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Will Donglegate Affect Your Decision To Attend PyCon?
theodp writes "Its Code of Conduct describes PyCon as 'a welcoming, friendly event for all.' But will the post-conference fallout from this year's 'Donglegate' debacle and proposed remedies affect your decision — one way or the other — to attend next year's PyCon in ironically naughty Montreal? And even if not, could 'Donglegate' influence the-powers-that-be whose approval you'll need to attend? How about conference sponsors?"
Pycon put out a statement that it was regrettable somebody was oversensitive and overreacted to something mildly offensive.
That under these particular circumstances it might have been best if the offended party had expressed the fact that she was offended directly to those offending her (as they were not the least bit threatening) or perhaps escalated it to Pycon security.
That Adria Richards was banned from all future events for violating Pycon privacy policies and making a hostile environment for all attendees, and the developers banned for a year for their part.
Imagine a world where Pycon did that, and stated that there would be no changes in policy as a result of the 'donglegate' effect, because no Pycon policy was an issue in the events as they unfolded.
A Donglegate is a novel biological gate revealed to the geeks from beyond the forbidden effeminate walls of feminism. This is a new mystery to geeks. They commented and were punished by god for eating the forbidden fruit. Along with the geek some others in the story were punished as well.
"Rocking the boar" sounds more interesting than any other part of this story.
At least part of the reason I go to Pycon is for recruiting; that means that I wear a company-branded t-shirt, and -- obviously -- my name tag has my company's name on it. I expect that I should always behave in a way that is consistent with representing my company well, and part of that means keeping my conduct strictly professional.
I don't see anything here that makes Pycon less useful, or interesting, or relevant to me, nor do I see any action on the part of the Pycon folks that I disagree with. And, having just talked with my management last night about Donglegate, I know they feel the same.
Now, Pycon being in Montreal is a different matter -- I don't really want to cross borders for Pycon.
If you try to strike this woman down, every woman with a militant feminist agenda will stand up and scream 'patriarchy!'.
The best you can hope for is that ignoring her leads to the problem going away - because keeping her in the limelight is almost certainly going to result in people creating policies to 'protect' everyone, and the reasonable voices will be drowned out, partially because they don't make as good news copy and partially because the reasonable people generally have something other than 'advocacy' to engage in, and are busy with it.
It's a significant and relevant story.
We know about race hustlers... people who like to twist any situation into a racist (against blacks) for their fame and profit. It's old news.
But we don't hear much about the more quiet problem... especially in the work place. The one quite a few of us in this demographic have suffered.
There are women out there who are equally prepared to play the sexism-card when it serves their interests. In this case, this woman is a pretty good example. People have been digging up her internet content everywhere exposing what she is and does. On one hand she has a clear history of sex related things. If she was so offended by sex related things, she has a weird way of showing it. So it wasn't the sex related things that bothered her. I have little doubt that she was harmed or offended by what she thought she heard.
She may have been annoyed by the cut-ups going on behind her. That's understandable. But instead of addressing the real problem, she made up a worse one. She created this drama. She got what she expected... at first. But then the community unexpectedly returned fire. Her employer couldn't afford to have her any longer. B'Bye bitch.
This is the unspoken reason there may be reservations about women in the workplace and especially in the tech fields. We're a BUNCH of immature geeks who care less about social crap and more about technical crap. When women enter the room, we're immediately terrified that our haven is being changed leaving us nowhere to go. The unspoken fear is that we know what women can and will bring. She is a perfect example of it. Once again, her self-documented history of sexy-flirty crap spins around in an instant to "I'm offended by this double entendre!!" And of course, everyone who seeks not to be branded "a part of the problem" is forced into doing whatever pleases her.
Nice play. For once it didn't work out quite as she expected. I wonder what she will advocate next? This geek crowd she offended? They are anonymous. They don't forget. They don't forgive. And she represents every woman in the workplace who has ever played that game. And I sincerely hope her hell will give other women cause to give a second thought about playing the sexism card like this.
