My email to Jim Franklin:
Hi Jim,
You have a mess on your hands, and I understand how hard it must be at SendGrid today.
I think you've made a defensible move, and it is hard to hold you in contempt for putting your employees and business first.
That said, I'm really disappointed in your response.
For as long as there have been tech conferences, they have been hostile to women. Sexually exclusive language is the starting point for harassment and assault that have been the status quo for the tech industry for decades. (tech isn't alone here, of course)
A woman trying to report these offenses often went completely unheard. The crimes were completely silenced by a community that protected itself with homogeny, and the results are strikingly obvious in the number of women working, participating, and attending conferences in technology.
This deeply-rooted problem is finally beginning to surface, and we're starting to talk about solutions in a productive way. PyCon was at the forefront of that as they worked incredibly hard to make women feel accepted. Their no-harassment policy and work to get more women speaking and attending represent a huge amount of progress.
It has been a very public effort by the conference, and the results were impressive. A huge number of women showed up to a space they thought would be more welcoming.
Of course, it wasn't perfect. Though we've made a lot of progress, there's still a long way to go before we'll get rid of exclusive attitudes towards women.
What's really disappointing, though, is that when a woman at this conference felt uncomfortable and made her discomfort public, she lost her job.
Her peers, our technology community, responded to her statement with incredible hostility. Threats of rape and murder were abundant yesterday, and we attacked a woman for expressing her discomfort publicly.
Some people, like yourself, said that it would be okay for her to express her discomfort privately, but that the publicity is what made it a problem. But in doing so, you're asking her to give up her voice. You're asking her to stay silent about an incredibly serious problem.
All she did was report factual discomfort publicly. She didn't lie or slander.
And now she's lost her job for it. The message is obvious: women aren't allowed to report misconduct like this. We don't want to hear about the sexual misconduct in our community. A woman's discomfort is her own problem, not ours.
That's the wrong message.