
Speaking up - petercooper
http://www.sazzy.co.uk/2013/02/speaking-up/
======
timsally
Whenever an instance of blatant sexism comes up, an attempt is invariably made
to rationalize away the fact that a sexist act has actually occurred. We have
had two such attempts made here so far and I expect more. One commentator is
attempting to advance the baseless theory that the bully did not care about
the sex of his victim. This particular individual even goes so far to say that
"the biggest problem" is the alleged misuse of labels related to racism or
sexism, as if this could somehow be worse that the discrimination the
disenfranchised experience on a day-to-day basis. Another commentator states
that it is because of her popularity not her sex. This too is bunk. There are
significantly more males in this industry with significantly more popularity.
Yet no evidence is presented that these figures also have received this level
of harassment.

There is one word for this behavior mentioned above: denial. Unfortunately,
there seems to be a part of our community that refuses to call things what
they are. This was an instance of sexism that manifested itself in a nasty
way.

~~~
h2s
Not to mention the conspiracy theorist positing that it might have been a
woman posting the fake porn pictures. The mental gymnastics some people will
perform to avoid facing the obvious truth are amazing. How can we solve a
problem we don't all admit exists?

~~~
konstruktor
Why worry about the meaning of the terms you use when there is an opportunity
to call somebody who disagrees with you names?

~~~
h2s
Well done you. It's about time somebody stood up for men brave enough to pitch
improbable edge-case possibilities in order to anonymously undermine a woman
reporting her experience of sexual harassment.

~~~
konstruktor
If you actually read TFA, you will notice that Sarah Parmenter is consistently
using gender neutral pronouns to refer to the person(s) who put online those
pictures and male pronouns for the guys wrote her inappropriate messages. That
is very conscious use of language.

Put that in contrast to the person who is calling somebody who is stating that
the perpetrator might have been one (sic) female a ""conspiracy theorist"" and
talks about "obvious truth".

~~~
hopeless_case
>Put that in contrast to the person who is calling somebody who is stating
that the perpetrator might have been one (sic) female a ""conspiracy
theorist"" and talks about "obvious truth".

all the while supposing that there is a consipracy among men to make women
feel uncomfortable at tech conferences.

If irony had mass, this thread would undergo gravitational collapse and form a
singularity.

------
newhouseb
Halfway through reading this article I had myself really wishing posts like
these would just publicly out the perpetrator instead of referring to them
anonymously - unfortunately as I finished the article I realized that she
hadn't done so because the perpetrator was never found out.

For the cases where there is no question who the perpetrator is - I wonder if
it would be beneficial to encourage more public shaming? Part of me knows that
if these people are lead to believe their actions are left without consequence
they will continue in their wrongdoing. When a blog post tells a story of
someone being assaulted, a lot of good people will come to their support but I
would be genuinely surprised if a creep is convinced not to be a creep by
reading a story in the third person about another anonymous creep.

If we call these people out and kick them out of the community, like when a
spouse kicks out a cheating partner, we have more room for responsible,
respectable community members.

On the other hand, public shaming at any level _seems_ childish to me, but I
can't point out why. Additionally, if someone makes false claims, they can do
serious damage very easily. There is probably no easy answer here.

~~~
lukeholder
I once criticized Sarah on twitter while agreeing with Robert Hoekman when he
wrote a blog post about another person in the UX speaking circuit who did not
have a huge amount of work behind them to back up the fact that they are up in
front of people, teaching them.

I since regretted my comments on Sarah's success. I believe I apologized on
twitter (after being called out). I was embarrassed, but have not contacted
her since, I just see her on rosters for speaking at various conferences.

Now, when I read this post of hers my heart sank. Not only because it is
utterly sickening someone could do this to another person, but that at one
stage I was unkind to her online.

What if she suspected me because of my remarks 2 years ago? What if she called
my name out as a suspect. My web development career and reputation would be
shattered. Now what if someone decides to play detective and look through
twitter history and sees my comments and accuse me publicly. Ruined.

Its not that public shaming is childish, its that that such accusations have
huge ramifications if false. It's "better that ten guilty persons escape than
that one innocent suffer"[0]

This does not mean I hope the person/people involved are not held accountable,
it just needs to be handled outside a public internet witch hunt.

