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> The investigation found no evidence to support the claims [...] of a sexist or hostile work environment. So, are they saying that Horvath was lying? I mean,

> The investigation found no evidence to support the claims [...] of a sexist or hostile work environment. So, are they saying that Horvath was lying? I mean, there was a lot of specific stuff she mentioned that seemed inappropriate. I don't want to get into whether the behavior was "sexist" or not, but I think we can all agree that if what she said was true, the work environment was hostile and unprofessional.

jmelloy 12y ago
They're saying that the investigative team brought in to determine if there was anything they could be sued over found no evidence/email trail for the specific things that they could get sued over. "We didn't find an email trail that could lead to a lawsuit, and the co-founder in question immediately resigned" is a very far cry from "Everything she said was a lie."
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
falcolas 12y ago
Note that the denial is couched in the terminology "there was no legal wrongdoing". Not that there was no wrongdoing, just nothing blatant enough (or which left evidence) that it broke laws.
- tptacek 12y ago
  No, the denial says "no evidence exists to support the claim". That's a direct and testable assertion, not weasel words.
  - calibraxis 12y ago
    I'd like to see how you (or anyone here) propose to test it. This isn't science; it's a corporate press release. Do we know the name of the "full, independent, third-party" investigator(s)? Do we know who paid for them, their methodology, and whether they reported to Horvath, giving her oversight? Or are investigators the same, like software contractors?
    - danielweber 12y ago
      You and I or 'tptacek probably cannot test it, but Horvath's lawyer may be able to sue to test it. It would be very dumb of GitHub to state that there is no evidence if there is evidence that Horvath could turn up. (Granted, sometimes companies are dumb.)
  - falcolas 12y ago
    Actually, that specific denial is limited to two items: gender based discrimination by Tom Preston-Werner and his wife, and the existence of a discriminatory/hostile workspace. Not coincidentally, these are the two claims which would have been against the law, and also the least of the claims brought forth by Horvath (though it's the angle latched onto by the media) - she instead claimed personal harassment from Horvath's wife, and the non-responsiveness of HR to these issues. The only real gender based problems she had were related to male co-worker's responses to female co-workers hula-hooping, as I remember it. There wouldn't be much evidence of personal harassment, particularly the kind described by Horvath.
  - theothermkn 12y ago
    "[D]irect and testable assertion" sounds scientific, certainly. It would be interesting to hear how you would flesh that out, though. For example, when they say "no evidence exists," don't we immediately run into the question of whether the claims of Ms. Horvath don't actually constitute evidence? What does constitutes "evidence"? Is that question testable? If Ms. Horvath's claims don't count as evidence, then why does Github's claim that "no evidence exists" count? What test or tests do you propose? Criminal and civil investigations are not scientific investigations. They may make use of science, but they are not scientific. To import the language of science--actually neo-Popperian pop-cultural language about science--into a discussion of an internal investigation into harassment claims is highly suspect. Your claim aside, these are weasel words. The way to discover the fact that they are is to appropriately apply language akin to that of jurisprudence, rather than inappropriately apply that of science.
  - bravura 12y ago
    No, the blog post says: "The investigation found no evidence". Failure to find is distinct from a negative result. You can't test for failure to find, just as you cannot test for statistical insignificance.
canadaj 12y ago
Maybe this hostile and unprofessional environment are the "mistakes and errors" from the article. I was curious about this, myself.
nymph 12y ago
There was a lot of specific stuff she mentioned that seemed inappropriate. Such as?
- baby 12y ago
  I was wondering as well since this is the first time that I learn about the issue: http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/15/julie-ann-horvath-describes-sexism-and-intimidation-behind-her-github-exit/ http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/15/julie-ann-horvath-describes...
  - nymph 12y ago
    Thanks.
- nymph 12y ago
  Downvoters: Would you mind explaining yourselves? It was a perfectly reasonable question to ask.
  - chrismonsanto 12y ago
    I didn't downvote you, but this is a hot-button issue right now. A lot of people are familiar with what happened, and (perhaps wrongly) assume that everyone else is as well. Assuming that context, your post can be interpreted as "I don't think that the things said Horvath brought up were a big deal", where you might have meant "I'm not familiar with this subject, what did she bring up that was so bad?"
    - nymph 12y ago
      That's about what I thought. But as it happens, no, I wasn't doubting the claims -- I just wasn't following the story obsessively and wasn't aware of the details.
unfunco 12y ago
They are definitely not saying Horvath was lying, they are saying they found no evidence of a sexist or hostile work environment - the investigation was lead by a third party, and best behaviour would have been in place at and before the moment they arrived following the claims, it's likely that many, if not most of the company hadn't experienced the same treatment that Horvath allegedly received, and they would have explained that to the investigators.
danso 12y ago
