Mother Jones
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It’s no secret that the tech industry can be a brutal place for women trying to work there. The parade of offenses continues: the social coding giant GitHub came under a firestorm of criticism earlier this year after one of the company’s few female developers quit, alleging a pattern of sexual and gender-based harassment. And a website called “CodeBabes” launched, offering to teach bros how to code under the tutelage of virtual strippers. It seems there’s no end to this type of news; in fact, there’s a whole site devoted to tracking these flareups.
On Thursday, a fed-up group of women technologists and leaders published an open letter about how women are treated in tech, and ways to do better. It was published it in Model View Culture, a startup media site that covers issues of culture and inclusion in tech. The cosigners include Divya Manian, a product manager at Adobe, Sabrina Majeed, iOS designer at Buzzfeed, Angelina Fabbro, who is on the developers tools team at Mozilla, and Jessica Dillon, a software engineer at Bugsnag, a San Francisco-based startup.
As the women put it, “We are tired of pretending this stuff doesn’t happen.” The whole letter is absolutely worth a read, but here’s an excerpt:
Our experiences? They’re just like the stories you hear about. But maybe you thought because we weren’t as loud, that this stuff doesn’t happen to us. We’ve been harassed on mailing lists and called ‘whore’/‘cunt’ without any action being taken against aggressors. We get asked about our relationships at interviews, and we each have tales of being groped at public events. We’ve been put in the uncomfortable situation of having men attempt to turn business meetings into dates.
We regularly receive creepy, rapey e-mails where men describe what a perfect wife we would be and exactly how we should expect to be subjugated. Sometimes there are angry e-mails that threaten us to leave the industry, because ‘it doesn’t need anymore c**ts ruining it’…
We’d rather be writing blog posts about best practices for development, design, and tech management instead of the one we’re writing now. We are tired of pretending this stuff doesn’t happen, but continuing to keep having these experiences again and again. We keep our heads down, working at our jobs, hoping that if we just work hard at what we do, maybe somehow the problem will go away…
Imagine if you were the only person like you on your team and when you left your computer and came back there was very graphic porn on your screen (a specific example that we have experienced)…
Source article:
These Women Are Tired of Being Nice. Read Their Badass Letter About Sexism in Tech.
