To clarify for many of you, you don't need someone shouting "I HATE WOMEN" for sexism to be occurring. The sexism in this scenario is subtle and persistent, something that likely tainted all of the workplace interactions at github, allowing a female employee's problems at work to be continually ignored. This eventually built up to the issue most people are focusing on, a founders spouse being allowed to harass an employee, which is not so much the main issue but a major symptom of a larger issue at github and in the tech industry as a whole, that issue being the downplaying of women's concerns, opinions and needs.
The hula hooping moment was important because it visibly demonstrated her male coworkers lack of respect for women as people. They were unabashedly staring at their female coworkers as "eyecandy" in that moment and even defended their doing so.
> The hula hooping moment was important because it visibly demonstrated her male coworkers lack of respect for women as people. They were unabashedly staring at their female coworkers as "eyecandy" in that moment and even defended their doing so.
I have never understood how this argument works, obviously I'm missing something. Because I momentarily focus my attention on someone for their physical attributes, I automatically and necessarily consider them "eyecandy" rather than intelligent people with their own will that are to be respected? Does this work with other attributes - if I appreciate and acknowledge someone for X, does that mean that X is all they ever are to me? If the male employees had put on an impromptu bodybuilding pageant, would that have been the same thing?
Naturally, the fact that the woman in question was actually disturbed by the situation does indicate that there is cause for concern.
It's possible to recognize the attractive features of someone while still being conscious of their humanity. Obviously there are degrees of attention you can give someone based on their looks that goes from socially acceptable to socially unacceptable.
I'm a man so I can't speak for women directly, but what I've gathered from the experiences of others is that women are interacted with on an attraction basis exponentially more than men are, this also constantly ranging from socially acceptable to unacceptable, wanted and unwanted. It manifests in little ways, cat-calling, aggressive or unwanted flirtation, maybe a creepy controlling coworker suddenly confessing his love? My own mom told me about a time when a total stranger grabbed her butt in a store and walked off. It makes sense to me that many women would be extra-sensitive to scenarios like this. Men literally don't have to deal with interactions like this at that level so it's totally different when the gender roles are reversed, and it's rare that they are.
The importance of that scenario was that it was relative to her entire work experience at Github. Even if we assume the intentions of the male workers were totally golden and the hula-hoopers were totally fine with their gawking, to me it makes sense why this scene would be triggering for her.
Thanks, I see your perspective.
> to me it makes sense why this scene would be triggering for her
It makes sense to me as well, but if I were her boss, I would ask her to take a more professional and less emotional perspective of the workplace (of course, after (hopefully having her problems presented in a clear manner and) solving the other issues that were causing her to feel unwelcome).
This is the core problem, though: it's difficult (impossible?) for someone to be professional when everyone around them is so unprofessional. Worse still when none of their claims are fully addressed by management.
There was no resolution here. I don't blame her for taking these steps to out Github.
That only more reason to be extremely professional - noone can blame anything on you. Or maybe it's just my viewpoint of the world, but I would take the most defensive route possible, and use the experience to my advantage (learn as much as possible, gain relevant & valuable experience, eject into another company as high as possible).
A description of the hula hooping from someone else at github:
> Probably worth mentioning that the hula hoop dancing happened at a Github party with a lot of people not from Github. It was also super badass hula hooping, not just regular dancing. Everyone was looking, men and women, because it was pretty awesome.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7408466 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7408466
You are not alone. I blame PC, overprotective upbringing and "I am offended by that" trend. As soon as some subject becomes taboo to discuss people lose the understanding why something is bad and start to treat everything related as bad and unacceptable. Reminds me of this: http://i.snag.gy/kdu77.jpg http://i.snag.gy/kdu77.jpg (doesn't matter if experiment was real or not). This is very prominent with sexism and racism—these words are losing the meaning really fast. Now merely acknowledging someones race is called racism. Same goes for gender. And god forbid you find someone attractive. I really don't get what kind of society these people want. The one where everybody walks covered in burqas?
You are not allowed to look at attractive person—you will offend them. I wonder how soon a simple glance will accepted as a kind of sexual assault.
You are not allowed to approach the person you like—it will be "unwanted advances". It's "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation. If woman will say that it makes her feel good when she senses attention she will be explained, that's just because patriarchal society made her to feel this way. More often than not those explaining will be males, ironically. What a terrible society to live, luckily it will die out soon for the lack of reproduction.
As for this story: it has nothing to do with sexism. Nothing at all. Actually the real sexists are the ones who think all this happened because of the sexism.
Guys (and girls): these issues are much much more complex and deserve to be treated with much more respect instead of rubber stamping like it is common now. Women and non-white people can be assholes too and I would like to retain the right call them as such without being accused of sexism or racism.
Though this right might be long gone.
Quite often it is a fun mental experiment to reverse the genders or races and think how vastly different reactions would be (if there would be any). Imagine that black person says: "I am proud to be black!". Now imagine that the white person says "I am proud to be white". Now throw away you knee-jercky reaction and think about it.
>Imagine that black person says: "I am proud to be black!".
>Now imagine that the white person says "I am proud to be white".
>Now throw away you knee-jercky reaction and think about it.
