Excuse me but I am surprised. I read a lot on HN and on several planets (feed aggregation) about harassment, but in my field (engineering) I have never seen/experienced/heard about such cases even if the ratio female/male is pretty low is some of these conferences. Is it something specific to the coder community? Or maybe chemical/process engineers are just an exception? Or is it specific to the US in this field (I have been to a couple of coder oriented conferences in Europe without experiencing such cases but only engineering confs in the US)?
Let's get a little louder
71–80 of 149 posts
Re: Let's get a little louder
#72> Let's stop talking about apologies too. "After the fact" doesn't really do any good. Sexual harassment should not happen in the first place. There should be a clearly-defined set of standards in place to prevent it.
I'm not sure how standards in place at a conference can prevent individuals from deciding to break the law.
Sure, you might deter the weak-willed or fearful, but these sorts of asshole moves aren't generally perpetrated by those kinds of people.
Unfortunately, for a lot of this kind of stuff, after-the-fact is all we have. I would love a better solution but the items listed don't actually _prevent_ this.
Re: Let's get a little louder
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. Why is the development community (this conference in specific) being held responsible for the acts of an individual who happens to reside within? This is clearly something that should be taken care like an adult of outside of a private community. The story is a bummer, but the author's response to the situation is quite childish and this blog post seems somewhat irrelevant.
And the response from the organizer should have been very simple and straight-forward: Ask the person to leave the conference and ideally, if it still had to take place, canceling their talk as well. I doubt anything but praise would have resulted from that, even though the best outcome would be that it was kept private and became a little piece of background gossip floating around the Django-community.
Sorry to go all patriarchy here, but the little Schneier on my shoulder just explained to me how to get anyone's talk cancelled at a conference that institutes this sort of policy.
I'm not sure that's a workable fix, either. This is sort of a hard problem.
Re: Let's get a little louder
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can I please get your full name and the list of conferences you plan to attend to further your career ? Don't worry, in no way am I going to abuse this information to make baseless complaints against you. All my complaints will be solidly based on malice.
I'll repeat myself to ease your fear of the rabid hordes of malignant women who want to make your life miserable: "they can make clear what will happen if they get a complaint about you." Of course what will happen from a complaint should take malignancy in consideration and offer at least some kind of right to respond to offenders.
>I'll repeat myself to ease your fear of the rabid hordes of malignant women who want to make your life miserable: "they can make clear what will happen if they get a complaint about you."
Can be paraphrased to apply to "rabid hordes of adulterous men who want to make your life miserable". Better ?
I'm just pointing out that for people discussing how to best setup procedures for handling deviant behaviour, you sure assume only perfectly honest people would come to use said procedures. If you assume p% of possible culpability for the accused, shouldn't you assume the same for the accuser ? Otherwise, you are just discriminating against the accused.
This is a hard problem society as large has not solved yet - witness both the huge cost of false negatives (unreported offenses) and false positives (false accusations). I'm just skeptical a conference organiser will correctly solve this between two round of emails.
Oh sure, he can publish a boilerplate "we take all complaints very seriously" policy. I predict we'll see them appear at most tech conferences shortly.
Re: Let's get a little louder
#75That really sucks, and maybe the conference organizers could have been better at coming up with a way to deal with this, but I don't know what a sexual harrassment policy would solve. Sexual harrassment is immoral and depending on the nature punishable by law. Spelling that out would be like spelling out that you'd prefer people not to defecate in the hallways. We need to find solutions, not add organizational scar t…
The difference is that defecating in the hallways isn't a routine practice in our industry, but sexual harassment of the sort she describes is. There's a need for more awareness and action within the community -- and a hands-off "let the law take care of it" attitude ignores that a lot of this happens out of the public eye, and can only be stopped when people close to it take a more public stand against it.
The point is that sexual harassment shouldn't be routine and we shouldn't tolerate it. I sort of understand where the anti-harassment policy folks are coming from, but I vehemently disagree that it's appropriate to codify common decency and respect, especially in technical circles, where we should all know better. We should strive to treat each other with respect regardless of gender, race, or anything else for that matter and where we fail, we should call each other out and work to fix it.
Re: Let's get a little louder
#76Maybe I'm missing something but why not handle it with the safeguards at the venue? The conference is not in the business of protecting its attendees from unwanted advances, especially outside of the conference areas/sponsored events. Why not speak to the manager of the bar and have him escorted out? If it happens at the hotel, do the same with the hotel manager. People in the service/hospitality industry know how to…
> The conference is not in the business of protecting its attendees from unwanted advances, especially outside of the conference areas/sponsored events.
