241–250 of 1001 posts
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That's a very bad analogy though. Perhaps if it was an Indian who made a joke about how Indians talk/act, but even that's stretching it.
That doesn't make sense. It was a man making sexual jokes in front of a woman, not a woman making sexual jokes in front of a woman... and probably besides the point in any event.
I think all of us would agree that technology has a sexism problem. However , the environment in 2013 and the way, as a whole, it seems that we have gone about countering it is roughly equivalent to napalming six city blocks to get rid of bedbugs in an apartment. (Edit: On reflection, a better analogy would be napalming New York City to eradicate bedbugs. I am aware of the scope of the sexism problem.) This little sa…
> The decision to ban someone for smoking pot really cracked me up, given who I smoked pot with at PyCon 2012. I've said this elsewhere, but: The pot smoker was a few feet from me in an informal conference late one evening. I don't think anyone complained that pot was smoked at all. They complained that it was smoked inside a crowded room. I would've been as personally annoyed if someone lit a tobacco cigarette in th…
I was there too. They were being obnoxious by stinking up the place (it didn't help that they got louder & less funny, i.e. more obnoxious, through the evening), and that is what got people's attention.
Anything that happens on the official premises of a professional, heavily sponsored and highly scrutinized conference is to some extent the responsibility of the organizers. They _had_ to do something.
I want to make a point that may or may not be applicable to this situation. Talking about sex is not inherently sexist. Making jokes about sex is not inherently sexist. It's inappropriate in a large number of places, but that doesn't make it sexist.
A couple of dudes making stupid dick jokes to each other in hall of hundreds doesn't really seem to me to be that big an issue.
I would also like a response from Sendgrid here. Somebody they sent to a conference, who was representing their company there, went on a personal vendetta against somebody and got them fired. That's awful, and I join the people I see online right now in saying that I cannot, in good conscience, ever do business with a company that supports that behavior. --And to how far Adria has set back womens' rights here-- The c…
As a SendGrid customer, it concerns me that SendGrid would stand behind the initiation of a public controversy under such questionable circumstances, especially one that resulted in the firing of a developer from his job. SendGrid should be in the business of email deliverability, not public shaming. Edit: I've tempered my phrasing above quite a bit and removed references to individuals.
The joke that she's making there is that her male friend should stuff socks in his pants to shock the screening TSA agent. This joke is not targeted at anyone in particular.
The comment she's replying to is a factual description of what actually happens in TSA screenings. In fact it is suspected by many that the TSA agents do this deliberately so that people will be discouraged from asking for the alternative screening.
The whole situation has a "he said, she said" feeling about it. But if everything that I just read is factually correct (not at all guaranteed), then she had something real to complain about.
Making the offence result in a firing seems to me to be an overreaction.
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Want to tell us which company you work for so we can all avoid doing business with firms who makes decisions about which technology to choose based on whether or not they like the recent tweets of a company's employees on their personal twitter accounts?
Why ridicule someone for making a personal choice to choose who he does business with? Adria is a part of the company's image and just like any other company they will be judged by her public actions.
Posting to HN about how you think people should coordinate and send e-mails to a company's sales department about how they don't want to do business with a company because they're bothering to stand by one of their employees and not fire them. -> A personal choice and any comments disagreeing with it is "ridicule".
Posting a tweet on your twitter account. -> Public actions representing a company.
Those seem like some strange conclusions.
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Taking a picture of two people without their permission and posting it on the internet eventually causing one of them to get fired doesn't seem like abuse to you? Why didn't she tell them to just be quiet? That's what normal people do.
Taking pictures at conferences and posting them on Twitter happens all the time. That's definitely not abuse. Quoting what people say at conferences also happens all the time. So that's not abuse. She was not involved in the firing; if that's abuse, it's not hers. She explained why she didn't just tell them to be quiet on her blog. But here's my take: It is not her job to teach people how to behave properly in public…
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Note where you stop in the causal chain: with the woman. You could blame the millennia of sexism that set up the situation. You could blame the gender-imbalanced context: it's easy for humans to be insensitive to minority views. You could blame the guy's parents and teachers for not raising him right. You could blame the guy for saying something inappropriate. You could blame his friends for not reigning him in. You…
So we need to remain eternally vigilant of the thousands of years of sexism during our day-to-day dealings? We need to be constantly thinking of the women and minorities in the room before we say anything? How is this being gender-neutral?
> How is this being gender-neutral?
These actually don't have anything to do with gender neutrality, btw. But it is pretty considerate. And if you don't think you need to be constantly considerate of diversity when speaking around a lot of people, you need to rethink that.
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Indeed, I am really puzzled as to why these "jokes" are supposed to be offensive to women. They might be offensive to people raised in some cultures / subcultures, and they don't sound like they're great jokes in any culture, but nobody ever told me about the meeting where women decided knob jokes were offensive. In fact a female friend texted me one about an hour ago.
Imagine this situation: You are walking down the street. It starts to rain, so you duck into the nearest business, a bar. You order a beer, and realize that you have stepped into a gay bar. The table behind you starts making jokes about how virgin anuses are the best. They are pretty big guys, leather daddies. You worry they're talking about you, about your anus. You worry. That feeling of discomfort? The way your he…
No, no they really don't!
Don't get me wrong, there are major gender issues within our society (not just the software industry). One of them is, this idea that ''all'' women are tender hearted souls who are ''constantly'' scared of any man that looks at them funny :)
There is a broad difference between discomfort and fear. And whilst the latter is significant, the core problem is the former.
I would also like a response from Sendgrid here. Somebody they sent to a conference, who was representing their company there, went on a personal vendetta against somebody and got them fired. That's awful, and I join the people I see online right now in saying that I cannot, in good conscience, ever do business with a company that supports that behavior. --And to how far Adria has set back womens' rights here-- The c…
as "a women in tech" (god i hate even saying it like that lol) i totally agree. i think what she did was absurd. It wasn't even a lewd or offensive joke. Maybe its my social group but something like that would even cause any of us (more women in tech) to even bat an eye. If it was bothersome in anyway it was they were so loud she was paying more attention to them and they private conversations and not the speaker. Sh…
But why did this person's employer fire them? I certainly wouldn't fire anyone for this reason and I would hire someone who made dick jokes for sure.
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Note where you stop in the causal chain: with the woman. You could blame the millennia of sexism that set up the situation. You could blame the gender-imbalanced context: it's easy for humans to be insensitive to minority views. You could blame the guy's parents and teachers for not raising him right. You could blame the guy for saying something inappropriate. You could blame his friends for not reigning him in. You…
So we need to remain eternally vigilant of the thousands of years of sexism during our day-to-day dealings? We need to be constantly thinking of the women and minorities in the room before we say anything? How is this being gender-neutral?