Adria Richards, a technology consultant, writes about women in tech, diversity, and her experience at a 2013 tech conference.
HN links it for her post on dongle and forking jokes at PyCon, with commenters arguing over her account and how the media reported it.
> How could I possibly find a quote that doesn't exist?
In any other circumstance, that might be OK. In this case though, she has written just ONE blog post about this incident. Obviously it makes sense to start there. She has given many interviews too about it, and commented on other websites. You could have left that for later.
Source http://butyoureagirl.com/14015/forking-and-dongle-jokes-dont-belong-at-tech-conferences/:
<blockquote>
Women in technology need consistant messaging from birth through retirement they are welcome, competent and valued in the industry.
Let’s unify the message to our daughters and to the women developers we work with:
“We want you to be here and we will do our best to welcome you into the world of programming.”
What has to change is that everyone must take personal accountability and speak up when they hear something that isn’t ok. It takes three words to make a difference:
“That’s not cool.”
</blockquote>
I am given to understand that katherineparker does not believe that she's one of these women who need to be massaged from birth to retirement, and katherineparker wishes Adria, being some kind of evangelist, had stopped "representing" women in general in this manner. That's cool. I absolutely refuse to massage anyone.
> You have made a false claim about what Adria Richards said.
False claim.
> You keep repeating that she represents all women.
Odd. KP said the opposite. There is definitely more matter for me to go on about. Just…
> Since when is Twitter the same thing as a professional conference?
First, she mentioned PyCon in that Twitter conversation[1]. If she had hashtagged it, there would be a stronger argument, but either way we might say she's having an "inappropriate conversation" in the "vicinity" of the conference. People searching about conference might see this, just like people at the conference might have heard the same inappropriate joke.
If we look deeper I think "but she made similar jokes" has other merit. What's the point of having "professionalism" rules at a conference? Because everyone is there publicly representing a company, and because they don't want distractions from the purposes of the conference.
Adria is a public representative of her company, and apparently uses her Twitter account in connection with that. Why does she get to mix her personal life into a public-facing account, complete with "overhearable" unprofessional jokes, but two friends in the same room with her can't do the same?
The only good reason I can think of is "because the conference rules say so, and they all agreed to them." Any other reason for her getting to be offended about a joke quietly exchanged between two well-acquainted professionals but overhearable in public, is hypocritical, because she set up the exact same situation on Twitter. When you consider her inappropriate, overreacting, passive-aggressive response, and calling them "ass clowns" on her blog[2] (it's at least partially…
From the FAQ
If you turn it on, you'll see all the submissions and comments that have been killed by the editors. They're mostly spam and duplicates.
Along with unverified information [Facebook/Twitter are not legitimate sources this early on] I am not surprised at all that these stories were 'deleted'.
I come to Hacker News for the reason that pg and the mods built and maintain it. Your speak of censorship is sensationalism. [which coincides with this whole story] This post is on the front page and I predict will get many points, not deleted and contain valuable discussion.
I am all up for discussion on this story - after reading her blog post [1] and the fact she posted here [2] - [which I wasn't even aware of until I came to this thread - thanks to the user down votes she received] her aim was not to get somebody fired, nor as it appears to me was trying to get herself fired. She was taking a stand - it had unintended consequences.
The key part of her blog:
Have you ever had a group of men sitting right behind you making joke that caused you to feel uncomfortable?
Every single conference I have been to in the 'tech' industry the delegates have been 90%+ males [very often the number of women facilitating was more than the number of men facilitating]
I have rarely felt 'uncomfortable' by a group of men making a joke - if they were drunk would more people have felt uncomfortable? Probably. Is that acceptable at a python conference? No.
Another quote from the blog…
This was a private conversation between two friends, none of whom referenced her or even knew she was listening.
Are you sure? How do you know?
If my reading of her article is correct, and she was telling the truth, then she did not think so. That does not mean that she was correct. And with a he said, she said situation there is no chance of sorting things out. But your unsupported assertion of fact is not necessarily true.
Her article is at http://butyoureagirl.com/14015/forking-and-dongle-jokes-dont-belong-at-tech-conferences/ if you want to read it to decide for yourself whether I am reading correctly.
Here is the scenario that I read from her description. She's sitting one in front. 3 guys are behind and (if she is turned) to her right. Guy #1 who is behind is talking about a presentation, she turns and agrees with him, and during their discussion he talks about forking a repository.
Guy #2 is to #1's left (on the right from her view), and begins making sexual jokes about forking with #3 riffing off of that. Then shortly after they riff off of a comment from the speaker and joke, "You can thank me" then start talking about big dongles.
Therefore their sexual jokes were based off of their overhearing HER conversation, and so they had every expectation that SHE would hear THEM in turn. Furthermore I get the impression that even though she was not looking at them, she believed that they were implicitly ADDRESSING HER. (I am not saying that this belief is…
While incidents like this are common at Ruby conferences, this is actually exceedingly rare to see within the Python community.
The Python community is generally much more like the C++, Java and .NET communities, where professionalism and a lack of drama are the norm.
My suspicion is that at least some of the people involved here may not really be part of the Python community in any sense, but were merely just attendees at one of the largest and most prominent Python conferences.
The "About" page[1] of the blog of one of the individuals involved doesn't currently mention Python once, but does list "Build a Ruby App for something I’m passionate about" as a "Life Goal", and lists "RailsConf" under the "Speaking Events" section. There's also a video entitled "I’m ready to start programming Ruby on Rails" shown on the "Videos" page[2], but none about Python. The "Speaking" page[3] lists "Instructor for RailsBridge Outreach Workshop For Women" at "SFRuby", but again I don't see anything having to do with Python. All of this indicates a much closer relationship with the Ruby community, and essentially none with the Python community.
I think that the Python community, and PyCon, may be the real victims here. They've been unjustly dragged into an incident involving at least one person who does not seem to be part of the Python community, and have suffered undeserved reputation damage as a result of this incident.
[1] http://butyoureagirl.com/about/
[2]…
Here's context:
The guy behind me to the far left was saying he didn't find much value from the logging session that day. I agreed with him, turned around and said so. He then went onto say that an earlier session he'd been to where the speaker was talking about images and visualization with Python was really good, even if it seemed to him the speaker wasn't really an expert on images. He said he would be interested in forking the repo and continuing development https://us.pycon.org/2013/schedule/talks/.
That would have been find until the guy next to him...
began making sexual forking jokes
I was going to let it go. It had been a long week. A long month. I had been on the road since February and PyCon was my 5th and final conference before heading home.
I know it's important to pick my battles.
I know I don't have to be a hero in every situation.
Sometimes I just want to go to a tech conference and be a nerd.
But...
like Popeye, I couldn't stands it no more because of what happened next:
Jesse Noller was up on stage thanking the sponsors. The guys behind me (one off to the right) said, "You can thank me, you can thank me". That told me they were a sponsoring company of Pycon and from the photos I took, his badge had an add-on that said, "Sponsor".
They started talking about "big" dongles. I could feel my face getting flustered.
Was this really happening?
The rest of the story I've posted on my blog:…