This is one of my pet peeves. This is a professional setting and the employees are not 13. They should be mature enough to be able to handle their personal lives without bans or frown upons. Someone can't handle rejection? Who says he/she can handle criticism? What about disagreements?
To me this is a personality problem that should be dealt with accordingly. Company-wide bans or silent rules can hide bigger problems.
Recently, however, the smart ones have been shouting back "British or European?"
Thanks for tall children...
On the other hand, there are plenty of people who can be in a relationship while working with each other. Hard cases make for bad law, and I'm uncomfortable with blanket proclamations against relationships at work, as long as two people at different levels along the same management line aren't seeing each other.
If the company is seen to have encouraged or even acknowledged the relationship it can create a huge liability, especially if one of the people involves feels like they got stiffed because of relationship issues (sidelined, transferred, had to resign, etc).
The number of couples who say they met at work suggests that blind eyes are often turned, but a company has those official bans on intra-office dating for good reason.
If, for the reasons you describe, they wish to maintain a public position of "we not encourage dating coworkers" that's one thing, so long as they don't actually think they have any say in this matter.
Shame that companies believe that just fine. They can and will fire an employee if "no dating coworkers" is a policy that said employee violated. You are welcome to avoid working for these companies, but that's your only recourse unless you have an overwhelmingly string case that discrimination was involved.
As a manager, you should be prepared for this eventuality once you become aware of the activity. It is unreasonable to forbid all dating since many happy marriages were established between people who met in the workplace. It is reasonable to let people know that they may face dismissal if their dating issues enter the workplace and prove a distraction for themselves or others.
On a practical level managers wish to avoid unnecessary turnover or drama in the workplace. Knowing that employee dating will almost inevitably lead to one or both of these things, I understand the "frown upon" aspect. The employees themselves should be adult enough to know that they are gambling with their jobs.
This is, sadly, the best thing to do because you don't know who is going to take offense.
PS: To avoid looking one-sided and narrow (which I believe I'm not) I really feel bad about this whole situation and the lady who had to go through that. Personally liked a github as a company.
Then excessive avoidance gets reinterpreted as snobbishness, sexism, not wanting to be inclusive, and so on. "Men actively avoid me and sit father away during meetings, they don't invite me for beers after works, it is a hostile environment". Anyway it is a fine line. And one can interpret a lot of behaviors as stemming from sexism or misogynism even if they are not.
If anyone -- attractive man, unattractive man, attractive woman, unattractive woman -- started hula-hooping in the middle of the office I would expect people to stare. Not because it's sexual, but because it's peculiar. The gap between "stare" and "ogle" is hardly objective, let alone a "chasm."
Anyway, another account of the incident paints a very different picture of the scene:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7408466
claiming that the gawking in question was undertaken by all present and not limited to men
The hard part here is defining "lecherous" but it would seem to imply that he is watching in a way that signals sexual intent. It's worth noting that women are generally much better at interpreting body language than men are, so it's possible that a guy is watching the woman dance and getting some sort of erotic enjoyment from it, tries his best to hide it but some subconscious subtle clue gives him away.
Having said that, hoop dancing would seem like an inappropriate thing to do in most offices to begin with but I would say the same thing about nerf gun fights.
That's not to say that I don't admire people that I find attractive. I just do it subtly to avoid making people feel uncomfortable.
For the record, I routinely hold open doors for people that I know are behind me and are leaving/entering a building. It surprised me to know end to get yelled at for it.
Exactly why I do it.
I've resigned myself to the fact that some people are just assholes. It's a trait that's not gender specific.
She was pretty unhappy about that as well, incidentally.
I know it's shocking if something like the door thing happens to you, but I wouldn't assume it reflects the general attitude of women.
"I do not offer my seat because you are a lady, but because I was taught to be a gentleman" - works for doors too.
My Dad would have had a fit if I didn't hold the door open for a group. He expected his children to be polite.
Nothing too bad, but people have glared at me, asked what I was doing or if they knew me, etc.