The conference is in the business of getting people together in a way that they find enjoyable and useful. Maybe it's just me, but being harassed by an asshole is neither enjoyable or useful.
I'm organizing a 300-person (non-conference) event right now, and getting the right attendees is something I think about a lot. If I were a conference organizer, I'd take this very seriously. There are an infinite number of things people can do with their time and money. If I want to be the one they pick, I wouldn't want them worried that the experience will suck. Whether it technically happened on the conference grounds would be irrelevant to me, in that attendees see it all as part of the conference experience when deciding whether to attend or not.
Re: Let's get a little louder
#77Maybe I'm missing something but why not handle it with the safeguards at the venue? The conference is not in the business of protecting its attendees from unwanted advances, especially outside of the conference areas/sponsored events. Why not speak to the manager of the bar and have him escorted out? If it happens at the hotel, do the same with the hotel manager. People in the service/hospitality industry know how to…
Agreed. Why is the development community (this conference in specific) being held responsible for the acts of an individual who happens to reside within? This is clearly something that should be taken care like an adult of outside of a private community. The story is a bummer, but the author's response to the situation is quite childish and this blog post seems somewhat irrelevant.
I can't think of a community that doesn't act, to one extent or another, to regulate the behaviors of its members. If nothing else, to protect the integrity of the community. But often also in support of shared values.
That's certainly true of tribes, towns, cities, and states. It's true of every virtual community I've used. It's even true of anarchic communities like Burning Man.
Re: Let's get a little louder
#78I am really quite disturbed by all of the people who are responding something along the lines of "this isn't the conference organizer's problem, it's happening outside of the conference." I've seen several such replies, so rather than responding to one, I'm responding to the whole sentiment here.
At a conference, there is a lot that goes on during unofficial off-hours, that is really an integral part of the conference. We shouldn't consider it acceptable for women to feel unsafe going to such off-hours events. If there is someone who is a guest at that conference, and showing up to off-hours events associate with the conference, that is still the conference's problem, as it significantly negatively affects an important part of the conference, and could be avoided by making that person unwelcome at the conference.
And this is not a court of law. We regularly ban people from online communities with a much lower bar of proof than would be required in a court of law, because those people are harmful to the community. Yes, any particular process could, in theory, be abused. But that isn't, as far as I know, a problem here. I have never heard of someone being banned from a conference unjustly. And we have a lower bar in these cases because the consequences are not as severe as criminal sanctions. We are not trying to lock someone up. We are not trying to get them arrested. We are just saying "this behavior is unacceptable, and you are not welcome in our community if you are going to behave this way."
All the original post is asking is that conferences have a clearly defined policy on what is unacceptable, and what will happen if someone crosses that line. It doesn't sound like there's any dispute about what happened. It sounds like the person in question had a history of problems, as the organizer said he shouldn't have allowed this person to come to the conference.
There isn't a problem here of people being unjustly accused and cut off from conferences because of it. There is a problem of women being harassed, seriously creeped out, feeling unwelcome and unable to do anything about it because of the actions of a few, and the lack of any clear policy or action on the part of conference organizers. And heck, a clear policy can help. Perhaps it can specify that the first time, someone will be warned, and only banned if they have already been warned. Perhaps it can specify a dispute resolution procedure. A clear policy will help everyone. We need to do better, because this keeps coming up and it is a serious problem.
Re: Let's get a little louder
#79Somehow I see no causation between a conference and the drunken comments by its attendees at a bar. Trying to argue that a conference organizer should hold some moral responsible for the people attending seems to me just ridiculous. He looked at me and sighed, confessing that he never should have allowed this guy to come to the conference. Here the Wait. What? Really? seems to be better placed - is there somebody rea…
> trying to paint the tech community as misogynist because of some random bar encounter
Could you show me where that happened? If anything, I think her feeling comfortable speaking up about this is a great sign that she thinks it's not irredeemably misogynist.
Re: Let's get a little louder
#80This sucks, period - there's no two ways about it. Things like this are why I am glad PyCon (us.pycon.org) has a code of conduct in place ( https://us.pycon.org/2012/codeofconduct/ ) which is enforced by staff. There is no place for this type of behavior, anywhere. I am sorry this happened to you Julia, it should not have, and the conference organizers should not have blinked before ejecting the responsible party fro…
> "and the conference organizers should not have blinked before ejecting the responsible party from the conference." So just assume guilt and throw him out, sans investigation? That's completely unreasonable and why these are sticky situations. It isn't black and white. Even with an air-tight sexual harassment policy, you can't automatically assume that the accused is in the wrong.
Not blinking doesn't mean that one can't investigate. It just means that one shouldn't flinch at it.