> The last few weeks have been very difficult for women in tech:
> Gurbaksh Chahal - then-CEO of a startup, was allegedly video taped violently attacking a former partner 117 times in 30 mins (He was finally fired some time after this was made public)
My reaction when I first read this: "wow, the guy beat up his company partner AND a woman, at that. What an asshole." Then I clicked through (note: he's still an asshole).
If you actually click through and read this, it is completely unrelated to tech. The partner that was attacked was a girlfriend. Not a company partner at all.
I'm not condoning the behaviour, obviously, but I feel like this article is setting the stage to create a "men vs women" thing in tech. If we spell it out, a full two out of five points the authors use to make their case can be summarized as:
A guy who has a temper problem and runs a tech company attacked a girlfriend who had nothing to do with the tech company. Everyone wanted to see proof.
Why is this particular instance difficult for women in tech? Why not everywhere? Why is this not used as an example of perhaps the stresses that people are under that cause them to behave this way? Is there a link to aggression and CEOs? This would be a better set of questions to take away from that incident than "if you work in tech and you are a woman, will you get beat up on a daily basis?"
> The last thing we want is for people reading this to be put on the defensive
The last thing I want is for people who want to bend the truth this much to be on the front page of HN.
The other stuff you wrote about? All great stuff. No one wants rapey emails. Even if you are fine as hell, you should be free from getting groped or otherwise harassed.
Don't adopt tangentially related stories to create a narrative that is more dire than real life. It just makes me shut off to anything else you want to say and then I don't want to work with you at all.