By:Kashmir Hill
Forbes
Over the weekend, a
female “developer evangelist,” Adria Richards, overheard two male developers
making what she thought were sexist jokes during a tech conference.
Uncomfortable with confronting them in person, she instead tweeted a photo of
the two to shame them publicly, writing that “jokes about forking repo’s in a
sexual way and big ‘dongles’” are “not cool.” One of the dongle-joking dudes
was wearing a visible nametag in the photo. Richards’s tweet was immediately
spotted by an organizer for the tech conference who pulled the two men aside to
confront them about the comments. According to a post on the conference’s website, the men agreed the comments were in poor taste and
apologized.
Richards explained in
a blog post why she needed to call out the behavior via twitter
That could have been the end
of the story but instead, like a sexist snowball rolling down a hyper-sensitive
mountain, the situation has escalated considerably. Richards wrote a blog post about the encounter, in which it’s not entirely clear that the
comments were sexist (in my reading).
