[luigi]

There are two really interesting, and frankly devastating, double standards at work here:

(1) We all know Adria Richards's name. We know all about her. Her personal address has been spread. Things she wrote in the past have been used against her. But we don't really know anything about those guys. We know who they work for and what they look like, but there's been no widespread effort to expose them in the same manner that Adria's been exposed.

(2) When that guy lost his job, everyone thought it was a great injustice, and that Adria should make a heartfelt apology to him. But when Adria lost her job this morning, there were no such pronouncements going the other way. No one declared, "That dude really needs to apologize to Adria for making the dick joke that eventually led to her getting let go." That's not an argument that's being made anywhere.

Ask yourself why these things are happening in one direction. In an equal world -- a balanced world -- things should cut both ways. These tactics should be used by people on both "sides". But in this instance, that's decidedly not happening.

[Smudge]

(1) Adria was the one using her non-anonymous Twitter account to publicly out these two individuals. So, by her own actions, we know her name.

(2) There is a direct set of causalities leading from Adria's actions to the first firing. It wasn't (IMO) Adria's fault that he was let go, but it was a direct byproduct of the way she dealt with the situation. On the flip side, Adria did not lose her job because that guy made dick jokes. The causality there, while perhaps still arguable, is far more uncertain. There are numerous other ways Adria could have dealt with the situation which would not have resulted in her being fired.

Furthermore, regarding it being a double-standard in general -- Had Adria been a man, I suspect that both your #1 and #2 points could still have been true given the nature of the events. But hypotheticals are tricky, and in either case there would probably be numerous double standards at play. But the divisiveness of how it was handled makes it hard to address the real issues, which is highly unfortunate.

And lastly, to be clear, I could never, ever condone the hurtful, misogynistic, vitriolic backlash against Adria that we saw. I'd like to believe that much of that was from the froth-mouthed fringes of an otherwise reasonable community, but nonetheless I do wish there were a lot more being done to address that part of this debacle. I myself flagged a Facebook comment, but gave up when nothing really came of it and hurtful comments started coming into my own message inbox.

[deepinside]

(1) She publicised herself widely, posted the picture on Twitter, wrote a long blog post on her blog, named her employer directly, claimed her employer backed her actions, has all her contact details and photos on her blog and Twitter. She made herself public.

You don't know much about the guys as they didn't make public claims or announcements.

You appear to be saying they should be identified, named and shamed... which is exactly what Adria tried to do, and look where that ended up

(2) The guy in question apologised almost immediately on HN, a very well written, and seemingly honest and heartfelt apology for making a mistake.

The PyCon organisers took the guys and Adria into a room and discussed the matter at the time, and all were said to have apologised and agreed the matter was over.

If "everyone" thought it was an injustice that the guy lost his job, but felt it was fair and reasonable that she did, perhaps this tells you something. Perhaps it tells you that "everyone" thought her actions were wrong (as the instigator of this affair), and the guy did little wrong

The "reason these things are happening in one direction" is that Adria behaved like a jerk. Quite simple really.

Not a woman jerk, not a black jerk, not a Jewish jerk ... just a jerk.

[flaviusb]

Regarding point (2), you are completely wrong. You are saying that because lots of people harassed Adria, therefore she was a jerk and deserved it. That is trivially disproved by noting that ethics as such exists, and is not simply whatever a group of people does. The reason this is happening is because people like you are shitheads who are doing bad things or enabling other shitheads to do bad things.