I think it's possible that Horvath was right about the poor actions of management, and at the same time, very little of what she alleged seemed to fall into the bounds of gender-based discrimination. A colleague who reverts your commits because you wouldn't date him...that's not gender-based, that's office-romance strife (though obviously, such strife can be exacerbated with a gender imbalance at the company). I'm kind of interested in what happened to that engineer. edit: FYI: her detailed complaint to TechCrunch: http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/15/julie-ann-horvath-describes-sexism-and-intimidation-behind-her-github-exit/ http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/15/julie-ann-horvath-describes... re: The co-worker who couldn't handle being rejected by her: > The rejection of the other employee led to something of an internal battle at GitHub. According to Horvath, the engineer, “hurt from my rejection, started passive-aggressively ripping out my code from projects we had worked on together without so much as a ping or a comment. I even had to have a few of his commits reverted. I would work on something, go to bed, and wake up to find my work gone without any explanation.” The employee in question, according to Horvath, is both “well-liked at GitHub” and “popular in the community.” His “behavior towards female employees,” according to Horvath, “especially those he sees as opportunities is disgusting.” And there was one more incident that would purportedly fall under sexism: > Two women, one of whom I work with and adore, and a friend of hers were hula hooping to some music. I didn’t have a problem with this. What I did have a problem with is the line of men sitting on one bench facing the hoopers and gawking at them. It looked like something out of a strip club. When I brought this up to male coworkers, they didn’t see a problem with it. But for me it felt unsafe and to be honest, really embarrassing. That was the moment I decided to finally leave GitHub. The first one, of course, is bad. And there's possibly a case to be made that if management knew about this engineer and let it slide, well, that does create a hostile environment. Yet I don't think Horvath points out where she complained about this guy's commit-reverting behavior to management. The second thing, about hula-hooping, without context, it doesn't really mean anything beyond what Horvath claims she was able to grok just by stumbling upon the scene. I think during the original HN discussion, a Githubber said that the hula-hooping happened during an in-office party. Either way, hula-hooping and watching said-hula-hooping is hard to claim, on its face, as being gender-discrimination. The other stuff though, about the co-founder unfairly pressuring her partner to resign, and the co-founder's wife claiming to have access to Github employees' private data...Those could be things that the company frowns upon enough to merit a resignation.
deleted 12y ago
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bertil 12y ago
The key word in there would be “evidence”: take the example of “oogling” female employees hulla-ooping. You can prove that they did hulla-oop, but not that the way others watched them was sexist. Proof is a huge issue with sexism in general: anecdotal, or separate cases for discrimination; expression of consent when it comes to rape, etc. I wished organisation handling such issues focused on provability in court, rather than awareness.
personZ 12y ago
So, are they saying that Horvath was lying? Neither party has to be lying. She might honestly believe she was treated in a specific way because of her sex, while others may have treated her in a specific way because of, for instance, her competence. Both may be 100% honest in their assessment of the relationship, yet be completely at odds. The workplace absolutely sounded unprofessional, which often means the entire gradient of behaviour from welcoming to hostile (versus the normal corporate realm of gray areas in between). Indeed, unprofessional workplaces are generally celebrated in the tech community, often for good reason.
- pdonis 12y ago
  > unprofessional workplaces are generally celebrated in the tech community, often for good reason Why for good reason? Do you have any specific examples in mind?
  - theorique 12y ago
    Not the OP but here's an example. And yet conventional ideas of professionalism have such an iron grip on our minds that even startup founders are affected by them. In our startup, when outsiders came to visit we tried hard to seem "professional." We'd clean up our offices, wear better clothes, try to arrange that a lot of people were there during conventional office hours. In fact, programming didn't get done by well-dressed people at clean desks during office hours. It got done by badly dressed people (I was notorious for programmming wearing just a towel) in offices strewn with junk at 2 in the morning. But no visitor would understand that. Not even investors, who are supposed to be able to recognize real productivity when they see it. Even we were affected by the conventional wisdom. http://www.paulgraham.com/foundersatwork.html http://www.paulgraham.com/foundersatwork.html The idea being, in that ultra-early-stage, 2-3 founding members only, state, trying too hard to be "professional" is counterproductive. Obviously, at the scale that we're talking about with Github, the game changes.
    - pdonis 12y ago
      Ah, ok, I agree there's a big difference between an ultra-early-stage startup and a company the size of Github. But the latter criterion is what seems relevant to me for this thread, since it's about what happened at Github.
PeterisP 12y ago
A comment by her colleagues here https://medium.com/p/d96f431f4e8e https://medium.com/p/d96f431f4e8e might be relevant to this.

jmelloy 12y ago

They're saying that the investigative team brought in to determine if there was anything they could be sued over found no evidence/email trail for the specific things that they could get sued over. "We didn't find an email trail that could lead to a lawsuit, and the co-founder in question immediately resigned" is a very far cry from "Everything she said was a lie."

