5 ms·

It seems increasingly clear to me that there is a concerted effort to paint some tech companies as more sexist than they are. Don't get me wrong, there is defi

It seems increasingly clear to me that there is a concerted effort to paint some tech companies as more sexist than they are. Don't get me wrong, there is definitely a problem of gender imbalance and harassment in our industry that needs to be addressed. But I have heard this "Github is sexist" meme in half a dozen of different contexts, but every time I investigate an incident it's some semantic squabbling about the word "meritocracy" or some idiot reporter who searched for racial slurs on a huge public corpus of user-submitted content, forgetting that the exact same argument could be applied to Youtube, Facebook, or literally any website. It's equally frustrating because if Github (and others) actually do engage in despicable sexist behavior, I want to hear about it and adjust my views of them accordingly. However, when reporters, bloggers, and commentators flood the internet with harassment stories accompanied with such vitriolic language, it's harder for me to tell the actual stories apart from the bombastic linkbait.

brown9-2 13y ago
How do you know how sexist a workplace is without working in it?
- natural219 13y ago
  I would love to read a first-hand account. For example, if Ms. Horvath blogged about her experiences and that was submitted to HN instead, it would have been much more interesting. This piece is simply there to piss people off and get clicks.
  - dbloom 13y ago
    If you were so hurt by constant harassment at your workplace that you decided to quit, how would you feel about publicly describing those experiences? What if you want to remain friends with some of your former co-workers? What if those former co-worker friends work on the same team as former co-worker harassers? Are you willing to put those friendships in jeopardy? Are you willing to make it harder for those friends to do their jobs? If they are forced to choose sides, how would you feel about affecting their working relationship with their coworkers? Sure, it's not your fault. But it's not their fault either! What if you misremember who was involved in a particular incident? (Do you take detailed notes every time you're harassed? Even if it's a lot of little things that all added up in the end?) What if you name the wrong person? What if the hacker community focuses on that and uses it to discredit you and destroy your reputation you spent years working to build? Would you enjoy remembering and reliving all of the experiences that hurt you over the past few years so that you can write a blog post about it? Would that actually make you feel better? Would you enjoy feeling like you had to write that blog post just so that people would believe you?
    - natural219 13y ago
      If you were that hurt, I don't think posting a string of accusatory but unspecific tweets would help your cause better. You'd best be served by writing a thoughtful, accurate summary of the events that occurred, and let the reader decide for themselves how to respond. I understand if she's just angry in response to other comments like the "Queen" one -- that's actually totally understandable. I don't blame her for reacting on Twitter like this. All that I said was if she did that, that would be one example of how I could understand what this kind of harassment is like and why it's harmful.
      - dbloom 13y ago
        "You'd best be served by writing a thoughtful, accurate summary of the events that occurred, and let the reader decide for themselves how to respond." Maybe she doesn't want the story to be about the specific events in her specific case. She wants it to be about the industry as a whole. Going into the details would distract from that message. The problems here are not specific to GitHub and certainly are not specific to her.
        claudius 13y ago
        > The problems here are not specific to GitHub and certainly are not specific to her. The problem here is that nobody has yet given a concrete example of such a problem. In this particular case, there are a bunch of vague tweets, in others, people looked at user-submitted content etc. Just saying ‘there is a problem’ neither makes it clear that there is a problem, nor what that problem is nor how to fix that problem.
        dbloom 13y ago
        According to Julie, GitHub's HR department is aware of the problems, and has been for a while: https://twitter.com/nrrrdcore/status/444887201935945729 https://twitter.com/nrrrdcore/status/444887201935945729 . GitHub knows about the problems. I hope GitHub makes an honest effort to fix them. And I hope they blog about what they fixed and why they fixed it. Hopefully when that happens, there will be some good lessons there. But we don't have to collectively relive what Julie went through. This story is about a real, systemic problem. It shouldn't turn into a "true crime" infotainment story about one person's experience.
  - pervycreeper 13y ago
    >I would love to read a first-hand account. It would be better to have the results of a survey done on a random sample of employees. Unfortunately, in journalism, we only get sensationalized and often completely unsubstantiated versions of single accounts. In this case, instead of an actual account, we merely have innuendo that could be one.
rm999 13y ago
Honest question: how does a prominent person quitting publicly make it more clear that there's a concerted effort (which insinuates an arranged effort, basically a conspiracy) to mislead people? If anything I took it as the opposite, that there is likely some incident(s) that concretely points to sexist behavior. I'm not saying you're wrong, but it seems to me that the simplest explanation is that Julie Ann Horvath quit because she was fed up, not to harm her ex-employer for a bigger cause. I just realized you may mean the author of the article is trying to harm github's image, which I agree is possible. But the real story to me is Horvath quitting, not someone writing an article about it.
- droopyEyelids 13y ago
  Disclaimer: I am speaking of the general case here... NOT about J.A.H. But what you're missing is that people sometimes crack up. We're all a little unstable. You see two choices: The person is harassed out by the conspiracy in their company, or the person quits to fuel the conspiracy they're a part of. I say there is a third choice: The person freaked out, or was under too much stress, or had a period of mental instability, and 'flamed out'. This actually happens to prominent people pretty frequently, hell it happens to most people at some time in their life. I've done it before. Fortunately I wasn't in a public position.

