So, women who signed up to those repositories had no say in this decision? I think they should've been asked first, what THEY want. Some projects might have contributors on GitHub. Ada Initiative promises to accommodate those people, but why weren't they talked to and accommodated before making this decision? It's so much for Ada Initiative "helping" women treating them merely like pawns.
An agreement that a spouse shouldn't work in the office. Gosh, this is even worse then the original complaint. In California you can't have such agreements, this is marital status discrimination. I don't know what kind of job Teresa was doing, but even thought she wasn't on a payroll, being a volunteer or an informal adviser is perfectly acceptable. If anything might be wrong here, this would be mixing up corporations or such. But employees are in the company to do their job, not to control borders, and "this person is not supposed to be here" sounds territorial and toxic. You're busy, not open for certain interactions, tell about it. I suspect it wasn't Julie who got harassed, especially combined with spreading gossip. And I find it incredibly sexist consistently referring to a professional woman as a "wife". Compare to: "I insist that this engineer/marketer/director shouldn't be on the floor".
No, you misinterpret. "Your wife, who is not employed by the company, cannot keep coming to our headquarters and using it / setting up a de facto office, let alone harassing employees to do pro bono work for her startup." Not "your spouse cannot be employed here".
Very good post, right on. I'm a woman, dealt with a number of more unpleasant situations, but wouldn't accept my life shuttered because somebody told me so. It's only beneficial for drama queens/kings, while naive people are thrown into the state of helplessness and hysteria without even realizing it. It's totally the opposite to the women empowerment, the one we want.
I would add 2 things - according to his (now removed, but still available in wayback machine) blog http://web.archive.org/web/20130923014010/http://objo.com/ Joe O'Brian wrote that he was looking for professional help with mental issues or such in June 2013 (substance abuse? a rehab?). So, now the internet is lynching a sick person who already realized a problem and was seeking help? How nice. While the other side blames her drinking problems on the society and "male industry" (how childish).
Second, having dealt with drunk men myself (no drugs or guns involved, just alcohol - like in the story). A slap in the face usually works very well to help him keep his hands to himself. If it still doesn't work, a good smash in the face and moving away works even better. Unless, a lady gets so plastered that she can't move or use her brain, or she's a damsel in distress type. Then her life was ruined long before somebody put a hand into her pants.
If you need someone with qualification X, and n%, n != 50, of students attending university to earn qualification X are of gender A, yet you try to employ genders A and B equally, you will get fewer good people with qualification X than if you employed n% people of gender A and (100-n)% people of gender B.
Since there are very, very few subjects attended equally by both genders, employing equally will get you worse people.
Note that the above actually assumes that people from both genders are in general equally capable/intelligent. If you add, for example, a higher standard deviation of the IQ for gender C, you will get even more skewed results.
I tried my own comments from this page. The majority gives me around 70-85% male (I'm a feminine female). But adding one comment which was talking "childcare" and such gave me "only" a weak male (saying it might indicate European). It's so stereotypical. Interesting also how it divides people into males, females and Europeans (the "weak" versions).
I looked up Hungarian laws, and the problem is not the government involvement, but that there is a huge difference between maternity and paternity leave (3 years vs 5 days). This somehow doesn't fit "anti-discrimination", as it's quite the opposite.
For tech companies it shouldn't be a problem to interview candidates blindly. Give some questions as written tests and coding assignments. If talking is necessary, there is software changing voice pitch. Skype has a plugin like that. Just interview a candidate sitting in another room, streaming what they write and use the same voice settings for all candidates. My impression that nobody uses written tests because companies want to keep bias, not to eliminate it.
The problem with that is similar to "online dating". Sure you can learn a lot about a person without ever seeing or hearing them... but you don't really know a person until you have spent a portion of time actually interacting with them. If you are hiring a person to be part of a team, you need that person to gel with the team at least on some level. I don't think you could get an accurate representation of that if you can't hear that person's true voice, see their mannerisms, etc. I've been in situations where our team was down to two candidates that had various strengths/weaknesses but for the most part were equally qualified. Either one of them was just as likely as the other to be able to perform the work we needed someone to do. Is it wrong to go with the person that we felt would fit into the team the best?
I have saved a really good booklet from my past employer about sexual harassment. Sexual harassment is actually gender neutral, and it doesn't have to be about sexual advances. Moreover, a man can be harassed by another man, as much as much as a woman can be harassed by another woman (happens way too often in my experience). The legal definition says harassment should be both severe enough and impose gender inequality (i.e. telling dirty jokes to both men and women doesn't constitute sexual harassment as long as they are not more derogatory to one gender). The problem is that there are too many stereotypes about sexual harassment, some are spread by corporations themselves (because they try to avoid lawsuits, nothing to do with employee fair treatment).