[0] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstones_formulation>

edit: grammar

~~~
newhouseb
Thanks, you helped clarify what I was looking to leave as an open question:

How do we hold individuals accountable without encouraging a witch hunt?

The larger developer community is open and unmoderated and as a result we have
no organizational "justice system" to fall back on in order to correct
behavior (not that I am proposing this).

------
h2s
Are there any high profile women in this industry who haven't been treated
like shit in some way such as this? What a nasty bunch of people we are. Are
we (developers) the douchey 80s guy of the 21st century?

~~~
mwetzler
On Friday I pitched my company to a room of 150 developers, since my company
was a hackathon sponsor. I was the only female speaker out of about 15.

Afterwards, a well-known, elite developer asked me if I programmed. When I
said yes, he said that made me 50% less attractive. Then he asked me if I
cooked and cleaned. To my face.

You don't have to be high profile to deal with this stuff. Just being in a
room where you're 1 female out of 15 males is enough to get this kind of
attention.

~~~
kstrauser
I just don't get this. Do these guys not have moms? Sisters? Wives or
girlfriends? Daughters? Women friends? I would be incredibly pissed if anyone
said those things to my family members; ergo, I can't imagine saying them to
someone else.

For me, it really is as simple as that. I want my daughters to feel as welcome
in their careers as I hope my sons will be. Anything less than that is utterly
unacceptable.

I'm sorry this happened to you and I hope you believe me that not all guys
think this way.

~~~
enraged_camel
They have moms for sure, and sisters maybe. But that's irrelevant. They are
behaving this way because that's how they see their dads treating their moms
and sisters growing up. If they see their dad treat the mom with a sexist
attitude (such as by expecting her to do the house chores or slapping her ass
in front of the kids) then that's how they treat women later in life.

------
DasIch
Sexist misogynistic asshole on a project? Take away his commit access and ban
him from all channels of communication, if you have the power and if you
don't, don't contribute to the project anymore, make the reason public and
create an alternative if possible.

In daily life I don't hang out with those assholes, do you? If not, why the
fuck are you doing it online? Just because they have decent skills? How many
people do they keep away from your project and from this community who could
easily make up for that, who would have better skills and who would bring you
project much further?

If you have a project and want to do something against what is currently
fashionable in discrimination, stop writing comments, write a code of conduct
and let's be honest if you don't, you are not any better than the people you
are criticizing.

~~~
cllns
Worth noting that outing someone requires an immense amount of courage.

I think the more privilege you have, the less courage it takes.

~~~
DasIch
You are probably right but that just makes it more important that we all do
it, whether a victim or a witness and especially if we are privileged.
Privilege is power and while its existence is bad just as the ways in which it
is so often used, I believe we can use it for good as well.

------
RyanMcGreal
It's somewhat encouraging to read the comments here and note that for a change
they are not already overrun by aggressive apologists for the continuing
misogyny in software development.

~~~
rjknight
Hmm. The number of apologists is actually quite small, in my experience. I
think the problem here is that most of the people here are men, who have no
real idea what being on the receiving end of sexual or sexually-motivated
harassment is like, but they also don't see what they can or should do about
it. I think it goes something like this: "Stories like the OPs are terrible, I
get that, but by saying that 'the tech community' is to blame, you're saying
_I'm_ to blame, and I've never been sexist to anyone!". Basically, they feel
like something is being done or said in bad faith here. A lot of the people
who wind up arguing on these threads aren't actually misogynists[1], they just
feel they're being told something that doesn't make sense to them, and in a
way they're not entirely wrong. There's not much reason to accept that "the
tech community has a problem" if you and your friends are members of the tech
community, and none of you are sexists, but you feel like you're being accused
anyway. We need to make a clearer distinction between the average member of
the tech community and, for want of a better word, the 'asshole contingent'
who are the source of the problem.

[1] That some people arguing on the 'wrong' side here are not doing so for
misogynistic reasons doesn't mean that nobody is; part of the problem is that
you can't easily tell the difference.

~~~
RyanMcGreal
I think you make a fair point. However:

> We need to make a clearer distinction between the average member of the tech
> community and, for want of a better word, the 'asshole contingent' who are
> the source of the problem.

