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Comment by jd0 | Hacker News Reader

To clarify for many of you, you don't need someone shouting "I HATE WOMEN" for sexism to be occurring. The sexism in this scenario is subtle and persistent, something that likely tainted all of the workplace interactions at github, allowing a female employee's problems at work to be continually ignored. This eventually built up to the issue most people are focusing on, a founders spouse being allowed to harass an employee, which is not so much the main issue but a major symptom of a larger issue at github and in the tech industry as a whole, that issue being the downplaying of women's concerns, opinions and needs.

The hula hooping moment was important because it visibly demonstrated her male coworkers lack of respect for women as people. They were unabashedly staring at their female coworkers as "eyecandy" in that moment and even defended their doing so.

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>allowing a female employee's problems at work to be continually ignored.

Who is to say that it was only a female employee's problems? It sounds like the wife is a nut case and she could very well have bothered other employees. There is no evidence here that her requests were being ignored because she is a female.

>The hula hooping moment was important because it visibly demonstrated her male coworkers lack of respect for women as people.

Are you serious? Is it really the case that you have no respect for a person if you watch them performing a sporting activity? If I start juggling and someone watches me, I highly doubt that it's because he/she has a lack of respect for me as a person.

Seriously, read what you just said. It implies that you cannot watch people performing an activity while respecting their autonomy.

You're taking what I said a little too literally. Take a look at my response to another commenter where I clarify my hula-hoop statement:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7408735

You're avoiding what I think is the better point, the first one. Her mistreatment by an estranged wife of a founder, in and of itself, doesn't constitute sexism. If her problems with this were ignored because she was a female, that would be sexism. But I didn't see any evidence of that presented and to me it seems more likely they were ignored quite simply because it was the wife of an important person at the company and HR was ineffective at resolving the situation.

Overall the article focuses very little on sexism and more on this really bizarre and inappropriate relationship with the Founder's wife. The section about someone reverting her commits because of being rejection might be a better example, but I don't really even see that as being gender specific either. If a women was rejected by a male coworker and she started reverting commits is that sexism? Jealousy isn't really gender specific and targeted at someone because they are a man or a women. Finally there were some vague mentions of pull request comments that might be sexist, but it's hard to judge without being able to see the comments and she really didn't expand into what about them were sexist.

Overall what I see is a very strange story about incompetence and inappropriate behavior, but very little talk about sexism except in a few random places and at the very end with the hula hoop story. I feel like there is a lot more to this story that has really been told.

I understand what you mean when you say that it "doesn't constitute sexism", and that's true for a definition of sexism as "acts or speech denigrating women on the basis of their gender."

I think what the prior poster is trying to express is that this is a situation, with the founder's wife, that could only occur to a female employee. The covert power of the wife over the complainant is based on gender, and her success in intimidating the complainant with bizarre behaviour -- to which the complainant had an entirely passive response -- is largely due to the social expectations that the complainant perceives, that as a woman she should not be confrontational nor assertive.

Given that I didn't see the hula-hooping incident myself, and only have the complainant's description of it, I cannot adequately address the question of whether or not the men involved were behaving improperly, or aggressively, or in a fashion such that I am sympathetic to the complainant's feeling that their attitude was demeaning to her female colleagues. Personally, I could happily watch attractive young women exercise for hours. But I would also sympathize completely with a young woman whom felt uncomfortable with that. From the complainant's description, it seems that her colleagues were hula-hooping together for fun, and that there was an abnormal number of male engineers sitting and watching them. The hula-hoopers were presumably aware of this. It spoiled the fun for the complainant, but how the hula-hoopers felt about it is still an open question.

I think you are absolutely right that the focus of discussion should be the founder and his wife. The situation sounds completely inappropriate, the HR response seems powerless and ineffectual, and whatever the other side of the story is, her resignation/dismissal occurred under entirely improper circumstances, and she probably deserves compensation for this.

> The hula hooping moment was important because it visibly demonstrated her male coworkers lack of respect for women as people. They were unabashedly staring at their female coworkers as "eyecandy" in that moment and even defended their doing so.

