juridatenshi

> In September, Cirne told employees that Beloved in Christ will aid victims of the wildfires that burned more than 1 million acres across Oregon.

He mentioned his personal, religious charity at work and targeted it at all employees as part of a fundraising effort (admittedly for a good cause in this case). At that point, it's not just outside-of-work.

I see you've found the strawfeminists. http://www.harkavagrant.com/?id=341

HSSSSSSSSSS!

::looks at responses to @defunkt's twitter post::

1) it appears to be a pretty even mix of men and women responding positively. 2) a huge number of the people who responded positively (male and female) are in fact software engineers, some of them fairly well known (e.g. conference speakers), several of which work at big name companies.

So, uhhhh, what the hell are you on about?

Being respectful of diverse groups of people and technical ability are not mutually exclusive.

1. Meritocracy is a myth. This is probably worth a read. http://www.garann.com/dev/2012/you-keep-using-that-word/

2. Everyone is entitled to their own opinions. That does not mean they are free from consequences when they share that opinion publicly.

You keep using the term "lynch mob." I do not think that means what you think it means.

There have been some studies that indicate these sorts of jokes may increase negative behaviors towards women, such as victim blaming. This is troubling because even if these jokes don't inspire someone to rape or assault someone, they may encourage them to act in a way that enables others to get away with doing so.

That's because (hopefully) if you find them distasteful you're not the sort of person who thinks violence against women is awesome. The thing is, there are people out there who do think it is awesome. They tend to have a very different response to these sorts of "jokes" and imagery.

Jokes like this can and do contribute to a culture where violence against women is a very real and regular thing. Regularly joking about how hilarious it is to beat and rape women normalizes it to a degree and encourages those who already think this is acceptable behavior.

A huge number of the examples are encouraging raping, beating to a bloody pulp, and/or murdering women. The issues with them goes well beyond being offended. However, I'm guessing arguments about rape culture are unlikely to sway you if you think these are jokes and not hateful.

As a side note, facebook already censors a bunch of things. For example, they've taken down images of women breastfeeding if nipples are shown. It's kind of fucked up that the sight of nipples in a non-sexual context is worthy of a takedown, but encouraging violence against women is totally ok.

Yes, it's become so hard to be a man at tech conferences. They're so filled with hate for men that one could describe it as misandry. Did the feminazis also steal your ice cream?

If you're talking about many MRA groups, people would likely have a problem because they're considered hate groups by regarded organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Additionally, it's not like we have a dearth of men in programming. They seem to be doing just fine.

Definitely. I'm excited they're doing this, and I think it is useful. :)

The comment about hiring was mostly an aside as something else I wish they were taking more active efforts with in addition to efforts like this one.

Agreed with you about the donations. Tangentially, it would be cool if GitHub had more diversity in their software engineering staff - that is something they have control over.

Blinding combined with active outreach to get more people to submit to a CFP has helped several conferences improve their numbers. GoGaRuCo is the one that immediately comes to mind.

There is some limited info from the CDC below.

http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5920a3.htm

My anecdata on this is that level of stigma varies a lot based on the mental illness involved. Some mental illnesses (e.g. schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder) appear to be labeled very harshly by our culture and have a huge amount of stigma attached to them.

I'll see if I can dig up any journal articles or research on this.

The shit last week absolutely scared some people. Some of us are steeled to get even louder because of it, but others were seriously considering being less visible or even dropping out. I'm not sure what the long-term effects will look like, only time will tell, but it absolutely negatively affected people in the tech industry.

As for Steve (and the others involved in the incident you mentioned), what they did was shitty. Behavior like that can have serious negative consequences as well. I was pretty pissed when that happened, and I really hope it's a mistake they won't make again (and if they do, they'll be getting an earful). However as far as I recall, the offending parties did apologize when called out.

We all fuck up, myself included. Apologies don't make everything better, but it's a world above people making death threats. I value allies who occasionally fuck up that I can call out on their shit over people who are regularly assholes and have no introspection when I call them on it. I've known both. The former has generally provided me with a support system. The latter has just tried to tear me down (see examples in my post).

Absolutely agreed on helping more than women.When I speak about personal experiences, they're mostly about women because that's my lived experience, but I am very much for helping a variety of people. Those who know me recognize me by my catchphrase, "MY TECHNOLOGY WILL BE INTERSECTIONAL OR IT WILL BE BULLSHIT!"

This is all easy for you to say considering the privilege you mention. These things are academic to you. They are a real lived experience for some of us.

Also, I'm not terrified of drinking events at conferences. It's not like it's this super-fun thing I'm so sad I'm missing because I've got this unreasonable fear. They're things I skip sometimes because it's more fun to go do something else than risk dealing with bullshit (or on rare occasions actual risk).

The intent of my blog posts (there's a few in the series) was to share my personal experiences and feelings. Not to explicitly label them as sexism or say everyone must share those feelings or say "hey you, you better go fix this" or any other number of things you seem to be attributing to it.

As for your comment about me being oversensitive, way to miss the point of the last paragraph of my post.

My feelings about drunk people at conferences parties varies depending on a lot of factors. Am I there alone or am I there with friends? Do I know some of the people in attendance or am I isolated? Is it in a dark or well-lit location? How easy is it for me to leave? How drunk are people getting? What's the ratio of men to women in attendance? etc. etc.

As these questions hint, my feelings vary on how safe I evaluate the situation to be for myself. I'm not likely to have a fun if I feel unsafe. Why do I evaluate a situation as unsafe sometimes? It's because alcohol lowers inhibitions and can lead to people saying and doing things they might not otherwise. When I'm in a space with people I know, people I can trust to be cool and reasonable even after a few drinks, I feel safe and I can have a drink or two.

In other occasions, I don't feel safe. I can't see the future, and I don't know how strangers will behave when drunk. History tells me that sometimes they'll act badly and sometimes they won't. It's not fun for me to gamble on a hope bad things won't happen this time, so I tend to skip parties with drinking on these occasions.

TLDR: Sometimes drunk people do stupid things. I don't like gambling that this won't be one of them.

You're reading an awful lot into my sentence. You may want to think about why that is.

I didn't claim the comment was sexist in my post. I said that it was a regular reminder that speakers don't consider me (and other demographics) part of their audience.

The thing is, I've never heard a woman speaker make a similar joke about her husband/boyfriend or a non-heterosexual speaker make a similar comment about their partner. Maybe I'd feel differently if there was more of a mix.

As mentioned in the post, I don't work there anymore. It's worth noting that this isn't the first bad experience I've had at a workplace (see other post [1]). Also, several of the things I mentioned have nothing to do with work, so a new job doesn't solve them.

[1]http://juliepagano.tumblr.com/post/46216419829/my-experience...

I was alluding to groups (in person or online) that are limited to only a specific minority audience, usually with the intent of creating a space where those people will feel safe to speak freely. For example, the Devchix mailing list is only open to women-identified people.

That's an incredibly misleading title based on what the conference's post about the topic actually says. It sounds like the conference organizers asked to cancel the talk after feedback from the Ada Initiative and discussion with Violet Blue.

It's her twitter handle and looks like it's one she's been using for a good long while. Pretty sure she's just signing her work.

Your comment reads a lot like a tone argument. That type of discourse is derailing and generally unproductive. :)

If you have to preface your comments with "I am not sexist," there's probably something sexist about the words that are going to follow. You're hitting a lot of the derailing for dummies points here...

Well, this all sounds sufficiently horrifying and terrible.

It might be a contributing factor, but I doubt it's the only thing going on. There was an interesting study recently showing a gender bias in academic science [1].

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/09/14/1211286109.abst...