I was astonished; it's just something that everybody does where I live so it was weird to have people react like I was doing something outrageous.
I know you mean well, but your sadness to me belies some ignorance about what it's like to be a woman working in a male dominated field. You'd like to live in a world where you can casually watch beautiful people doing beautiful things. I don't begrudge you that, and I wouldn't accuse you of sexism.
That said, I have zero interest in watching women hula hoop at work. None. Not because I am incapable of enjoying a show like that, but because I desire so deeply to work in an environment where woman can just kick ass at their jobs without having to deal with sexual politics. We're nowhere near that point as a culture, but that's where I want to be.
So I'm not sad that I can't watch women hula hoop at work. I'm really excited to have positive, professional interactions with women at work about their actual jobs.
At my work, there is a woman who brings hula hoops to company events. When there's music, she likes to dance and do tricks with them and she obviously practices a lot. When she's doing it, people (including me) stare. But, at least for me, it has nothing to do with any sexual aspect of what she's doing...I'm watching it because I like appreciating the skill and practice that's gone into her performance. And similar things happen at other company functions. For example, we have an employee who majored in music and is an amazing pianist. There's a bar we go to with a piano that he's played a few times. Guess what...everyone stares at him while he's playing. Hell, we've even got a couple of people who are amazing beer pong players that gather a crowd whenever the ping pong balls come out at events with a keg.
So when does staring and admiring a skill cross the line to ogling? That depends entirely on the person making the determination and often says more about them and their perspective/past experiences than it does about the people doing the staring.
The bottom line is that for those of us who weren't there, nothing in the account we've been provided gives us any information to judge the appropriateness of what went on. We have only one fact: the author of the account, who, rightly or wrongly, has an axe to grind with the company, felt that it crossed some line. It's bad PR, but it's not proof that anything untoward happened.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7408466
it was at a party, with many non-Githubbers in attendance, and the onlookers were not only guys.
So basically the article's description may be totally inaccurate.
Gawking and looking are not the same thing. There are also times where even the most socially incompetent will realise that some girls doing things that might be nice to look at is not an invitation to check them out doing it (this is, of course, excepting people who go the reductionist route of thinking that feminists invent their own problems).
They're not animals at the zoo, they're people.
Then why do any of those things in a non-private setting with reasonable expectation of gawkers being present?
Where does this nonsense end? If (almost) all my co-workers are staring at me as I adjust my belt, standing in the middle of the lunch room, I will do that activity in the confines of a men's room next time. If the same thing happens as I stretch my leg muscles before a run, I will do that activity outside. Why is it my co-workers' fault if they stare at me if I do something that is not the norm?
If being merely 'looked at' troubles you, then you need to look at yourself before closing others' eyes.
"Why are you uncomfortable?", should not be that hard a question to answer, clearly and succinctly, for something that evokes such a strong response from you.
Impossible. You can pick your friends, you can pick your nose, but you cannot, however, pick your friends' nose.
"What a hostile environment that coworkers tell me to not hula hoop in the office!"
You can't win with some people or environments.
That is not a typical example of office decorum. If they were spinning plates they'd probably gather a few looks as well.
I get it, you find someone attractive and you want to gawk at them, cool. I learned to control that impulse when when I was hitting puberty. Seriously, there really isn't an excuse and it's inappropriate in most situations.
It's not really as clear cut as "staring makes you an asshole." I've found that in a workplace people will have wildly variable interpretations of the same event. The only solution is to work with mature adults who can assume good faith and work out their own issues. This almost never happens, so instead companies create hyper-sanitized environments where everything is against the rules.
While personally I think its creepy to just hang out and leer at them, it's not really against societal norms in any way.
It's not like these guys broke into the girls bathroom to watch this or something.
But I think it's impossible to really judge this situation without the context. Did other people decide to participate or was it really just two girls hula hooping the whole time? It boils down to was the mentality from the males perspective "oh hey, cool, people are hula hooping!" or "oh hey, the two attractive girls are hula hooping and I want to gawk at them!" The first one is fine, the second one is not.
