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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

#291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both. Very common problem: interviewers asking questions about who was going to take care of the kids. Actually happened: an interviewer displayed a picture of himself not wearing pants. That interview was in Chicago; I was in Michigan at the time, thankfully. I see no correlation between company size and occurrence of this stuff. I have friends who happen to be both notoriously successful in the tech field and femal…

W T F ? "Actually happened: an interviewer displayed a picture of himself not wearing pants." How many people even have a picture of themselves without pants on at their fingertips, ready to display at a moment's notice?

Personally, I might put a picture of myself not wearing pants (in boxers, of course) in something if I were making a joke about a relaxed work environment, that kind of thing. It would be pretty damn inappropriate to just say "Hey look at this" to a female interviewee, of course... it's all about context.

Re: Female FOSS dev quits tech industry due to harassment

#292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you do not understand. You think my problem is that 'many people disagree with [me] on what should be the boundary of free speech.' This is incorrect. I am not making a normative argument about what the boundaries of free speech should be. Frankly, I don't know exactly where they should be; where many people see boundaries I tend to see a grey area, and my ideas on this tend to shift around a bit. It is much easi…

The problem I refer to is the invocation of 'free speech' to dismiss complaints about all undesirable speech, inclusive of that which may qualify as criminal. Who has done this? I'd be curious to see which posts you believe do this. I suspect all you will find is a set of posts which assume MikeeUSA committed no criminal acts. This is the assumption I'm working under, based mainly on the fact that no one has even acc…

When we document what MikeeUSA does, or participating in documenting his emails and actions and talking in public (or possibly in private) about being one of his targets, makes us more his target. It makes us more of a target for other harassers too. It is like declaring a security vulnerability, which then draws more attention and thus attacks. If you have been going around as we have at geekfeminism.org, and asking people if they've been targeted by MikeeUSA, then you'd hear more stories of the reasons people have for not revealing and exposing every incident like this and every detail of it.

Also, when women report harassment, they get a wide range of scrutiny and criticism of every aspect of their life, personality, personal history, looks, and so on. The way they've reported the harassment is always criticized as being too private, too public, not official enough, or overreacting by going through official channels too quickly rather than trying to solve things informally. If you as a man watch a person you know go through this process, as their confidante perhaps, you might see some of these patterns crop up.

It can be disheartening to find that so many harassing incidents, assaults, and rapes go unreported because women don't want to put themselves in a position where they will be subject to even more attack.

To you all it's like a quirky little exercise in logic or something, and you get to have fun with your academic debate over whether harassment really exists or not. You don't have to think, not only will MikeeUSA stick you in his trolly, psychotic, rapey crosshairs on his pedophile message boards, nor do you have to know that you probably have just filtered yourself out of several possible future jobs since someone won't hire you because you are a known troublemaker who might accuse someone of sexual harassment at work. It is so deeply offensive to have you all debate the existence of our oppression while you understand about 1% of its surface. But, obviously, it is a learning experience people need to go through. I just wish that some of you all would bother to listen more, go do some reading, and actually try to educate yourselves in a significant way rather than waiting for the magic feminism fairy to bless you with enlightenment. Cheers!!!

Re: Female FOSS dev quits tech industry due to harassment

#293
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it's her fault that a continued campaign of harassment "bothered" her? Have you ever experienced anything like that, or are you just guessing what it would feel like?

Well, she didn't do herself any favors by talking at conferences about women in tech, or setting up a feminist movement. If you wanted to attract abuse, that's a good way to go about it. It should be expected. Why didn't she talk at conferences about code?

I'm not sure if you're joking and I hope so, but she did give talks on coding, and then after giving one talk about women in tech that was quite successful and changed a lot of people's thinking, a lot of other conferences invited her to give similar talks in an attempt to make their own environments more diverse/welcoming, and in fact she turned down many more. I shouldn't even have to say that but apparently someone does. And if setting up a movement to support other women means that we're setting ourselves up as targets "to attract abuse" then you know what, count me in, because that only means we need MORE activism.

Re: Female FOSS dev quits tech industry due to harassment

#294
post #203
post #200

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> For instance, if you go hang out in your local university's maths (or physics) department There's the trans-gendered (male to female) mathematician who'd disagree. She says that when she used to give talks (as a male) she got respect, but now people say things like "Her brother was better" not realising it's the same person.