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

falcolas 12y ago

Note that the denial is couched in the terminology "there was no legal wrongdoing". Not that there was no wrongdoing, just nothing blatant enough (or which left evidence) that it broke laws.

tptacek 12y ago
No, the denial says "no evidence exists to support the claim". That's a direct and testable assertion, not weasel words.
- calibraxis 12y ago
  I'd like to see how you (or anyone here) propose to test it. This isn't science; it's a corporate press release. Do we know the name of the "full, independent, third-party" investigator(s)? Do we know who paid for them, their methodology, and whether they reported to Horvath, giving her oversight? Or are investigators the same, like software contractors?
  - danielweber 12y ago
    You and I or 'tptacek probably cannot test it, but Horvath's lawyer may be able to sue to test it. It would be very dumb of GitHub to state that there is no evidence if there is evidence that Horvath could turn up. (Granted, sometimes companies are dumb.)
- falcolas 12y ago
  Actually, that specific denial is limited to two items: gender based discrimination by Tom Preston-Werner and his wife, and the existence of a discriminatory/hostile workspace. Not coincidentally, these are the two claims which would have been against the law, and also the least of the claims brought forth by Horvath (though it's the angle latched onto by the media) - she instead claimed personal harassment from Horvath's wife, and the non-responsiveness of HR to these issues. The only real gender based problems she had were related to male co-worker's responses to female co-workers hula-hooping, as I remember it. There wouldn't be much evidence of personal harassment, particularly the kind described by Horvath.
- theothermkn 12y ago
  "[D]irect and testable assertion" sounds scientific, certainly. It would be interesting to hear how you would flesh that out, though. For example, when they say "no evidence exists," don't we immediately run into the question of whether the claims of Ms. Horvath don't actually constitute evidence? What does constitutes "evidence"? Is that question testable? If Ms. Horvath's claims don't count as evidence, then why does Github's claim that "no evidence exists" count? What test or tests do you propose? Criminal and civil investigations are not scientific investigations. They may make use of science, but they are not scientific. To import the language of science--actually neo-Popperian pop-cultural language about science--into a discussion of an internal investigation into harassment claims is highly suspect. Your claim aside, these are weasel words. The way to discover the fact that they are is to appropriately apply language akin to that of jurisprudence, rather than inappropriately apply that of science.
- bravura 12y ago
  No, the blog post says: "The investigation found no evidence". Failure to find is distinct from a negative result. You can't test for failure to find, just as you cannot test for statistical insignificance.

canadaj 12y ago

Maybe this hostile and unprofessional environment are the "mistakes and errors" from the article. I was curious about this, myself.

nymph 12y ago

There was a lot of specific stuff she mentioned that seemed inappropriate. Such as?

baby 12y ago
I was wondering as well since this is the first time that I learn about the issue: http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/15/julie-ann-horvath-describes-sexism-and-intimidation-behind-her-github-exit/ http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/15/julie-ann-horvath-describes...
- nymph 12y ago
  Thanks.
nymph 12y ago
Downvoters: Would you mind explaining yourselves? It was a perfectly reasonable question to ask.
- chrismonsanto 12y ago
  I didn't downvote you, but this is a hot-button issue right now. A lot of people are familiar with what happened, and (perhaps wrongly) assume that everyone else is as well. Assuming that context, your post can be interpreted as "I don't think that the things said Horvath brought up were a big deal", where you might have meant "I'm not familiar with this subject, what did she bring up that was so bad?"
  - nymph 12y ago
    That's about what I thought. But as it happens, no, I wasn't doubting the claims -- I just wasn't following the story obsessively and wasn't aware of the details.

unfunco 12y ago

They are definitely not saying Horvath was lying, they are saying they found no evidence of a sexist or hostile work environment - the investigation was lead by a third party, and best behaviour would have been in place at and before the moment they arrived following the claims, it's likely that many, if not most of the company hadn't experienced the same treatment that Horvath allegedly received, and they would have explained that to the investigators.