The majority of your judgemental and passive/aggressive posts in this thread suggest otherwise.
I wonder what do you think about people who don't speak English or who don't eat their food with a forks but with other ustensils.
What on earth are you talking about?
How does not allowing dating between employees solve this situation? Regardless of whether Horvath was seeing anyone or not she could have rejected this person because she wasn't interested and the same things could have happened. If anything her trying to avoid dating anyone in the office would have led to the same result, so how exactly would a rule like that have helped in this situation?
I think the general mentality of don't date anyone from work is silly, you can't just sweep under the rug any emotions or relationships that might happen to develop with people you work with 5 days out of the week. The important thing is to make sure that no conflict of interest issues develop and make sure these relationships are known so HR can handle them properly.
Of course there are a lot of complicated scenarios that can develop, but like someone else said, we're all adults here. People should be able to handle these things in a professional manner and if they can't then really the company needs to question whether they should be working there in the first place.
That's between the two people. Period. If they become problem employees, then they are problem employees, not two people who date. The problem behavior that happens on the clock is HR's only legitimate concern.
Prohibiting dating is like firing women who get pregnant.
Counter example, where I work there are so many married or dating couples within the company that it's almost a thing.
Could not disagree more. It's none of the founder's business and the culture in the US that tries to forbid this is sick.
And, even though you don't have time to meet anyone, you can't form a life bond with the designer that you work with everyday- despite you mutually digg each-other and are best friends.
And now, it seems its forbidden to explain male behavior as anything but evil. Because they are 'predators' by default.
Resorting to these "PC rules of engagement" ends rational discussion. Reducing this to the choir preaching to one another.
Your answer is kind of what I expected: You believe sexism is an attack on men, and therefore need to be on the defense.
Don't you think it's then disingenuous to call it sexism?
> Don't you think it's then disingenuous to call it sexism?
Not if each group unfairly characterizes the other based solely on gender traits. Sexism is a two-way street -- if a man says, "All women are dumb", that's very clearly sexist. If a woman says, "All men are rapists," that's equally sexist.
It doesn't matter whether the source of that sexism is the way the men treat women, or whether its the way a high-powered woman treats the other women. (Both are at play in this particular story.) If someone is being discriminated against due to their gender, the company culture has an issue with sexism.
I brought up jealousy as an example, but I didn't mean it to be romantic. It can be an issue of feeling threatened by another woman, as when a woman used to be the only female voice at her company. It's a twisted perspective, but there's data to say it exists.
It's sexism if a human being[1] is being mistreated, harassed, or "labeled" because of their gender[2].
It's perhaps easier to understand from analogy[3], take a look at racism[4] and see if you can find any similarities.
Feel free to ask any question if something is still unclear.
[1] https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_being
[2] https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender
If someone inanimated me, I would quite right then and there. Thats some freaky x-men shit.
My issue with this is she had no problem with the females doing the hula hooping but had a big problem with the guys who were watching. This is one of the problems with these ongoing debates: Women very often feel it is somehow solely on men to not look (or whatever) while claiming women can do any damn thing they want. Anyone, male or female, who tries to suggest that women bear some responsibility for not shakin it at work get called a victim blamer, rape apologist, etc.
The problem isn't sexism so much as objectification. It's just shitty to treat someone like meat. It's not going to help people feel like part of a team if they're gawked at. If it's men gawking at women, it's going to alienate the women. Like, seriously, can't people just control themselves and treat other people as people and not sexual objects?
As for the sexism part… historically, you know, men are allowed to stare at women and women aren't really allowed to (their traditional role is to be coy, y'know?). It's an action that is typically masculine, and it's an action that reminds women that they're different. That they don't quite belong. Etc. etc. It's just not positive, it's not helpful, it's just base instinct—and one that should probably be overpowered in the workplace.
It's one of those things that is going to be painfully obvious to someone who has experienced discrimination (eg. sexism, racism, homophobia, whatever) in their life, and not a big deal to those that haven't.
