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Comment by ilovecomputers | Hacker News Reader

You're missing the point. From this story alone, it seems the company is run by individuals who never mentally developed out of high school. Those incidents you mentioned are merely a red flag of the immaturity of some of these people. Awkwardly hitting on an employee to a point of discomfort, messing with someone's work cause they turned you down to a date, creepily staring at an employee in the gym; you should at least know well into your 20s and 30s that is inappropriate behavior at a workplace.

I would agree in that I wouldn't call this an instance of industry-wide sexism. The root of the problem is the immaturity at the leadership level of this company. If the leadership is as immature as this story is making it out to be, than these sexist incidents wouldn't have happened. Still, I shall reserve my judgment on GitHub until I hear more sides to this story.

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> creepily staring at an employee in the gym

That's not what the article says:

> The final straw for Horvath came when she saw men gawking at women who were hula-hooping at the office. [...] Two women, one of whom I work with and adore, and a friend of hers were hula hooping to some music.

Emphasis on at the office. It sounds like they were making some kind of show. While I agree that the rest of the story sounds like a massive clusterfuck, I can't understand what is supposed to be wrong in this episode.

If this commentor is to be believed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7408466

Then it was not only in the office, but in the office during a party to boot.

Right. It sounds like Horvath completely misinterpreted it, then. That said, the rest of her points look solid enough that it doesn't detract from the overall issue of mismanagement.

"It's creepy only if you are unattractive."

"individuals who never mentally developed out of high school"

Luckily that isn't a crime... (not saying that I agree with that assessment either, just saying).

it seems the company is run by individuals who never mentally developed out of high school

Github is developed in Ruby. Enough said.

There does seem to be some truth to what you're suggesting.

For whatever reason, there's a propensity for this sort of drama to occur within organizations and at events where Ruby and Ruby on Rails, or users of such technologies, are involved in some way.

Off hand, I can think of that controversial presentation at GoGaRuCo a few years ago, the controversy about the diversity of the presenters at the BritRuby conference a bit later, and this matter here. Then there was that whole "Donglegate" incident, which while it occurred at PyCon, it involved at least one person with some ties to the Ruby community. I'm sure there are other events I'm missing, too.

Maybe it's just the so-called "brogrammer" culture that's so ingrained within the Ruby world that's responsible. Regardless, for a community that's actually quite small, there seems to be a whole lot of this sort of strife.

On the other hand, the ruby community just seems to have more women in it than a lot of other programming communities. Many technical communities simply don't have as many opportunities for these sorts of situations to arise.

Other communities may also have less opportunities for truly great pro-women-in-coding projects to emerge. Last year the 3 people who started Rails Girls were honoured with Ruby Hero awards at Railsconf. There was near-universal support and genuinely excitement that something like this emerged within the community and had made such a strong impact in bringing women into the field.

http://railsgirls.com/

Both the Ruby and the JS community are younger than, for example, the Python community.

I think that manifests itself in both positive and negative ways.

Exactly my theory. You don't hear many stories about sexism in the Perl community because your standard Perl meetup probably consists of all of the people who also meet up monthly for their LUG meetups.

For those of you who have never been to either, picture a room full of people who remind you of people like Alan Cox, RMS, or ESR.

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