Speaking up

Its been pointed out a number of places that no, this doesn't represent the majority of male developers. It's established it's a small subset of a larger population.

Even so, the fact that its a minority is irrelevant, its the fact that it happens, and the fact that it happens on a regular basis is the issue.

That it happens regularly is what makes it the norm, not that its perpetrated by the majority of people.

And as people that work in the industry, we do have a responsibility for how others act, and we should act accordingly. Yes, it may not directly be our faults, be we do have a responsibility to react to this kind of behavior, and deal with it.

Otherwise, we are condoning it and then it does become our fault. As cliche'd/dramatic as it is, this is exactly the situation that is talked about in "all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing"

Also I guess people are more likely to either be "careful" or to adapt their behavior successfully if there's one woman on a 5 person team and one or more of the guys are in some way sexist or inappropriate, than if it's a casual interaction with someone at a coffeeshop or conference.

I don't know how I feel about the "Beards of Experience" thing. I guess I'd be annoyed if it were a permanent branding of the site, but as a one-off short campaign, I'm I think I'm fine with it. It does only focus on a specific group (I assume it is "unix neckbeards vs. hipster/corporate/suave designer developers", ignoring women entirely), but for a short marketing message, it's probably better to strongly appeal to a subset vs. be "meh" for everyone. It's not on its face offensive, which would be bad even if 5-10% of people were seriously offended and 50% were approving, just narrowly scoped. But it's obviously bad if that kind of exclusion is the default across the whole industry all the time.

(Proper link is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_formulation )

And from that same page, "better for whom?"

It takes great care to attempt to apply knowledge from one domain to another domain. Humans are great at seeing patterns and making analogies, but no matter how many times you say "technology is evolving," that won't make it adhere to the Hardy-Weinberg principle[0]. Attempts to actually implement these analogies tend to be problematic[1].

The US justice system, on the federal and state level, has a wide array of checks against it that (nominally) protect people from state abuse. This is necessary because of the vast power imbalance between a nation-state and a private individual. In this case, it's probably far better to have a 10:1 false negative:false positive ratio. The more false positives, the more potential for abuse.

Conventions and the hacker community do not have the power of nation-states. There's no reason to apply the same very stringent and very necessary restrictions that we apply on nation-states to DefCon. DefCon cannot hurt you the same way the US government can.

So, who is this better for? Certainly not the women attacked: they're left with few options, little sympathy, and copious amounts of victim blaming and denial (as the current top comment indicates). It's far better for the abusers -- especially when the potential for system abuse is far less, because conventions and other hacker/tech events are not nation-states.

If we're going to solve this (or any) problem, we need to look past platitudes and into quantified, measured thought towards a solution. This might very well be naming and shaming likely perpetrators, especially when the evidence is more convincing than a few twitter posts two years ago. We might get more false positives, but we have to contrast this with the current status quo of simply denying any justice to the people actually being harassed for their gender. Personally, I think the cost-benefit is overwhelmingly in favor of excluding more maybe/maybe-not abusive men from our communities, if it results in half the human population being allowed to add their talent to the collective pool.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardy%E2%80%93Weinberg_princip... [1] http://web.archive.org/web/20070818124133/http://www.greythu...

If you actually read TFA, you will notice that Sarah Parmenter is consistently using gender neutral pronouns to refer to the person(s) who put online those pictures and male pronouns for the guys wrote her inappropriate messages. That is very conscious use of language.

Put that in contrast to the person who is calling somebody who is stating that the perpetrator might have been one (sic) female a ""conspiracy theorist"" and talks about "obvious truth".

Sexism definition: Prejudice, stereotyping, or discrimination, typically against women, on the basis of sex.

This was clearly sexism since it was demeaning to the woman and her gender was used as a part of that (e.g. the fact that pictures of naked women were used in the attack).

If the same happened to a man, we would probably call it harassment, not sexism, since men at large are not discriminated against based on their gender. A female posting pictures of a man at the conference wouldn't be signaling that men don't belong in the group, since the group is dominated by men to begin with.

Either gender can be stalked, but there are FAR more female victims, a symptom of sexism at large in society. FAR more women are harassed as well. 1 in 5 college women are raped during their college years.

To take some of your words, the deed was encouraged by and reflective of rampant sexism in society at large.

I don't think I've done a good job explaining this, but hopefully provoked some thoughts on it at least.