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Comment by zhemao | Hacker News Reader

Really? Ada Initiative is going to throw away a partnership that was beneficial to them and their constituents because of unproven allegations of harassment by a founder and his wife against a single employee?

If Github was truly hostile towards women, why would they support the Ada Initiative in the first place? Sponsoring two conferences "to support women in open technology and culture" is not something a misogynistic organization would do.

I do not envy Github's PR staff. It seems like they are going to have a hell of a time repairing the damage from this incident.

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> Sponsoring two conferences "to support women in open technology and culture" is not something a misogynistic organization would do.

Of course they would. No organization is likely to official advertise that they are hostile towards women, and sponsoring this kind of events is an easy PR operation. That says absolutely nothing about the day-to-day situation within the company.

Github as a corporate entity and Github as a cultural place to work are different things. You can still have misogyny in your organization while the company promotes the opposite.

Indeed. To borrow a phrase from Ralph Waldo Emerson: "The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons"[1]. If you do have a misogynistic workplace then sponsoring anti-misogynist causes may be a way of covering that up (in environmental circles this is known as "greenwashing").

[1] http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/31953/the-louder-...

> If Github was truly hostile towards women, why would they support the Ada Initiative in the first place?

It's never that simple. Almost everyone says they want more women in tech. But few take steps to actively promote that -- by increasing hiring of women, by fighting misogynistic elements of company culture, etc. Misogynistic company cultures are far more likely to arise through unconscious propagation of stereotypes and behaviors than from misogynistic leadership.

The Ada Initiative isn't trying to call Github misogynistic. It's just saying they haven't done a very good job of living up to their principles.

Who said they were throwing it away? Distancing one's self is not burning a bridge. I thought the press release was very mature and thought out. The Ada Initiative's goal isn't to help github grow up, it is to help women and girls in tech.

And yes, one always has to sacrifice something on principle, otherwise they wouldn't be principles, just more profitable choices.

> Who said they were throwing it away?

They did. "We will not accept future sponsorships from or partnerships with GitHub unless the situation changes significantly."

> The Ada Initiative's goal isn't to help github grow up, it is to help women and girls in tech.

Free private repositories "to over 500 women learning to write open source software" isn't beneficial to women and girls in tech? Having a well-known, well-funded, and (until recently) well-respected company sponsoring conferences isn't beneficial to women and girls in tech? I wasn't saying that they should care about how this affects Github. I'm saying they should care about how this decision affects them and their ability to carry out their stated mission.

Yeah, they are turning down some free resources, but they are also very politely saying that what happened and how it was handled did not meet expectations.

They aren't nuking peoples repos. People are welcome to have free public repos on github and there is plenty of alternatives. Github != Git.

if github changes through action, not words, I am sure they could work something out. Space and time will heal this.

I would argue that it is worse PR to be aligned with the Ada Initiative. They are doing github a favor here.

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