It's not every day that you experience blatant and brutal misogyny in the
technology industry. Today's example is Adria Richards. At PyCon,
Adria overheard two men making penis jokes, photographed them and posted it
on Twitter. Following this, the employer of one of the men, PlayHaven (link
withheld) dismissed him. In retaliation, Richards' employer, SendGrid
(ditto), was DDoSed for approximately five hours. To put an end to it,
SendGrid publicly released Adria.
To begin, why did PlayHaven fire the man? Did he have a history of things like this, and this incident was simply the straw that broke the camel's back? Was it to save face amidst a potential PR disaster? Given no evidence to the contrary, I'll naively assume the latter. In this case, PlayHaven is pathetic; PlayHaven is stupid; and PlayHaven is to blame.
Adria did not get anybody fired. Posting something innocuous on Twitter that somebody's pathetic, stupid company decides to fire them over is not equivalent to getting someone fired. There is no chance at all that Adria snapped the photo with the intention of getting the man fired.
This is my favourite part, and the most appalling. Here are some links:
- I'm pretty sure that Adria Richards has set women in technology back 50 years. What a bitch.
- @adriarichards you need to kill youself tranny what you did was wrong
In addition to this, we see an image of a decapitated and bound woman with the title "when I'm done" and alongside links to Richards' address.
If you had to describe these tweets in one word, what would it be? If you say sensible, you're the target audience of this gist. If you say fucking abhorrent and disgusting, you're a sane human being.
In attempting to unveil casual misogyny in the tech field, Adria has accidentally revealed the actual misogyny that lies in our industry, and there's nothing casual about it. Fuck PlayHaven for firing people over nonsense, fuck SendGrid for being spineless cowards, and fuck every member of the technology community.