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GitHub I’m angry because I’m afraid.

28 points by evolve2k 13y ago

louhike 13y ago
The cached version, as the website seems down now: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:HmMy-esKPN8J:blog.ellenchisa.com/2014/04/22/im-angry-because-im-afraid/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&lr=lang_en%7Clang_fr http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:HmMy-es...
rubiquity 13y ago
> Every time I tweet gender, I go back through to make sure all the people who are “important” to me still follow me. (Hint: people with power over me. Heads of Product at interesting companies. VCs. I’m not too afraid that my friends are going to stop following me.) I don't even really know what to say to this. Thanks for your honesty, I guess? > The situation started feeling much worse when Marc Andreesen tweeted his support.. I’ve always looked up to A16Z. I’ve respected the people I’ve met there. Ben Horowitz used female pronouns in his book! Woah, hey now. Quite the contrast between this paragraph and the other paragraph that I highlighted above. Much like you make sure people that have power over you being wealthy still follow you, A16Z takes care of people that are very likely to result in making A16Z wealth.
- StavrosK 13y ago
  > I’m not too afraid that my friends are going to stop following me. He probably means "I know my friends know me better and won't stop following me over a pronoun".
JonFish85 13y ago
> It said “he messed up enough to need to leave, but it’s not a technical legal claim.” That’s.. ambiguous. It comes across as “something bad happened, but we’re going to pretend it didn’t to protect ourselves legally.” I don't really see why people are confused about this. He probably exercised some poor judgement, as they said, but poor judgement and illegalities are often a long ways apart. The best thing for both parties was probably for him to leave. He was a distraction to GitHub, and this whole mess is a distraction for him. Part ways, both parties move on and continue. I don't think it comes across sketchy, personally. There was almost no way he was going to stay on long-term, given this history. It's a liability for the company, and honestly he's probably on eggshells around the company anyways. Even as the author states, it's hard to PROVE that something was sexist. I imagine he said some inappropriate things, and maybe even did some inappropriate things, but proving that they were illegal is a WHOLE different bag. >The entire situation reads: A male executive can do something that’s wrong/sexist. The company will want to cover itself legally, so it will discredit the claims. Let's fix that. "An executive can do something that's wrong/sexist. The company will want to cover itself legally, so it will discredit the claims." Let's not make this about gender. A company has a duty to its shareholders to protect itself.
- personZ 13y ago
  "He probably exercised some poor judgement" As you said, people seem to fail to understand the nuances of something like this. It's entirely possible that he meant entirely well, but acted in a manner that was -- as they mentioned to his wife -- terribly naive, at least for a company of the scale of Github. Just to give an example of such a nuance, in a tiny startup there might be occasions where everyone might have a big drinking and cavorting pool party at the founder's pad. As the company gets bigger, however, such activities become legal liability cesspools, and it would be very poor judgment because everything becomes a perilous he said/she said type situation. That is an extreme example, but it's why senior management often become increasingly insular and detached as the company grows: Because they legally have to. It sounds like Tom failed to do this. Which is exactly what it sounds like happened here. I kind of despise this blog entry because while it berates the unfairness of the old boy's club and so on, it seems to argue that any woman who claims anything should be treated as unequivocal truth, punishment meted out to the harshest extent possible. That is scary, but it is sadly where many of these conversations seem to go. Not all women are honest and truthful. Women are not above pettiness, power plays and self-interests.
  - grifpete 13y ago
    'despise' is a very strong term. It implies a much much stronger reaction to the material than just disagreeing with it. Why is that? 'it seems to argue that any woman who claims anything should be treated as unequivocal truth, punishment meted out to the harshest extent possible' No it doesn't. It doesn't say anything of the kind.If you take that from the article then you are bringing that position to the material. "Not all women are honest and truthful. Women are not above pettiness, power plays and self-interests." Very true. But it is hard to see how this relates to the real point of the blog. All in all, I detect clear evidence of an angry person, ready to project his resentment at what he believes to be inappropriate powerplays by scheming women. Scary powerplays that are too often blindly supported.
    - personZ 13y ago