I thought about it, and here's what I found: The different reactions which those two assertions may elicit depend crucially on different shades of meaning of the word "proud" which come into play, depending on the colour of the person who says it. These different meanings come into play because of the history of oppression associated with these colours; we don't (usually) think in a vacuum. To make this clearer, consider the following, slightly modified thought experiment:
Imagine that a black person says: "I am not ashamed to be black!".
Now imagine that a white person says "I am not ashamed to be white!".
How strong is the knee-jercky reaction now? Think about it.
>allowing a female employee's problems at work to be continually ignored.
Who is to say that it was only a female employee's problems? It sounds like the wife is a nut case and she could very well have bothered other employees. There is no evidence here that her requests were being ignored because she is a female.
>The hula hooping moment was important because it visibly demonstrated her male coworkers lack of respect for women as people.
Are you serious? Is it really the case that you have no respect for a person if you watch them performing a sporting activity? If I start juggling and someone watches me, I highly doubt that it's because he/she has a lack of respect for me as a person.
Seriously, read what you just said. It implies that you cannot watch people performing an activity while respecting their autonomy.
I think, if anything, the incident that triggered her leaving was an indication of how safe other girls at the company felt at the same time when she was bullied by the founders wife till she broke.
> The hula hooping moment was important because it visibly demonstrated her male coworkers lack of respect for women as people.
Maybe hula-hooping is a common occurrence in Silicon Valley offices, but if my co-workers would be hula-hooping I would be looking as well (regardless whether they are male or female). Probably I would be thinking 'why on earth are you hula-hooping in you workplace instead of working'. I guess there is a fine line between gawking and looking.
Don't get me wrong - the entire situation she describes sound horrible but the hula-hooping did not sound very professional in the first place.
Why are those mutually exclusive? I get that women don't like being ogled upon, but if you are hula-hooping in the workplace, that's bound to attract some attention and not because you are such a smart person (althou you can certainly have fun and be smart). I wasn't there so I can't tell what the tenor was but I suspect that Horvath's state of mind due to the extreme pressure might have exaggerated that incident. I've seen comments throughout the thread saying she should have gotten help on the dick coworker reverting her code. In that environment it's very easy to become unsure of herself. She wasn't getting help with the founder-wife issue, why would HR respond to this? I've been wondering about Atlassian for a while. Maybe I should take a second look.
Perhaps they liked being stared at as eyecandy.
It's not disrespecting people to consider them attractive.
> The hula hooping moment was important because it visibly demonstrated her male coworkers lack of respect for women as people. They were unabashedly staring at their female coworkers as "eyecandy" in that moment and even defended their doing so.
Totally disagree. If someone is hula hooping in a company that usually builds software to host version control repositories, they are doing something quite out of the ordinary, which is going to lead people to gawk. This does not necessarily imply sexual objectification, though it doesn't preclude it.
> They were unabashedly staring at their female coworkers as "eyecandy" in that moment and even defended their doing so.
Why should someone be "abashed" at staring at someone who is hula hooping in the office? This is slowly starting to lean towards 'thoughtcrime', as long as they don't make overtly sexual or lewd comments, they shouldn't be unnecessarily be accused of a "lack of respect for women as people".
Your only source on this story is Horvath's recounting of it, and she says it was inappropriate. By what means do we have to question her assessment of the events? In questioning her, with no other information, you're saying "I don't believe you, you've irrationally overreacted". And that can only based not on the facts of the situation, but on your personal opinions of what "women" in aggregate are like. In other words, you're explicitly marginalizing Horvath's opinion because she is a woman.
This is how sexism works.
The sexism in this scenario is subtle and persistent, something that likely tainted all of the workplace interactions at github, allowing a female employee's problems at work to be continually ignored.
Lots of people of both sexes are impotent and disaffected at work, so it's not necessarily proof of anything when someone says "my opinion is not respected" and then finds superficials to explain it. If you can demonstrate a pattern, sure, but simply drawing from personal experience is very close to useless. In this case she is drawing from personal experience.
The hula hooping moment was important because it visibly demonstrated her male coworkers lack of respect for women as people.
What a gigantic jump. I mean, solar system crossing. Two people put on what sounds like a unique, if not artistic demonstration. People watch. It might actually be her own insecurities and hangups that led her to decry this, which is actually a perverse and rather incredible bit of sexism in itself ("women of Github...hide your shame. Don yon burkas and shroud yourself from the lusts of men").
This is not a clear story at all (clearly the founder's wife -- who is a significant owner of the company, fwiw -- got involved for something completely unspoken), and there is no reason for anyone to knee jerk to either side.
Further (and this comment is more general) it is toxic and repressive for the classic "Oh woe am I, look at all of the victim blaming in here! How offensive!". Github, and all of the players involved, are people too. Because one person yells the loudest and earliest doesn't mean that you can grab your torches with legitimacy without being the problem yourself.
Roll eyes. Men get treated as eye candy too. Honestly, if you do that at work, it doesn't matter who you are, you are going to get gawked at.
Most of this seemed like a poor performer who socialized too much at work. The problem was the crazy wife. Two bad drivers meet at an intersection..
And for people saying the guys don't get worked over in pull requests or have their code passively aggressively reverted, all I can say is LOL.