What I'm suggesting is that the average member of the tech community himself
needs to do a better job of being distinguishable from the asshole contingent
- and the typical pedantic, aggressive, head-buried-in-sand HN reaction to
instances of sexism, chauvinism and abuse is a real part of the problem.

------
Nursie
It does sicken me sometimes, the attitudes towards women of some of the tech
folks I've run into. Not usually out and out misogyny, but stupid jokes and
inappropriate comments. Most often made/said when there are no women around,
they show how some of my fellow developers still think and it honestly feels
to me like I'm working with neanderthals.

On the minor-but-still-horrible end of the scale, female colleagues have
complained in the past that their ideas are often not taken seriously until
repeated by a man. I hope I'm not guilty of this one (being the repeater or
the listener) but I'm not entirely sure.

There have also been incidents where female friends and colleagues have been
verbally and physically harassed in the workplace or in learning
establishments, and they face an uphill struggle to get anyone to take their
claims in the least bit seriously, with witnesses dropping out and the accused
making all sorts of bizarre claims.

So no, sat here in the enlightened 21st century, amongst the people at the
cutting edge of technology, the people who like to think themselves the
vanguard of the new knowledge and tech based society... we're not the vanguard
of social enlightenment, we don't operate as the fabled meritocracy, and we
need to watch out for this behaviour and encourage women to speak up about it
as much as possible.

If nothing else I have no desire to spend my days around sexist arseholes.

------
rjknight
Who _are_ these people? I mean, really, what the fuck?

It seems hardly a week goes by without someone bringing forward a genuinely
awful case of harassment, abuse, or worse, and that's only the stories
horrible enough to make the front page of HN. So, who the fuck is doing this
and how do we make them fuck the fuck off?

I kinda understand why some people's response is to doubt that this could
really be happening, because it is pretty fucking unbelievable. But it seems
that it really _is_ happening, and it's undermining some pretty central
notions of the meritocratic, no-bullshit character of the community. This kind
of thing is pretty outrageous bullshit.

OK, to a certain extent we must accept that there will always be assholes, and
the kind of spite and vindictiveness the OP relates sounds like the behaviour
of a disturbed, obsessive individual, but there must be a way of deterring
such behaviour. What more can we do here?

------
iuguy
When I speak at conferences, it's not unusual for me to receive heckles. It's
part of a thing where a lot of people who know me know that I'm pretty good
with banter and will usually respond with a put down or your mum joke in good
nature. It's mainly because I grew into conference speaking in a hostile
conference environment, and also I've done a bit of stand-up now and again so
you get used to it.

The problem with all of this that I've realised is that other people in the
audience will see me being heckled and will think it's perfectly fine to
heckle speakers, and that other people will see me being heckled and might be
discouraged from speaking. It's got me thinking quite a bit about this. Any
ideas what I should do about it?

~~~
fatbird
Here's one: Instead of engaging them as a standup comic, willing to cross
swords with a heckler (which likely encourages them), make up a three line
response about how "this is a tech talk at a conference, please don't heckle,
it just wrecks things for everyone." In other words, deflate the situation by
being bland in your reply, and only bland.

------
dgrnbrg
What do we do about less overt sexism? For instance, there's a popular
developer who writes useful plugins named after genitalia and sex acts. I find
his code useful, and I've asked him publicly and privately to choose nonsexual
names for his code, but he and his users see nothing wrong with this. Even
consider the "weinre" project that's on the frontpage right now. "Get your
weinre out"?!

His assertion is that it's not sexist if his projects are called "testicle" or
"foreplay", since those words aren't intrinsically sexist. How do we, as a
community, emphasize that sexuality and development can't mix if we want women
to feel comfortable, given that they're currently a minority?

~~~
h2s
Are you talking about Tim Pope, whose work includes vim-foreplay, vim-
scriptease, vim-eunuch, vim-speeddating, and hookup?

~~~
dgrnbrg
I am talking about Tim Pope. I have forked his code and renamed it, but
instead of the community helping me, I've received a lot of negative feedback
about "fragmenting the community" for trying to maintain and evangelize a non-
sexist version of the plugin. It is difficult to continue in the face of so
little support, but I believe in what I'm doing, and all of my male and female
developer friends agree with me.

~~~
h2s
I think you're right that it's a less overt form of sexism, but I support what
you're doing and I hope one day this clicks for Tim and he sees what a minor
concession this is and what a positive thing it would be.

