Rolling 'this is sexist' thread

new face of corporate america. just keep your head down. if anyone mentions you for any reason ever -- chop.

'T____ H___ Check ur privieledge.

the difference between a twitter feed and a conference.

Thinking on this for a second - neither of these things is cut and dry at all. Very public conversation viewable to tens of thousands vs. overheard private conversation, etc.

i hope everyone involved sues everyone else involved until all the companies go bankrupt and their vcs go bankrupt and the banks that funded anyone go bankrupt and then a cleansing fire comes and burns babylon, burns it clean.

lol do u ever go outside then
― 乒乓, Thursday, March 21, 2013 5:18 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I don't get what you mean. I'm talking about taking direct photos of strangers. I see so many pics on Twitter and elsewhere where the poster has taken a pic of someone who looks funny on the tube or whatever - I think it's a serious asshole move.

i didn't know 'developer evangelist' was a kind of job now but apparently it is, perhaps that can go in the cleansing fire too

Can we please stop mischaracterizing this as if she happened to overhear dude's gross jokes? According to her account, which was not disputed by the dude making the jokes, she was talking to one dude about how they both wished they were getting more out of that particular session, at which point the dude who got fired chimed in with his "I'd fork his repo!" joke, which set off this whole thing.

Walter, twitter is a place generally accepted as a tool for frivolous chatter, that conference was a professional environment with written rules about acceptable behaviour.

Also, it's been made clear that it wasn't an overheard private conversation.

GODDAMMIT I LIKE DONGLE JOKES STOP FORCING ME TO SHOW WHY THEY'RE NOT OKAY.

I don't think it's okay to take a direct picture of someone without their permission unless they're maybe in the act of committing a crime. I see that as a much greater violation of safety & privacy.

― Walter Galt, Thursday, March 21, 2013 1:16 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

wonder if any of these people rising up in favor of the right for dudes to be all cartman-on-maury look at reddit's creepshots threads

dongle dude got off light imo. should've been executed as a cultural enemy.

wonder if any of these people rising up in favor of the right for dudes to be all cartman-on-maury look at reddit's creepshots threads

I don't know what either of the things in the second half of that sentence means.
I think the characterisation of Twitter as "a place generally accepted as a tool for frivolous chatter" is some bullshit.
I think the guy's an asshole for making a joke like that to someone he didn't know. I think she's an asshole for taking a picture of someone she didn't know. I guess that's it.

http://venturebeat.com/2013/03/20/playhaven-developer-fired-for-making-sexual-jokes-after-sendgrids-developer-evangelist-outs-him-on-twitter/#Twsrfa4DheaGtsBE.99

"While I did make a big dongle joke about a fictional piece hardware that identified as male, no sexual jokes were made about forking. My friends and I had decided forking someone’s repo is a new form of flattery, the highest form being implementation, and we were excited about one of the presenters projects; a friend said “I would fork that guys repo.” The sexual context was applied by Adria, and not us."

that IS a pretty good joke about flattery

I think the characterisation of Twitter as "a place generally accepted as a tool for frivolous chatter" is some bullshit.

Why?

playhaven builds a "mobile game ltv maximization platform" to "control your monetization."

sendgrid manages semi-spam email 'newsletter' services for marketing.

ok, sexism bad. but on a broader level, these companies need to be herded into that part of California that will fall into the ocean when the big earthquake hits.

Why?

People losing their jobs over dumb shit on twitter ain't unprecedented.

dongle dude got off light imo. should've been executed as a cultural enemy.

― Mordy, Thursday, March 21, 2013 1:30 PM (21 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol elmo if u don't want hostilities stop writing passive aggressive stupid strawman nonsense shit like "itt i learned that developing nations don't produce artists, thx mordy"

― Mordy, Thursday, March 21, 2013 11:34 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

dongle dude got off light imo. should've been executed as a cultural enemy, thx phil.

People losing their jobs over dumb shit on twitter ain't unprecedented.

That doesn't actually address my question, but thanks anyway.

I find precedents to be a very important metric in careful evaluation regarding arbitrary human resources decisions of fuckwit employers.

That doesn't actually address my question, but thanks anyway.

