What happened was bad taste to be sure, but it isn't sexism. If they made a comment asking why all the women in the audience aren't bringing them beer that would be sexist. Using sexual language is not by itself sufficient for sexism. It is bad taste and an argument could be made it should be rooted out in a professional environment, but it shouldn't be confused with actual sexism.

Sexism: Belief one of the sexes can inherently not do a task due to their sex (write code, vote, make brownies).

Bad taste: Abercrombie ads, Fork You shirts, South Park, Maxim.

That's a tempting argument, but I agree with pukka_my. Sexual jokes or innuendo make some people, especially women, uncomfortable. Among friends, in private, you might know that everyone present is fine with that kind of banter. In a public place, you can't know that. So giving yourself permission to make such cracks anyway is at best insensitive and, if repeated, betrays an attitude that says "because I'm a man and you're a woman, I don't have to care how you feel about this". That's sexist.

It's entirely dependent on context and who's doing the delivery. If someone makes an unwanted comment towards you, gay or straight, you can laugh it off and make a joke back that it isn't going to happen. If they continue even after you've made it clear you aren't receptive, that's harassment. And finally, if there's a systematic coverup of the unwanted advance that would be sexism.

Trying to accuse two guys of making an inappropriate joke of sexism is serious embellishment. She was merely trying to get hits on Twitter because sexism witch hunts are en vogue and it backfired. Witch hunts do nothing to cure the world of witches.

Actually, it is sexist to believe that it's ok to make comments of a sexual nature if they are likely to lead to members of the audience feeling uncomfortable or offended. Sexism is not just skill-related, it's the attitude that the opinions, feelings or actions of one gender are somehow inherently inferior or less important than those of another and expressing that attitude through your own actions or words. Intentionality has nothing to do with it; sexism is often implicit or so internalized that people (especially but not exclusively men) fail to realize when they are in fact acting in a sexist manner. A little self-reflection might help here . . .

Making innuendo about forking or dongles isn't sexism because they aren't belittling any specific gender. A man could be offended by that innuendo as much as a woman. If he had said, "women only exist to get forked by big dongles," that would be sexism because he would be belittling women. Don't confuse sexual for sexism.

Making innuendo jokes to a friend is not sexual harassment either. If he had said, "hey want to see my big dongle?" to the girl, that would be harassment because he would be making unwanted sexual comments towards her.

However, he just made a joke to a friend in private, and she overheard. I'm allowed to say anything I want to my friend, even if it may be inappropriate for the setting. She was free to think of him as a jerk, or even tweet "there's a jerk behind me." (Although I don't think there's anything wrong with making an innuendo joke to a buddy, but clearly she does.) Unfortunately, publicly shaming the guy for a private comment not meant for her was totally uncalled for and puts her on the wrong side of this mess.

Intentionality has nothing to do with it? The problem is if we played your game everything we do or say could be sexist. You could argue the act of programming is some sort "performance" of male dominion over women or some such sociological jibber jabber. If you combine that with the well known law that there's always someone in the world that think just about any crazy thing could name, you're always in danger of offending someone.

I stopped in a local donut shop a couple weeks ago and there was a patron with his child that was horribly offended that the shop had a TV in the store and it was turned on (to some benign news channel) without even the volume on. I could tell it was one of those crazy people that don't even want their children to even know TV exists, he kept going on and on about "I can't believe they would have a TV." Long story short, the fact that you're alive will offend someone.

In this case, I don't believe Adria was offended. She is inauthentic to me.

I agree, you can't put South Park there, makes me think all the satirical points just went above your head. Have you actually seen an episode and get the point of the episode it makes (usually at the end by either Stanley or Kyle)

But then again I'd even go so far and put Abercrombie under racism. You seen their Singaporean ads?

The difference between south park's jokes and the dongle jokes is that south park is generally funny.

The amazing thing about this situation is that if the guy's jokes were funnier, they'd probably have gone over better. You could spin it as he was fired because his dick jokes weren't funny enough.

I think you'll find that a major part of South Park's popularity is not its satire, but its juvenile humor.

Abercrombie ads and Maxim are like South Park and Github merch? There are degrees of bad taste, you know...

I'd even offer "contact conference organizers in a non-public way if you don't feel comfortable confronting the other person directly".