I have never understood how this argument works, obviously I'm missing something. Because I momentarily focus my attention on someone for their physical attributes, I automatically and necessarily consider them "eyecandy" rather than intelligent people with their own will that are to be respected? Does this work with other attributes - if I appreciate and acknowledge someone for X, does that mean that X is all they ever are to me? If the male employees had put on an impromptu bodybuilding pageant, would that have been the same thing?

Naturally, the fact that the woman in question was actually disturbed by the situation does indicate that there is cause for concern.

It's possible to recognize the attractive features of someone while still being conscious of their humanity. Obviously there are degrees of attention you can give someone based on their looks that goes from socially acceptable to socially unacceptable.

I'm a man so I can't speak for women directly, but what I've gathered from the experiences of others is that women are interacted with on an attraction basis exponentially more than men are, this also constantly ranging from socially acceptable to unacceptable, wanted and unwanted. It manifests in little ways, cat-calling, aggressive or unwanted flirtation, maybe a creepy controlling coworker suddenly confessing his love? My own mom told me about a time when a total stranger grabbed her butt in a store and walked off. It makes sense to me that many women would be extra-sensitive to scenarios like this. Men literally don't have to deal with interactions like this at that level so it's totally different when the gender roles are reversed, and it's rare that they are.

The importance of that scenario was that it was relative to her entire work experience at Github. Even if we assume the intentions of the male workers were totally golden and the hula-hoopers were totally fine with their gawking, to me it makes sense why this scene would be triggering for her.

Thanks, I see your perspective.

> to me it makes sense why this scene would be triggering for her

It makes sense to me as well, but if I were her boss, I would ask her to take a more professional and less emotional perspective of the workplace (of course, after (hopefully having her problems presented in a clear manner and) solving the other issues that were causing her to feel unwelcome).

This is the core problem, though: it's difficult (impossible?) for someone to be professional when everyone around them is so unprofessional. Worse still when none of their claims are fully addressed by management.

There was no resolution here. I don't blame her for taking these steps to out Github.

That only more reason to be extremely professional - noone can blame anything on you. Or maybe it's just my viewpoint of the world, but I would take the most defensive route possible, and use the experience to my advantage (learn as much as possible, gain relevant & valuable experience, eject into another company as high as possible).

A description of the hula hooping from someone else at github:

> Probably worth mentioning that the hula hoop dancing happened at a Github party with a lot of people not from Github. It was also super badass hula hooping, not just regular dancing. Everyone was looking, men and women, because it was pretty awesome.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7408466

You are not alone. I blame PC, overprotective upbringing and "I am offended by that" trend. As soon as some subject becomes taboo to discuss people lose the understanding why something is bad and start to treat everything related as bad and unacceptable. Reminds me of this: http://i.snag.gy/kdu77.jpg (doesn't matter if experiment was real or not). This is very prominent with sexism and racism—these words are losing the meaning really fast. Now merely acknowledging someones race is called racism. Same goes for gender. And god forbid you find someone attractive. I really don't get what kind of society these people want. The one where everybody walks covered in burqas? You are not allowed to look at attractive person—you will offend them. I wonder how soon a simple glance will accepted as a kind of sexual assault. You are not allowed to approach the person you like—it will be "unwanted advances". It's "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation. If woman will say that it makes her feel good when she senses attention she will be explained, that's just because patriarchal society made her to feel this way. More often than not those explaining will be males, ironically. What a terrible society to live, luckily it will die out soon for the lack of reproduction.

As for this story: it has nothing to do with sexism. Nothing at all. Actually the real sexists are the ones who think all this happened because of the sexism. Guys (and girls): these issues are much much more complex and deserve to be treated with much more respect instead of rubber stamping like it is common now. Women and non-white people can be assholes too and I would like to retain the right call them as such without being accused of sexism or racism. Though this right might be long gone. Quite often it is a fun mental experiment to reverse the genders or races and think how vastly different reactions would be (if there would be any). Imagine that black person says: "I am proud to be black!". Now imagine that the white person says "I am proud to be white". Now throw away you knee-jercky reaction and think about it.

>Imagine that black person says: "I am proud to be black!". >Now imagine that the white person says "I am proud to be white". >Now throw away you knee-jercky reaction and think about it.