Hey, I'm just guessing. Twitter is pretty much frivolous by definition but if you were arguing otherwise the blurred lines between professional/personal would be a likely angle.

Lot of people coming to the sexist threads based on a misreading of the title, just looking for some fellow feeling. Why do we have to be so cruel to them?

I'd feel a fellow. Haven't done that since college, but hey what the heck

@sendgrid supports me

free username up for grabs

OK I might've been outed as a tool of the patriarchy y/day when I thought it was a slight mountain-out-of-molehill situation but now it's a fucking mountain chain. only solution I can see is to execute everyone who has ever worked in IT. lying on the block right now, peace out guys

:(

LOL @ dongle. what a stupid word

passive aggressively taking a photo of someone at a tech conference and putting it on twitter indicates someone with a bad personality imo

but maybe I am thinking of the time this guy at walgreens let me in line in front of him for some odd reason, and then got seriously angry that I didn't thank him PROFUSELY for doing such a wonderful gesture, that he said "unfucking-believable!" very loudly and took my photo and put it on twitter. I am under the bitch hashtag somewhere, pretty sure. It's just really classless.

Careful you'll make andrew's sexist list

WOW at that dude.

maybe he is one of those very short term memory dudes who forgot he let you in front and then just saw you cut in line and has to twitter everything like that dude in memento or he'll forget, except instead of writing down what happened the only thing he twitters is "unfucking-believable" about 50x a day.

or.. maybe he is a giant ass

dude don't spoil memento

Homo, he probably can't believe you didn't gratefully fellate him for doing you that massive favour. Please tell me you reported the guy for abuse/spam?

Well now we all know about him and agree he's a total asshole so unless you can get his photo too this is probably the best internet justice you will get.

I am under the bitch hashtag somewhere, pretty sure.

tempting display name opportunity imo

you cant report someone for spam irl

to be clear, you can report hormel, if they're doing something illegal.

@sendgrid supports me

http://blog.sendgrid.com/a-difficult-situation/

Publicly shaming the offenders – and bystanders – was not the appropriate way to handle the situation.

No I think it's a pretty good idea actually, fuck you sendgrid

The terrorists have already won.

Do not ask for whom the eagle cries.

Wondering how appropriate it is for this company and the men who work there to decide what is an appropriate way to react to misogyny when it's happening in front of a woman.

^^^^^

this is making the rounds now: https://amandablumwords.wordpress.com/2013/03/21/3/

I emailed SendGrid via friends who worked there to inform them of the pattern: when Adria is offended, she doesn’t work within the community to resolve the problem, and how ultimately,it actually harms female developers because it forms the perception that we are to be feared, we are humorless, that we are hard to work with. I suggested that SendGrid had the resources to retrain her and teach her better techniques and that I hoped they would choose that path instead of penalty to her. This morning, they went the other way, SendGrid posted that she was no longer with the company.

ick

Something in the article stuck out like an infected zit on the end of a programmer's nose:

There’s a gentleman’s code for privacy

Gentlemen's agreements and codes are opaque and homosocial. Women never prosper when this kind of thing is in force, and women who cite them to a more outspoken woman to criticise her for speaking are at best apologists for sexism, and at worst, total tools of patriarchy. I would also argue that it is not a woman's responsibility to assuage men's irrational perceptions about their female colleagues, in addition to her actual job. Adria seems to me to be someone who has on numerous occasions expressed, in public, what her boundaries are so it could be argued that her employers already knew she was unlikely to suffer misogynist foolishness gladly, regardless of whether it is cryptic or overt.

http://butyoureagirl.com/14015/forking-and-dongle-jokes-dont-belong-at-tech-conferences/

just for posterity for those who haven't read, i'll post her account of what went down.

Have you ever had a group of men sitting right behind you making joke that caused you to feel uncomfortable? Well, that just happened this week but instead of shrinking down in my seat, I did something about it an here’s my story…
Yesterday, I publicly called out a group of guys at the PyCon conference who were not being respectful to the community.
For those of you visiting from Hacker News from the tweet and from this post, thanks for stopping by. Enjoy the context.
I tweeted a photo of the guys behind me:

I publicly asked for help with addressing the problem:

I tweeted the PyCon Code of Conduct page and began to contacting the PyCon staff via text message:

and I’m happy to say that PyCon responded quickly not just with words but with action and a public response:

What I will share with you here is the backstory that led to this –
The guy behind me to the far left was saying he didn’t find much value from the logging session that day. I agreed with him so I turned around and said so. He then went onto say that an earlier session he’d been to where the speaker was talking about images and visualization with Python was really good, even if it seemed to him the speaker wasn’t really an expert on images. He said he would be interested in forking the repo and continuing development.
That would have been fine until the guy next to him…
began making sexual forking jokes
I was going to let it go. It had been a long week. A long month. I’d been on the road since mid February attending and speaking at conferences. PyCon was my 5th and final conference before heading home.
I know it’s important to pick my battles.
I know I don’t have to be a hero in every situation.
Sometimes I just want to go to a conference and be a geek.
But…
like Popeye, I couldn’t “stands it no more” because of what happened –
Jesse Noller was up on stage thanking the sponsors. The guys behind me (one off to the right) said, “You can thank me, you can thank me”. That told me they were a sponsoring company of Pycon and from the photos I took, his badge had an add-on that said, “Sponsor”.
My company was a Gold sponsor as well.
They started talking about “big” dongles. I could feel my face getting flustered.
Was this really happening?
How many times do I have to deal with this?
Can they not hear what Jesse is saying?
The stuff about the dongles wasn’t even logical and as a self professed nerd, that bothered me. Dongles are intended to be small and unobtrusive. They’re intended for network connectivity and to service as physical licence keys for software. I’d consulted in the past with an automotive shop that needed data recovery and technical support. I know what PCMCIA dongles look like.
I was telling myself if they made one more sexual joke, I’d say something.
The it happened….The trigger.
Jesse was on the main stage with thousands of people sitting in the audience. He was talking about helping the next generation learn to program and how happy PyCon was with the Young Coders workshop (which I volunteered at). He was mentioning that the PyLadies auction had raised $10,000 in a single night and the funds would be used the funds for their initiatives.
I saw a photo on main stage of a little girl who had been in the Young Coders workshop.
I realized I had to do something or she would never have the chance to learn and love programming because the ass clowns behind me would make it impossible for her to do so.
I calculated my next steps. I knew there wasn’t a lot of time and the closing session would be wrapping up. I considered:
The type of event
The size of the audience
How the conference had emphasized their Code of Conduct
What I knew about the community and their diversity initiatives
How to address this issue effectively and not disrupt the main stage
Added 3/19: Description and photo of ballroom
The ballroom was huge. Here’s a photo from that morning of the keynote speaker, Guido van Rossum, creator of Python. Each section was 12 seats wide and 20 rows deep with six sections (front and back) in the ballroom. I would estimate it held over 1,000 people that afternoon. I was located approximately 10 rows deep from the front right screen in the top-right section and about 5 seats in from the aisle on the left of the section.

