Watching "Donglegate" unfold over the past few days has been like watching a comedy of errors slowly metastasize into a tragedy of thoughtlessness. News coverage of what unfolded at (and after) this year's PyCon developer conference has already been written; I'll assume that you’re up to speed. What follows is straight opinion about a silly situation.
As events unfolded from Sunday until today, partisans quickly formed to weigh in on some key questions. Was SendGrid evangelist Adria Richards right or wrong to take offense at the jokes in question? Were the two male developers out of bounds with their "dongle" comments? Did they even say the things they were accused of? Was taking the matter right to Twitter the wrong way to go? Was the termination of two people—including Richards herself—a preferred outcome? How did DDoS vigilantes get involved in a complaint over some genital jokes? Finally: how long until the lawsuits?
Let's start by spreading the blame where it's deserved: on nearly everyone involved. The "Boy’s Club” mentality is thankfully no longer acceptable in tech, but it's still common—some people have actually described tech to me as "men's work." The jokes appear to run afoul of PyCon's code of conduct, which strives to create a welcoming atmosphere for everyone, and their unfunny-ness is equaled only by their lameness. “Forking a repo” and “big dongles” must rank somewhere around "0.5: classless brospeak" on the seismic scale of harassing/menacing behavior toward women. While such sexually inappropriate comments are completely unnacceptable in professional settings (to many men as well as women), neither merits firing unless someone had a history of making unwelcome comments. A teaching opportunity should not generally be turned into a termination event. (PlayHaven, which employed both developers, says that it will not comment "on all the factors that contributed to our parting ways" with one developer, so it's not clear what the exact situation here was.)
Suddenly, a couple off-color jokes represented all the serious forces that can hold women back from tech careers.
Yet these two men don’t get all of the blame. One recurring theme on message boards and chat rooms, including our own, is that while Richards had every right to report the behavior of the two men to conference organizers, snapping their photograph and posting it publicly to "Twitter shame" them was a step too far (speaking of a step too far, there are other, more repugnant recurring themes among commenters, too). They're right; going public was not the only way Richards could get a relatively minor issue addressed. She could have confronted the two men or she could have gone straight to PyCon. Her actions only escalated the situation.
In a blog post explaining the story in her own words, Richards wrote about how, over the course of the jokes, she moved from “I was going to let it go” to “I realized I had to do something.” The moment of decision came after seeing a picture of a young girl on the main stage who had attended a Young Coders workshop. “She would never have the chance to learn and love programming,” Richards wrote, “because the ass clowns behind me would make it impossible for her to do so.”
Clearly, this is hyperbole. These two guys weren’t going to prevent anybody from doing anything. Suddenly, a couple off-color jokes represented all the serious forces that can hold women back from tech careers. While denouncing bad behavior certainly has its place, proportion is important—and this approach to these jokes simply makes it harder to have a sincere discussion about misogyny and men's/women's issues in the workplace.
Richards decided that her method of intervention would combine public shaming on Twitter as well as pinging PyCon organizers to do something about the incident. Richards said that she “was a guest in the Python community and as such, I wanted to give PyCon the opportunity to address this.” This is why she did not confront the two men directly. Instead, she pinged PyCon and, well, the rest of the Internet. Sledgehammer, meet nail. (To its great credit, PyCon appears to have handled the issue well, speaking to both parties and securing an apology from the developers.)
In the aftermath, one of the developers lost his job and Richards eventually lost hers too. While I believe that Richards unfairly shamed these guys in public (two wrongs don’t make a right, as they say), PlayHaven and SendGrid emerge as the real reputational losers here. Ironically, the companies shared in the same core mistake Richards made. The asymmetry of incident and response has now elevated Donglegate from dust-up into life-changing event for at least two people, and it didn't have to end this way at all.
reader comments
658