I'm a Vim user myself, and a big fan of his work. It's not nice to mention his
name in a thread like this, however tangentially related. But given the topic,
I thought for once it might be forgiveable to err on the side of those
_without_ male privilege.

------
d4nt
> it’s about finding female speakers who have enough of a thick skin to want
> to stand up infront of an audience of twitter-trigger-happy males and public
> speak

Was this awful incident a one off or is attacking female speakers at tech
conferences a _thing_? I've not noticed it until now. I don't get it, why
would you? To what end?

~~~
simonw
Unfortunately, it's a thing:
<http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Timeline_of_incidents>

~~~
vickytnz
One of the more famous incidents was the twitter backchannel for dana boyd's
Web2.0 talk
[http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2009/11/24/spectac...](http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2009/11/24/spectacle_at_we.html)
(admittedly, she did have a talk that bombed, but that's still no excuse for
the angle that the twitter talk took.

------
rimantas
Please, tell me, how would comments look if someone did the same thing, but
for the guy? The sight of a bunch of guys rushing to fight sexism (often
without even understanding what sexism is) and solve women's issues for them
is amusing. This is not to say, that there are no problems. But the biggest
problem I see is a knee-jerk reaction to anything involving gender or race.
Sometimes assholes are just assholes and couldn't care less if their victim is
women or black person, or whatever. The bunch of self proclaimed righteous
knights however fails to see that and then everything becomes sexims and/or
rasism thus diluting real problems.

~~~
DanBC
> Please, tell me, how would comments look if someone did the same thing, but
> for the guy?

HN is getting better at being less aggressive and at being more constructive
with criticism.

Perhaps you can find an example where a male dev had pictures of his face, and
pictures of another man's penis, posted to a website with his name and email
address. And, when you find it, HN will be supportive of that man and will
condemn the anon attacker.

~~~
onemorepassword
Even if there is such an example, you really need to have your head stuck
firmly up your ass if you're willing to argue that it would have anywhere near
the same social and emotional impact.

Perhaps "outing" a developer as gay could have a comparable impact for men,
but that would only apply in predominantly homophobic communities.

Which in turn says a lot about this community's attitude towards women. If it
wasn't hostile to women in the first place, extreme examples like this troll
would never have such an impact.

~~~
Tichy
Just read it again, and have to ask: what was the impact of those actions on
the community? It obviously had an impact on the targeted woman, but the
community? Did anybody really think "gee she looks ugly in those pictures, I
guess she sucks as a person" or anything like that?

~~~
DanBC
Maybe female devs saw it, and decided they didn't want to be the target of
that behaviour, and decided not to contribute to tech conferences?

------
bobx11
I worked with Sarah 1.5 years ago and can't imagine why someone would have a
grudge with her personally - she's incredibly nice.

------
lifeisstillgood
Is there becoming a general consensus on what to do about a problem we are
becoming aware is worse than most of us thought?

I glean the following from a few of these threads

1\. Conferences, conventions, hackathons all should have published "acceptable
behaviour" statements, and possibly a red / orange / green card system that
everyone understands

2\. online examples get red / orange carded though a bitly link posted on a
red card site (did I read that?)

3\. conferences share blacklists

4\. we accept that this shit will continue and get worse in an anonymous
internet and that we accept that as a price of freedom and try to mitigate it
for those who actually pay that price.

~~~
mnicole
I read that the card system turned into a running joke at DEFCON (people
giving their buddies cards at the slightest insinuation), which could lead to
watering down the purpose or making it somewhat of a joke to receive one in a
literal sense. Do any other conferences have in-the-moment/non-confrontational
methods of calling people out?

~~~
tedks
In activist circles, getting called out for racist or sexist behavior means
you're kicked out, immediately, no questions asked.

Based on my understanding of it, the red/yellow card system is largely an
effort in self-policing, in that they're based on the assumption that someone
who receives a red card will learn and change their behavior.

This seems like a bad assumption. A better system might be to have a simple
mobile app or website, run by the conference, that allows women (and only
women) to report harassment by a particular person, causing that person to be
immediately blacklisted.

