Speak Out Against Sexism and Get Fired
This is going to be fast. I rarely post twice in a day, but this is a subject that is near and dear to my heart. A woman, Adria Richards, attending a developer conference, PyCon, heard men making sexist jokes at the conference. She tweeted their picture. One of the men in was fired by his employer PlayHaven. Hackers congregating at sites like 4chan put pressure on Richards’ employer, SendGrid, which then fired her.
fojap 
I didn’t like this…….but promised to give you a like.
Hard to understand! I found the article. Something about she was “dividing the community” so she had to be fired.
I think this is the real reason:
“The internet backlash against Ms Richards included campaign to get her fired on the 4Chan message board, denial of service attacks on her blog and an attack on her employer’s website.”
There’s a real problem with sexism among hackers. An interesting detail is that there were actually more women in programming forty or more years ago. It’s actually a field where the female presence has declined. I should probably add that I haven’t personally found that much sexism in person among programmers. It really seems to be the online hacker “community”, although I hate using that phrase because exactly what the hacker community is seems so inexact to me. Just getting a consistent, useful definition of hacker is nearly impossible.
I have no idea about this part of the world. It really is all foreign to me.
still not easy to fight for transparency …
Hmmmmm. Just stumbled on your blog and it isn’t clear to me whether you thought she should be fired or not . . .
I didn’t. In fact, I sent an email to the company saying that as both a woman and a programmer I was disappointed by their decision.
As it happens, I think that firing the man who made the jokes might have been overkill. Assuming that it wasn’t part of a larger pattern of harassing behavior on his part, I would think talking to him so he would understand why it’s not appropriate would have better long term consequences for everyone.
Sounds like two cases of over-reacting.
Reblogged this on Suzy Is Opionated and commented:
Stupidity is gaining ground. Be afraid, be very afraid…
Yah, I read about this. There is so much danger in social media. One has to be careful sometimes.