

Adria Richards' Story Shows How Sexual Harassment Endures in Tech Community - jellicle
http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/03/25/adria_richards_her_firing_online_harassment_show_how_sexual_harassment_endures.html

======
gonvaled
"Shortly thereafter, one of the men was fired by his employer, who hinted at
multiple contributing factors beyond the jokes"

Isn't this completely wrong? Wasn't the engineer fired _long before_ Adria was
fired? Wasn't the vitriol towards Adria not caused by the fact that the
engineer was fired?

Not that the vitriol was right. Just getting the facts straight before getting
to conclusions.

~~~
jerrya
_who hinted at multiple contributing factors beyond the jokes_

(<http://blog.playhaven.com/addressing-pycon/>)

Given that link that Valerie Aurora attributes to this, Aurora's
characterization is just wrong at best, and is an out and out lie of Aurora's
at worst.

There is absolutely nothing in PlayHaven's statement "hinting at multiple
contributing factors beyond the jokes."

~~~
jellicle
Well, except for the line where they hint at multiple contributing factors
beyond the jokes.

"We value and protect the privacy of our employees, both past and present, and
we will not comment on all the factors that contributed to our parting ways."

And also where they declined to punish the other employee involved. I'm pretty
sure that anyone with basic reading comprehension would read that statement as
a very clear one that the company already had issues with developer X.

Do we even know the name of this martyr? I don't believe it has been
published.

------
yarrel
"It's up to us to change the culture of consequence-free online harassment."

It wasn't consequence free. Richards got someone fired.

Oh, wait...

~~~
RyanMcGreal
> Richards got someone fired.

No she absolutely did not. It was the employer who fired the employee, good or
bad, right or wrong, not Richards. Maybe the employer had good reason and
maybe they didn't, but Richards did not make that decision and is not
responsible for it.

~~~
olgeni
"See, I _just_ pushed the guy right into traffic, but I didn't _actually_ run
over him with the truck."

------
pmelendez
I still don't understand why authors keep addressing this as a _sexual
harassment_ , to the best of my knowledge the jokes weren't referring to her.
How can you harass a person with a joke that wasn't directed to her?

~~~
danielweber
You can make a harrasing environment even without directly addressing someone.

------
syncerr
> Yet only last week a woman of color, Adria Richards ...

WTF. How did this become about race?

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Cabal
Nonsense. Agenda Adria is a bully with a history of doing these things.

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general_failure
"The attacks weren't coming from just the darker corners of the Internet,
places where people trade "creepshots" of 14-year-old girls. This time, many
of the threats came from places like Hacker News, a respected computer news
discussion site run by Paul Graham's venture capital company, YCombinator."

Terrible journalism. This makes me sad. Why put in the phrase about creep
shots of teens ? Written only to provoke and not to reason.

------
jellicle
An excerpt from the linked article:

"The attacks weren't coming from just the darker corners of the Internet,
places where people trade "creepshots" of 14-year-old girls. This time, many
of the threats came from places like Hacker News, a respected computer news
discussion site run by Paul Graham's venture capital company, YCombinator.
Ambitious computer professionals post on Hacker News under their real names to
boost their careers—and felt comfortable posting vicious abuse under those
same names."

~~~
pifflesnort
This seems to run counter to reality. I saw critiques and criticism from
regular commenters, but no "vicious abuse", outside of what appeared to be
new/anonymous accounts. The HN threads themselves were linked to from
elsewhere and drew in a lot of anonymous/new commenters.

[edit]

Also, this article is written by Valerie Aurora, the same person responsible
for the censorship disaster at Security BSides:
[http://violetblue.tumblr.com/post/44107008572/what-
happened-...](http://violetblue.tumblr.com/post/44107008572/what-happened-
with-my-security-bsides-talk)

Hardly an unbiased source. Perhaps its time to stop propagating the noise from
this particular echo chamber.

------
jerrya
If I have this right (I may not) Valerie Aurora's article is interesting in
how it ignores some of the charges made that it was the zero tolerance
characteristics of _her_ Ada Initiative's code of conduct (adopted by PyCon)
that exacerbated the situation.

~~~
DanBC
No. The problem started after tweeting a photo of a bunch of men and accusing
2 of those men of unacceptable sexist behaviour, but without being clear which
2 men in particular.

The code of conduct was working well until the Internet pile-on after that
tweeted photo.

------
xcasex
talk about setting up a story with a false premise.