This is severe enough that you won't see it being used as a joke, and it'll be
effective at removing scuzzy people from conferences.

~~~
DenisM
Don't you see the potential for abuse?

The mere idea of abuse creates an incentive to steer clear of any females in
the audience, which is sort of the opposite of the desired goal - acceptance.

~~~
tedks
Of course there's potential for abuse -- that's a feature, not a bug.

By taking the patriarchal power dynamic and turning it on its head, systems
like these create radically better environments for collaboration and
collective empowerment.

If you're a man who would avoid talking to any women at a convention where
women calling you out for harassing/threatening/misogynist behavior, the real
problem isn't the system that allows women to hit back harder than their
abusers, it's that you have _far_ too high a probability of doing something
harassing/threatening/misogynistic, and you should take some time to
reconsider your behavior-patterns.

------
belorn
Conferences are a problematic area even if one ignore what kind of community
it is. (be that IT, gardening, Sci-Fy, trucks, manufacturing, or furries). The
math is not giving out pretty numbers.

Lets compare two conferences. One is 5% females participation, and a other is
50%. We can directly say that the risk of getting sexually assaulted is
minimum 20x larger at the 5% conference than the 50%. there is also a number
of additional considerations one can add to the risk assessment like age,
marital status of people in the conference, and access to alcohol.

~~~
pekk
Based on what data can you "directly say that the risk of getting sexually
assaulted is minimum 20x larger at the 5% conference than the 50%"?

~~~
belorn
Let's make up some numbers, and let's pick say 200 members conference. Let's
also say that each male participant is a equal risk of being a person who
commit a sexual assault, and that risk is 10%.

    
    
      50%/50% distribution:
      100 male participants, 100 female participants
      number of sexual assaults: 100x10% = 10
      *Risk for each female participant: 10/100 = 0.1
    
      5%/95% distribution:
      190 males, 10 females
      number of sexual assaults: 190x10% = 19
      *Risk for each female: 19/10 = 1.9
    
      *Risk compared: 0.1 vs 1.9 = 0.1/1.9 = 19x
    

Okey, not 20x, I rounded the number 19x to 20x. It also assumes that:

A), Female to Female sexual assault is 0. Not true, but close enough in regard
to what is reported.

B), Regardless to number of females, the risk of each male participant stays
the same. If the 50%/50% actually has a higher number of assaults in practice,
then the risk difference between the two type of conferences actually drop.

------
enemtin
Here's to your bravery Sarah. I admire your courage, it's not easy to publicly
announce that kind of thing.

------
whiterabbit2
What's always very frustrating, some guy may hold a grudge or be sexist... but
why does he always find so many supporters, like those who visited his web
site and sent this woman emails? People who shouldn't have anything against
this woman but just can't keep themselves from attacking her. Frat house? Too
many people in this industry don't seem to ever graduate from it.

------
methodin
I constantly wonder if the era of self-centered, socially-awkward developers
is coming to an end (hopeful). More often that not the younger developers I
see tend to be bucking that trend which should go a long way towards
addressing this problem - unless of course they are the primary offenders. Are
these instances centered around older or younger developers, I wonder? If
younger then perhaps this entire assumption is baseless, in which case the
path developers are on in general is indeed alarmingly derailed.

------
Skywing
How would you combat this scenario, though? If the person who is doing this
has not been caught, then is it really a good idea to publicly state how much
of an annoyance he or she is being? (I say she, because seriously, it could be
another woman as well. Everybody is assuming it's probably a guy. We've all
seen how mean women can be to other women, though. I grew up with 2 sisters
and their friends ... I've seen a lot of that.) But, if this person is still
anonymous then I'd think this would just fuel the fire and make them go even
more full throttle, now. I don't think staying quiet helps either, but this is
just that typical internet scenario where somebody is hiding behind anonymity
and is enjoying the attention and drama that their actions are creating. I
really don't know how I'd combat this, if it were happening to me.

