Sexist culture and harassment drives GitHub's first female developer to quit
dailydot.com
dailydot.com
She is public friends with a group of high functioning SJWs (and for this reason stay the fuck away from them unless you want to be character assassinated - they are throwing that around a lot right now) who think GitHub of all places is the pinnacle of misogynistic, explicitly female hating culture. If that's GitHub then truly tech is doomed, but then again this is SJW world where any mostly male environment is a hostile work environment, where things like libertarianism is hated because they don't value equality of opportunity and instead demand equality of outcome irregardless of merit. They think that feelings, that status matters more than results... you know, building things, making the world a better place one little thing at a time instead of always being on complaining.
Internet trolls being assholes has nothing to do with sexism. People who feed the trolls, who are male and female, get burned. Let the idiots burn. And yeah I've been called a gender traitor by the SJW idiots because I don't agree with their idea that feminism = females.
It's a special shame, because I imagine if someone were a predator and wanted to pick victims who would be unlikely to be taken seriously, that entire SJW milieu would be ripe grounds for such victim hunting. Anything any of them say will be immediately assumed to be wildly exaggerated hysterical nonsense, because almost everything they say is exactly that.
I wonder if they realise just how much they're shooting themselves in the foot and enabling their "oppressors".
"demand equality of outcome"
If you want to be part of a profit-seeking enterprise that balances equality of outcome of social justice and work product that adds value, then you probably need to create just an enterprise yourself instead of joining existing enterprises that don't explicitly share your goals and complaining years after discovering that they don't.
(PS. "regardless" not "irregardless")
Thank you for bringing this to my attention. Many incorrect words are common in my area's dialect.
I tried to project an image of guys who were introverted and shy around women, and that so called "brogrammers" were in the extreme minority.
But those same women I tried to convince gave me concrete examples, sometimes even in the companies I worked for. Things I might have ignored or looked past were seen in a different light from their perspective.
When you are in the minority somewhere, even small things are personal and cut deeper. A fact that many in the tech industry seemed to have forgotten from high school, if they were there in the time before being a computer geek was considered cool.
As I said in the related thread on this event, let's stop with the victim blaming and personal insults when someone makes claims of being harassed. We pride ourselves on being intelligent and tolerant. Let's act like it and put down those who don't live by it.
We have someone who's been accused of being unable to take criticism and being vindictive. She responds by throwing a public tantrum and blaming all of Github for it. If the shoe fits... Why is she so convinced that post is about her anyway? Unless there was some truth to it.
The tech feminists never seem interested in taking the high road, and instead optimize for maximum drama. Don't complain about being a public figure when you broadcast your life on Twitter.
GitHub, like any company, wouldn't say anything about an individual HR case.
We should be reserving our judgement of what happened - personally, I'll wait a month or two and ask GitHubbers what they actually think when I see them - but this isn't a professional way to handle something.
The person is obviously angry, so:
- get off Twitter
- chill out for a week
- think about getting a lawyer
if you believe you were harassed.
At least the linked article seems to just be a "she said", so, unless there's more info somewhere, I don't think this has even reached the he-said/she-said stage.
All I ask for is evidence.
If there was some evidence I could believe it, all we have is someones (clearly hot headed) claims. I have worked with many women programmers in school and on the job and have never seen sexism. I have however heard multiple woman complain about not having enough women in tech, as well as complain about sexism.
Yet, they always seem to be treated fairly. If women did not complete her job on time she was forced to stay after, same with the men. If a woman didn't know how to answer a question she missed the points, same with a man.
Further, I fail to see any justification for sexism. Not only is there no evidence, but there is no reasoning as to WHY they were sexist (besides giving her bad performance reviews, which may or may not be deserved).
Maybe she is withholding it because she might want to take github to court?
Excerpt:
She's not alone in her frustration. Last fall, a community member of GitHub's code base, Ruby on Rails, blogged about being sexually harassed by her own boss while attending a Ruby conference. She later deleted her post due to receiving an onslaught of victim-blaming, rape, and death threats.
Yeah, there's a lot that needs to change. Sigh. A lot.
Given that I am homeless in part because of my inability to effectively network and turn my online projects into an income stream, I feel very strongly that you don't have to threaten rape or murder to quietly and politely do egregious harm to a woman's life.
Anyway, time for me to go to lunch. Later.
I dont mean to sound rude but I was curious what made you come back.
I didn't really want to leave, so I am glad to feel more comfortable at the moment than I did previously. HN doesn't really have any competition. One reason I am not real keen on naming names, linking to public assholish personal attacks, etc is because I don't think that furthers any of my own goals. I would like to be able to participate productively here -- because, frankly, this is where the money and the power is for some of the things I want to accomplish. I have no desire to be relegated to a pink collar ghetto (btdt). I think most of the women who air a lot of dirty laundry are probably doing themselves more harm than good. But when I try to talk about things I think are very basic concepts in that regard, I get accused of "victim blaming" and crap like that. So I say relatively little compared to what I think about such things.
Can you elaborate?
So I'm now even more confused about your story and the main story we were discussing...which are both incredibly vague and provide no real insight into the issue we're discussing.
FWIW, I have a very serious medical condition and I was in a lot of pain yesterday. So perhaps my remarks were not at their wisest. But I also have quite the track record for discussing hot button topics in a manner that helps vent steam and reduce the pressure everyone feels rather than leading to a big blow up. Usually, initial response is pretty ugly because people bring a lot of preconceived notions and baggage and thus fully expect me to be an asshole about it. It takes time for it to sink in that this is not the case.
Take care.
when the people who respond with death threats, rape threats, and other sorts of abuse are welcome members of a community, it is indeed that community's fault. A community of actual decent human beings would blacklist people who act in these ways.
viz eg weev and Kathy Sierra
Communities like Twitter are largely amorphous and chaotic. Akin to a huge bazaar where everyone is being loud. How would one go about to blacklist people? That's McCarthyist bullshit. Mob mentality is far too dangerous to pull off idiotic stunts like informal global blacklists, although many try.
Seriously, weev? Who the hell praises and welcomes weev? Everyone knows he's a despicable asshole and a troll, but nonetheless his charges over the AT&T incident are still unjust and based on a highly vague and harmful piece of legislation: the CFAA. So it is perfectly legitimate to defend him on that.
What does that mean? Just someone who has her repo on github? I am not sure how github would be responsible for someone who just has her code on github.
More distant relation than that -- it appears that the connection that is being drawn is that the person at issue had a job that involved working with Ruby on Rails, and Github is built on Rails, so, clearly this is some kind of deep connection between these incidents.
Here is something I wrote that made the front page not terribly long ago (like February, I think): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7203401 I am a woman and I get accused all the time of victim blaming for talking about what women can and should do differently if they really want things to change, but, seriously, your remark just sounds really misogynistic and ugly to me.
> your remark just sounds really misogynistic and ugly to me.
Pointing out that creating a sexual situation in the workplace is a dumb idea does not mean I hate women, and not does it create a hostile environment for anyone.
You are accusing people of offending you because you want attention.
1. Purge every company of assholes
2. Allow complete freedom of association
Alas, the obvious solution is illegal under US federal law. Asshole-filled companies are required by law to hire the kind of people assholes love to harass. In other words, the very laws designed to promote the interests of asshole-targets guarantee that they will come into contact with assholes. (Medical geeks might recognize this as iatrogenesis.)
Of course, there's always:
3. Convert all assholes to non-assholes
In sum, the obvious solution is illegal and the desirable solution doesn't work. Is it any wonder this conflict seems never-ending?
HR exists to protect the company. In a large company, where both the victim and the harasser are relatively small in the overall scheme of things, HR is (assuming the department is somewhat competent at its job) likely to be somewhat useful to a victim, simply because the downside risk to the company of not dealing with harassment is probably much greater than the value of even a supervisory employee. Even with a higher-level harasser, in a large company the firm is more likely to have established protocols, the violation of which would increase the risk to the company, which might make HR more useful to victims.
At smaller companies, its less likely that HR will be useful, and, at any company, its a given that HR's primary interest isn't protecting the victim its protecting the company (including, especially, against a potential lawsuit by the victim).
And, all that aside, yes, there is often a stigma attached to reporting the kind of things which constitute sexual harassment (a stigma which is reinforced by a society which engages in victim-blaming and slut-shaming), and, despite the laws against such, a very common fear of retaliation.
Does anyone out there in the startup community have a more integrated dev team? And if so how did you attract female devs and guide the team culture to make them feel welcome and accepted?
I haven't seen any actual evidence of this in the link, so where are you getting it from?
https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/6efcedf483bd
http://www.dailydot.com/business/hacker-news-justine-sexual-...
http://articles.latimes.com/2013/oct/24/business/la-fi-tech-...
But with regard to this specific case, since you say that you see no evidence at the original link, I would urge you to think about the fact that you evidently do not consider Julie's own words that she has been harassed to be evidence enough. Denying that there is an issue, or that the complaints of women like Julie are legitimate is part of the problem in the first place.
Personally I see a consistent pattern of low participation of women in the industry, and regular instances of women complaining about sexist treatment and not being taken seriously. I therefore see no issue with taking Julie's words at face value because I see plenty of evidence that this is a legitimate problem.
That's a bit rich, coming from rapist like you.
Why having more women would be extremely positive?
Yes, we don't know who is right or wrong right now.
> I hope GitHub issues a public apology
How do you know they are in the wrong?