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Female FOSS dev quits tech industry due to harassment

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Re: Female FOSS dev quits tech industry due to harassment

#81

Post by scott_s »

maximusprime wrote: post #70
scott_s wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excuse me? At what point do you stop calling someone a "troll" and start calling them a "stalker"? Perhaps the harassment she received was so much that changing her whole life greatly improves her quality of life. Is she still "just supporting negative stereotypes" then?

I think the point is that men have to put up with such shit all the time online.

No, I don't think they do. And if you think they do, I don't think you understand the scale of what she's talking about. It's linked several times in this thread. Please read it.

Re: Female FOSS dev quits tech industry due to harassment

#82

Post by maximusprime »

pnathan wrote: post #68
maximusprime wrote: post #20

Men have to put up with such abuse harassment and dickery all the time online. Welcome to the internet. Unfortunately us men can't just play the "sexism" card.

No. No, we don't. I've been online for years , and men never get this particular kind of tripe thrown in their faces. It's a pretty unique kind of anger that comes out.

You've not been on IRC have you...

Re: Female FOSS dev quits tech industry due to harassment

#83

Post by DiabloD3 »

matt_yoho wrote: post #50
DiabloD3 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm being downvoted for supporting woman's rights and publicly stating so. Welp, I have karma to burn, I'm not going anywhere.

I think you're being downvoted for poor reading comprehension and for the entirely unnecessary and contextually-inappropriate use of the term "bitching".

Bitching is bitching no matter if a guy or a woman does it. If you let political correctness run your life, you are no different than the people who think women should be kitchen slaves.

Re: Female FOSS dev quits tech industry due to harassment

#84

Post by EthanG »

Hmm. I read the whole thing and was surprised and saddened to find it seems genuine. There are some beastly women operating under the flag of feminism, but if I'm any judge of character I don't think Bayley is one of them.

I am curious about the removal of code issue, but I'm sorry to say it's a morbid curiosity. I would like to see if my opinion of ESR's judgement of human issues can get any lower.

Re: Female FOSS dev quits tech industry due to harassment

#85

Post by mchanson »

jimwise wrote: post #7

No disagreement with the basic, point, but was a bit surprised by this quote: "So, here's our situation. We have a man (presumably; at any rate he appears to want to be identified as such) in the Australian Linux community, who targets women by sending them private abusive emails from a throwaway address and with a name that can't readily be connected to any publicly known member of the community. His ISP won't hand…

I don't know, but in the US don't a lot of states have stalking laws that would cover this kind of behavior.

I see this site has info by state. Dunno if this kind of thing exists in Australia...

http://www.haltabuse.org/resources/laws/index.shtml

Re: Female FOSS dev quits tech industry due to harassment

#86

Post by _delirium »

ugh wrote: post #58
maximusprime wrote: post #20

Men have to put up with such abuse harassment and dickery all the time online. Welcome to the internet. Unfortunately us men can't just play the "sexism" card.

Examples? It’s rough on the internet, sure, but were I a woman I would think long and hard about revealing my gender. Women are quite visibly treated differently and everyone being oblivious to this sexism (or even belittling it) doesn’t really help.

Stacy Horn has some good examples applied to both genders, even in the 1990s, in her book Cyberville (http://www.amazon.com/dp/044651909X), an account of her time running ECHO. Even if only a small percentage of your users are insane, a large community seems to get a few.

I do agree women are visibly treated differently, especially in the sense of pervasive weird harassment, like random sexual or hostile comments from dozens/hundreds of users for no reason. The specific issue of crazy stalkers trying to get you fired may also apply to women more frequently, but I'm less sure of that--- 4chan has a history of doing that sort of stuff, mostly to males, and bloggers and website admins who piss people off get it all the time. Both Richard Kyanka of SomethingAwful and Rusty Foster of Kuro5hin have writeups floating around somewhere of some of the harassment they and their families have received due to running popular forums (in rusty's case it more or less caused him to check out).