Really? I've played football with a few women from my office playing but most on the sidelines staring.
That sounds like a spectacle. I'd watch it regardless of male or female doing it.
The hula hooping moment was important because it visibly demonstrated her male coworkers lack of respect for women as people. They were unabashedly staring at their female coworkers as "eyecandy" in that moment and even defended their doing so.
Who is to say that it was only a female employee's problems? It sounds like the wife is a nut case and she could very well have bothered other employees. There is no evidence here that her requests were being ignored because she is a female.
>The hula hooping moment was important because it visibly demonstrated her male coworkers lack of respect for women as people.
Are you serious? Is it really the case that you have no respect for a person if you watch them performing a sporting activity? If I start juggling and someone watches me, I highly doubt that it's because he/she has a lack of respect for me as a person.
Seriously, read what you just said. It implies that you cannot watch people performing an activity while respecting their autonomy.
Overall the article focuses very little on sexism and more on this really bizarre and inappropriate relationship with the Founder's wife. The section about someone reverting her commits because of being rejection might be a better example, but I don't really even see that as being gender specific either. If a women was rejected by a male coworker and she started reverting commits is that sexism? Jealousy isn't really gender specific and targeted at someone because they are a man or a women. Finally there were some vague mentions of pull request comments that might be sexist, but it's hard to judge without being able to see the comments and she really didn't expand into what about them were sexist.
Overall what I see is a very strange story about incompetence and inappropriate behavior, but very little talk about sexism except in a few random places and at the very end with the hula hoop story. I feel like there is a lot more to this story that has really been told.
I think what the prior poster is trying to express is that this is a situation, with the founder's wife, that could only occur to a female employee. The covert power of the wife over the complainant is based on gender, and her success in intimidating the complainant with bizarre behaviour -- to which the complainant had an entirely passive response -- is largely due to the social expectations that the complainant perceives, that as a woman she should not be confrontational nor assertive.
Given that I didn't see the hula-hooping incident myself, and only have the complainant's description of it, I cannot adequately address the question of whether or not the men involved were behaving improperly, or aggressively, or in a fashion such that I am sympathetic to the complainant's feeling that their attitude was demeaning to her female colleagues. Personally, I could happily watch attractive young women exercise for hours. But I would also sympathize completely with a young woman whom felt uncomfortable with that. From the complainant's description, it seems that her colleagues were hula-hooping together for fun, and that there was an abnormal number of male engineers sitting and watching them. The hula-hoopers were presumably aware of this. It spoiled the fun for the complainant, but how the hula-hoopers felt about it is still an open question.
I think you are absolutely right that the focus of discussion should be the founder and his wife. The situation sounds completely inappropriate, the HR response seems powerless and ineffectual, and whatever the other side of the story is, her resignation/dismissal occurred under entirely improper circumstances, and she probably deserves compensation for this.
I have never understood how this argument works, obviously I'm missing something. Because I momentarily focus my attention on someone for their physical attributes, I automatically and necessarily consider them "eyecandy" rather than intelligent people with their own will that are to be respected? Does this work with other attributes - if I appreciate and acknowledge someone for X, does that mean that X is all they ever are to me? If the male employees had put on an impromptu bodybuilding pageant, would that have been the same thing?
Naturally, the fact that the woman in question was actually disturbed by the situation does indicate that there is cause for concern.
As for this story: it has nothing to do with sexism. Nothing at all. Actually the real sexists are the ones who think all this happened because of the sexism. Guys (and girls): these issues are much much more complex and deserve to be treated with much more respect instead of rubber stamping like it is common now. Women and non-white people can be assholes too and I would like to retain the right call them as such without being accused of sexism or racism. Though this right might be long gone. Quite often it is a fun mental experiment to reverse the genders or races and think how vastly different reactions would be (if there would be any). Imagine that black person says: "I am proud to be black!". Now imagine that the white person says "I am proud to be white". Now throw away you knee-jercky reaction and think about it.
