"There is a difference between believing some particular individual is guilty of harassment and accepting that a harassment problem exists in an industry or com

"There is a difference between believing some particular individual is guilty of harassment and accepting that a harassment problem exists in an industry or company." You're right, and legal protections exist to protect individuals under these circumstances. It's a primary responsibility of Human Resources department to document such occurrences and justifiably fire bad actors when they occur so things don't devolve into 'he said, she said' chaos. Instead there was no documented attempt at intervention. The woman in question reached out mass media to garner sympathy (a fireable offense in and of itself); 'he said, she said' was accepted as fact, and the man was asked to step down as a result. "Better a murderer go free than an innocent be hanged, and so forth." That's quite the slippery slope. The burden of proof exists to protect individuals from unjust accusation. Libel is a crime for a reason. It's the legal and ethical duty of an organization to prevent from blindly taking sides in the absence of proof. Toxic, spiteful, aggressive, conniving, manipulative personalities aren't exclusive to any gender, race, creed, etc. Considering the evidence after the fact, it seems that this was an organizational failure. As a result it set a bad precedent. GitHub lacks the ability to protect the well-being of its employees and worse, protection is exclusively granted to women. To quote: "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." GitHub should be committed to building a safe environment for all employees. The resulting outcome proves that their neither willing nor capable of protecting the well being of their employees absent of institutional bias. ----- As far as it concerns Tom Preston-Werner, he failed in his duty as the leader of the organization. From all outward appearances it seems like he's well aware of where things went wrong. Unfortunately, the damage is already done. As much as we'd all desire to be friendly and personable with our colleagues, leadership should always maintain a degree of separation from those they lead. The military has clear rules about fraternization, well established businesses usually have similar rules. Startups are, well... startups. Their greatest strength -- to break common convention -- is also their greatest weakness.