Adria Richards' Story Shows How Sexual Harassment Endures in Tech Community | Hacker News Reader

Adria Richards' Story Shows How Sexual Harassment Endures in Tech Community

slate.com

10 pointsjellicle30 comments

"Shortly thereafter, one of the men was fired by his employer, who hinted at multiple contributing factors beyond the jokes"

Isn't this completely wrong? Wasn't the engineer fired long before Adria was fired? Wasn't the vitriol towards Adria not caused by the fact that the engineer was fired?

Not that the vitriol was right. Just getting the facts straight before getting to conclusions.

I guess the author meant shortly after the pics were posted on Twitter.

Mmmm. Nonononono! This is the relevant part:

"Yet only last week a woman of color, Adria Richards, was publicly fired from her job at technology company SendGrid, following a massive online campaign of rape and death threats, racial slurs, and computer hacking. Her crime? Tweeting a picture of the two men making sexual jokes behind her at a computer conference. (Shortly thereafter, one of the men was fired by his employer, who hinted at multiple contributing factors beyond the jokes.)"

For anybody not familiar with the story, this reads:

0) Men make sexual jokes 1) Adria tweets 2) Massive online campaign against Adria 3) Adria is fired 4) One engineer is fired

In any case, it does not make the explicit connection that people were upset because Adria tweeted and that tweet caused the engineer to be fired. And that Adria did not let the engineer the chance to apologize, or PyCon to correct privately the issue, or, or, or ...

Without getting into details of freedom or expression and other related issues.

The article is also using the skin-color card to make this issue even more political: not only a woman, but a woman of color was fired! (as if she was not employed beforehand). Mean engineers!

It's a reading comprehension thing. We're obviously going back in time, to some kind of cause, at "Her crime?". And then "Shortly thereafter" follows the sentence about the tweet and there is no reason to assume it refers to some earlier sentence.

Sure, you are perfectly right. The reason why I point it out is that, even though I was familiar with the story, reading that gave me the impression that Adria was the first to be fired. I had to re-check the facts to make sure I was not mistaken.

Is that relevant? You bet! The way Adria handled this issue was the main reason why she was fired: having a person loose his job over a sexist remark is overreaction (even Adria admitted this). But having a developer-relations person loose her job because developers are very angry at her is maybe not that surprising.

Is that confusion intended by the article author? I think so!

"Is that confusion intended by the article author?"

Probably not. Most everything can be misunderstood, but it's not really a particularly confusing paragraph.

The article is vague, but can be legitimately read as saying that "thereafter" is after the tweeting of the pic, not of Richards's firing.

So it is confusing at best. It is glossing over the main reason why people were upset - which is why Adria was fired: she was a developer-relations person, and developers were upset with her, which prevented her to perform her job.

who hinted at multiple contributing factors beyond the jokes

(http://blog.playhaven.com/addressing-pycon/)

Given that link that Valerie Aurora attributes to this, Aurora's characterization is just wrong at best, and is an out and out lie of Aurora's at worst.

There is absolutely nothing in PlayHaven's statement "hinting at multiple contributing factors beyond the jokes."

Well, except for the line where they hint at multiple contributing factors beyond the jokes.

"We value and protect the privacy of our employees, both past and present, and we will not comment on all the factors that contributed to our parting ways."

And also where they declined to punish the other employee involved. I'm pretty sure that anyone with basic reading comprehension would read that statement as a very clear one that the company already had issues with developer X.

Do we even know the name of this martyr? I don't believe it has been published.

"It's up to us to change the culture of consequence-free online harassment."

It wasn't consequence free. Richards got someone fired.

Oh, wait...

> Richards got someone fired.

No she absolutely did not. It was the employer who fired the employee, good or bad, right or wrong, not Richards. Maybe the employer had good reason and maybe they didn't, but Richards did not make that decision and is not responsible for it.

"See, I just pushed the guy right into traffic, but I didn't actually run over him with the truck."

I still don't understand why authors keep addressing this as a sexual harassment, to the best of my knowledge the jokes weren't referring to her. How can you harass a person with a joke that wasn't directed to her?

You can make a harrasing environment even without directly addressing someone.