I thought about it, and here's what I found: The different reactions which those two assertions may elicit depend crucially on different shades of meaning of the word "proud" which come into play, depending on the colour of the person who says it. These different meanings come into play because of the history of oppression associated with these colours; we don't (usually) think in a vacuum. To make this clearer, consider the following, slightly modified thought experiment:

Imagine that a black person says: "I am not ashamed to be black!". Now imagine that a white person says "I am not ashamed to be white!". How strong is the knee-jercky reaction now? Think about it.

But that's exactly what the parent was saying - if you perceive the meaning of the words slightly differently based on the skin color of the speaker, it's textbook racism. Some people might call it positive racism/discrimination, but it's still racism.

> if you perceive the meaning of the words slightly differently based on the skin color of the speaker, it's textbook racism.

What textbook would that be? My dictionary defines racism as:

1. the belief that all members of each race possess characteristics, abilities, or qualities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races.

2. prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one's own race is superior.

This does not suggest to me that it is racist to acknowledge that a shared history (of oppression, in this case) may have an influence on the language of a people.

(in reply to gphillip)

There's a whole bunch of literature on the topic beyond what's contained in a dictionary definition.

"PC, overprotective upbringing, and I'm offended by that" are not some new horrible plague - they are attempts to let underprivileged voices and opinions survive.

When a black person says that they are proud to be black, they are expressing that they feel a certain pride in their race, which exists in this country thus far as a marginalized and underprivileged set of humanity. Saying you are "Proud to be white" kind of makes you sound like an asshole, because white people have crafted a society to let them have more advantage. True, any given white person might not be some sort of evil society architect, but white people are clearly those who most benefit from this society. Blaming this on political correctness is a cowardly and conservative move that stems from a false sense of equality between people.

As progressive and bottom-up our community can be, we are not a meritocracy, and everyone is not equal.

Judging by your comment history, you do appear to have internalized your ideology very thoroughly.

But, no. First of all, your example is biased towards Western society. Expressing white pride in an Eastern Asian society would be absolutely fine, according to your logic.

Here's the issue, however. Even though black people have been historically marginalized in the USA (as I'm implicitly assuming this is US-centric) and still face disadvantages, despite being largely equal in most facets, this does not make their racial pride any less "asshole"-ish.

Pride is reserved for things once has accomplished, not ones that you're inherently born with. Just by that alone, racial pride is frivolous.

Even further, by setting up this double standard, you are actually contributing to the extension of racism. Why? You're giving people carte blanche to keep focusing more and more on racial characteristics as being essential to them as people.

"It's bad to be racist, but we still must be preoccupied with race and being inoffensive at all costs."

That is only slowing progress down. You go from a society that is maddeningly obsessed with race as a way to persecute people they don't understand to a society that is maddeningly obsessed with a race as a way to kiss ass, idolize and never question those majestic black people who can clearly do no wrong and deserve to have double standards because they have suffered injustices throughout their history.

Yet so have all races and cultures, honestly. Black people do not hold a monopoly on persecution.

You make it sound as though racism against black people is a largely resolved old issue rather than an active and present problem.

I invite you to take a walk around Oakland and SF and see if you think that is still true.

It's not resolved, but it has improved drastically. There's still barriers, primarily in socioeconomic status and tendencies to cluster in ghettos as a result, but it is still far better than one could have ever imagined.

If you want a crippling issue, go for homophobia. Homophobia is still very much rampant in the USA and it is still completely fine for politicians to be openly homophobic for reasons like "preserving family values".

Yet when was the last time you heard a US politician make openly racist and white supremacist statements? When has a white supremacist been elected? David Duke is the most recent example I can name of, and he was reviled.

Racism for US politicians is an instant career killer, no question. Race is a touchy issue and the moment a representative says something unfavorable concerning race, they get annihilated by press and public advocacy. Not the same for homophobia.

It's time people stop with their persecution complexes. The past is the past. No one owes you anything.

> It's time people stop with their persecution complexes. The past is the past. No one owes you anything.

So really you are claiming that racism is over as a problem. Nice.

No, I'm not. You're twisting my words to fit your agenda.

By dividing complex social issues into dichotomies of "oppressor versus oppressed" and allowing double standards as a perverse form of reparation for past injustices that current generations no longer have to suffer from, you are exacerbating the issue of race.