I'm not trying to "strike her down" and make her into some feminist Obi Wan. I'm simply learning how the game works nowadays. If I'm hanging out with some of my colleagues during conference breaks and chatting, and a female attendee walks in, my job and my 2 kids college fund/food supply/roof depends on me immediately maintaining a silence and uttering "Yes m'am" or "No ma'm" if and when appropriate, and that is all. There will be no conversation, exchanging views on squat, smiling etc. Its just gotten too dangerous to talk freely now.
"One of these men lost his job as a result of this incident, and we are seeing numerous people blame Adria for that. This is a clear example of a culture we live in, where it is more appropriate to blame the victim than to blame any other offenders."
What the everliving fuck?
She wasn't a "victim" of anything. These guys didn't rape her. They didn't assault her. They didn't slander her, they didn't harass her they didn't DO anything to her. They told a joke meant for each other and happened to be within earshot of her. That was the reason she got fired. She's claiming to be some sort of victim and framing all women as victims of "this sort of behavior" and its just bullshit. You do not have a right to not be offended. As long as that person isn't directly talking about you, thats where your rights end.
Now if they had said "I bet this chick in front of us here would love it if the presenters had bigger dongles" or something of that nature, she'd have a bit of a case here as that could very easily be considered harassment.
Nice play. For once it didn't work out quite as she expected
Actually I think she knew exactly what would happen, the same thing as always, people rape threatning her and calling her all kind of things. Amanda Blum's excelent blog post highlights the problem with Adrias behaviour but hopefully give you some insight to the larger problem.
If this has thought us something it is that there are some serious problem with sexism at tech conferences, even if you don't like what she did the backlash kind of proved her point IMHO.
She gets the guy fired, and gets fired herself for her troubles.
Nobody wins, because feminism is in of itself, sexism at it's finest. Poor pitiful females that can't defend themselves. Bullshit. They have carved themselves a niche in popular culture that they are untouchable, and because of that they have adopted and invincible attitude, until they feel they have been somehow wronged, and then they turn on the tear-jerking water works about how defenseless they are. Comedian Bill Burr has it right...
People need to learn how to take a joke. HR departments need to be wiped out, because in this age, they have long since outlived their usefulness. They had their time, but it has since passed.
If women want equal rights, then there should be no feminists.
You're not paranoid if they really ARE out to get you...
s/Submit/Preview/;
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
We are all at risk here. Even though we have freedom of speech, we run the risk of losing our livelihoods if we say something that might offend someone somewhere. Richards was being a real "bitch." I say "bitch" because it is a disparaging name for a female. Not because I wish to be sexist. If the perpetrator of this nonsense was a guy, I'd call him a real "bastard." Calling a woman a "bastard" doesn't seem to be the correct usage in the English language. If someone can come up with a disparaging name to call a female that is not sexist, please suggest one, but if it is not sexists to call a guy a bastard, I refuse to accept that there is no non-sexist name we can call a woman when we are condemning her and her actions, but I digress.
Seriously, I've been in the situation where I have been pulled aside by management for saying something offensive, but they won't say what, to someone, but they won't say who, and that I should stop it, but they don't say how. The whole harassment mentality is very kafka-esque. The REAL hostile work environment is created by zero-tolerance crap, which, by definition, means "intolerant."
Human beings are imperfect. "Appropriate" behavior is a myth of the modern workplace police. Human beings build relationships and we communicate. We are not robots. Humor is part of humanity, and sometimes humor is off color. There is a difference between saying, "Hey, my dongle is bigger than yours" and "Have sex with me or your fired."
Also, lets be honest here, if ms Richard heard these jokes from her friends at that conference, she would not have complained. She should try to understand and take to heart Voltaire's quote: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." An evangelist should stand for something besides her own notoriety. Gatherings of human beings are generally improved when we all try to be tolerant of one another.
a nosy bitch
lol, sexism. I thought information wanted to be free?