There is a concept in law and HR of a "hostile work environment", which is why the original joke would have been unacceptable per the PyCon conference guidelines that attendees agreed to. It's not necessarily harassment of her in particular, but that doesn't make a backdrop of sexual innuendo and double entendre appropriate for a professional conference either. The actual joke wasn't really that bad (certainly not to the point of warranting termination of employment), but I can understand why Adria would be uncomfortable. I certainly wouldn't feel welcome at a music festival where an audience was talking about all the geeks they'd be giving wedgies to, even if they weren't talking to or about me specifically.

The issue with Adria was what in particular she chose to complain about (mere sex jokes are indeed not harrassment of her in particular, and make her look hypocritical), and especially how she went about it.

There are 2 points here. 1) Is it sexism? 2) This wasn't aimed at her

1) It's a recent-historical thing.

Ignore for a moment this situation. Imagine a hypothetical situation. There is an engineer, Ann. Behind Ann at a conference are Bob and Chris tell a joke about penises.

Plenty of cases exist that show Bob and Chris are creating an environment that is hostile to Ann; and this has traditionally been handled under sexual discrimination laws.

You're right in that plenty of women enjoy telling penis jokes and that plenty of men are just as offended at penis jokes and that we shouldn't be treating women as delicate flowers that will curl up when hearing a penis joke.

But all of that is missing the point. Don't tell dick jokes around people that you don't know well. Especially do not tell dick jokes while wearing a shirt with your employer's logo on, with a conference pass around your neck, at a professional conference, while surrounded by a bunch of people who you don't know. It might not meet some strict definition of sexism, but it will meet definitions of harassment.

2) Imagine Ann walks into the workplace. Bob has topless calenders up in his cubicle. These are not aimed at Ann. There are plenty of cases to show that Bob is creating a hostile work environment for Ann, and again these have been handled under sex discrimination law. You don't have to do something to Ann for it to be sexism that affects Ann.

> Yet only last week a woman of color, Adria Richards ...

WTF. How did this become about race?

Nonsense. Agenda Adria is a bully with a history of doing these things.

An excerpt from the linked article:

"The attacks weren't coming from just the darker corners of the Internet, places where people trade "creepshots" of 14-year-old girls. This time, many of the threats came from places like Hacker News, a respected computer news discussion site run by Paul Graham's venture capital company, YCombinator. Ambitious computer professionals post on Hacker News under their real names to boost their careers—and felt comfortable posting vicious abuse under those same names."

Do they mention the supporters of that woman? Or the people who disagree strongly with the tweeting of the photo but who agreed with the rest of what she said?

Do they mention that most[1] of the worst aggressive offensive posts were made by new accounts?

[1] Most, but not all. Some posts made by established HN accounts was pretty vile.

If someone posted threats under their real name, I hope the police are involved.

This seems to run counter to reality. I saw critiques and criticism from regular commenters, but no "vicious abuse", outside of what appeared to be new/anonymous accounts. The HN threads themselves were linked to from elsewhere and drew in a lot of anonymous/new commenters.

[edit]

Also, this article is written by Valerie Aurora, the same person responsible for the censorship disaster at Security BSides: http://violetblue.tumblr.com/post/44107008572/what-happened-...

Hardly an unbiased source. Perhaps its time to stop propagating the noise from this particular echo chamber.

"many of the threats came from places like Hacker News"

Wait, when did she receive threats from here?

Verbal abuse, certainly. But ~threats~?

Terrible journalism. This makes me sad. Why put in the phrase about creep shots of teens ? Written only to provoke and not to reason.

If I have this right (I may not) Valerie Aurora's article is interesting in how it ignores some of the charges made that it was the zero tolerance characteristics of her Ada Initiative's code of conduct (adopted by PyCon) that exacerbated the situation.

No. The problem started after tweeting a photo of a bunch of men and accusing 2 of those men of unacceptable sexist behaviour, but without being clear which 2 men in particular.

The code of conduct was working well until the Internet pile-on after that tweeted photo.

She complained about someone's behavior; PyCon staff talked to everyone involved for a few minutes in the hall; everyone went back to their seats and watched the rest of the presentation. No one was expelled or punished in any way whatsoever.

In what way is that some sort of "zero tolerance" punishment that "exacerbated" the situation? Isn't that pretty much what any conference on any subject would do anywhere in the world if they received a complaint about attendee behavior?

Ada Initiative has its own problems, but PyCon seems to be one of the few "clean" parties in this whole snafu.

talk about setting up a story with a false premise.

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