I thought about it, and here's what I found: The different reactions which those two assertions may elicit depend crucially on different shades of meaning of the word "proud" which come into play, depending on the colour of the person who says it. These different meanings come into play because of the history of oppression associated with these colours; we don't (usually) think in a vacuum. To make this clearer, consider the following, slightly modified thought experiment:
Imagine that a black person says: "I am not ashamed to be black!". Now imagine that a white person says "I am not ashamed to be white!". How strong is the knee-jercky reaction now? Think about it.
What textbook would that be? My dictionary defines racism as:
1. the belief that all members of each race possess characteristics, abilities, or qualities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races.
2. prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one's own race is superior.
This does not suggest to me that it is racist to acknowledge that a shared history (of oppression, in this case) may have an influence on the language of a people.
There's a whole bunch of literature on the topic beyond what's contained in a dictionary definition.
When a black person says that they are proud to be black, they are expressing that they feel a certain pride in their race, which exists in this country thus far as a marginalized and underprivileged set of humanity. Saying you are "Proud to be white" kind of makes you sound like an asshole, because white people have crafted a society to let them have more advantage. True, any given white person might not be some sort of evil society architect, but white people are clearly those who most benefit from this society. Blaming this on political correctness is a cowardly and conservative move that stems from a false sense of equality between people.
As progressive and bottom-up our community can be, we are not a meritocracy, and everyone is not equal.
Thinking of 'white' as a single group of people who are always middle class is a fantastically ignorant thing to do.
Does the white kid whose parents are Ukrainian janitors deserves a leg up less than the black kid whose parents are an English professor and a photographer?
Full disclosure: my grandfather was an uneducated Ukrainian immigrant (:
Nope, but he's going to get one as a white person who lives in America.
But, no. First of all, your example is biased towards Western society. Expressing white pride in an Eastern Asian society would be absolutely fine, according to your logic.
Here's the issue, however. Even though black people have been historically marginalized in the USA (as I'm implicitly assuming this is US-centric) and still face disadvantages, despite being largely equal in most facets, this does not make their racial pride any less "asshole"-ish.
Pride is reserved for things once has accomplished, not ones that you're inherently born with. Just by that alone, racial pride is frivolous.
Even further, by setting up this double standard, you are actually contributing to the extension of racism. Why? You're giving people carte blanche to keep focusing more and more on racial characteristics as being essential to them as people.
"It's bad to be racist, but we still must be preoccupied with race and being inoffensive at all costs."
That is only slowing progress down. You go from a society that is maddeningly obsessed with race as a way to persecute people they don't understand to a society that is maddeningly obsessed with a race as a way to kiss ass, idolize and never question those majestic black people who can clearly do no wrong and deserve to have double standards because they have suffered injustices throughout their history.
Yet so have all races and cultures, honestly. Black people do not hold a monopoly on persecution.
No one is saying white people can't be proud of their heritage. They can be proud, and they do celebrate their heritage all the time. Acknowledging someone's race isn't extending racism, it's embracing them and their culture.
To be honest I used to think similarly, I never got why people had to be proud of their race, or why it was part of their identity. Eventually I realized it's because the dominant culture is white, I don't have to ask myself what it means to be white or what it means to be american. It is part of my identity, I just have the luxury of not having to think about it.
Anyway, I would highly recommend watching "The Color of Fear", it changed my mind on a lot of stuff I'd never thought about critically.
Black culture isn't a thing, either. What, you think all people have the same traditions and customs because they have a common skin color? What idiocy. What frivolity. What (inadvertent?) racism.
Being overly attentive to race is not an embracing of their culture. It is a fallacy, a misunderstanding of how the world works under the lens of this Western postmodernist narrative that people as an entire superficial group are responsible for misdeeds of their ancestors, whom they share no relation to whatsoever beyond their whiteness.
You're not embracing culture. You are erasing culture with your narrow, Western-centric guilt narrative where everything works in binaries. That being black dictates a common culture, and that Irish people have no culture, because they're white.