Some people have a hard time addressing these issues directly – particularly when in the minority (by gender, in this case). It happens, and I'm not going to judge it. The issue here isn't that she was offended, but, rather, that she went from 0 to 100% full-on public on a well-trafficked twitter feed. She certainly skipped a few steps in the ladder of escalation, sure, but I think she had options other than just those you present. Just say'n.

I'm just disappointed that this is the top thread, since it's basically little more than a cheap ad-hominem attack and doesn't contribute anything to resolving or working towards a better understanding of the underlying issues that have caused this all to escalate so badly.

Do you know Adria personally?

Saying that "We got an unstable, hypocritical, oversensitive jaded person out of our way. I think this was a win." without knowing her personally would be ... well ... not exactly OK.

In her blog post about this, she was likening herself to Joan of Arc over this event. And that was just the beginning. Too bad that website is down.

I'd like to see anyone take this level of vitriol and be completely level-headed. I would start stockpiling food, because apparently Jesus Christ has come back and the End Times are here.

Her Joan of Arc screed was in her initial blog post - there was no vitriol until then. Chicken and egg.

Her initial blog post isn't what caused this. She was featured on Hacker News before she wrote it.

This is an interesting take on the subject: https://amandablumwords.wordpress.com/2013/03/21/3/

"She has no right to do that."

Perhaps better way to phrase that is that she has every right to do that but then has to understand the consequences and ramifications of her actions at least job wise. In this case sendgrid apparently has updated their code of conduct. But not every situation can be spelled out (because it hasn't happened yet).

> People like that are hard to be around, constantly tip toe.

It really isn't.

Most of us that actually work in a professional environment aren't making crude jokes about sexual topics. And we sure as hell are on our best behaviour at offsite events. Clearly this is a foreign concept to you.

> It really isn't.

If saying something like "I'd fork him on GitHub" is going to provoke you to publicly shame me, then you're difficult to be around.

With certain people, it's not just about crude jokes. I think Lyndsy Simon summed it up pretty well in his comment on Avdi Grimm's G+ post [1]. It's not possible to link to a comment, so I'll reproduce it here:

I was at a sprint on Monday, speaking to a female developer. She was discussing a project she'd worked on, and a coworker's method for solving a tricky problem. I said something along the lines of "So, which path did he take?". Her reply "She decided to..."

Oh, crap.

I honestly didn't mean to offend anyone, and I could tell she took issue with my presumption. Her tone was enough to call me out, and that was all that was said. About an hour later, I spoke with her away from everyone else and apologized. She said she didn't even notice, but I'm fairly sure she was sparing my feelings.

Now, think about that - my own inadvertent actions were approximately on par with the "jokes" that this is all about. That could be me be lambasted around the world.

I get that others feel excluded on a regular basis from things where I assume inclusion. I'm sorry, I do everything I can to make sure that's not the case when I'm involved - but the fact that someone who's "on their side" is concerned that their feet will be held to this fire is evidence that there is a lack of empathy from all sides of the debate, and that's a bad thing.

[1]: https://plus.google.com/104757475552569715504/posts/N81SaYUT...

Well, except nothing happened to him. He wasn't reported, he wasn't fired, his photo wasn't taken. So obviously it's not the same as those jokes.

That's irrelevant. Here's the concluding mark from the quote:

> but the fact that someone who's "on their side" is concerned that their feet will be held to this fire is evidence that there is a lack of empathy from all sides of the debate, and that's a bad thing.

He didn't say it was the same. He was commenting on his feelings and his perception of the social atmosphere.

Yeah, but he tried to use it as an example of something that could lead someone to shame him. But... it didn't happen. I don't know many people who would shame someone for assuming an unknown programmer is a man. It sucks, because it does kind of exclude women, but the default gender in our lexicon is aliased to "male." It was pretty tough for me to stop using it and start using "they" instead. It wasn't as tough for me to stop saying dick jokes in public.

And I'd like someone to link me to where these two guys, who are still anonymous by the way, are being "lambasted around the world." Because there's only one person being lambasted, and I'll give you one guess who it is.

I don't think me disproving their example, which is essential to their point, is irrelevant. I think it's very relevant.

> Yeah, but he tried to use it as an example of something that could lead someone to shame him.

Right.

> But... it didn't happen.

So?

> I don't know many people who would shame someone for assuming an unknown programmer is a man.