The ultimate goal should be to render race as a non-defining characteristic, one that should not cloud peoples' judgement or fuel their insensitivity. Instead, what's going on is that we're turning race into an emotional circus.

The fact is that being white by itself does not mean your ancestors were involved in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Mine were too busy being under Ottoman rule. Conversely, being black does not make you exempt. Many tribal warlords traded slaves with the Europeans voluntarily. There were some few thousand or so black slave owners in the USA before abolition.

People are not responsible for what their ancestors perpetrated in the past, and the world does not revolve around the West. Yet these ideologies of white guilt and reparation act like it's exactly that way.

What you're doing is turning race into a novelty.

> The ultimate goal should be to render race as a non-defining characteristic

That's a pretty OK goal, although it's unrealistic, because we can only get closer to that by successive approximation.

However your real mistake is trying to use your long term goal (ignoring race) as a short term strategy (ignoring racism). You're correct that racism is a less big deal in many contexts than it used to be. But for the time being, racism is quite a big thing in many other contexts. And ignoring it won't help get us to the place where we can safely ignore it.

Then what do you propose? Exacerbating it?

I would propose learning what you can about what it's like for people different than you so that you have more opportunities to lend help and compassion.

Racism isn't about the past.

Just out of curiosity (not interested in joining the debate)—do you mind if I ask whereabouts do you live? Bay area, east coast, somewhere else?

I'm white and queer and can assure you that racism and sexism are much more serious problems than homophobia in the US.

Right, because gay people have civil rights but black people and women don't...

Then again "queer" these days often means "straight but wants tumblr oppression points," so your perspective might be different from an actual gay person's.

People do say they are proud to be white all the time, just in a different way. I hear "I'm proud to be Irish!" all the time. The thing is "white culture" isn't really a thing, "white culture" is simply the dominant culture in our society that we tell other cultures they should adapt to.

No one is saying white people can't be proud of their heritage. They can be proud, and they do celebrate their heritage all the time. Acknowledging someone's race isn't extending racism, it's embracing them and their culture.

To be honest I used to think similarly, I never got why people had to be proud of their race, or why it was part of their identity. Eventually I realized it's because the dominant culture is white, I don't have to ask myself what it means to be white or what it means to be american. It is part of my identity, I just have the luxury of not having to think about it.

Anyway, I would highly recommend watching "The Color of Fear", it changed my mind on a lot of stuff I'd never thought about critically.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vAbpJW_xEc

Of course there isn't a "white culture" because people are not homogenous in their customs by their skin color alone. Finnish culture is separate from Polish culture is separate from American culture and so on.

Black culture isn't a thing, either. What, you think all people have the same traditions and customs because they have a common skin color? What idiocy. What frivolity. What (inadvertent?) racism.

Being overly attentive to race is not an embracing of their culture. It is a fallacy, a misunderstanding of how the world works under the lens of this Western postmodernist narrative that people as an entire superficial group are responsible for misdeeds of their ancestors, whom they share no relation to whatsoever beyond their whiteness.

You're not embracing culture. You are erasing culture with your narrow, Western-centric guilt narrative where everything works in binaries. That being black dictates a common culture, and that Irish people have no culture, because they're white.

You sound like a racial nationalist.

Ummm, I kinda explicitly pointed to the Irish having a distinct culture that people celebrate.

And where did I say people are responsible for the misdeeds of their ancestors? You definitely aren't responsible, but you do benefit disproportionally from a long history of oppression. You shouldn't feel guilty, but you should be aware of it.

Nor was I saying we should be overly attentive to race, I'm simply saying that acknowledging someone's race isn't racist. And I hate to break it to you, but yes people do have a shared experience based on their skin color. Whether you're black and 8th generation American, or you're from Africa, there is a shared experience in the way you are perceived and treated in a society dominated by "white culture."

You sound like every defensive white dude ever who can't handle the fact that just maybe our society is built around us. You are the one who is erasing culture.

Seriously watch that video I linked (better yet, watch the whole movie).

Everyone benefits from the oppression of others in some way. Everyone who participates in consumer culture: white, black, Hispanic, Asian, etc. are benefiting from it. I'm not a special case.

