Your primary problem is when you think of "women in tech" as being "sexually interesting people in tech" instead of "people in tech". All the rest follows from that. When you meet somebody at a professional conference, ignore their gender and treat them the way you would want to be treated.

Also, a nice person who is rude to the waiter (or barista, or retail clerk, or...) is not a nice person.

I agree with most of your points except for #4.

There's nothing inherently wrong with flirting at a conference. Flirting is a very natural type of interaction for people, and asking people to not do it at all doesn't seem realistic.

However, men should not assume that flirting means that a woman is inviting you to touch her or sleep with her. In fact, she may not even be flirting. Men often misinterpret simple friendliness as sexual interest.

Be conservative in what you say and do. At a professional event, it is far better to miss an opportunity for a casual hook up than to be aggressive and make the conference an unwelcoming place for women.

If women say there is something wrong with flirting at a conference, then there is something wrong with it. It's a professional event.

Why is a professional event even seen as "an opportunity for a casual hook up"?

To say that flirting is "natural" is quite a claim; while it might be prevalent in our culture, that doesn't mean it's natural.

At the last programming conference I attended, I saw a man and woman holding hands. These two people had not, to the best of my knowledge, met before the conference. I don't know how far this relationship went (not that it's my business), but it was clearly mutual, and it started at the conference.

Conferences are both professional and social. In fact, it's hard to think of anything that is purely professional. People form short- and long-term relationships through all sorts of initial meetings.

I don't see any women saying "all flirting all is wrong at a conference". I see them saying they don't want to be harassed. The two things are not the same. I've talked to women at length about these issues and I've championed the adoption of strong anti-harassment policies at conferences I speak at (http://blog.urth.org/2011/09/05/conference-code-of-conduct-c...).

Maybe we just have different definitions of flirting. To get back to the original article, the Twitter exchange that it highlights is not flirting. It's just a man being an asshole. I also note that the article makes no mention of the word "flirt". It talks about "harassment", "groping", and "sexism".

Why is it the responsibility of women to take the stand? Isn't it the responsibility of the people making unprofessional advances to stop and silent bystanders to tell them so? Why is a professional conference ever even thought of as a venue for making advances?

I don't understand why you think this is not sexism.

> Isn't it the responsibility of the people making unprofessional advances to stop

Well, yes, but if your plan to stop sexism is something along the lines of "Wait for jerks to suddenly become good people," you're doing a disservice to their victims.

> and silent bystanders to tell them so

I don't feel like it is my business to step in and speak for a woman who has not implicitly or explicitly asked me to do so. That seems like a really degrading viewpoint. If she clearly wants the guy to go away and he won't, yes, go up and help her. But the idea that it's my job to run around policing women's sexuality is just antediluvian.

I don't see why it's degrading for a victim to have someone else (publicly or privately) tell their agressor to stop.

The assumption of woman as victim when there's no indication that she sees it that way is what's degrading. Can you imagine if anytime you were talking to a member of your preferred sex, somebody came running up and yelled to the person you were talking to, "Hey, back off, buddy"?

There's a difference between talking and awkward, unwanted, sexist advances. If you can't tell the difference, then you're right, you probably shouldn't tell anyone off. But just because the victim doesn't say something doesn't mean they don't want something to be said.

Sure, if a guy walks up to a chick and sticks his hand down her pants, that's one thing, because he's clearly out of control. But the example given in the OP was something like "Would you like to have a drink?" I don't think I would be inclined to come charging to the rescue if I saw that. I don't like that women have to deal with unwelcome advances, but I wouldn't feel right rejecting him for her.

> Why is it the responsibility of women to take the stand?

Because you can't control the actions of others, but you can control your response to the actions of others. As much as any activity can be labelled taboo, humans are dynamic creatures and have the ability to break taboo at any moment, without any kind of notice.

> Isn't it the responsibility of the people making unprofessional advances to stop

Yes. But to suggest that is blue sky thinking. Isn't it the responsibility of criminals to stop criminal behavior? Why don't they?

> and silent bystanders to tell them so

Maybe. Bystanders don't have perfect insight into the victims mindset. What if a husband put his hand on his wifes knee? Should a noble bystander lay into the husband for his sexist behavior? Do you assume that every bystander is listening to every conversation within earshot, waiting for something to become inappropriate? Chances are, bystanders have their attention focused on other things, like the conference at large, or the people they are conversing with.

If a person makes it very vocally clear that they are being victimized, then yes, bystanders should do something. And thats the answer to your question as to "Why is it the responsibility of women to take the stand?"

As a bystander who becomes aware of such behaviour of course it's your responsibility to get involved. But if we're talking, as the article does, about a woman and one man alone in an elevator, and that man happens to be an asshole, what can the rest of us realistically do to prevent this happening?

As the article says: "Be better about putting guidelines in place to show zero tolerance for harassment or inappropriate behavior. Train your staff to be on the lookout and how to handle situations. Respect female attendees by not letting booth babes walk the expo floor and not hanging women from your ceiling and calling it entertainment."

It's about creating a positive environment. Of course there will be isolated incidents, but can we really resign ourselves to doing nothing?

I do not think that it is sexism BECAUSE it is SEXUAL HARASSMENT or even sexual abuse in some conditions. Sexism is when you are promoted or NOT promoted because you are a WOMAN. Or someone ask a WOMAN to CLEAN some spilled coffee because she is a WOMAN...

Sexual harassment and sexual abuse are encouraged by sexist culture.

I think the point is more this: everything is optimized for men, it's like a self-amplifying loop. Sure the things you mention are also a problem, but women face that everywhere.

Lack of manners and as..ole men are enabled by a sexist environment. These are symptoms of an underlying problem. Women don't feel safe in these environments because of the behavior of a relatively small number of individuals, but these individuals are enabled by a system problem in which their behavior is rationalized and ignored as just s social faux pas.

>Women don't feel safe in these environments

Women don't feel safe in tech conferences? Like it's south central Los Angeles or something?

I've attended several tech conferences, with women colleagues and friend, and I've not seen all this hoopla people constantly bring up on HN. Heck, those things don't even happen on Linux and OSS conferences, much less in business tech meetings. Groping a woman? WTF have you witnessed that?

I don't know, maybe it's that conferences in Europe are different.

Not much pertaining to Europe (if anything), plus a lot of unrelated incidents among the list. I mean, how does this qualify:

"An offensive tweet was made against the PyLadies group at EuroPython 2012. Lynn Root (a keynote speaker and founder of PyLadies) blogged twice about the incident."

Really? One can find thousand of offensive tweets for anything, from your choice of programming editor, to Mac vs PC, to politics, to Twilight, to Coke Light vs Zero. And an "offensive tweet" somehow deserves to be in a list about "sexist incidents"? Other stuff is nearly as lame.

Judging from the above list, and compared to, e.g. the fashion or the journalism industry, the tech industry seems comparatively sexism free.