I don't know many people who would shame someone for saying "I'd fork him on GitHub" or making irreverent "dongle" jokes either. But clearly, they exist. And clearly, public shaming can do significant damage.

I understand this to be the central point of the GGGP.

> And I'd like someone to link me to where these two guys, who are still anonymous by the way, are being "lambasted around the world." Because there's only one person being lambasted, and I'll give you one guess who it is.

The first public remark in this whole incident was a lambasting of two individuals including a picture.

> I don't think me disproving their example

You didn't disprove anything. Whether or not the person quoted in the GGGP was publicly shamed was irrelevant. I stated this before and I'll say it one last time: the central point was the commenter's feelings and the commenter's perception of the social atmosphere. Those things are not dependent upon whether the commenter was publicly shamed, and yet, they can greatly affect the way we interact with each other.

Ugh, I really hate it when people split posts up like that. It gets unwieldy and strips the post of its overall context. I'm guilty of it, but I've been trying to cut back. It makes my posts smaller since I have to reply to the meat of it, you know? Not just its individual components.

Anyway, I'm saying that someone who would feel threatened by accidentally assuming a male gender might not necessarily be on their side, and their assumption might just be misguided. That invalidates the rest of his post, since it all relied on him feeling threatened when the threat doesn't exist.

I recognize the annoyance of splitting up a post. I find it incredibly difficult to avoid if I am to achieve the level of precision and concision that I want in my replies. This is partly due to my unimaginative writing and partly due to my desire to be as unambiguous as possible. Splitting out the post caters to both, but at the cost of continuity and a more pleasant reading experience.

What exactly does it take to have knowledge of the existence of a threat? In the case that has provoked all of this, there weren't any warning signs of impending doom. It therefore seams reasonable to me that nobody can know if a threat exists or not until after-the-fact. If it's unknowable, then what's the point in bringing it up anyway?

More importantly, this isn't an academic point. Feelings can't be invalidated. It doesn't make sense to speak of feelings or perceptions as invalid or valid---they simply exist in our minds. Perhaps they will go away or subside with more careful reflection and discussion, but that doesn't mean it is somehow invalid to acknowledge them. Particularly in this context, where presumably, this feeling was fostered by the recent kerfuffle.

The only thing we can say about the validity of the commenter's feelings or perceptions is that either they are truly what the commenter believes he felt, or the commenter is lying. The first is the only useful assumption given what we know; so we go with it.

So what if the commenter escaped without any public shaming? That has no impact on the commenter's feelings or perception at the time and therefore is missing the point of the commenter's reflection.

They were using their feelings to back up their point. If their feelings are misguided, the point they were trying to make is invalid. There is no proof that they would ever be publicly humiliated for misusing a pronoun, so to live in fear of that is misguided, and to use it as a reason why you should change your actions is ridiculous.

I still don't see any impending doom. Her original photograph tweet was retweeted... 20 times, I think? The only reason that guy was fired was because it was featured on HN through no action of Adria's.

I'm just going to say it. If you're going to compare these two things, you're crazy. Some assumption that is partly an accident of language, partly an accident of imagining others to be similar to your self without any other information, and the recognition of statistics, could in, any way, be shame worthy is just nuts.

Well yes... That's the point... I also think it's crazy that forking and dongle jokes are shame worthy. And yet, here we are.

Oh really? Well the question is, I am currently not sure how the person in question would react to a "Fork you" shirt. So...... that's the problem, that was my point. Where is the line? Because apparently that triggered.

But somehow, "example" is a foreign concept to you, since you sorta got stuck on the "crude joke" portion.

Way to go to miss the whole point.

The "line" for professional conduct is really simple.

If you are thinking about doing something ask yourself this question, "Would I do this if the CEO of our company was standing next to me".

My CEO? Absolutely. If I worked at another company, probably not. You have to judge the company you're in, and if someone takes offence, apologise, and be more mindful next time.

I don't think so. Many CEOs are irrational dunces and would react negatively if you admitted any flaws in the product or in yourself or anything of that nature. However, I don't think that as such makes it unprofessional. I think it's just common sense (which I'm aware is not so common).

Best behavior at offsite events... There's nothing inherently wrong with this and perhaps hard to argue with; however, it just seems like something a cog in a wheel would say ... nothing mean spirited intended, just rubs me the wrong way. :)

I'm with you there, was sorta dronish.