One of twitter's engineers has been accused of attempting to rape a female speaker at ApacheConf. That's the reason two friends of mine have quit Twitter last year. Their culture is incredibly broken.
And for some reason, it's always germans. A german from VW violently raped one of my father's engineers at a conference 20 years ago, and VW tried pretty hard to cover it up. Since dad is now dead, I don't feel sorry to say that he beat this man to within an inch of his life, and then had him arrested.
Shameful.
There was no handling of it. The typical rapist response was "she was drunk, she asked for it". Then it was swept under the rug.
Moral of the story: Women at conferences are there to work, not to get hit on by some pimply-faced nerd with no game. Especially married ones with rings who say "NO".
If you were at a party where you didn't know everyone, and had had a couple of beers, and someone beat the living shit out of you in the toilet and stole your wallet, have you been stupid?
I'm assuming you don't think you've been stupid in that situation, so what's the difference?
And yes, I do think there's no difference between a bunch of drunk, sexually-deprived "strangers" partying in a hotel-room at 3 AM at a tech-conference and a couple of thugs looking for your wallet. Lots of people assume (like this girl does) that if you've got more of an education then suddenly you're inner instincts (good or bad) suddenly change also, but this is not the truth.
You seem to be saying that a girl has to behave in a very restricted manner if there are socially retarded people around. If that's the case, why aren't such people put under mental health care? That's what we usually do with people who have mental issues that render them unable to deal with normal human interactions.
Getting "hit on" [1] is fair game in my book. Getting sexually assaulted is not.
[1] Where I come from this is entirely verbal, no contact.
When you hit on a woman while she's working, you're not going to get laid, you're just going to be the latest in a long string of men making her life hell that day.
Below you talk about "not taking no for an answer". I don't call that "hitting on", I call that pestering and, yes, that would make someone a dick. But in my opinion that makes you a dick no matter where you do it, not just in business scenarios.