Maybe they just disrespect him because... let's face it, surgically mutilating your penis, taking a bunch of hormones and demanding that everybody call you "she" is just plain weird , regardless of what current orthodoxy says.

Your comment really bothers me. I really just want to respond with "fuck you", but maybe there's still something there to save. How exactly is trying to make your body conform to what your mind is telling you so weird?

Try to use a little empathy, and imagine (if you're a man) waking up in a woman's body tomorrow, and having everyone treat you as if it's always been that way. Might you not want to try to have your body express what you feel you are internally?

Re: Female FOSS dev quits tech industry due to harassment

#295

This reminds me of back in University ~10 years ago. In one of my Java courses we had a female professor and one female student. The female student ended up dropping the course within the first month not from harassment by her fellow male students but because the professor was embarrassing/harassing her in almost every lecture by bringing up the fact that there was a female student in the course. As a side note, that…

Regarding Queues and Sockets: what? Can you give her explanation for that? Was it just "those terms sound difficult and women don't like that kind of thing", or something even sillier like "queues are phallic"?

Re: Female FOSS dev quits tech industry due to harassment

#296
post #215

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People have historically used "scientific" evidence to prop up spurious claims that women and blacks were inferior to white men. [1] OP is probably reacting to that whenever people try to bring in biological explanations for gender gaps. If you want her to be more understanding to your hopefully pure motivations in seeking truth, you should also be more understanding of her recognition that people often hide bigotry…

You couldn't have picked a worse example. Go read the article "The Mismeasure of Science", by Jason Lewis et al. It's a fairly detailed analysis which shows that Stephen J. Gould was simply wrong about skull measurements (which were accurate). From the abstract: ...We investigated these questions by remeasuring Morton's skulls and reexamining both Morton's and Gould's analyses. Our results resolve this historical con…

It's a perfectly fine example. If you read the book, Gould is accurate in reporting that Broca genuinely thought differences in cranial capacity and the racial variations thereof meant differences in achievement. That your abstract reports that Morton's skull measurements were actually accurate actually just reinforces my point.

Re: Female FOSS dev quits tech industry due to harassment

#297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with the assumption that muslims are not terrorists is that (as any terrorism investigator will tell you) fundamentalist islamic words are very often a precursor to violent physical action. See the problem with this logic? You can't paint all people holding certain beliefs with the brush of the small subset who engage in violent acts.

No, your logic actually implies that we shouldn't paint people who say "I will come to your country and blow up your buildings" with the same brush as people who come to our country and blow up our buildings. I don't think I'm out of line to say that threats like that ought to be taken pretty seriously.

MikeeUSA has not been accused of saying "I will engage in violent acts against you, woman."

Re: Female FOSS dev quits tech industry due to harassment

#298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you clearly state "the problem"? Based on what has been posted, it's hard for me to clearly see a problem beyond "in a society with free speech, some people will speak in ways that others dislike." That is a legitimate (unsolvable) problem, but I don't think it's the problem you are referring to.

Yeah, sure, I'll try to clarify. I'm not advocating that we should stop them from speaking with any kind of legal measure. I value free speech too highly for that. I'm referring to the specific comments that I paraphrased. I don't think those posters have any specific malice towards women. I don't know them, but they're probably smart, generally respectable guys. But they are an example of people who are apparently u…

So the problem is, near as I can tell, that some people don't accept personal experiences and want harder evidence. Is that right?

Incidentally, your comment exhibits some bias of it's own: People with no personal experience in the matter saying it's not a problem and ignoring the fact that those who do have personal experience are saying that it is.

Wait a second - women have no personal experience being a male public figure. So how can women know what level of harassment a male public figure would receive? Do women really believe that "I know better than you do, and I say that you aren't being harassed as much as women are"?

Is this attitude among women also a problem?

Re: Female FOSS dev quits tech industry due to harassment

#299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that some of the 'bad apples' are senior members of the community who are or were respected and widely listened to. The fact that Eric Raymond is/was taken seriously ought to be hugely embarrassing to the open source community. EDIT: since I got downvoted already I may as well add: ESR is a vile pathetic excuse for a human being. I don't say that lightly, he really is obnoxious. I know he has a big fan…

Can you bring cites to this claim? Not challenging you, just I've heard this before, but never anything specific for us who don't know the details.

I know of at least one: he sent Bruce Perens a threatening email, enough that Bruce contacted the police. Here's a link:

http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/1999/04/msg00201.html

Edit: his response to receiving one threatening email is pretty revealing, too:

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=290

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