This is nothing against the author of the article, this is just me some what
brainstorming out loud about how to combat this scenario. Without trying to
take action, and with the antagonist still unknown, what does the author want
everybody to do, though? What is the call to action here?

~~~
rada
"We've all seen how mean women can be to other women".

Thanks for contributing your "all women are bitches" opinion to a discussion
on sexism. Classy.

------
gavanwoolery
Sorry about your treatment. :(

(And here I go into down-vote territory... :D)

Before I say anything, let me say clearly I am _not_ sexist; I am a strong
advocate of equal rights (key word: equal).

Some of your attacks can definitely be attributed to sex, but it's bad
propaganda just to throw them all in the sexism bucket, or treat sexism like
it is the norm. I know several females in the industry who are not afraid of
anything, and have never been attacked on the basis of their sex (or even been
attacked otherwise). Sometimes people attack just because they don't like the
cut of your jib. In other words, it can be tempting to project your
experiences on the rest of the industry, but I think as a whole the majority
of men are "good guys".

The simple truth is the more you open yourself to the public, the more you
open yourself for attack, regardless of sex. You have almost 30,000 followers,
so statistically speaking at least a few of them are probably psychopaths
and/or sexist. Some of the highest profile tweeters, like Notch, get attacks
daily (mostly by angry 13 year olds). My $0.02...

~~~
mtrimpe
And how many speakers have porn created of them distributed during
conferences? And when that happened would you expect at least a small
percentage to secretly have a little laugh at it?

There was another post on the front-page just minutes ago called The Distress
of the Privileged [1] and it makes the very good point that these things are
about a _difference of scale_.

On the one hand we have one of the most high-profile of tweeters facing
regular childish threats; on the other hand we have a not all that well known
female presenter having to deal with porn 'of her' being distributed during
speaking engagements.

[1] [http://weeklysift.com/2012/09/10/the-distress-of-the-
privile...](http://weeklysift.com/2012/09/10/the-distress-of-the-privileged/)

~~~
gavanwoolery
Yes, people are going to attack women in very different ways then men. I can't
imagine that many people would want to create nude pics of a guy to insult
him. But that's not what I am getting at -- I am trying to say that this
incident does not reflect the majority of males, nor does it make the whole IT
industry sexist. You can't start saying that everyone/everything is sexist
just because one incident of it occurred. Maybe people being bored with her
talk had nothing to do with her being a woman -- maybe it was just a boring
talk.

~~~
nollidge
Nobody said it reflected the majority of males. Nobody said it makes the whole
industry sexist. Nobody said everyone is sexist. Nobody is basing their
opinion on one incident.

Tell me more about this "straw man fallacy", though.

~~~
fatbird
See his reply to mine above :)

~~~
nollidge
That's what I was referring to, perhaps a little too obliquely :)

------
hakaaaaak
This post is just so sick. I'm sorry that anyone would have to go through all
of that. While I think that calling people sexist or racist when it isn't
founded is terrible, this is an extremely obvious case of harassment and those
involved should be punished. I hope my daughters don't have to deal with this
crap when they grow up.

------
charlieok
How awful is it that when I see a trending headline on Hacker News titled
“Speaking up”, I can make a very good (and in this case accurate) guess on
exactly what it is about.

------
baconhigh
I want to do something about this.

How can I help?

------
imran
We have to fight for what is right!

------
ucee054
Let's keep in mind that the perpetrator of the fake porn pictures might have
been a woman

~~~
lazugod
Why is that worth keeping in mind? The result is still sexist discouragement.

~~~
sp332
It's worth keeping in mind because people might assume that men are worth
avoiding, or let their guard down among women.

------
nacker
Face it people, Feminism is Evil!

[http://www.jesus-is-
savior.com/Evils%20in%20America/Feminism...](http://www.jesus-is-
savior.com/Evils%20in%20America/Feminism/feminism_is_evil.htm)

------
sakri
An attractive female that makes dorky men do stupid? You don't say...

------
abcd_f
So apparently, she is a web designer (or a web design agency owner), but it
takes an effort to find a link to an actual portfolio. There is the Resources
page but it's full of her own photos from every angle. The About page is too
full of important aspects of her professional background including how she
takes her coffee (apparently 3rd most frequently asked question).

I understand that she _is_ the brand and she's probably doing more public
speaking than HTML coding, but I find this sort of "I am the only girl in web
design, totally braving it" blatant self-promotion to be very off-putting. It
feels calculated and manipulative.

~~~
mattdeboard
Everyone is too polite or concerned with HN decorum to say so but you're a
fucking asshole.

~~~
anu_gupta
I really hope you don't get hellbanned for this - I absolutely agree with you.

~~~
abcd_f
Good for you, guys. A knee-jerk reaction at its best.