      >Why is that? Because it is unfair when someone supports someone, and their position, purely because of their gender. It is despicable behaviour. It is absolutely worth strong emotions. >It doesn't say anything of the kind. It quite clearly lays out a case that Horvath must be in the right, Tom must be in the wrong (and those supporting him will face the wrath of all women who will now not want to deal with them, because of the above), and Github is merely trying to clean their hands of it. Yes, it absolutely says so. All outcomes are only variations of the preceding. >All in all, I detect clear evidence of an angry person Take your white knight act somewhere else. Your particular form of discouraging disagreement is disgusting. No, seriously, it is vile, and is the sort of banal ignorance of people who have nothing interesting to say. It is actually remarkably paternalistic how many take stories like that: She is a woman, so she simply must be the victim. He is a man, so he simply must be the villain. Yet this base assumption goes unstated and simply assumed, as if we're all in agreement. But we aren't, and stating that women are as great as men in all things, including the negatives, is important, because brave knights such as yourself fail to understand this.
lolwutf 13y ago
'I want to spend it doing Product Management and founding companies.' ...so what you're saying is you don't really do anything?
- personZ 13y ago
  Everyone has a right to be heard, but I confess that I was searching around on the site wondering "who is this person?" While it sounds harsh, it sounds like their claim to fame is being one of the 3 billion or so females on the planet.
  - jwarren 13y ago
    You don't need to have fame to have feeling and worth.
  - grifpete 13y ago
    It does sound harsh. There is a lot of material online about the case in question.
at-fates-hands 13y ago
This whole situation is really sketchy for me. Horvath brought some pretty serious allegations, but never actually sued GitHub. Instead, she wrote about it on Twitter and social media sites, because that's what you do these days when you feel you've been discriminated against and harassed, right? More people jumped into the fray and stated Horvath was acting weird and starting nasty rumors about the founder's wife and their new baby. GitHub didn't help its cause very much when the owner's wife was banned from the office and the founder stepped down, which seemed to give Horvath's supporters some more fuel to tweet about, even though it was probably more damage control than admitting any wrong doing. I'm still not sure where I sit on this one. Everybody is accountable, and to some degree it feels like Horvath is milking this for all its worth, for better or worse. In some of the environments I've worked in, women who have "alpha" traits are not looked upon favorably and detested by their male counterparts. It seems like Horvath has some of these traits and was probably part of the problem at GitHub. I'm in the Midwest, but is this situation pretty rare and we're blowing it out of proportion, or do these situations occur more frequently than I read about?
- grifpete 13y ago
  What are 'alpha' traits please?
  - at-fates-hands 13y ago
    "In social animals, the alpha is the individual in the community with the highest rank. Male or female individuals or both can be alphas, depending on their species. Where one male and one female fulfill this role, they are referred to as the alpha pair. Other animals in the same social group may exhibit deference or other symbolic signs of respect particular to their species towards the alpha or alphas." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_%28ethology%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_%28ethology%29 The way her blog reads and the stories surrounding the GitHub incident indicates to me, she thought she was in charge and pushed people around, which turned a lot of people off. Alpha positions are earned, not given. When people come in and just expect to be the dominant personality, you get the issues she ran into at GitHub. This doesn't take away from any of her allegations, but it probably was a role in the issues and friction she had with team members.
renata 13y ago
> Julie Ann saying what she did was credible because of the reputation she’d built. As somebody who hadn't heard of her before her allegations, her reputation to me was "person who was offended by a meritocracy rug and people watching hula-hoopers at a party". If anything, I'm more afraid of working with Horvath because any little thing I do could seemingly get me fired.
- grifpete 13y ago
  I think this is a very unfair characterization of her statements. The substance of her concerns was not a rug or people watching hula hoopers. I think your remark about being afraid of working with her is both understandable and disturbing. And both stem from the same thing - uncertainty. Understandable because if she really is an oversensitive harridan then you might well not want to work with her. But disturbing, because if she isn't then you have judged her unfairly. And the reason this is doubly unfair is that if her case has any merit she can't win in this situation. There will always be people like you who don't want to give her ANY benefit of the doubt. This is a stigma very similar to the one that whistle blowers suffer. So I understand where you are coming from but it really sucks that the whiff of scandal can result in people not wanting to touch her with a barge pole.

