[loudin]

This is a very silly situation. Someone made a joke about a dongle and got fired. Another person posted that she was offended about the said dongle joke and it's flared up into a massive discussion about gender in tech.

Here's the bottom line - if such a tame joke can have this large an effect and warrant this type of a knee-jerk reaction from the tech community, our conception of gender equality is seriously fragile.

Better discussions about sexism in the workplace could revolve around the lack of female leadership, sexist working environments, an overabundance of male developers, company roles that appear to be gender-specific, etc.

We are so wrong on the major issues that we want to make the full situation as easy to digest as a dongle joke and a tweet.

It's far more complex than that. And this is the only thing I'm going to say about the situation because we all look like children for addressing this.

[rmc]

One problem is that for every joke like this that was reported there are often many many more that aren't.

[claudius]

Many more unreported jokes would only be a problem if said jokes were a problem. So far, I have not seen a conclusive argument why such a joke would be a problem.

[rmc]

Listen to women. Some of them talk about feeling uncomfortable when there are loads of dick jokes.

I mean this isn't the 1960s anymore. The rest of the professional world has moved on and knows that dick jokes are bad for a professional environment. Why is this such a hard thing for people in tech?

[claudius]

I feel uncomfortable around openly religious people. I also tend to feel uncomfortable around people engaging in meaningless chitchat or when people ask meaningless questions (‘How are you?’ being one of my favourites in this regard). I don’t try to get people fired for wearing a crucifix, nor do I burn chatting people at a stake.

[ktsmith]

> The rest of the professional world has moved on and knows that dick jokes are bad for a professional environment.

You haven't been to many conferences or events for other industries have you? I'm not arguing whether this is right or wrong but it's definitely not isolated to tech.