brown9-2 13y ago

How do you know how sexist a workplace is without working in it?

natural219 13y ago
I would love to read a first-hand account. For example, if Ms. Horvath blogged about her experiences and that was submitted to HN instead, it would have been much more interesting. This piece is simply there to piss people off and get clicks.
- dbloom 13y ago
  If you were so hurt by constant harassment at your workplace that you decided to quit, how would you feel about publicly describing those experiences? What if you want to remain friends with some of your former co-workers? What if those former co-worker friends work on the same team as former co-worker harassers? Are you willing to put those friendships in jeopardy? Are you willing to make it harder for those friends to do their jobs? If they are forced to choose sides, how would you feel about affecting their working relationship with their coworkers? Sure, it's not your fault. But it's not their fault either! What if you misremember who was involved in a particular incident? (Do you take detailed notes every time you're harassed? Even if it's a lot of little things that all added up in the end?) What if you name the wrong person? What if the hacker community focuses on that and uses it to discredit you and destroy your reputation you spent years working to build? Would you enjoy remembering and reliving all of the experiences that hurt you over the past few years so that you can write a blog post about it? Would that actually make you feel better? Would you enjoy feeling like you had to write that blog post just so that people would believe you?
  - natural219 13y ago
    If you were that hurt, I don't think posting a string of accusatory but unspecific tweets would help your cause better. You'd best be served by writing a thoughtful, accurate summary of the events that occurred, and let the reader decide for themselves how to respond. I understand if she's just angry in response to other comments like the "Queen" one -- that's actually totally understandable. I don't blame her for reacting on Twitter like this. All that I said was if she did that, that would be one example of how I could understand what this kind of harassment is like and why it's harmful.
    - dbloom 13y ago
      "You'd best be served by writing a thoughtful, accurate summary of the events that occurred, and let the reader decide for themselves how to respond." Maybe she doesn't want the story to be about the specific events in her specific case. She wants it to be about the industry as a whole. Going into the details would distract from that message. The problems here are not specific to GitHub and certainly are not specific to her.
      - claudius 13y ago
        > The problems here are not specific to GitHub and certainly are not specific to her. The problem here is that nobody has yet given a concrete example of such a problem. In this particular case, there are a bunch of vague tweets, in others, people looked at user-submitted content etc. Just saying ‘there is a problem’ neither makes it clear that there is a problem, nor what that problem is nor how to fix that problem.
        dbloom 13y ago
        According to Julie, GitHub's HR department is aware of the problems, and has been for a while: https://twitter.com/nrrrdcore/status/444887201935945729 https://twitter.com/nrrrdcore/status/444887201935945729 . GitHub knows about the problems. I hope GitHub makes an honest effort to fix them. And I hope they blog about what they fixed and why they fixed it. Hopefully when that happens, there will be some good lessons there. But we don't have to collectively relive what Julie went through. This story is about a real, systemic problem. It shouldn't turn into a "true crime" infotainment story about one person's experience.
- pervycreeper 13y ago
  >I would love to read a first-hand account. It would be better to have the results of a survey done on a random sample of employees. Unfortunately, in journalism, we only get sensationalized and often completely unsubstantiated versions of single accounts. In this case, instead of an actual account, we merely have innuendo that could be one.

rm999 13y ago

Honest question: how does a prominent person quitting publicly make it more clear that there's a concerted effort (which insinuates an arranged effort, basically a conspiracy) to mislead people? If anything I took it as the opposite, that there is likely some incident(s) that concretely points to sexist behavior. I'm not saying you're wrong, but it seems to me that the simplest explanation is that Julie Ann Horvath quit because she was fed up, not to harm her ex-employer for a bigger cause. I just realized you may mean the author of the article is trying to harm github's image, which I agree is possible. But the real story to me is Horvath quitting, not someone writing an article about it.

droopyEyelids 13y ago
Disclaimer: I am speaking of the general case here... NOT about J.A.H. But what you're missing is that people sometimes crack up. We're all a little unstable. You see two choices: The person is harassed out by the conspiracy in their company, or the person quits to fuel the conspiracy they're a part of. I say there is a third choice: The person freaked out, or was under too much stress, or had a period of mental instability, and 'flamed out'. This actually happens to prominent people pretty frequently, hell it happens to most people at some time in their life. I've done it before. Fortunately I wasn't in a public position.