28 points by evolve2k 13y ago

The cached version, as the website seems down now: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:HmMy-esKPN8J:blog.ellenchisa.com/2014/04/22/im-angry-because-im-afraid/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&lr=lang_en%7Clang_fr http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:HmMy-es...

rubiquity 13y ago

> Every time I tweet gender, I go back through to make sure all the people who are “important” to me still follow me. (Hint: people with power over me. Heads of Product at interesting companies. VCs. I’m not too afraid that my friends are going to stop following me.) I don't even really know what to say to this. Thanks for your honesty, I guess? > The situation started feeling much worse when Marc Andreesen tweeted his support.. I’ve always looked up to A16Z. I’ve respected the people I’ve met there. Ben Horowitz used female pronouns in his book! Woah, hey now. Quite the contrast between this paragraph and the other paragraph that I highlighted above. Much like you make sure people that have power over you being wealthy still follow you, A16Z takes care of people that are very likely to result in making A16Z wealth.

StavrosK 13y ago
> I’m not too afraid that my friends are going to stop following me. He probably means "I know my friends know me better and won't stop following me over a pronoun".

JonFish85 13y ago

> It said “he messed up enough to need to leave, but it’s not a technical legal claim.” That’s.. ambiguous. It comes across as “something bad happened, but we’re going to pretend it didn’t to protect ourselves legally.” I don't really see why people are confused about this. He probably exercised some poor judgement, as they said, but poor judgement and illegalities are often a long ways apart. The best thing for both parties was probably for him to leave. He was a distraction to GitHub, and this whole mess is a distraction for him. Part ways, both parties move on and continue. I don't think it comes across sketchy, personally. There was almost no way he was going to stay on long-term, given this history. It's a liability for the company, and honestly he's probably on eggshells around the company anyways. Even as the author states, it's hard to PROVE that something was sexist. I imagine he said some inappropriate things, and maybe even did some inappropriate things, but proving that they were illegal is a WHOLE different bag. >The entire situation reads: A male executive can do something that’s wrong/sexist. The company will want to cover itself legally, so it will discredit the claims. Let's fix that. "An executive can do something that's wrong/sexist. The company will want to cover itself legally, so it will discredit the claims." Let's not make this about gender. A company has a duty to its shareholders to protect itself.

personZ 13y ago
"He probably exercised some poor judgement" As you said, people seem to fail to understand the nuances of something like this. It's entirely possible that he meant entirely well, but acted in a manner that was -- as they mentioned to his wife -- terribly naive, at least for a company of the scale of Github. Just to give an example of such a nuance, in a tiny startup there might be occasions where everyone might have a big drinking and cavorting pool party at the founder's pad. As the company gets bigger, however, such activities become legal liability cesspools, and it would be very poor judgment because everything becomes a perilous he said/she said type situation. That is an extreme example, but it's why senior management often become increasingly insular and detached as the company grows: Because they legally have to. It sounds like Tom failed to do this. Which is exactly what it sounds like happened here. I kind of despise this blog entry because while it berates the unfairness of the old boy's club and so on, it seems to argue that any woman who claims anything should be treated as unequivocal truth, punishment meted out to the harshest extent possible. That is scary, but it is sadly where many of these conversations seem to go. Not all women are honest and truthful. Women are not above pettiness, power plays and self-interests.
- grifpete 13y ago
  'despise' is a very strong term. It implies a much much stronger reaction to the material than just disagreeing with it. Why is that? 'it seems to argue that any woman who claims anything should be treated as unequivocal truth, punishment meted out to the harshest extent possible' No it doesn't. It doesn't say anything of the kind.If you take that from the article then you are bringing that position to the material. "Not all women are honest and truthful. Women are not above pettiness, power plays and self-interests." Very true. But it is hard to see how this relates to the real point of the blog. All in all, I detect clear evidence of an angry person, ready to project his resentment at what he believes to be inappropriate powerplays by scheming women. Scary powerplays that are too often blindly supported.
  - personZ 13y ago
    >Why is that? Because it is unfair when someone supports someone, and their position, purely because of their gender. It is despicable behaviour. It is absolutely worth strong emotions. >It doesn't say anything of the kind. It quite clearly lays out a case that Horvath must be in the right, Tom must be in the wrong (and those supporting him will face the wrath of all women who will now not want to deal with them, because of the above), and Github is merely trying to clean their hands of it. Yes, it absolutely says so. All outcomes are only variations of the preceding. >All in all, I detect clear evidence of an angry person Take your white knight act somewhere else. Your particular form of discouraging disagreement is disgusting. No, seriously, it is vile, and is the sort of banal ignorance of people who have nothing interesting to say. It is actually remarkably paternalistic how many take stories like that: She is a woman, so she simply must be the victim. He is a man, so he simply must be the villain. Yet this base assumption goes unstated and simply assumed, as if we're all in agreement. But we aren't, and stating that women are as great as men in all things, including the negatives, is important, because brave knights such as yourself fail to understand this.

