speech.
However it do not necessarily protect anyone from sanctions from your employer. In this case it is his employer that has acted, not the state.
The biggest losers here are Playhaven & SendGrid. The dev who made the silly joke will get another job and Adria successfully raised her profile and will get more speaking gigs.
I wish this ceo and the blogger would just admit they overreacted.
Linking a sexual comment (‘big dongles’, possibly forking) to gender equality implies the assumption of a necessary link between sexuality and different genders since ‘gender equality’ wouldn’t make sense otherwise. You are hence grossly discriminating against homosexuals and dismissing the efforts of the gay community not to be oppressed at the workplace. In other words, you are not only against freedom of speech in private circles, but also utterly homophobic.
If you find slight exaggerations, please feel free to reuse and recycle them :-)
Quite often this "women as sexual objects" attitude is actually quite homophobic. It equates men who are fed as women or "not real men". (a la "you're only gay if you take it"). "Men must be the one fing, if you're the one being fed, then you're not a man". Stopping that sort of attitude is actually good* for LGB people in the workplace.
Sorry for the crude language, but I can't think of a good verb that has an active and passive form like that
If a sexual joke is classified as sexism, it necessarily requires a link between sexuality and gender[1], since otherwise, a joke about sexuality could not have any effect on gender, hence could not be sexist[0]. But by linking sexuality and gender, you imply that there is no sexuality within one gender, since otherwise you could not make the leap from ‘sexual’ to ‘gender’. By assuming that all sexuality is inter-gender, you ignore intra-gender sexuality, i.e. homosexuality.
Yes, this is an exaggeration and I usally don’t care at all what you think/say of/about my sexuality and would furthermore prefer a society where everybody can say whatever the hell they want and if people find that offensive, it would be their own fault rather than the fault of those on whom they eavesdropped. But this whole sexism debate really annoys me, so apologies for that.
[0] Where I use ‘sexist’ in the meaning of ‘generally treating different genders differently and/or specifically dismissive of one gender’.
[1] I hate the word ‘gender’, but saying that you imply a link between sex (the activity) and sex (the property) might be slightly confusing.
If you're looking for actual counterpoints; I'm an LGBT man and I support Adria for her right to be offended about these statements, which I feel is all that's truly at stake here.
I agree with you that people are allowed to be offended, but I also think that people should be allowed to offend – if we tried to never offend anybody, we wouldn’t get anywhere[0]. I take it it depends on your personal values whether you think that free speech is more important than feeling well, but I hope we can nevertheless agree that it is neither possible to never offend anyone nor is it wise to always offend everybody. Things are unfortunately rarely as black and white as we would like them to be.
"What about lesbians?" is not an uncommon response, here's some details on why this isn't such a great justificiation: http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/What_about_lesbians%3F
Is that so? Because judging from your concrete actions, one would be led to presume that the preferred course of action is to do anything to prevent such a discussion.
> as a company that is dedicated to gender equality
So, I noticed your leadership list (10 people) does not mention any females. I don't assume you are sexist; there probably just aren't that many competent ones that are fit for the break-neck business of peddling templated casual games.
> In that spirit, I would personally like to hear your thoughts and concerns.
I, too, like to judge people based on hearsay; fortunately for the general public, I don't have the power to let my fear of public opinion affect the lives of those who depend on my rational judgement of situations. It's too bad that a CEO position does not come with a spine and a pair of testicles.
Playhaven should have done the same.
Hearing stories like this is both tiresome (what do you mean this is still happening?!) and embarrassing; it makes male IT workers look like a bunch of poorly-socialized teenagers.
I'd like to emphasize I'm not a fan of public naming-and-shaming.
That said, just because something was accepted elsewhere - or barely tolerated - does not mean that it is acceptable behaviour.
I saw the photo (as I'm guessing most have), and it was very obvious that they were representing the company. I'd have been pissed too... they shouldn't be sailing so close to the wind that there was even potential for the kind of "he-said, she-heard" that has happened.
I don't fault Playhaven for firing someone who hasn't represented them in the manner they expect when that staff member is on their dime and acting on their behalf.
How many of the mosaic of "United Colors" pictures they imply are employees are actually stock photos? Why has a games company handicapped itself so much in developing products for half of the games-playing population? When will Playhaven promote its first woman to a leadership position? Would a woman have made the same stupid firing decision this sausage-party of an executive team made?
[edit: http://www.playhaven.com/team is the page I'm referencing. In case it changes, I see the following names listed under "Leadership": Andy Yang, Michiel Frishert, Jason Liu, Charles Yim, Ville Heijari, Brian Doxtator, Brian Howell, John P. Joseph, Sutton Trout, Zach Phillips, Thomas Gieselmann, and Hany Nada]
You are trolling right? Or did you really infer all of that from a web page.
Besides, this page is the public face of the company, which they choose to show the public. The semiotics of the "United Colors of Benetton" mosaic is clear, but it is undermined by the "Leadership" sidebar, under even the most generous possible reading.
What case? You have zero information about how the personell decisions are being made within that organization. You don't know when those appointments were made, nor do you have any information about the composition of the organization when they were made. All you have is the result which currently includes all men. Is it plausible that a woman was passed over for one of those positions? Sure. It's also entirely plausible that the men holding those positions were the best candidate available to the company at the time the roles were filled.
> The semiotics of the "United Colors of Benetton" mosaic is clear,
You are taking a mosaic and applying what you want want to find in it. It certainly isn't clear to me that their intent was to be associated with the United Colors of Benetton. If anything I looked at it as a weak implementation of a current design trend in use on tech companies about pages.
You have also failed to address how you came to the conclusion that the company has a "culture of discrimination." Did you work there? Have you been to their offices or know someone that worked there? A single page on a web site is not sufficient evidence to understand the "culture" of a company let alone to determine that it is discriminatory.
Anyway, where is the Sendgrid statement ? Their silence seems to be an endorsement of Adria's bad behavior (eavesdropping and then public humiliation via twitter).
I'm astonished that Sendgrid are OK with this.
There are 2 companies here I want to make sure I have no dealings with.
@adriarichards Black people CANNOT be racist against White people. Racism is a position of the oppressor who has the power - http://i.imgur.com/ou8JZVu.jpg