You sound like a racial nationalist.
And where did I say people are responsible for the misdeeds of their ancestors? You definitely aren't responsible, but you do benefit disproportionally from a long history of oppression. You shouldn't feel guilty, but you should be aware of it.
Nor was I saying we should be overly attentive to race, I'm simply saying that acknowledging someone's race isn't racist. And I hate to break it to you, but yes people do have a shared experience based on their skin color. Whether you're black and 8th generation American, or you're from Africa, there is a shared experience in the way you are perceived and treated in a society dominated by "white culture."
You sound like every defensive white dude ever who can't handle the fact that just maybe our society is built around us. You are the one who is erasing culture.
Seriously watch that video I linked (better yet, watch the whole movie).
To say there is a "shared experience" between all people of the same skin color is completely ignoring cultural and socioeconomic rifts that are present in the equation. There is common ground between subgroups, but ultimately, what you're speaking about reeks of an ethnic nationalism.
Is our society built around white people? Western society? Yes, most likely. It's hardly surprising when it has a predominantly white racial makeup.
Good to know I'm a defensive culturally erasing white dude for not buying into a narrow and binary white guilt narrative where some 80% of the world's population is under a homogenous yoke, that is inconsistent with how the world works at large. Some history lessons might do you well, I believe.
I saw the video. All I saw was an emotional man yelling out a black nationalist argument, largely as a reaction to how he may have been personally mistreated.
I don't buy into the whole white-guilt complex
I invite you to take a walk around Oakland and SF and see if you think that is still true.
If you want a crippling issue, go for homophobia. Homophobia is still very much rampant in the USA and it is still completely fine for politicians to be openly homophobic for reasons like "preserving family values".
Yet when was the last time you heard a US politician make openly racist and white supremacist statements? When has a white supremacist been elected? David Duke is the most recent example I can name of, and he was reviled.
Racism for US politicians is an instant career killer, no question. Race is a touchy issue and the moment a representative says something unfavorable concerning race, they get annihilated by press and public advocacy. Not the same for homophobia.
It's time people stop with their persecution complexes. The past is the past. No one owes you anything.
Then again "queer" these days often means "straight but wants tumblr oppression points," so your perspective might be different from an actual gay person's.
So really you are claiming that racism is over as a problem. Nice.
By dividing complex social issues into dichotomies of "oppressor versus oppressed" and allowing double standards as a perverse form of reparation for past injustices that current generations no longer have to suffer from, you are exacerbating the issue of race.
The ultimate goal should be to render race as a non-defining characteristic, one that should not cloud peoples' judgement or fuel their insensitivity. Instead, what's going on is that we're turning race into an emotional circus.
The fact is that being white by itself does not mean your ancestors were involved in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Mine were too busy being under Ottoman rule. Conversely, being black does not make you exempt. Many tribal warlords traded slaves with the Europeans voluntarily. There were some few thousand or so black slave owners in the USA before abolition.
People are not responsible for what their ancestors perpetrated in the past, and the world does not revolve around the West. Yet these ideologies of white guilt and reparation act like it's exactly that way.
What you're doing is turning race into a novelty.
That's a pretty OK goal, although it's unrealistic, because we can only get closer to that by successive approximation.
However your real mistake is trying to use your long term goal (ignoring race) as a short term strategy (ignoring racism). You're correct that racism is a less big deal in many contexts than it used to be. But for the time being, racism is quite a big thing in many other contexts. And ignoring it won't help get us to the place where we can safely ignore it.
I'm a man so I can't speak for women directly, but what I've gathered from the experiences of others is that women are interacted with on an attraction basis exponentially more than men are, this also constantly ranging from socially acceptable to unacceptable, wanted and unwanted. It manifests in little ways, cat-calling, aggressive or unwanted flirtation, maybe a creepy controlling coworker suddenly confessing his love? My own mom told me about a time when a total stranger grabbed her butt in a store and walked off. It makes sense to me that many women would be extra-sensitive to scenarios like this. Men literally don't have to deal with interactions like this at that level so it's totally different when the gender roles are reversed, and it's rare that they are.
