PROGRAMMERS BEING DICKS

• 2013-05-13

  Songkick introduces equal parental leave policy

  Bravo.

• 2013-04-16

  An Open Letter to Women in Technology

  Shanley Kane:

  Make no fucking mistake that you occupy your cushy tech salary, your mid-level management job, your paltry access to power by permission of the patriarchy. It is a deal with the devil. They will pay you, and let you make small career advances, in exchange for acting more like a poster child than a revolutionary, more like a mother than a peer, more like a secretary than a boss. In exchange for you shutting the fuck up, in exchange for you being content with your cute women-in-technology dinners, in exchange for your affirmative-action speaking slots, in exchange for you focusing more on “community building” than burning shit down. In exchange, in exchange, in exchange.

  Recognize these small concessions are just Trojan horses, wheeling feminist submission into the great city of our revolution under the guise of advancement. It is hard to renounce the few material demonstrations we have, that prove we are the equal of our oppressors. But we must rise above.

• 2013-04-10

  Eric S. Raymond’s Considered Reckons on Female Sexuality

  Basically don’t read this.

• 2013-04-04

  

• 2013-03-28

  

  “Photo from a friend from GDC (Game Developers Conference). Yup, those are scantily clad women dressed as bunnies dancing on stage. I mean, they might as well have held it at the Playboy Mansion.”

  —Anonymous submission

• 2013-03-26

  The cuts started early. I’m discouraged and humiliated in math classes throughout my school years to the point where I still get anxious doing math in front of others despite being good at it in private. A high school teacher tells me that I shouldn’t go to college for engineering, but instead something nurturing (you know, what women are good for). My college classes have next to no women in them. A professor makes creepy comments about “geeky girls” during class. One of my few female classmates tells me she’s just doing this to prove her father wrong. Classmates don’t take me seriously until I scream.

  — Julie P.: My experiences in tech: Death by 1000 paper cuts 

  Source: juliepagano

• 2013-03-25

  Well, this is breathtakingly horrible.

• 2013-03-22

  Blog Posts about Adria Richards that Don’t Claim She Should Just Have Been More Polite

  (…or gloss over the part where she and others were the targets of a focused campaign of rape threats, death threats and racial slurs.)

  Flavia Tamara Dzodan:

  Notice how almost all the comments, even those in favor of Adria Richards, many of them (as the one I am quoting here), from White women defending Richards are all about disciplining the uppity Black woman.

  They don’t like her tone. Her vocal antics are improper. She didn’t deserve to be fired but… It always boils down to it: the misbehaved Black woman should have known better. Even ostensibly feminist blogs are giving space to such opinions.

  Melissa McEwan:

  It is a privilege to be able to imagine that politely asking would have stopped their behavior. And it doesn’t matter if in this one specific case it would have, which we cannot know. The context of this situation is that women have been politely (and impolitely) asking men to stop behaving in sexually inappropriate ways for centuries, and asking DOESN’T WORK.

  Courtney Stanton:

  PyCon has also chosen to signal via dogwhistle whose side it’s on, for those who can hear; they’ve updated their Code of Conduct with this: “Note: Public shaming can be counter-productive to building a strong community. PyCon does not condone nor participate in such actions out of respect.” Yes, this is the same public shaming that got their attention and action in the first place. […] There’s a way to leave room for public callout when necessary while protecting the photo rights of attendees, and this isn’t it.

• 2013-03-20

  “Lynch mob”

  Lindsey Bieda:

  Lynch mobs in the U.S. and Britain were almost exclusively targeted at disenfranchised groups. This term is racially charged and using it to describe something like internet comments is completely insensitive and softens the absolute horror of men and women killed at the hands of actual lynch mobs and it’s absolutely not okay.

• 2013-03-19

  Forking and Dongle Jokes Don’t Belong At Tech Conferences

  Adria Richards:

  I was telling myself if they made one more sexual joke, I’d say something.

  The it happened….The trigger.

  Jesse was on the main stage with thousands of people sitting in the audience. He was talking about helping the next generation learn to program and how happy PyCon was with the Young Coders workshop (which I volunteered at). He was mentioning that the PyLadies auction had raised $10,000 in a single night and the funds would be used the funds for their initiatives.

  I saw a photo on main stage of a little girl who had been in the Young Coders workshop.

  I realized I had to do something or she would never have the chance to learn and love programming because the ass clowns behind me would make it impossible for her to do so.

  Props to Richards for calling them out (though she really shouldn’t have had to—looks like there were plenty of other men in the audience), and to PyCon for responding (though it’s not clear what they did).