(Math inclined folks: feel free to provide your estimates on how many people the ballroom held in the comments.)
Accountability was important. These guys sitting right behind me felt safe in the crowd. I got that and realized that being anonymous was fueling their behaviour. This is known as Deindividualization:
Deindividuation is a concept in social psychology that is generally thought of as the losing of self-awareness in groups. Theories of deindividuation propose that it is a psychological state of decreased self-evaluation and decreased evaluation apprehension causing antinormative and disinhibited behavior.
Deindividuation theory seeks to provide an explanation for a variety of antinormative collective behavior, such as violent crowds, lynch mobs, etc. Deindividuation theory has also been applied to genocide and been posited as an explanation for antinormative behavior online and in computer-mediated communications.
It very much reminded me of Lord Of the Flies. I decided to put out the fire at the base.
PyCon has gone to great efforts to position themselves as a conference that everyone is welcome to attend according to their homepage:
PyCon is the largest annual gathering for the community using and developing the open-source Python programming language. PyCon is organized by the Python community for the community. We try to keep registration far cheaper than most comparable technology conferences, to keep PyCon accessible to the widest group possible.
and they go on to say:
PyCon is a diverse conference dedicated to providing an enjoyable experience to everyone. Our code of conduct is intended to help everyone maintain the PyCon spirit. We thank all attendees and staff for observing it.
I did a gut check and waited until Jesse finished introducing Diana who would be the new PyCon US chair for 2014. I stood up slowly, turned around and took three, clear photos. I said back down, did another gut check and started composing a tweet.
Three things came to me: act, speak and confront in the moment.
I decided to do things differently this time and didn’t say anything to them directly. I was a guest in the Python community and as such, I wanted to give PyCon the opportunity to address this.
A few minutes later, one of the PyCon staff member approached to the left. I stood up, went outside to talk with him and explain the situation with a few of the other PyCon staff. They had seen my tweet. After explaining, they wanted to pull the people in question from the main ballroom. I walked back in with the PyCon staff and point them out one by one and they were escorted to the hallway.
As I walked back to my seat, I cannot tell you how proud I was of the PyCon and Python community at the very moment for keeping their word to make the conference a safe place to be. A bit shaken, I took my seat to continue watching the lightning talks. I sent an updated tweet that the situation was being dealt with and later on, PyCon tweeted they had addressed the issue.
For context, I’m a developer evangelist at a successful startup.
That means I’m an advocate for developers, male and female. I hear about demanding bosses with impossible deadlines for product launches and the overall experience of working at other startups firsthand.
I listen and offer suggestions, ideas and mentoring to help developers become problems solvers. Sometimes the answer is our API or not answering email after 7pm while other times it about being assertive and shedding impostor syndrome.
The forking joke set the stage for the dongle joke. Neither were funny.
What many of you don’t know is that this wasn’t the first time that day I had to address this issue around harassment and gender.
I had been talking with a developer after lunch in the hall and he told me he had made a joke. He had been looking for some boxes and said aloud that he was looking under the skirt (he had meant a table skirt) in the expo hall. A woman had “given him a look” and/or made a comment after he said this so he responded by saying “it was bare, just the way he liked it” as an innuendo for when women shave off all their pubic hair. I explained that while this could be funny, it was out of context because:
We were at a tech conference
There was a job fair going on
Women historically have felt unwelcome at tech conferences
PyCon was making a special effort to be welcoming to women
There were several women’s groups here (PyLadies, Women Who Code, CodeChix, Ada Initiative)
He was wearing company logos and that meant his actions and words carried on their behalf
….much further than his sense of humor ever would.
He disagreed. I urged him to talk to someone at the conference who worked for the same company who was a guy and who would understand this issue and potential for brand/reputation damage. We were able to discuss this because we were in the hallway, not a packed ballroom.
At a conference where it was was celebrated that 20% of attendees were women

it wasn’t the place to make “jokes” like this. I felt our chat went well (as well as could be expected) and headed on my way to more sessions and the final closing talks. Why did he share his joke with me? Maybe because I told him I’d just finished a 5 week stand up comedy class and he wanted to reciprocate. Maybe because my job as a developer evangelist means I spend a lot of time around male developers and he thought I would understand. What I did know is I needed to say something instead of laugh.
I have been to a lot of tech conferences and hackathons over the years. I’ve heard a lot of things said. That means I’m more desensitized than others but it doesn’t make it ok. Here I could go into all sorts of comparisons on things I could say around guys to make them uncomfortable but that’s not the point of this post.
There is something about crushing a little kid’s dream that gets me really angry.
Women in technology need consistant messaging from birth through retirement they are welcome, competent and valued in the industry.
Let’s unify the message to our daughters and to the women developers we work with:
“We want you to be here and we will do our best to welcome you into the world of programming.”
What has to change is that everyone must take personal accountability and speak up when they hear something that isn’t ok. It takes three words to make a difference:
“That’s not cool.”
Not all men at tech conferences are like these guys.
Not every woman who attends a tech conference is a victim in waiting.
We need to build bridges and be aware of our actions and not discount that our words carry weight. A guy in my PyCon sprint group today shared a beautiful French proverb today:
“Live a good life then make room for others.”
Yesterday the future of programming was on the line and I made myself heard.

because the guy was obviously an immature dork but i'm really failing to see the misogyny. and i went to college and everything

Where there are guys who are immature dorks, misogyny is generally in the room with them.