danso 12y ago

I think it's possible that Horvath was right about the poor actions of management, and at the same time, very little of what she alleged seemed to fall into the bounds of gender-based discrimination. A colleague who reverts your commits because you wouldn't date him...that's not gender-based, that's office-romance strife (though obviously, such strife can be exacerbated with a gender imbalance at the company). I'm kind of interested in what happened to that engineer. edit: FYI: her detailed complaint to TechCrunch: http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/15/julie-ann-horvath-describes-sexism-and-intimidation-behind-her-github-exit/ http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/15/julie-ann-horvath-describes... re: The co-worker who couldn't handle being rejected by her: > The rejection of the other employee led to something of an internal battle at GitHub. According to Horvath, the engineer, “hurt from my rejection, started passive-aggressively ripping out my code from projects we had worked on together without so much as a ping or a comment. I even had to have a few of his commits reverted. I would work on something, go to bed, and wake up to find my work gone without any explanation.” The employee in question, according to Horvath, is both “well-liked at GitHub” and “popular in the community.” His “behavior towards female employees,” according to Horvath, “especially those he sees as opportunities is disgusting.” And there was one more incident that would purportedly fall under sexism: > Two women, one of whom I work with and adore, and a friend of hers were hula hooping to some music. I didn’t have a problem with this. What I did have a problem with is the line of men sitting on one bench facing the hoopers and gawking at them. It looked like something out of a strip club. When I brought this up to male coworkers, they didn’t see a problem with it. But for me it felt unsafe and to be honest, really embarrassing. That was the moment I decided to finally leave GitHub. The first one, of course, is bad. And there's possibly a case to be made that if management knew about this engineer and let it slide, well, that does create a hostile environment. Yet I don't think Horvath points out where she complained about this guy's commit-reverting behavior to management. The second thing, about hula-hooping, without context, it doesn't really mean anything beyond what Horvath claims she was able to grok just by stumbling upon the scene. I think during the original HN discussion, a Githubber said that the hula-hooping happened during an in-office party. Either way, hula-hooping and watching said-hula-hooping is hard to claim, on its face, as being gender-discrimination. The other stuff though, about the co-founder unfairly pressuring her partner to resign, and the co-founder's wife claiming to have access to Github employees' private data...Those could be things that the company frowns upon enough to merit a resignation.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

bertil 12y ago

The key word in there would be “evidence”: take the example of “oogling” female employees hulla-ooping. You can prove that they did hulla-oop, but not that the way others watched them was sexist. Proof is a huge issue with sexism in general: anecdotal, or separate cases for discrimination; expression of consent when it comes to rape, etc. I wished organisation handling such issues focused on provability in court, rather than awareness.

personZ 12y ago

So, are they saying that Horvath was lying? Neither party has to be lying. She might honestly believe she was treated in a specific way because of her sex, while others may have treated her in a specific way because of, for instance, her competence. Both may be 100% honest in their assessment of the relationship, yet be completely at odds. The workplace absolutely sounded unprofessional, which often means the entire gradient of behaviour from welcoming to hostile (versus the normal corporate realm of gray areas in between). Indeed, unprofessional workplaces are generally celebrated in the tech community, often for good reason.

pdonis 12y ago
> unprofessional workplaces are generally celebrated in the tech community, often for good reason Why for good reason? Do you have any specific examples in mind?
- theorique 12y ago
  Not the OP but here's an example. And yet conventional ideas of professionalism have such an iron grip on our minds that even startup founders are affected by them. In our startup, when outsiders came to visit we tried hard to seem "professional." We'd clean up our offices, wear better clothes, try to arrange that a lot of people were there during conventional office hours. In fact, programming didn't get done by well-dressed people at clean desks during office hours. It got done by badly dressed people (I was notorious for programmming wearing just a towel) in offices strewn with junk at 2 in the morning. But no visitor would understand that. Not even investors, who are supposed to be able to recognize real productivity when they see it. Even we were affected by the conventional wisdom. http://www.paulgraham.com/foundersatwork.html http://www.paulgraham.com/foundersatwork.html The idea being, in that ultra-early-stage, 2-3 founding members only, state, trying too hard to be "professional" is counterproductive. Obviously, at the scale that we're talking about with Github, the game changes.
  - pdonis 12y ago
    Ah, ok, I agree there's a big difference between an ultra-early-stage startup and a company the size of Github. But the latter criterion is what seems relevant to me for this thread, since it's about what happened at Github.

PeterisP 12y ago

A comment by her colleagues here https://medium.com/p/d96f431f4e8e https://medium.com/p/d96f431f4e8e might be relevant to this.