I'm privileged. I also have a black belt in taekwondo, studied other martial arts/self defense techniques, and I'm big and fat and subjectively beautiful with a couple thousand Twitter followers ;) I'm part of a bunch of women/diversity-focused communities I can turn to for help too. (Double Union, devchix, Tech LadyMafia, etc. if anyone was curious.)

There will be women that can't do what I'm willing to do for a lot of reasons. People, even. There are people still having problems with what they've done in the past to discourage bad behavior even though they were the victims. There will never be a shortage of that, ever.

So whatever you think someone else should do, don't forget you can help too. Discourage this behavior in everyone, support codes of conduct or implement them in your own groups, and follow said codes of conduct. The community will become a better place for it, not just for women but for everyone in general, and you can't go wrong with that.

Of course, had I seen such behavior I'd have told the jerk to back off myself and pointed out that she's clearly uncomfortable with your inappropriate behavior. It's a bitcoin meetup, not a singles bar.

Okay, so that's what women should do, then what should men do?

Obviously, not be total jerks like that guy and grope women you don't know. I'm not blaming her at all, don't mean to imply that. He was in the wrong.

Sure, I didn't think you were blaming her, but I do think the issues go deeper.

Think about it from the perspective of the groper. He perhaps doesn't understand why the action was uncalled for, in his mind he was just being 'friendly' or 'flirty', a little forward but nothing more. How is there this disconnect between these mostly harmless intentions and the inappropriate actions that followed? Certainly a level of ignorance and/or lack of emotional intelligence is at play. So as men, what can we do to help change this?