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Comment by Aqueous | Hacker News Reader

I'm not entirely sure the hula-hooping incident - merely observing girls hula hooping is not a crime, is it? - by itself constitutes a hostile atmosphere for women, unless inappropriate comments were being made.

What we have here is some completely inappropriate, cloak and dagger, soap opera shit being perpetrated by the wife of the cofounder, who has no business meddling in the affairs of his employees. (If true, this is completely bizarre behavior.) But I'm not entirely sure this hostility was directed at her simply because she was a woman.

She is absolutely justified in getting the fuck out of dodge, either way.

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I don't think it creates a 'hostile' atmosphere per say. Obviously if both parties are alight with the situation then it's fine for them.

I think it's an inappropriate one for a workplace though. This comes down to company culture. The problem isn't the women hula hooping, a casual environment means such things will happen. People will exercise together, work on hobbies, etc.

The problem is that in a work environment everyone who works there has to be treated with respect, and equally, and that means not cat-calling your co-workers. Even if the women were fine with it (and they probably were since they didn't stop), the large group of men treating them like sexual objects in the workplace is not conducive to an environment where women are respected. If this was a strip club there wouldn't be a problem.

To draw a parallel, if 7 out of 10 people at the office were having nerf gun fights, and it was disrupting other peoples work (because they are reflexively duck, etc) to the point where they can't work when there aren’t big nerf gun fights (but still one or two shots every now and then), then it's a problem, and destructive to a good work environment. This is where management needs to step in and say, "ok guys, I know we are pretty lax around here, but seriously cut this shit out". Obviously it isn't a perfect parallel.

It's also a culture fit thing. This was the thing that broke the camels back. This employee suffered discrimination from executives (and startup founder's significant others are likely going to be part of the executive team one way or another. They certainly have the standing of the executive team in many ways. Legally speaking they are almost the same 'person' in many ways), she suffered discrimination from a single employee, and then she suffered it from a group of employees (a group mentality). And all three of these things feed into each other, and in a work environment (especially a casual one), employees need to be able to move their bodies without worrying about a group of other employees demeaning them.

>and that means not cat-calling your co-workers.

There was no cat-calling in this case, so why bring that up? I suppose you could mention also that it's not okay to rape your co-workers too. Kinda disingenuous though, isn't it? Bringing it up in the context of this story implies that it happened.

My mistake (noticed when I went back to quote the article), I misread:

> What I did have a problem with is the line of men sitting on one bench facing the hoopers and gawking at them

> What I did have a problem with is the line of men sitting on one bench facing them, hollering and gawking at them

But the point remains. Although it's a bit less in severity than I first realized.

> To draw a parallel, if 7 out of 10 people at the office were having nerf gun fights, and it was disrupting other peoples work (because they are reflexively duck, etc) to the point where they can't work when there aren’t big nerf gun fights (but still one or two shots every now and then), then it's a problem, and destructive to a good work environment. This is where management needs to step in and say, "ok guys, I know we are pretty lax around here, but seriously cut this shit out". Obviously it isn't a perfect parallel.

If 7 out of 10 people at the office are having an epic nerf gun fight, who's to say the three outliers are in the right? I'm not sure what you're trying to illustrate with this analogy.

Well I was using it as more of a 30 out of a 100 outliers.

I'm saying (and this is where the parallel breaks down a little) that if people want to have an epic nerf gun fight it should probably be scheduled, and out of the work place/time (like during launch, or after 5pm or something. And this is where it breaks down. Nerf gun fights are fine, but creating an environment that discriminates or (equivalently) encourages discrimination is never ok). They both distract many of the employees trying to work (i.e. the ones not involved in the discrimination/nerf gun fights), and it being able to break out randomly at any time is a massive continual distraction.

To continue the analogy. Consider an employee is doing their own thing to relax (as opposed to nerf gun fights), perhaps they aren’t quite a company culture fit (since they don't like nerf guns) and they choose to do some hoola hooping, but almost every time they go to do that, they get pelted with crossfire from nerf guns, making it difficult to do their own relaxing thing.

Now the other side (with the github environment with hola hooping women): Consider an employee is doing their own thing to relax (as opposed to hoola hooping), perhaps they aren’t quite a company culture fit (since they aren't interested in women. And for that matter, are a woman) and they choose to do some yoga, but almost every time they go to do that, a bunch of guys start gawking at them, making it difficult to do their own relaxing thing.

I don't know what the day-to-day is like at GitHub, but if people were hula-hooping to music at my place of work, I'd probably be pretty interested in watching them too (male or female).

It's not what or whether they were watching, it's how they were watching. It's a judgement call but pretty easy to tell if a group is leering or just watching friends have fun.

Even more so, it is the sexual attractiveness of the guys who are watching.

are you implying that if it had been an attractive male watching the females, there wouldn't have been any complaint, despite being leered at?

Yes, that's what is being implied, and it's certainly something that happens, in degrees. People generally enjoy attention from those they themselves find attractive - obviously up to a limit, but that limit is much different than when you don't find the other person attractive.

And that is why the "making a woman feel uncomfortable constitutes sexual harassment" standard is problematic. And of course it's not entirely wrong either because it certainly can be done on purpose.

Not by the hula hoopers

What really concerns me; is why she was watching them watch.

Ye, calling this sexism, is either an editorial edit by TC, for reasons I can only assume is high clickbait title, or JAH has some issues herself, which it seems like considering that she thought watching girls hulahoop is sexist.

After all that drama she should've been in a very bad mindset (Any human being would be). She probably wanted some last straw to break it.

The article, strangely, begins with JAH already having an unspecified grievance against GitHub and the founder's wife pleading with her not to leave GitHub and blog publicly about it. It's strange that at no time has JAH specified what this grievance was, but my educated guess based on her tweets and her blog post from a year ago would be, previous additional incidents of sexism or perceived sexism.

I suspect the nature of the founder's wife is that the founder and his partner decided that a female was the best person to handle the omitted original issue.

Since the wife may have been there when it was just three guys, the non-employee boundary might not be there as with other staff partners. She probably thought she was helping.

Yeah, I found that to be the oddest part; that after so much bullshit, that was the last straw. It was almost too anti-climatic of an ending to this sexism/crazy-founder/wife tale.

Agreed though, completely 100% justified in getting out of that shit, glad the story got told as well.

The "last straw" literally means a last small thing, FYI.

Isn't that how I used it?

Yes, but a last straw is by definition a small thing, so of course it's going to be a small thing. Real life is not a novel.

Ahhhh, gotcha gotcha, rereading it I completely see what your point was.

In fact I'm pretty embarrassed to not have parsed your meaning the first time, my initial thought was just that I had misused the phrase in some way.

Look, I don't know about you. But people can usually tell the difference between someone casually watching another, and someone gawking at them.

If you're already primed, through some other form of hostility, to think that you're surrounded by a bunch of sexists, then innocent watching can look at a lot like gawking.

It is too open to interpretation, and thus not objective.

It might not be a crime, but if I were a woman, I could easily see myself feeling uncomfortable in a situation that were to remind me of our gender-imbalanced culture(s).

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