By Deanna Zandt, Contributor If you’ve not been following along in the latest brouhaha concerning sexism and the tech industry, this week saw a monster of a flame war spring up around conduct at a tech conference. Many other terrific bloggers have summed up what’s been happening, but let me offer a set of bullet points and links to bring everyone up to speed: Adria Richards overheard a conversation behind her (in the audience) at PyCon, where some men were making jokes to each other about “dongles” and “forking.” If those words don’t make sense to you, they’re standard tech terms that can easily be made into sexual innuendo. Adria took a picture of the men and tweeted it, calling them out for what she felt was inappropriate sexual behavior at the conference. She also blogged about it, and it was posted to Hacker News. Internet discussion ensues. A small percentage (happily by men!) of the dialogue was thoughtful and nuanced; most of it wasn’t–it turned threatening, racist and misogynistically demeaning pretty quickly. One of the men in the picture was fired from his job. No official verification of this, that I could find, but everyone participating in this conversation seems to think it’s true. All Internet hell breaks loose, and Adria becomes the target for some 4chan members, some groups claiming to be Anonymous, and more: death threats, rape threats, racist slurs (including the N-word, comments on her religious heritage, and more), doxxing of her personal info, denial of service attacks on the her website and/or the website of SendGrid, for whom she works. Adria is then fired from her job as a developer evangelist for SendGrid, as they’ve capitulated to the mob. At almost every juncture, there has been a festering petri dish of sociological behavior to study. A lot of people have been debating whether or not what Adria experienced was valid sexist behavior. I’m leaving that aside for a minute, and picking one particular dish to work with: the focus on many, many people–a lot of them women–on asking the question, “How could Adria have handled the initial situation with the men behind her in the audience differently?” They point out that she should have just addressed them directly, or gone to the conference organizers, or taken on any of a variety of their helpful tips. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest