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Comment by EvenThisAcronym | Hacker News Reader

>Even so, we work in a world where inequality exists by default and we have to overcome that. Bullying, intimidation, and harassment, whether illegal or not, are absolutely unacceptable at GitHub and should not be tolerated anywhere. GitHub is committed to building a safe environment for female employees and all women in our community... I'm sorry to everyone we let down, including Julie. I realize this post doesn't fix or undo anything that happened. We're doing everything in our power to prevent it from happening again.

Why the apology on Github's part after it was concluded that there was no gender-based harassment towards the engineer in question? Is this apology pertaining to the other issues?

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I think this is saying that even though GitHub is not guilty in this case, sexism is a real issue in the industry.

Most all the sexism issues in the industry start in elementary school and persist until anyone, male or female, enters the work force. Teachers and parents (male or female) all participate in fostering and perpetuation the issues encountered in industry.

To claim its an "industry thing" is naïve. Open-source isn't an industry and almost every single open-source community begins and matures absent any industry involvement at all. By the time business opportunities arise in a community, the culture is already mature and well-formed.

NodeJS for example is a viable part of the tech industry now, but 4-5 years ago it was a bunch of hobbyists. There was no industry to speak of. I imagine that most of the members of that community back then were men, just as it is today. This suggests that the entire NodeJS like almost every other tech community has formed its identity well before every being an "industry".

Want to solve this issue? Find out how to make sure future new tech communities are more egalitarian and inclusive from day one. Trying to bolt that on afterwards may mitigate the harms, but it certainly isn't going to fix them. Path dependency has presents problems, but you can't just ignore the role of path dependency in getting us to where we are now.

This is a great point. Open source communities are ones in which you are very unlikely to see any sexism, as most people in these communities neither see each other, nor have a very clear way of identifying gender, and generally hold egalitarian political beliefs to boot.

So its clear that the idea of gender roles starts much earlier. Now whether you think that gender roles are a bad thing, or you think they are a reasonable evolutionary strategy that has contributed to our success (we are certainly not the only mammals who adopt gender roles), that's a separate question.

There are also certain biological reasons that may lead to more men being attracted to these fields - Robert and Chevrier found boys performed significantly better in spatial tasks than girls, but girls performed better at language tasks. So maybe as programming moves from lower-level languages (more spatially oriented) to higher level languages, we'll see more women get into the field.

I personally have worked with some excellent women in the tech world, and think the presence of at least some women on the team changes the dynamic for the better, but if we want to do it correctly, we cannot pretend that biology doesn't play a role. We'll have to make the strengths of the different genders work together.

They apologized for letting everybody down. It's hard to address the myriad of grievances that folks have come up with about this issue in a reasonably-sized letter especially when GitHub probably feels like it didn't do anything wrong on some fronts.

I read this as an apology for not having the preventative processes or environment in place. Despite no legal wrong doing, they still failed miserably when faced with this situation. To their credit, they know this and are working to fix it.

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