Issue of the week: Sexism in the tech industry

Silicon Valley has a “serious, persistent problem with women,” said Matt Buchanan in NewYorker.com. It surfaced in “an Internet firestorm” last week after Adria Richards, a developer attending a programming conference, took to Twitter to call out a couple of men for making nerdy sexual puns about “dongles” and “forking.” One of the men was later fired by his company, PlayHaven. Richards, who is black, was soon “bombarded by deeply misogynistic and racist vitriol on Twitter, Facebook, and elsewhere, including threats of rape and murder.” Her company, SendGrid, was hammered by a denial-of-service attack, after which it terminated Richards. Nobody emerges from this tawdry episode looking squeaky clean, but it’s the backlash against Richards that’s most troubling. It’s bad enough that the technology industry has a shortage of women, “but the culture itself is warped, as the harrowingly misogynist response to Richards clearly shows.”

Firing Richards for sticking up for herself sends a chilling message, said Mary Elizabeth Williams in Salon.com. SendGrid “has now told the world that when a woman subjects herself to vile sexism and invasion of her privacy, she is responsible for the destructive attention she’s attracted.” In a statement, SendGrid CEO Jim Franklin said that Richards’s tweet “put our business in danger.” What a damnable and “cowardly response.” Yes, Richards could have made her point without publicly shaming anyone on Twitter—for the record, I think her response “was immature and unnecessary.” But by failing to stand by its employee, SendGrid is saying that “whatever threatening, harassing, illegal things some morons who possess the unholy combination of abundant misogyny and free time unleash, it’s all her fault.” It buys into a sickening “mob mentality of ‘punish the bitch’” that desperately needs to change.

“Welcome to the digital age,” said Kashmir Hill in Forbes. One tweet leads to thousands of comments, and four days later, two people have lost their jobs. “While Richards was right to call out fellow conference attendees for making sexual jokes that made her uncomfortable,” she should have done it in person and privately. Instead, we’ve become “very quick to call out wrongdoing publicly” online, largely because “it’s easier to point the finger digitally than having to deal with the discomfort and awkwardness involved in doing it to people’s faces.” Of course, there’s a benefit to public shaming, which holds “all of those involved accountable.” But in Richards’s case, it backfired—badly.

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Sadly, any legitimate questions about Richards’s tweet “have already been lost in the flood of vitriol,” said Russell Brandom in TheVerge.com. The conversation, dominated “by the loudest and most offensive voices,” has become “an echo chamber of horrible.” Richards is still getting death threats, many of them racially motivated. Her critics keep wondering why she couldn’t have called the men out on their high school humor in private or face-to-face. “In a world where thousands of men can instantly gather to deliver swift retribution,” is it any wonder that women feel vulnerable?