91–100 of 149 posts
Pics or it didn't happen. Seriously. YouTube is worth a thousand zero tolerance policies.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is hardly “some random bar encounter”. This is the latest in a string of publicly described issues with sexual harassment in the tech community, both at conferences and elsewhere. The same rule applies here as with bugs reported by users: if one person is talking about this out loud, it means dozens are probably running into it and staying silent. That is unacceptable. And to consider conference organizers respons…
The drunk aspect was more to contrast the context. It just seems ridiculous to me to apply the same standard of sexual harassment at a bar scenario as the one that is in place in a work environment. Some cheesy pickup line might loose someone his job at day but get laid at night. It is clearly about context and social appropriateness. Both people in the story are in my opinion having some odd expectations in that reg…
What about the guys that are getting sexually harass by other guys???
I was at the conference and my gaydar was off the charts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Someone who's frustrated and being unable to control their teenage daughter?
I've met frustrated parents, from those with lazy kids to those whose kids where skipping (and failing) most classes to go smash stuff and do drugs (and not exactly pot) with adolescent criminals. I still believe only an asshole would talk about their son or daughter like that, particularly to someone not close.
Somehow I see no causation between a conference and the drunken comments by its attendees at a bar. Trying to argue that a conference organizer should hold some moral responsible for the people attending seems to me just ridiculous. He looked at me and sighed, confessing that he never should have allowed this guy to come to the conference. Here the Wait. What? Really? seems to be better placed - is there somebody rea…
There are some things that can be dealt with more appropriately at a different level than the legal level. In the US, we have a fairly strong concept of freedom of speech. There are certain hurtful, hateful things that you are legally allowed to say. But that doesn't make them welcome at a private event. And that doesn't mean that people who say them to other people at a bar meetup related to an event should continue to be welcome at that event. We can put higher standards on what is acceptable behavior than merely that which is legal.
> but trying to paint the tech community as misogynist because of some random bar encounter is in my opinion unacceptable.
I am very unclear where you saw anyone painting the tech community as misogynist. One person complained about one event, and the fact that the organizers didn't have an effective policy in place for how to deal with that situation. She is recommending certain changes that could avoid this problem in the future, and her employer is supporting her by lending some weight to her complaint. This isn't painting the tech community as misogynist, and if we want to solve these kinds of problems, we need to avoid making those kinds of sweeping generalization and brushing off real problems just because someone misperceives a fairly narrow complaint as painting an entire wide group of people as misogynist.
Excuse me but I am surprised. I read a lot on HN and on several planets (feed aggregation) about harassment, but in my field (engineering) I have never seen/experienced/heard about such cases even if the ratio female/male is pretty low is some of these conferences. Is it something specific to the coder community? Or maybe chemical/process engineers are just an exception? Or is it specific to the US in this field (I h…
This sucks, period - there's no two ways about it. Things like this are why I am glad PyCon (us.pycon.org) has a code of conduct in place ( https://us.pycon.org/2012/codeofconduct/ ) which is enforced by staff. There is no place for this type of behavior, anywhere. I am sorry this happened to you Julia, it should not have, and the conference organizers should not have blinked before ejecting the responsible party fro…
Event organizers are responsible for events that occur at the event. They are not there to police attendees both at and away from the event.
I am really quite disturbed by all of the people who are responding something along the lines of "this isn't the conference organizer's problem, it's happening outside of the conference." I've seen several such replies, so rather than responding to one, I'm responding to the whole sentiment here. At a conference, there is a lot that goes on during unofficial off-hours, that is really an integral part of the conferenc…
> It sounds like the person in question had a history of > problems, as the organizer said he shouldn't have allowed > this person to come to the conference. Even then, it may be far from clear-cut. We don't know what those problems are. Have there been reports of harassment regarding this guy? If so, that's fairly clear-cut. But maybe this is just kind of a jerk, but hasn't done anything over the line before. While…
I don't know what sort of configuration people were in at this bar, obviously. But when she mentioned that the fellow singled her out, I took it to mean that he got into a one-on-one conversation rather than pitching his offensive remarks across a conference table. Bars tend to be noisy and people often break up into pairs or mini-groups as the evening wears on.
I am really quite disturbed by all of the people who are responding something along the lines of "this isn't the conference organizer's problem, it's happening outside of the conference." I've seen several such replies, so rather than responding to one, I'm responding to the whole sentiment here. At a conference, there is a lot that goes on during unofficial off-hours, that is really an integral part of the conferenc…
> It sounds like the person in question had a history of > problems, as the organizer said he shouldn't have allowed > this person to come to the conference. Even then, it may be far from clear-cut. We don't know what those problems are. Have there been reports of harassment regarding this guy? If so, that's fairly clear-cut. But maybe this is just kind of a jerk, but hasn't done anything over the line before. While…
All of this is idle speculation that is really besides the point. The point is that conferences should have a policy for how to deal with these kinds of situations. Those policies are probably going to depend on a certain amount of judgement from the conference organizer. They make all kinds of other judgements, about who to include as keynote speakers or accept for talks. One of their criteria should, perhaps, be whether the person in question has stepped seriously out of bounds at previous events.
> I'm wondering where the rest of the community was when this harassment was going on at the bar. The victim says they were there in a group. So a whole group of conference attendees was just standing around, letting this victim be harassed?
You have been to a bar before, right? Many of them are dark, and loud. There can be many conversations going on at once. It's pretty easy, even with a large groups present, for people to have a conversation that no one else can hear, because there's music playing, and they are involved in their own conversation.
If people did overhear, there's always the bystander effect. In groups, people are sometimes less likely to intervene in a situation, because they expect someone else to intervene, or because they see no one else intervening and feel some social pressure not to break the ice.
And we've seen several other incidents like this. Sometimes, it happens off in a corner where no one else is around; or in a hallway in the conference hotel. Those are situations we need to deal with just as much, and we can't depend on there being a helpful bystander.
The only point is that we need a policy. The policy does not need to be bulletproof. These are human situations. There will always be cases that slip through the cracks. Some of them might just turn into a he-said, she-said that can't be resolved. Some people might never come forward to the conference organizers. Some people might abuse a policy to just get someone kicked out that they don't like. But you do your best to try and provide the best, most accepting environment that you can.
And right now, we have a real problem. We have people abusing the lack of any policies, the lack of will of organizers to do anything, to continue coming to events without repercussion for repeated behavior that is clearly unacceptable. We can do better.
You know, the policy might be a warning at first. It might include some form of adjudication if the events are in dispute. It might give someone a cooling off period, and allow them back after a certain amount of time. There are lots of options, and a large space to explore. But it is fundamentally unacceptable that we just say "well, we can't tell what really happened with a legal level of proof, so we're going to keep inviting creeps to our conferences and let anyone who feels uncomfortable with that stay away."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is hardly “some random bar encounter”. This is the latest in a string of publicly described issues with sexual harassment in the tech community, both at conferences and elsewhere. The same rule applies here as with bugs reported by users: if one person is talking about this out loud, it means dozens are probably running into it and staying silent. That is unacceptable. And to consider conference organizers respons…
The drunk aspect was more to contrast the context. It just seems ridiculous to me to apply the same standard of sexual harassment at a bar scenario as the one that is in place in a work environment. Some cheesy pickup line might loose someone his job at day but get laid at night. It is clearly about context and social appropriateness. Both people in the story are in my opinion having some odd expectations in that reg…
We should not confuse ambiguous situations in which someone makes a slightly off-color joke with serious, repeated harassment. That does nothing to help the situation.