lolwutf 13y ago

'I want to spend it doing Product Management and founding companies.' ...so what you're saying is you don't really do anything?

personZ 13y ago
Everyone has a right to be heard, but I confess that I was searching around on the site wondering "who is this person?" While it sounds harsh, it sounds like their claim to fame is being one of the 3 billion or so females on the planet.
- jwarren 13y ago
  You don't need to have fame to have feeling and worth.
- grifpete 13y ago
  It does sound harsh. There is a lot of material online about the case in question.

at-fates-hands 13y ago

This whole situation is really sketchy for me. Horvath brought some pretty serious allegations, but never actually sued GitHub. Instead, she wrote about it on Twitter and social media sites, because that's what you do these days when you feel you've been discriminated against and harassed, right? More people jumped into the fray and stated Horvath was acting weird and starting nasty rumors about the founder's wife and their new baby. GitHub didn't help its cause very much when the owner's wife was banned from the office and the founder stepped down, which seemed to give Horvath's supporters some more fuel to tweet about, even though it was probably more damage control than admitting any wrong doing. I'm still not sure where I sit on this one. Everybody is accountable, and to some degree it feels like Horvath is milking this for all its worth, for better or worse. In some of the environments I've worked in, women who have "alpha" traits are not looked upon favorably and detested by their male counterparts. It seems like Horvath has some of these traits and was probably part of the problem at GitHub. I'm in the Midwest, but is this situation pretty rare and we're blowing it out of proportion, or do these situations occur more frequently than I read about?

grifpete 13y ago
What are 'alpha' traits please?
- at-fates-hands 13y ago
  "In social animals, the alpha is the individual in the community with the highest rank. Male or female individuals or both can be alphas, depending on their species. Where one male and one female fulfill this role, they are referred to as the alpha pair. Other animals in the same social group may exhibit deference or other symbolic signs of respect particular to their species towards the alpha or alphas." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_%28ethology%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_%28ethology%29 The way her blog reads and the stories surrounding the GitHub incident indicates to me, she thought she was in charge and pushed people around, which turned a lot of people off. Alpha positions are earned, not given. When people come in and just expect to be the dominant personality, you get the issues she ran into at GitHub. This doesn't take away from any of her allegations, but it probably was a role in the issues and friction she had with team members.

renata 13y ago

> Julie Ann saying what she did was credible because of the reputation she’d built. As somebody who hadn't heard of her before her allegations, her reputation to me was "person who was offended by a meritocracy rug and people watching hula-hoopers at a party". If anything, I'm more afraid of working with Horvath because any little thing I do could seemingly get me fired.

grifpete 13y ago
I think this is a very unfair characterization of her statements. The substance of her concerns was not a rug or people watching hula hoopers. I think your remark about being afraid of working with her is both understandable and disturbing. And both stem from the same thing - uncertainty. Understandable because if she really is an oversensitive harridan then you might well not want to work with her. But disturbing, because if she isn't then you have judged her unfairly. And the reason this is doubly unfair is that if her case has any merit she can't win in this situation. There will always be people like you who don't want to give her ANY benefit of the doubt. This is a stigma very similar to the one that whistle blowers suffer. So I understand where you are coming from but it really sucks that the whiff of scandal can result in people not wanting to touch her with a barge pole.