To say there is a "shared experience" between all people of the same skin color is completely ignoring cultural and socioeconomic rifts that are present in the equation. There is common ground between subgroups, but ultimately, what you're speaking about reeks of an ethnic nationalism.

Is our society built around white people? Western society? Yes, most likely. It's hardly surprising when it has a predominantly white racial makeup.

Good to know I'm a defensive culturally erasing white dude for not buying into a narrow and binary white guilt narrative where some 80% of the world's population is under a homogenous yoke, that is inconsistent with how the world works at large. Some history lessons might do you well, I believe.

I saw the video. All I saw was an emotional man yelling out a black nationalist argument, largely as a reaction to how he may have been personally mistreated.

The modern world was invented in a cosmopolitan Europe. I think we should recognize that and preserve the best parts of that legacy, and yes, even be proud of it.

I don't buy into the whole white-guilt complex

> because white people have crafted a society to let them have more advantage.

Thinking of 'white' as a single group of people who are always middle class is a fantastically ignorant thing to do.

Does the white kid whose parents are Ukrainian janitors deserves a leg up less than the black kid whose parents are an English professor and a photographer?

People frequently confuse class and race. We should really be thinking about the former (though obviously the two are related to a degree).

Full disclosure: my grandfather was an uneducated Ukrainian immigrant (:

>Does the white kid whose parents are Ukrainian janitors deserves a leg up less than the black kid whose parents are an English professor and a photographer?

Nope, but he's going to get one as a white person who lives in America.

In Texas at least the opposite will happen.

> The hula hooping moment was important because it visibly demonstrated her male coworkers lack of respect for women as people.

Maybe hula-hooping is a common occurrence in Silicon Valley offices, but if my co-workers would be hula-hooping I would be looking as well (regardless whether they are male or female). Probably I would be thinking 'why on earth are you hula-hooping in you workplace instead of working'. I guess there is a fine line between gawking and looking.

Don't get me wrong - the entire situation she describes sound horrible but the hula-hooping did not sound very professional in the first place.

Hula-hooping is an especially complex example because it sounds like a strip-club kind of activity, but is also a kind of reclaimed hipster activity like knitting or roller-derby.

The connotations depend a lot on the context.

Why are those mutually exclusive? I get that women don't like being ogled upon, but if you are hula-hooping in the workplace, that's bound to attract some attention and not because you are such a smart person (althou you can certainly have fun and be smart). I wasn't there so I can't tell what the tenor was but I suspect that Horvath's state of mind due to the extreme pressure might have exaggerated that incident. I've seen comments throughout the thread saying she should have gotten help on the dick coworker reverting her code. In that environment it's very easy to become unsure of herself. She wasn't getting help with the founder-wife issue, why would HR respond to this? I've been wondering about Atlassian for a while. Maybe I should take a second look.

Roll eyes. Men get treated as eye candy too. Honestly, if you do that at work, it doesn't matter who you are, you are going to get gawked at.

Most of this seemed like a poor performer who socialized too much at work. The problem was the crazy wife. Two bad drivers meet at an intersection..

And for people saying the guys don't get worked over in pull requests or have their code passively aggressively reverted, all I can say is LOL.

I think, if anything, the incident that triggered her leaving was an indication of how safe other girls at the company felt at the same time when she was bullied by the founders wife till she broke.

It's not disrespecting people to consider them attractive.

Perhaps they liked being stared at as eyecandy.

Totally disagree. If someone is hula hooping in a company that usually builds software to host version control repositories, they are doing something quite out of the ordinary, which is going to lead people to gawk. This does not necessarily imply sexual objectification, though it doesn't preclude it.

> They were unabashedly staring at their female coworkers as "eyecandy" in that moment and even defended their doing so.

Why should someone be "abashed" at staring at someone who is hula hooping in the office? This is slowly starting to lean towards 'thoughtcrime', as long as they don't make overtly sexual or lewd comments, they shouldn't be unnecessarily be accused of a "lack of respect for women as people".

