[hueving]

>allowing a female employee's problems at work to be continually ignored.

Who is to say that it was only a female employee's problems? It sounds like the wife is a nut case and she could very well have bothered other employees. There is no evidence here that her requests were being ignored because she is a female.

>The hula hooping moment was important because it visibly demonstrated her male coworkers lack of respect for women as people.

Are you serious? Is it really the case that you have no respect for a person if you watch them performing a sporting activity? If I start juggling and someone watches me, I highly doubt that it's because he/she has a lack of respect for me as a person.

Seriously, read what you just said. It implies that you cannot watch people performing an activity while respecting their autonomy.

[jd0]

You're taking what I said a little too literally. Take a look at my response to another commenter where I clarify my hula-hoop statement:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7408735

[efuquen]

You're avoiding what I think is the better point, the first one. Her mistreatment by an estranged wife of a founder, in and of itself, doesn't constitute sexism. If her problems with this were ignored because she was a female, that would be sexism. But I didn't see any evidence of that presented and to me it seems more likely they were ignored quite simply because it was the wife of an important person at the company and HR was ineffective at resolving the situation.

Overall the article focuses very little on sexism and more on this really bizarre and inappropriate relationship with the Founder's wife. The section about someone reverting her commits because of being rejection might be a better example, but I don't really even see that as being gender specific either. If a women was rejected by a male coworker and she started reverting commits is that sexism? Jealousy isn't really gender specific and targeted at someone because they are a man or a women. Finally there were some vague mentions of pull request comments that might be sexist, but it's hard to judge without being able to see the comments and she really didn't expand into what about them were sexist.

Overall what I see is a very strange story about incompetence and inappropriate behavior, but very little talk about sexism except in a few random places and at the very end with the hula hoop story. I feel like there is a lot more to this story that has really been told.

[escape_goat]

I understand what you mean when you say that it "doesn't constitute sexism", and that's true for a definition of sexism as "acts or speech denigrating women on the basis of their gender."

I think what the prior poster is trying to express is that this is a situation, with the founder's wife, that could only occur to a female employee. The covert power of the wife over the complainant is based on gender, and her success in intimidating the complainant with bizarre behaviour -- to which the complainant had an entirely passive response -- is largely due to the social expectations that the complainant perceives, that as a woman she should not be confrontational nor assertive.

Given that I didn't see the hula-hooping incident myself, and only have the complainant's description of it, I cannot adequately address the question of whether or not the men involved were behaving improperly, or aggressively, or in a fashion such that I am sympathetic to the complainant's feeling that their attitude was demeaning to her female colleagues. Personally, I could happily watch attractive young women exercise for hours. But I would also sympathize completely with a young woman whom felt uncomfortable with that. From the complainant's description, it seems that her colleagues were hula-hooping together for fun, and that there was an abnormal number of male engineers sitting and watching them. The hula-hoopers were presumably aware of this. It spoiled the fun for the complainant, but how the hula-hoopers felt about it is still an open question.

I think you are absolutely right that the focus of discussion should be the founder and his wife. The situation sounds completely inappropriate, the HR response seems powerless and ineffectual, and whatever the other side of the story is, her resignation/dismissal occurred under entirely improper circumstances, and she probably deserves compensation for this.