Gender issues in the overwhelmingly male-dominated tech industry have been getting plenty of airtime of late; particularly with a number of women taking on some high-profile roles in the industry.
Now misogyny in Silicon Valley is a hot topic again, after a woman who called out two men for making sexist jokes was subsequently fired from her job at a tech company, following an online campaign in which she was targeted with racial slurs, rape and death threats.
At a PyCon tech conference last week, Adria Richards claims she overheard two men making inappropriate jokes about “forking” and “dongles”, which in the context of the tech community, can be translated into sexual innuendos.
Richards tweeted a photo of the men to her 10,000 followers, and asked the conference organisers to intervene and address the matter.
The online world also quickly intervened, with backlash from certain communities on Hacker News, Reddit, and members claiming to be from hacktivist group Anonymous. Some Twitter commenters targeted Richards with violent threats.
Richards was fired by her employer, as was one of the men in the photo.
Debate and online outrage ensued, with many in the online community disagreeing with Richard’s decision to tweet a photo of the men, dismissing it as an overreaction. Some suggested what she’d experienced was not sexist at all, while others claim the matter is really about misogyny and sexism in the tech world.
Richards, who calls herself a developer evangelist, explained her reasons for tweeting the photos of the men, declaring she was tired of the widespread hostility facing women in her industry.
“Instead of shrinking down in my seat, I did something about it” she wrote on her blog.
Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of online community Reddit also called out his “fellow geeks” for perpetuating sexist behaviour, telling the Verge he was upset by the discourse.
“It could have been an opportunity for a lot of important progress,” he said.
In the same week as the PyCon conference events, tech website Complex also added fuel to claims of sexism in the industry, ranking and publishing a list of the “40 Hottest Women in Tech”.
While its author, Luke Winkie, wrote on the Daily Beast that his original piece focused on breaking “gender divisions” in “an area like tech”, and had “only included normal looking women” on his original list, he discovered when the piece ran that it had been edited to celebrate looks over ability and “over half of the women [he] had included were replaced with people like Morgan Webb, complete with the usual lascivious dialogue.”
“In my world we wouldn’t ever have to create lists of women to make money on the internet,” he wrote. “Unfortunately, we don’t live in that world yet.”
Incidents like these continue to disempower the women who already work in the industry and perpetuates the idea that women are not equal, and in many cases, not tolerated in the boys club. It further deters them from getting involved in the tech industry.
“Women in technology need consistent messaging from birth through retirement they are welcome, competent and valued in the industry,” Richards wrote on her blog.