The importance of that scenario was that it was relative to her entire work experience at Github. Even if we assume the intentions of the male workers were totally golden and the hula-hoopers were totally fine with their gawking, to me it makes sense why this scene would be triggering for her.
> Probably worth mentioning that the hula hoop dancing happened at a Github party with a lot of people not from Github. It was also super badass hula hooping, not just regular dancing. Everyone was looking, men and women, because it was pretty awesome.
It makes sense to me as well, but if I were her boss, I would ask her to take a more professional and less emotional perspective of the workplace (of course, after (hopefully having her problems presented in a clear manner and) solving the other issues that were causing her to feel unwelcome).
There was no resolution here. I don't blame her for taking these steps to out Github.
Maybe hula-hooping is a common occurrence in Silicon Valley offices, but if my co-workers would be hula-hooping I would be looking as well (regardless whether they are male or female). Probably I would be thinking 'why on earth are you hula-hooping in you workplace instead of working'. I guess there is a fine line between gawking and looking.
Don't get me wrong - the entire situation she describes sound horrible but the hula-hooping did not sound very professional in the first place.
The connotations depend a lot on the context.
Most of this seemed like a poor performer who socialized too much at work. The problem was the crazy wife. Two bad drivers meet at an intersection..
And for people saying the guys don't get worked over in pull requests or have their code passively aggressively reverted, all I can say is LOL.
Totally disagree. If someone is hula hooping in a company that usually builds software to host version control repositories, they are doing something quite out of the ordinary, which is going to lead people to gawk. This does not necessarily imply sexual objectification, though it doesn't preclude it.
> They were unabashedly staring at their female coworkers as "eyecandy" in that moment and even defended their doing so.
Why should someone be "abashed" at staring at someone who is hula hooping in the office? This is slowly starting to lean towards 'thoughtcrime', as long as they don't make overtly sexual or lewd comments, they shouldn't be unnecessarily be accused of a "lack of respect for women as people".
This is how sexism works.
You are using "inappropriate" like it's an objective word. Which is false. If she said something like "they were wolf-whistling and throwing dollar bills", that's an objective statement that we can either think is true or false, and form certain opinions about it. The only objective word we have heard so far is "staring". She is saying, "Ah, they were staring at a bunch of women hula-hooping in the middle of the office at a tech company, how inappropriate!", I am not being sexist when I say, "No, that's not inappropriate, stop with your 1800s attitude."
It is just a difference between Horvath's rather prim definition of "inappropriate" and my more liberal one, and I don't see how that is sexist, or marginalizes her opinion. My grandfather would probably agree with Horvath that staring at a bunch of women hula-hooping in the office is "inappropriate", and I would disagree with him too.
She says it was inappropriate, and more importantly, that it made her feel uncomfortable. You have to either accept that, or you have to call her a liar.
If you choose to call her a liar, your basis for calling her a liar is what defines you as sexist. If it's "my vast and varied dealings with the Github staff at all levels never suggested anything unprofessional ever went on there"[0], then you are not sexist. If it's because "women overreact to stuff like this", you're sexist.
And it's one way or the other. You can't say "I am not calling her a liar, but I don't believe her". That's just mealy-mouth calling her a liar. And you can't say, "I didn't experience any of the involved facts for myself, but I'm not basing it on prejudices", because again, that's just speaking out of both sides of your mouth.
[0] which, given how shitty their code is, I can't see how anyone could ever make such a claim.
This particular account isn't even filtered through a journalist!
Lots of people of both sexes are impotent and disaffected at work, so it's not necessarily proof of anything when someone says "my opinion is not respected" and then finds superficials to explain it. If you can demonstrate a pattern, sure, but simply drawing from personal experience is very close to useless. In this case she is drawing from personal experience.
The hula hooping moment was important because it visibly demonstrated her male coworkers lack of respect for women as people.
