GitHub Founder Resigns Following Harassment Investigation

An anonymous reader writes "Late Yesterday, GitHub concluded its investigation regarding sexual harassment within its work force, and although it found no evidence of 'legal wrongdoing,' Tom Preston-Werner, one of its founding members implicated in the investigation resigned. In its statement, GitHub vows to implement 'a number of new HR and employee-led initiatives as well as training opportunities to make sure employee concerns and conflicts are taken seriously and dealt with appropriately.' Julie Ann Horvath, the former GitHub employee whose public resignation last month inspired the sexual harassment investigation, found the company's findings to be gratuitous and just plain wrong."

Comments

Re:The term "Sexual Harassment" is very misleading

[Anonymous Coward]

What part of ex is hard to understand?

Re:The term "Sexual Harassment" is very misleading

[erikkemperman]

... and mod me down into the dirt, even though deep down you know I'm right.

More likely, because they get this weird impression that you might be a misogynous reactionary.

Re:The term "Sexual Harassment" is very misleading

[Richard_at_work]

No idea as to the credibility of this blog, but worth a read anyway:

https://medium.com/p/d96f431f4...

Every story has two sides and for several weeks now Julie Ann Horvath has decided to share only the details of her side of her experiences at GitHub and the circumstances around her departure.

A few of us, those who knew Julie and the events that occurred, have decided that if Julie wants to share this story so publicly then everyone should at least have all of the story.

Here are some details that may help explain this story a little differently.

The Engineer
Julie calls out an engineer in her story. The engineer she alleges harassed her was in fact an ex-boyfriend that she was still friends with at the time, not a random coworker she barely knew. They had dated prior to working at GitHub and were on good terms at the time.

The project he “ripped out” code from was a small css refactoring on an internal side project that he was helping her with. At the time of the incident, she was not upset about it and it was quickly fixed. At the time of her departure, she was not on great terms with him and her public story changed.

The Cofounder and His Wife
Around the end of 2012, Julie started dating a close male friend of the cofounder’s wife and didn’t like that they were close. She asked them to stop being friends and when they would not end their relationship, Julie started telling coworkers that the wife had affairs and that the cofounder’s newborn child was not his. She told this to multiple coworkers directly and also to the wife through her boyfriend.

This is where the wife reached out to her and the rest of her story starts. All of Julie’s story involving the cofounder’s wife occurs only after Julie was spreading vicious rumors about him to even new employees.

Three months later, the first Passion Projects talk was held at GitHub. It’s difficult to know if this was a concession by the cofounder for her to stop threatening his family and undermining him to his employees, or perhaps just a way for him to try to get on her good side so she would not want to hurt his family.

We share this because reading through the TechCrunch article with this in mind changes the story for us. It seems less like a story of gender issues and more like a story of the problems that arise when employees date coworkers and cannot separate work and personal life.

We dislike that she is taking advantage of people’s trust in her in order to craft a message for which she wants to be the symbol. Good people are suffering for a story she knows is not fully true and she does not seem to care.

Re:The term "Sexual Harassment" is very misleading

[tomhath]

"ex boyfriend" is relevant in this context. She's claiming she was bullied by a coworker at GitHub. If fact she's having relationship issues with an ex-boyfriend who also also worked at GitHub, and has caused additional problems for herself by dating the friend of a GitHub manager and getting into a pissing contest with the manager's wife over that relationship.

That said, GitHub management should have sat everyone down and told them to act like adults or find somewhere else to work, her included.

Re:The term "Sexual Harassment" is very misleading

[Ol Olsoc]

The term "Sexual Harassment", - with the word "Sex" followed by another word "Harass", - sounds awfully serious.

But, like all other liberal creation (social welfare, for example) "Sexual Harassment" itself has been abused.

Fortunately no conservative constructs have ever been abused... couldn't resist - back to the topic

Nowadays you can be slapped with a "Sexual Harassment" lawsuit if you comment on the way someone dress herself or "itself".

In some cases, it was much worse before. In the 1980's, at the place where I worked, we had our first gender harassment seminars.

It quickly turned surreal. Your example of how the woman dresses was spot-on. The gender harassment rep told us that it was very dangerous to compliment a woman regarding any physical matter. That telling her "Those earrings are nice" was okay, but saying you look great in those earrings was skirting the edges of harassment.

Then when a man asked what the definition of sexual harassment was, she said "Sexual harassment is whatever a woman says it is". You could have heard the proverbial pin drop.

This draconian interpretation started a years long mess, where the men actively avoided all the women. Male supervisors would not engage 1 on 1 with female staff - there would always be at least one other person. Men quit talking to or socializing with women.

And the women absolutely hated it. Some of the ladies I worked with were dirty minded and flirtacious enough to make me blush some times, and the men were avoiding them like the plague.

One of the machinists had a nice photo of a young lady in a cheerleader outfit on his toolbox. A woman took offense to it, and he was told to take it down. It was his daughter. The pathetic part was this estrangement only alienated normal guys. The men who were actually harassing women still did all the same things, blocking doorways so the woman had to brush up against them, "accidentally" touching them in the places you might expect, they just kept on keepin' on.

Fortunately, calmer, more rational heads saw what had been created, and modified the rules. Instead of treating all men as rapists who just hadn't been caught yet, they focused on the guys - and women who were the real problem.

In the end, it did help, although a lot of the older guys were pretty set in their ways, and never did socilize much with the female staff.

In fact, I can be charged for "Sexual Harassment" right now, because of the term "itself" that I've used to describe people whom I do not know how to describe (they are not male, nor female).

I brought up the question one time, if a man avoids all contact with women in the workplace - except for the minimum to get work done - in order to not be accused of harassment, and the women know he avoids them because of that, is his avoidance sexual harassment?