Heroku Pulls Sponsorship After Boston API Jam Publishes Sexist Eventbrite

One of the easiest and most powerful actions you can take to change attitudes towards acceptable behaviour in a community is, unsurprisingly, to immediately express disapproval whenever undesirable behaviour happens in your presence.

It's Frown Power. It's effective. Sqoot engaged in some pretty douche-y sexism in the e-presence of thousands of people, and thousands of people are expressing disapproval back at them. It's a safe bet they'll get the message that doing things like that in the future is undesirable, because having people vociferously disapprove of you isn't a pleasant experience.

It might not fix the attitudes of the people who wrote that line, but if it discourages the expression of those attitudes, the culture will radically change in a quite short period of time regardless of whether or not those individuals ever get a clue.

(Incidentally, comparing Sqoot getting told off on twitter and losing some sponsors to minorities being murdered because of their race is more than needlessly hyperbolic).

In responding to something that further alienated women from the tech field, I'm assuming they felt it would make sense to reassure them that there are in fact women working in some of the best regarded companies in that field.

Then shouldn't you be angry at the Boston API Jam people, not people 300 miles away who have nothing to do with this?

Am I missing the part where they actually no longer intend to have female-only event staff/beer-servers? The apology makes it sound like they just changed the ad copy.

Whenever people get outraged about things like this, it interests me. I like looking at attractive women. I like programming. Would it be possible to have an event where I could program and look at attractive women at the same time? Or does enjoying seeing attractive women in public make me a bad person? As a man, is this my original sin?

In fact, I've even been known to flirt with attractive women in public--perhaps even servers at restaurants and events. I've dated many women I've met this way. Is it ok, when I'm eating and drinking, but not when I'm programming?

Sorry, but I don't think this is as cut-and-dried as the pitchfork brigades here make it seem. In my world, there isn't a bright line between "professional and sexless" and "fun", with programming strictly under "professional and sexless". Obviously there's a conflict here. I don't know what the right balance is, but I cringe every time men are screamed at for not hiding carefully enough that they like sex, as if it's mens' faults that women are powerfully interesting to them in a biologically mandated and different way than vice versa.

While I'm at it, I might as well mention that I very much doubt the dearth of women in technology is because men are sexual predators. Medical doctors have been mostly men, and, in my experience, exhibit pretty much the same desire for women as tech people, but that never stopped women from flocking to become nurses. As you well know, doctor/nurse fraternization is a time-honored pursuit. There is one big difference between the two groups, though, in that doctors are considered by women to be higher status than technical men. I've noticed that behavior which is welcome from high status men is often labeled "creepy" when exhibited by low status men.

Edit: I notice that people have latched onto the doctors thing which is bizarre inasmuch as it strengthens my point. I worded it the way I did on purpose, "have been", with an idle thought to making a point about the inroads made by women, but was too lazy to look up the percentages. The fact that the male/female ratio of doctors has improved so much is a tribute to the fact that women have no problem succeeding in a previously male dominated industry if it caters to their interests. And if you don't think the medical profession was a good 'ol boys club, or think that systematic "awareness raising" was the cause for the improvement, I'm afraid you're not too familiar with the history and dynamics of that industry.