Your only source on this story is Horvath's recounting of it, and she says it was inappropriate. By what means do we have to question her assessment of the events? In questioning her, with no other information, you're saying "I don't believe you, you've irrationally overreacted". And that can only based not on the facts of the situation, but on your personal opinions of what "women" in aggregate are like. In other words, you're explicitly marginalizing Horvath's opinion because she is a woman.

This is how sexism works.

When someone tells a story and there's a gap between the events they relate to you and the conclusion they draw from it, it's natural to criticize their conclusions.

Unless you were there, you can't possible know what happened. We are receiving a third-hand accounting--a TechCrunch journalist relating what Horvath told them--of events we didn't experience. For all we know, the journalist editted out a part where the "gawkers" were wolf-whistling and throwing dollar bills. The point is not that they may or many not have done that, the point is that Horvath's (diluted) account is the only one we have to go by, and to dismiss it is literally nothing but marginalizing her opinion just because she's a woman.

She says it was inappropriate, and more importantly, that it made her feel uncomfortable. You have to either accept that, or you have to call her a liar.

If you choose to call her a liar, your basis for calling her a liar is what defines you as sexist. If it's "my vast and varied dealings with the Github staff at all levels never suggested anything unprofessional ever went on there"[0], then you are not sexist. If it's because "women overreact to stuff like this", you're sexist.

And it's one way or the other. You can't say "I am not calling her a liar, but I don't believe her". That's just mealy-mouth calling her a liar. And you can't say, "I didn't experience any of the involved facts for myself, but I'm not basing it on prejudices", because again, that's just speaking out of both sides of your mouth.

[0] which, given how shitty their code is, I can't see how anyone could ever make such a claim.

No one is dismissing Horvath's account as related by TechCrunch. Critically reading that account and then discussing the gaps in the internal logic of the account itself is the opposite of dismissal.

We're not dealing with a court of law here. "Gaps" in the story do not call into question the integrity of the story.

Don't they? But I'm talking more about gaps between the facts as they are being related to us and the conclusions we are being told to draw from them.

> Your only source on this story is Horvath's recounting of it, and she says it was inappropriate. By what means do we have to question her assessment of the events?

You are using "inappropriate" like it's an objective word. Which is false. If she said something like "they were wolf-whistling and throwing dollar bills", that's an objective statement that we can either think is true or false, and form certain opinions about it. The only objective word we have heard so far is "staring". She is saying, "Ah, they were staring at a bunch of women hula-hooping in the middle of the office at a tech company, how inappropriate!", I am not being sexist when I say, "No, that's not inappropriate, stop with your 1800s attitude."

It is just a difference between Horvath's rather prim definition of "inappropriate" and my more liberal one, and I don't see how that is sexist, or marginalizes her opinion. My grandfather would probably agree with Horvath that staring at a bunch of women hula-hooping in the office is "inappropriate", and I would disagree with him too.

We also have this account of the incident, by somebody who claims they were present, has put their name behind their account, and may or may not be a github employee: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7408466

This particular account isn't even filtered through a journalist!

The sexism in this scenario is subtle and persistent, something that likely tainted all of the workplace interactions at github, allowing a female employee's problems at work to be continually ignored.

Lots of people of both sexes are impotent and disaffected at work, so it's not necessarily proof of anything when someone says "my opinion is not respected" and then finds superficials to explain it. If you can demonstrate a pattern, sure, but simply drawing from personal experience is very close to useless. In this case she is drawing from personal experience.

The hula hooping moment was important because it visibly demonstrated her male coworkers lack of respect for women as people.

What a gigantic jump. I mean, solar system crossing. Two people put on what sounds like a unique, if not artistic demonstration. People watch. It might actually be her own insecurities and hangups that led her to decry this, which is actually a perverse and rather incredible bit of sexism in itself ("women of Github...hide your shame. Don yon burkas and shroud yourself from the lusts of men").

This is not a clear story at all (clearly the founder's wife -- who is a significant owner of the company, fwiw -- got involved for something completely unspoken), and there is no reason for anyone to knee jerk to either side.

Further (and this comment is more general) it is toxic and repressive for the classic "Oh woe am I, look at all of the victim blaming in here! How offensive!". Github, and all of the players involved, are people too. Because one person yells the loudest and earliest doesn't mean that you can grab your torches with legitimacy without being the problem yourself.

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