What a gigantic jump. I mean, solar system crossing. Two people put on what sounds like a unique, if not artistic demonstration. People watch. It might actually be her own insecurities and hangups that led her to decry this, which is actually a perverse and rather incredible bit of sexism in itself ("women of Github...hide your shame. Don yon burkas and shroud yourself from the lusts of men").
This is not a clear story at all (clearly the founder's wife -- who is a significant owner of the company, fwiw -- got involved for something completely unspoken), and there is no reason for anyone to knee jerk to either side.
Further (and this comment is more general) it is toxic and repressive for the classic "Oh woe am I, look at all of the victim blaming in here! How offensive!". Github, and all of the players involved, are people too. Because one person yells the loudest and earliest doesn't mean that you can grab your torches with legitimacy without being the problem yourself.
1. Founder's wife asked Horvath out and gave her a lecture about who is the boss. Probably out of jealousy.
2. Founder's wife physically inanimate Horvath, making her unwelcome and scared.
3. Founder did not stop the wife and protect his wife.
4. Horvath was approached by a male co-worker and according to her her rejection had caused tension between her and that co-worker.
5. Horvath's partner is also a Github employee.
6. Another founder tried to step in but the situation didn't really resolve.
7. Horvath felt male co-workers gawking/staring/looking at female co-workers hula-hooping while sitting in a couch looked like someone visiting a strip club.
This is more like a failed company management than sexism at work.
A partner can help his or her partner looking after/helping/running a company even as a non-employee. He or she could send employees your homemade cookie or send them birthday card. It's okay to share thoughts with partner how to run a company, how to resolve people-people problem.
But the founder should not let his or her partner to intimate anyone: HR, executives, managers, engineers. This type of behavior, I thought I would only see them in drama (well I guess you can say something about WhiteHouse...)
The founder accused Horvath for bringing love affair into the company because she was/is dating an employee. The founder has a good point: try to avoid dating someone working with you. It's a beautiful story; but you can cause all sorts of mess. See this childish engineer who was rejected by Horvath became angry at her and started ripping her code out. I have read about Github's open culture, but hey, how could anyone do that!? And yet no one seen to care internally at all because he's a popular figure in the company. Well, I can't say everyone in that company is shit because there is also a rank in any organization. I wouldn't go against someone senior or more popular unless I have to. This is also a bystander problem: unless we have to deal with it, let other people and the people in the story deal with the situation.
While the founder is right about avoiding dating someone in your own company, he couldn't see that his wife (effectively meaning his own family problem) was also leaking into the company's daily operation.
The other founder tried to help Horvath. The founder apologized and tried to restrain his wife from sitting across Horvath. But the wife continued to "spy" on her. She was welcomed to do whatever she want to do. Horvath tried to ask other executives to help for the very last time and none worked out. Either the founder was scared of his wife (love her so much he didn't want to yell at her) or none of the executives really care. Someone with management skill should have step in and tell the founder "stop letting your wife to come in!"
Apparently, people fear the founder? and the wife??
Regarding the strip-club comment, I don't know the best way to avoid it. I, as a male, try to avoid staring at another female because I fear someone like Horvath accuses me of sexism. Maybe the guy was just bored or thought that female worker was beautiful. Staring at someone shouldn't be counted as sexism. It's hard. Would a female staring at a beautiful male count as sexism?
I am not saying there is no sexism in work place, but I think Horvath's overall sexist experience might have been influenced/augmented based on her treatment in the company (no one stop the founder and his wife abusing power).
But hey, I am just reading off the article. Her experience could be worse! I do feel bad for all the intimations she had to go through. I felt really bad as I was reading the article.
Final point:
Horvath then told her partner, also a GitHub employee, about what was happening. She warned him against being close to the founder and his wife, and asked him not to relay information to them.
I have a mixed feeling. If I were in his situation, I would try to sort out the problem with the founder myself. But now that I read about it, I guess in the future, if I were in a similar situation, I would not talk it out until situation gets worse.