Julie Ann Horvath Describes Sexism and Intimidation Behind Her GitHub Exit

It's terrible that anyone should experience what he put her through. (Regardless of the founder's wife stuff, he produced an exceptionally hostile work environment by actively undoing her work, plus likely made her fear for her safety when he did not immediately respect her requests to leave after professing his love.) It's problematic that women in tech are much more likely to experience this than men (because of gender ratios and men tending to be more forward), and that the power dynamics and implicit threat of violence will also tend to be worse when women are the recipients of the attention.

Given this, having your first response be to ask her to be empathetic is ridiculous. Do we ask the victims of shootings to empathize with the perpetrators who had mental illness, had absentee parents, grew up poor, etc? Sometimes these issues come up in the wake of tragedies, and they are an important part of understanding the problem.

But the victim is the absolute last person to ask the be empathetic. She has an unquestionable right to feel personally safe and to do her work without others hostilely inhibiting her. When someone infringes on that, she's already being unfairly burdened. It's completely unfair to further burden her with an imperative to be understanding of what lead him to be the kind of person that would do that, rather than take every measure to remedy the situation, and to call out GitHub for failing to adequately do so.

Yes, it would be great if everyone empathized with those who wrong them. But until it becomes commonplace for people to show understanding toward people who mug them on the street because anyone willing to risk their safety and freedom for a few hundred dollars has likely hard a very hard life rather than reporting it to the police and seeking their imprisonment, let's focus on big, clear concerns: What he did to her was completely unacceptable, and if GitHub failed to quickly take action to end it and ensure it would not happen again, they deserve to be publicly shamed.

Remember that in a small company, especially startups, everyone around you including the bosses wife, has something to prove. Through whatever means, work or socially. Usually both.

Unfortunately having something to prove is basically the instinct of a prepubescent teen and has nothing to do with getting work done.

Mix that with sexual tension and you have a problem. A big big problem.

In college my gf worked for an unnamed insurance company where her boss would repeatedly invite her into his office to harrass her and show her naked pictures of himself until she finally quit.

And this was a BIG company, so you can imagine how a small company run by social misfits would treat you.

We have a long way to go folks...a long way to go.

The hula hooping moment was important because it visibly demonstrated her male coworkers lack of respect for women as people. They were unabashedly staring at their female coworkers as "eyecandy" in that moment and even defended their doing so.