Not sexism at all. She was listening to a conversation that had nothing to do with her, hence "nosy". And her reaction to it clearly proves her to indeed be a "bitch".
Then she got fired for rocking the boar.
Dude, what the hell goes on at PyCon?!
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
The problem is that she handled it in an extremely immature fashion. I'm not necessarily saying that she should have let it go, but posting the pictures online without giving them a chance to explain, is rather poor form for an evangelist. And if she couldn't handle it with more grace, she should have left it alone, this kind of immature and self righteous behavior is not going to further women's rights, all it does is send the message that if you offend somebody, for any reason, you can lose your job. Not helpful. What's more, it sounds like it was just one joke about dongles and she was doing it for reasons other than being offended.
Or at least that's how I read her blog, it's pretty clear she was trying to advocate for people that weren't in the room at the time and without being asked to do so. What's more, she could very easily have caused her employer to receive a nasty libel suit as a result of this.
She was fired over the way in which she handled it. As an evangelist, she is probably being held to a higher standard than other folks, but she should have known that. She could have handled it in a way that at least allowed the individuals to apologize and or explain, tweeting it without even having her facts straight, is hardly conducive to building an inclusive community.
She also had the opportunity to just ignore it, which is what she should have done if she couldn't handle it in a mature way. Yes, it would have been less good than dealing with it, but as it stands, she's just another data point on the "why we shouldn't trust women" board.
If you speak in public, expect to be heard by others. If someone hears what you say, you have no right to force them to pretend they didn't hear it.
Yes, I hear many things in course of the day. I don't usually tweet about them. And not once did I feel an impulse to backstab by silently taking someone's pic and then tweeting "OMG, look at this jerk!" instead of discussing why is this a jerkish behaviour with said someone.
"Bitch" is not sexist in the same way that "nigger" is not racist.
Stop bitching about semantics, you pedantic prick. <-- see here, both "bitch" and "prick" have sex-related etymology, but neither "bitch" nor "prick" refer to your gender in this case. Do tell me more about inherent sexism.
If you eavesdrop on someone having a private conversation in a public setting, don't expect to hear a politically correct message. It amazes me that a "strong, independent woman" crumbles into this powerless victim once someone random makes a random comment. To name this event 'donglegate' is quite funny OTOH.
The whole thing is worrying.
I am a male lead programmer in China, I hire a lot of female programmers and extol the virtues of hiring female programmers to my Chinese peers who lead other projects, who have started hiring female programmers also, seeing my success in using female programmers to achieve good results. I think they are more consistent and reliable, about 10-30% cheaper then men and have better company loyalty than men. There is a surprising amount of coding that could do with a woman's touch. I like to have over 30% of my team to be women since in my experience if a woman has done something before, she's much less likely to make a mess of it than a man is, since men of above average IQ tend to get bored, lazy and arrogant the second time around. Women also don't like being assigned repetitive work, but even if they get angry with me, they generally still don't screw it up, though they will quit eventually if one exploits this too much.
My little sister and cousin are both female programmers in Australia. They are both excellent, consistent and make very few mistakes, my cousin even has some of the problem solving creativity that the women I've managed seem to lack and I'm optimistic about my sister developing that skill too with time. This high profile firing stuff makes me somewhat concerned for the careers of these two dear young ladies.
The thing is, in China, sexism is a non-issue, by which I mean, it exists in a huge way, but nobody talks about it. In the west, it's a big issue with big consequences, so I realised, if a manager was considering hiring a woman in Australia into an all male team, they would quite likely first measure up the probability and possible severity of a sexual harassment issue and offset that against her utility as an employee. For large companies who have various HR policies supporting diversity and for whom maintaining a completely male workforce would be utterly impractical anyway, this is a non issue, the risk is lower and the reward is higher. For smaller, up-coming companies with higher potential for growth but larger exposure to risk, this is going to really going to work against female candidates. This is somewhat irrelevant anyway, because these two young ladies both work for absolutely enormous multinationals, but for others, or in the future, who knows.
