Kathy Sierra

Women in technology and harassment

Almost 6 years ago, in March of 2007, technologist and public speaker Kathy Sierra shuttered her online site and declined her speaking engagement at O’Reilly ETech because she had been threatened and harassed online and feared personal attacks in real life. [Geek Feminism Wiki: Kathy Sierra Incident] At the time, it generated an outpouring of discussion about the abuse that women who speak in public, especially women in the technology field, face on the basis of their sex. I had attended her keynote address at SXSW that year, and was shocked that such a competent and engaging speaker was being terrorized online, and felt she needed to step out of the limelight for her own safety.

There’s been an ongoing discussion about the lack of women speakers at Tech conferences in the intervening years, with some of the best and the brightest tech conferences making an engaged and active commitment to gender diversity.

But as designer and tech speaker Sarah Parmenter discovered after speaking publicly at several public events this past year, female tech speakers are still the targets of harassment from men in the tech field. [Speaking Up] After Sarah spoke out about her experience, others have come forward: Relly Annett-Baker [Also Speaking Up].

If your wondering why there is such a climate of hostility towards women in the tech field, Milo Yiannopoulos’s incredibly sexist post on Kernel [Put A Sock In It, You Dickless Wonders] will go a long way towards shining a light on it:

For this is the technology industry: there are more men in it because the male mind is, in general, better primed with the sorts of skills the industry values; men are simply better suited to most technology jobs.

Women therefore tend to work in roles that require finesse and communicative skills, where they pop up in this world at all. What is hard to understand about this, or offensive about pointing it out? The sexes are wired differently, and that’s perfectly fine.

There will be exceptions. Women who succeed should be celebrated – though on their merits, not because they have a vagina (hello, Evening Standard). But there will always be more men. It’s a biological inevitability.

It’s certainly nothing to feel crippling guilt about.

Obviously a load of pure hogwash; there’s no evidence that men and women are wired differently or that such sweeping generalizations are even remotely true. [Susan Fisk, Is the female brain innately inferior? subject: Josef Parvizi, Clayman Institute fellow and assistant professor of Neurology and Neurological Sciences at Stanford University]

But that this attitude is published on a tech blog is very telling about what men in the tech industry think as they listen to women speak. It’s not surprising that women would be reluctant to step up to a podium, given this sort of a climate. The experiences that Kathy Sierra, Sarah Parmenter, Relly Annett-Baker faced were not meant merely to silence them, but also to silence women in general in the tech industry.

Ada Lovelace
Ada Lovelace
It goes beyond just women speaking in tech to working every day in tech fields. There are times I’ve felt at my own tech job that I was in a climate I felt wasn’t welcoming or respectful towards female employees. If this kind of harassment is aimed at women who step up and speak out, what can those of us working every day in the industry expect to do about it? It’s disheartening to say the least.

Fortunately, there are some organizations like the The Ada Initiative working actively to change things for women in technology, by providing guidelines for tech conferences on how to handle harassment of women speakers and attendees, conducting research and surveys about women in the industry, holding their own conferences and a half dozen other great programs design to make things better. Support them if you can, and promote their work.

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Stop Cyberbullying Day

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Read more about it here…..
In all of this, one of the things that is bothering me is people’s defense of the “mean kids” who put up the two sites that were promoting maliciousness towards various tech people, including Kathy Sierra. Like one of the comments in my previous post, who actually went so far as to make the brazen claim that Sierra’s calling them out was on the level of what happened to her.
As far as the “mean kids” are concerned — boo hoo. They were running sites with a basic premise of mean-spiritedness. Nowhere on either site did they issue a policy about what level of mean-spiritedness was acceptable, and what things went beyond the pale. It’s a bit disingenuous to suddenly say “well gee, we never expected that to happen” when someone takes it way too far. And from the details I’ve been able to see, when death threats were actually posted on their sites, they came from the main participants of the site, not anonymous comments. That makes the claim “it wasn’t us” a pretty tough sell, although I guess one of the participants is trying to make the case that he was hacked.

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Kathy Sierra, hate comments, and women bloggers

I’ve avoided blogging about this because it’s very difficult to explain, really. I’ll try to keep it really short:

Kathy Sierra is a tech guru who got her start in Java, published some really popular books, and became well-known in the tech community for her ideas about technology and writing user-friendly web applications. She writes a popular blog called Creating Passionate Users, and speaks regularly at industry events. She was a keynote speaker at SXSW, a panel I attended. I’ve been subscribed to her site since last year, when Rich and Jerrod saw her at SXSW and raved about her when they got back.

Over the past several weeks, Kathy has, like several prominent female technogeeks before her, become the target of anonymous personal abuse that rose to the level of criminal threats of violence and murder. The reasons for why that occurred aren’t terribly clear, because Kathy’s about the closest thing to sunshine and puppies that you can get.

But the basic sequence of events seems to be this – some high-profile tech geeks who are more cynical and caustic got together and created a site called “meankids.org” to talk smack about their fellow wonks in the technology world. Kathy and some other women she knew were common targets of their cynicism and abuse, partly because they are women. This online sandbox for maliciousness bred more meanness in the forums and comments of the site as anonymous readers stepped up the abuse to increasing levels.

(Gee, that sounds familiar. I wonder where I’ve seen that happen before? Oh, yeah. I remember, we have our own version of this kind of virulent crap here in Indiana.)

When the women complained, the abuse increased even more, to the level of violent threats posted in anonymous comments on the abuse sites, and on Kathy’s site. The level of the threats were such that Kathy began to feel unsafe, and even canceled a prominent speaking engagement because of it. After she wrote about it on her blog, discussion of the whole incident has exploded across the internet.

One of the interesting things that has come out of this is discussion from numerous prominent women in the tech industry, who have come out with their own revelations of this happening to them. There is, it seems, a systemic problem in the industry.

I’ve been following the story for the last several days, mainly because all the big name web designers who’s blogs I read have weighed in, because either Kathy or the mean kids are their friends. But what made me actually decide to comment on the whole issue is this small quote from a BBC interview of Kathy on the threats she received:

She also thinks it could be time to re-examine whether the blogosphere needs to be completely uncensored.

“There is an unwritten rule in the blogosphere that it is wrong to delete nasty comments. It suggests that you can’t take criticism but now there is a sense that this is nonsense,” she said.

I happened to agree with that sentiment – I’ve practiced it for quite a while. I get 5-10 comments a day that are basically anti-gay trash directed at me. Most of the time, they’re caught in my spam filter (I have some unique keywords entered to catch them) and I simply delete them. Occasionally one or two will slip through live, but I usually delete them pretty quickly. Lately, though, the number of vitriolic posts and anti-gay comments has increased pretty drastically – it’s about double what it’s been in the past, so I have to monitor the comments more closely.

As far as I’m concerned, my website is my real estate. If you visit and decide to plant some flowers in my garden, that’s awesome; you’re always welcome back. If you visit and you graffiti my house, you’re not welcome and your contributions will be removed. Just like a newspaper that chooses not to publish every letter to the editor, I’ll choose to publish what I think adds substance.

It’s not a free speech issue as far as I’m concerned – you only have free speech in a public setting. My website isn’t a public space, it’s my space. No one’s stopping you from starting your own blog, or standing on a street corner preaching, or otherwise speaking out in public places. But you can’t come to my house and insult me and expect to stay.

For the past several weeks I’ve had a post rolling around in my head about my feelings about homophobia and anti-gay hatred and abuse, and how my feelings have developed and changed over the past 20 years that I’ve been “out of the closet.” Sometime soon I need to actually sit down and write that post, when I have a bit of extra time.

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