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Julie Ann Horvath Describes Sexism and Intimidation Behind Her GitHub Exit

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Re: Julie Ann Horvath Describes Sexism and Intimidation Behind Her GitHub Exit

#831

Post by brongondwana »

d4nt wrote: post #572
garethsprice wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Relationships breaking down are messy at the best of times, toxic at their worst. More people than not, when faced with the collapse of a relationship, will act like a 13 year old than a rational adult. If the company is seen to have encouraged or even acknowledged the relationship it can create a huge liability, especially if one of the people involves feels like they got stiffed because of relationship issues (side…

What you say is true, but I don't believe a contract of employment entitles any company to tell someone who they can or cannot date. If, for the reasons you describe, they wish to maintain a public position of "we not encourage dating coworkers" that's one thing, so long as they don't actually think they have any say in this matter.

Reasonable is "don't date anyone in your line of management". Options in the case that you do start dating including transferring out to a different manager. That's reasonable, because it's a conflict of interest issue rather than a "who you are allowed to date".

Re: Julie Ann Horvath Describes Sexism and Intimidation Behind Her GitHub Exit

#832

Post by rdl »

gaius wrote: post #736
rdl wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At big paranoid organizations (CIA, NSA, etc.), they actively encourage internal relationships and marriages, as it simplifies security modeling. But not really in the same group.

Actively encourage how? Genuinely curious, do you get a joint bonus if you marry a cow-orker or something?

Social events, peer pressure.

Re: Julie Ann Horvath Describes Sexism and Intimidation Behind Her GitHub Exit

#833

Post by grifpete »

gojomo wrote: post #288

While the 'wife' aspect has drawn a lot of attention, it seems that through her marriage she may essentially have a founder's level of equity in the company. I don't know the personalities involved, but she might also have relevant professional experience, and/or have been genuinely helpful in handling thorny issues in the past (even if this case clearly escalated into many kinds of mutual suspicion and recrimination…

It doesn't matter how much equity she has. Or how much professional experience she has. She is not an employee and hence is not entitled to interfere in the internal affairs of the company without management oversight.

If an appropriately senior office of the company invites someone (equity holder or not) to observe or participate in the internal affairs of the company then it is that officer's responsibility to make the situation clear to the employees which whom he/she will be interacting and to oversee such interactions. Needless to say, if such interactions cause distress or could constitute harassment then it is the officer's job to deal with the problem.

To state the blindingly obvious, I may have shares in IBM and expertise in cloud computing but that does not entitle me to walk into IBM data centers and sit opposite ops staff all day.

Re: Julie Ann Horvath Describes Sexism and Intimidation Behind Her GitHub Exit

#835

Post by MarkTee »

lnanek2 wrote: post #789
greenrd wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If her problem with it was that some random other guy openly finding some random other girl attractive in her workplace "makes her feel unsafe", then that would be highly hypocritical, as she admits she was dating a coworker and that other coworkers knew this, which can only encourage others to think it's OK to make romantic advances to coworkers. I mean, you can't have it both ways. If you think men and women should…

By the way they kept saying partner I was under the impression she was dating a woman. In which case she could theoretically hate males looking at women and still date a woman on the team.

That's what I thought too, but there are a couple places where they refer to him as a "he".

"Horvath later learned that the founder had a similar talk with her partner and demanded that he resign."

Re: Julie Ann Horvath Describes Sexism and Intimidation Behind Her GitHub Exit

#836

Post by vellum »

testrun wrote: post #294
tesseractive wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to the article, she did this because she was being anonymously, publicly slandered on Secret.

how did she find out?

Maybe she was using the app. Once Secret has access to your contacts, it shows you what's been posted by your friends and friends of friends. So she would have seen what almost everyone at Github was posting.

Re: Julie Ann Horvath Describes Sexism and Intimidation Behind Her GitHub Exit

#837

Post by grifpete »

gvb wrote: post #773
enneff wrote: post #169

If you are one of the people in this thread jumping to defend GitHub in this situation, ask yourself why. GitHub are perfectly capable of defending themselves. They are the group in power here. Second-guessing the motives and truth of this woman's story does nothing but undermine her, and undermine the confidence of others who may have similar stories (at GitHub or elsewhere).

GitHub cannot defend itself in public. It is a multimillion dollar company with a very disgruntled ex-employee charging them of sexual discrimination. You can bet their lawyers are saying in tones that cannot be ignored to not say anything until and unless it goes to trial.

Of course they can defend themselves in public. Corporations engage PR firms to manage that expertly for them all the time. And ironically, whether this goes to trial or not, the worse the objective case for Github the more confident you can be that their lawyers will be telling them to say little or nothing. Expect a very bland statement to appear shortly about how much they love and value their female employees. We may well also have statements from other female employees about how happy they are at Github - these may well be given 'off the record' without attribution as in "A female employee who did not want to be identified told me she has never been happier than she is at Github, surrounded as she is by sensitive colleagues and a supportive management." :)

Re: Julie Ann Horvath Describes Sexism and Intimidation Behind Her GitHub Exit

#838

Post by stoptalkingshit »

grifpete wrote: post #766
harshreality wrote: post #190

The article quotes JAH's email as saying, "Two women, one of whom I work with and adore, and a friend of hers were hula hooping to some music. I didn’t have a problem with this. What I did have a problem with is the line of men sitting on one bench facing the hoopers and gawking at them. It looked like something out of a strip club. When I brought this up to male coworkers, they didn’t see a problem with it. But for…

My observation is that it is very easy to misunderstand stories like the hoola hoop example. Imagine 2 scenarios: a) a company where we stipulate that there is no sexism and women feel respected and valued b) a company where to stipulate that there is widespread sexism and women detect a myriad of signs of it every day. In scenario a) the hoola hoop incident is highly unlikely to spark a reaction from a woman but in…

And yet there is no evidence in this article that the company us unfriendly to women - just rambling about her "feelings".

Re: Julie Ann Horvath Describes Sexism and Intimidation Behind Her GitHub Exit

#839

Post by grifpete »

ebfe wrote: post #532
enneff wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is going to hurt Horvath more than it hurts GitHub. She's going to receive a torrent of abuse for speaking out like this, whether her version of events is accurate or not.

>This is going to hurt Horvath more than it hurts GitHub. Really? You'd rather pay out a $250,000 settlement than incur an increase in the number of negative comments you receive on the internet for a couple weeks?

If you do a little research about how things work out for whistle blowers you might not be quite as confident about what a great deal this is for her.

Re: Julie Ann Horvath Describes Sexism and Intimidation Behind Her GitHub Exit

#840

Post by reneherse »

michaelt wrote: post #404
megablast wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Oh, okay, I'll talk to him and make sure it stops." Can I come live in your world where everything is solved by a quick talk.

When a line manager decides to make sure an employee stops doing something, it's actually several conversations: 1. A friendly conversation in which the manager points out the problem, establishes that they expect it to stop, but that if it stops immediately it'll all be forgotten. 2. A less friendly conversation in which the manager says I thought we were clear that you aren't supposed to do it. You're still doing i…

Regarding conversation number 3. Why give a hostile employee time to retaliate? Just give them the choice of resigning or being fired, but make both effective immediately.

GOT fans will remember Ned Stark made a similar mistake.

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