I completely agree that inappropriate behaviour in the workplace is bad and should be stopped. But for a manager, being forced to fire potentially crucial people for something unrelated to performance is extremely scary. If a manager looks at a candidate and has any niggling doubt that "HR has a remote chance of making me fire some people I need if I hire this person and something goes wrong" then it really doesn't help the candidate. I really do not think this helps women in the industry.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
Once a bitch always a bitch. Here's some backstory on the problem told from the perspective of a decent and respectable woman.
I applaud her for saying something about the stupid innuendos going on at these kinds of cons, but she shouldn't couch it in sexism.
Forking/Fucking is not degrading to women.
Dongles/Penises are not degrading to women.
If anyone thinks that sex is inherently degrading to women, or that penises are inherently degrading to women, they should seek counselling.
That said, the geek community is full of sexually inexperienced and frustrated people who say stupid and immature things. I seriously hope that the organizers simply would have told these guys in a sincere and compassionate way "you're in public, and your behaviour reflects on the community. This is a family-friendly event and a common problem but we need to change the geek culture. Your sexual innuendos are not in keeping with the environment we're trying to foster at this event and they contradict the code of conduct. Please stop yourselves, and stop your friends. Spread the word."
No need to degrade people who are already socially marginalized and awkward.
The summary should contain enough information to make me know if I'm interested. Is it more time efficient for one person to write "the sexist tweet scandal infamously dubbed donglegate" or for thousands of /. readers to have to individually follow the link to another (very brief) article summary?
Simply put: if the average reader doesn't know what the summary is talking about, the summary is no use at all.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
You're deeply concerned about the careers of women, who you like to hire... because you can pay them less for doing more reliable quality work.
What a moving tribute to China's acceptance of the modern Western Capitalist workplace values.
I posted a bunch of details here but the main point is :
Richards had pissed off people by pulling similar publicity stunts before. Amanda Blum was one of those people Richard had pissed off. She sent a constructive email to SendGrid suggesting how one keeps such loose cannons under control. SendGrid simply read Blum's email as past behavior and fired Richards rather than taking Blum's constructive advice.
It's worth noting that Richard actions constitute libel in the U.K. I donno if her accusation of the forking remark constitute libel in the U.S., perhaps given that it's false. I'd assume that her accusation of the dongles remark does not constitute libel in the U.S., being true.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
I'm a gay man. Adria's reaction was not "logical and expected". There is occasionally real hostility and real insults directed at minorities at tech conferences; this wasn't it. Adria's reaction to a harmless pun was merely the act of a professional publicity whore (and I'm using that term in a gender-neutral way), and she has hurt the cause of women and other minorities.
That said, the geek community is full of sexually inexperienced and frustrated people who say stupid and immature things.
That's a steorotype about 'geek culture'. The reality is that the majority of 'geeks' are past their twenties and get plenty of action (with real women, mostly). It's just demographics. From the ages 15-30 is only a third of the time from 30-60, and IT has been around long enough that there are still plenty of greybeards out there. So let's get real - 'geek culture' is a handy stereotype, but a stereotype nonetheless. Decisions based on a stereotype will always carry some degree of inaccuracy.
As an aside. What is interesting that the biggest promoters of the stereotype are marketing outfits that see the chique of geek and want to cash in. All sorts of outfits used to do this in the past too with science - from detergent ads where 'scientists' only wear white lab coats to 'Christian Science' that is anti-scientific superstition but appends the word 'science' to benefit from the cachet of the triumphs of reason. So, it's ok to accept the 'geek stereotype' as long as you also make a mental note that this is an approximation of reality and really only covers the 1/3 of 'new' geeks (those still excited about 'coming out' to self-identify as a geek comfortable with the label).