Not really sure what to do about the stalker problem, since that appears (in this case, at least) to have been a single person, and problems that one-in-a-million people can cause are difficult to stamp out. The pervasive harassment problem, of course, could and should be fixed.

Re: Female FOSS dev quits tech industry due to harassment

#87

Post by mootothemax »

monochromatic wrote: post #52

Trolls exist on the internet. Bayley is just supporting negative stereotypes about how women can't handle the pressure when she lets a troll get the best of her and changes her whole life because of him.

Bayley is just supporting negative stereotypes about how women can't handle the pressure when she lets a troll get the best of her and changes her whole life because of him.

No, you're helping to perpetrate such a myth by writing a comment like this without taking into account all the facts. Unless you label people who repeatedly phone your employer and make accusations of paedophilia as mere trolls.

Re: Female FOSS dev quits tech industry due to harassment

#88

Post by maximusprime »

scott_s wrote: post #81
maximusprime wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point is that men have to put up with such shit all the time online.

No, I don't think they do. And if you think they do, I don't think you understand the scale of what she's talking about. It's linked several times in this thread. Please read it.

I've read it. There are billions of disturbed weird people in the world. Lots of them make it online. This is one of them.

It's a shame she let it bother her.

Re: Female FOSS dev quits tech industry due to harassment

#89

Post by peterwwillis »

A couple of points if I may:

1. If you speak at conferences, especially about a non-technical subject like "women in FOSS projects" (which is more likely to get sexists riled up), you are going to get unwanted attention. Pretty much every speaker who speaks on a controversial, or non-technical, or just media-glamorized topic is going to get harassed - if not hacked. It happens all the time to men and i'm sure it happens to women.

2. She started a "geek feminist" website, so that didn't help in terms of getting some sexist asshole's attention. It's like starting a "geek black people" website and not expecting white supremacists to send hate mail. I'm not saying it's justified, only that you have to expect the assholes out there will come out of the woodwork to give you shit.

3. I need to do something that feels rewarding and fun, and the work I was doing - which involved lots of speaking at conferences wasn’t giving me that any more. - So stop speaking at conferences? The tech industry has more going for it than giving talks.

4. If the guy isn't posing a physical threat, suck it up and ignore it. Do you know how many people troll me every week? A lot. But I make myself a target - just like being bullied in school - and thus I need to defend myself or move on.

5. Stop trying to 'get more women in technology'. Why is this seen as a serious problem that needs fixing? Go ahead and work to reduce sexism, I think that's necessary because the internet tends to reduce everything to childish unprofessional behavior. But nobody's code is going to get better just because there's more females working on it. Instead, focus on improving the tech industry as a whole instead of one little facet of it (like the distribution of gender).

I'm sorry if I sound unsympathetic. I do sympathize. A friend of mine stopped working in the underground infosec community because he was putting out a magazine and people were sending him hate mail. I understand he didn't want to get shit, but he had to expect haters - it's the fucking internet.

Re: Female FOSS dev quits tech industry due to harassment

#90

Post by DiabloD3 »

Tangurena wrote: post #72
DiabloD3 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MikeeUSA frequently states dumb shit like "oh, women deserve to be raped since the day they first bleed because this is what God created women for" and other shit. He does it purely for the sake of trolling, and people periodically bite the trollbait. Is this illegal? No. Should he be beaten with in an inch of his life? Yes. Is that going to happen outside of a prison? Probably not, no one is quite sure of his exact…

A number of women have been beaten, raped and/or murdered by men making identical noises. MikeeUSA wasn't trolling, he was threatening to murder those women he was stalking, and justifying it. As MikeeUSA himself wrote: > The women of the "geek feminism" movement will be just as effective at excising men from the movement as Nina was at systematically destroying Hans Reiser's life untill he saw no reason, nothing lef…

But thats just part of his troll persona. He's like 14, lives in his parent's basement, and hates the bright light of the daystar in the big blue room.

If a woman said hi to him, he'd spooge his pants and pass out, complete with nosebleed.

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