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Comment by tesseractive | Hacker News Reader

So if you were a woman considering taking a job at GitHub, this would have no influence on your decision? Really?

All it would take for me personally to reverse my stance on an employer being a good place for women is a single case in which I reported being sexually harassed and management then took the side of the harasser over me. Because one case is not acceptable, and it's all it takes to turn a workplace into a hostile and unpleasant environment.

That's not to say "oh, if she says something, she must be telling the truth", but the possibility that she is telling the truth is a huge red flag.

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You're thinking only one level deep and taking her statements at face value. Look at the entire construction of this piece. What was specifically referenced? Nothing really.

In my opinion, a simple tweet like "@x has done @y thus influencing me to leave this company, will put up a blog post." would be much more effective.

This way people know what happened, and all journalism is formed around the actual event. If the guy didn't want to get called out publicly, maybe he shouldn't have fucked up, but this way we get to hear both sides of the story.

No, I'm using risk analysis to conclude that the cost to me of accepting a job there if she's telling the truth is much higher than the opportunity cost of not taking the job (assuming I have other options) if her complaint turns out to be wrong.

Edited to add: the process of deciding the best action to take given uncertain information is fundamentally different from the process of trying to decide what is most likely to be true when there is nothing in particular at stake personally.

1) You have no idea what happened 2) The company has no history of this

Great basis to form a decision.

1. Which is why I have to estimate risk from incomplete information. Which is a pretty common thing for people to have to do in real life.

If I'm in an unfamiliar city and someone I don't know says "Hey, watch out for that alley, several people have been attacked there recently," I wouldn't know whether it was true. But it would be pretty stupid to decline to take any precautions until I could perform my own plot of crime statistic data by location to assess the truth value, don't you think?

2. Actually, they have a history of problems with women that they were trying to repair. Which is why she was trying to turn the company around on the issue and evangelize it in the first place. Did you read the article?

Have you ever heard of gaslighting? I don't know what actually happened with this woman either, but it is unfair to say, "Tell us what exact event caused this."

Many people have developed PTSD from a traumatic childhood within which no one distinct event/spoken sentence can be pointed to-- just many, many hurtful episodes over days, weeks, months, and years.

There probably was an event that set her over the edge. I just wouldn't expect it to be some Disney movie scene in which a guy in a suit slams his fists down and shouts, "Women are the worst!" Real people are more crafty than that. Real-life abuse is more subtle.

Again-- I don't know what happened. Just can't help but point out the kind of faulty logic being used here, since it is so common.

don't participate in rumors. avoiding a workplace with a rumor might be logical but that doesn't make it right.

> So if you were a woman considering taking a job at GitHub, this would have no influence on your decision? Really?

If I was a woman interviewing at GitHub and then read this, it would absolutely influence my decision. I'd want to work there more.

There are two possibilities here:

1) Github has a culture of sexist workplace harassment

2) She is not telling the truth and Github is a perfectly nice place to work

In 1), I would be harassed, sure. I would then take care to document the harassment and file a lawsuit against the unrepentantly sexist company. I'd get a great settlement, Github likely has deep pockets or backers who do and would be desperate for this to go away. Cha-ching, cash in, and feel great doing it.

In 2), I'd have a nice job and everything would be cool.

Says a person who has obviously never been in such a situation and can't even imagine the reality.

It's cartoon-ish to say, "Well then I'd sue and everything would be worth it." Know why most women don't sue? Death treats. Rape threats. Not being able to ever get a job in tech again. No one believing the claims could possibly be true. The expense of suing someone and losing. Etc.

The day-to-day psychological effects alone are bad enough that, with any familiarity, you would never roll the dice on that chance.

> Says a person who has obviously never been in such a situation and can't even imagine the reality.

I worked on a community care facility for developmentally disabled adults when I was in college. I was young when it happened, probably 19-20, and an older woman I worked with made constant unwanted sexual advances. We worked unsupervised in a two person team in a group home, and for about six months she would never let a day go by without pointing out that she would be willing to engage in intercourse with me, right here and now, in pretty graphic terms. I was pretty low on the totem pole, the woman harassing me was very good friends with management, and so I never did anything about it.

So yes, I have been in a situation like that, can imagine the reality, and would totally be willing to go through it again and do it right by reporting it and maybe saving others from getting that treatment in the future.

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